Heaven's Gate and the Postmodern Death Drive

We can interpret the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate group as a prototypical example of the role played by the symbolic death drive in our current postmodern culture. The members of this group who took their own lives were dominated by a form of discourse that replaced real bodies with symbolic modes of representation. I will posit that their real death was only an extension of their subjective submission to the symbolic order of language and law. By castrating themselves and taking on an androgynous appearance, these subjects displayed a belief that their natural bodies and sexualities could be lost and shed like an un-needed skin or container. What replaced these lost bodies was a postmodern belief system comprised of science fiction, cyber space, and a New Age millennium pseudo-scientific religion.

In order to explain the connections among these symbolic systems and acts of self-destruction, we can employ Freud's theory of the death drive. This concept helps us to understand why and how postmodern subjects desire to replace real sexuality and bodily experiences with virtual symbolic discourses. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud develops his concept of the death drive in order to account for a series of self-destructive behaviors. In children's games, war neuroses, and anxiety dreams, Freud locates the same desire to repeat a painful experience that goes against the pleasure principle's goal of reducing all forms of tension and excitement. For example, he asks himself why a child who just had a painful experience at the doctor's office will go home and play doctor with another child. If this subject were really dominated by the pleasure principle, he or she would avoid repeating this painful experience. Freud's first hypothesis is that people gain a sense of control and mastery by repeating something in a game and by moving from a position of passivity to one of activity. Thus, the child who passively experiences the painful visit to the doctor is now activ