Sex after death: François Ozon's libidinal invasions

Extract

By now it should be well understood, within and beyond the bounds of gender and sexuality studies, that queer praxis has been both a sustained response to a particular history of loss and an important contribution to the ongoing psychosocial project of theorizing mourning. Among other things, ‘queering’ mourning has meant overruling reticence with the antagonistically explicit; displacing mortuary and memorial decorum with improvised and impatient performances; reconceiving illness, care and forms of farewell to accommodate new experiences of familiarity with, and estrangement from, bodies; freshly embracing the work of anger, ambivalence and melancholy. It has meant risking not only futures but the very consolations of futurity in favour of preposthumous resistance to the logics of reproduction and self-bestowal. And it has meant coming to terms with pleasure at the core of the experience of mourning.

To say that mourning has become a way of life is banal, for it has never been anything else. And the sanguine recommendation that loss be apprehended as ‘productive rather than pathological’ is too weak a tonic for many.¹ But to assert that mourning entails a phenomenology of pleasure remains as provocative today as it was when Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud, early in the last century, noted with perplexity and discomfort the libidinal assertiveness of grief. ‘My impression’, Abraham wrote to Freud in 1922,

is that a fair number of people show an increase in libido [eine Steigerung der Libido] some time after a bereavement. It shows itself in heightened sexual need [gesteigertes sexuelles Bedürfnis] and appears quite often to lead, e.g., to conception shortly after a bereavement. Sometime at your convenience I should like to know what you think about this and whether you can confirm this observation.²

Abraham persisted in his query, fruitlessly, in the face of Freud's repeated epistolary evasions. Maria Torok characterizes Freud's resistance in terms of ‘the reluctance we all feel when, in a sacrilegious move, we want to grasp the inmost nature of mourning’. Her own clinical experience, however, confirms the intuition Abraham allowed himself to be discouraged from pursuing. ‘The illness of mourning’, she writes,

does not result, as might appear, from the affiction caused by the objectal loss itself, but rather from the feeling of an irreparable crime: the crime of having been overcome with desire [d'avoir été envahi de désir], of having been surprised by an overflow [débordement] of libido at the least appropriate moment, when it would behoove us to be grieved in despair.

These are the clinical facts. A measure of libidinal increase [accroissement libidinal] upon the object's death seems to be a widespread, if not universal phenomenon.³

There is no question of paraphilia in the cases Torok reports or in those she infers from her metapsychological analysis – no pathological excitation, for example, over the non-resisting, non-rejecting corpse. On the contrary, the conclusion she draws is that heightened sexual need is among the commonest sequelae of grief, due primarily to the imagoic congealment of unassimilated desire – the condensation of an unconscious fantasy of return to ‘a satisfaction that was initially granted and then withdrawn’.⁴ The surge of libido, then, is the ecstasy of the transient lifting of a shared repression, a hallucinatory gratification of a repressed desire, preserved as an ‘exquisite’ (literally, sought out) moment, or ‘“exquisite corpse” that together the dead and the survivors had both long before consigned to the grim tomb of repression’.⁵