The death drive: Cronenberg, Ondaatje, Gould

This project investigates how three English Canadian artists, David Cronenberg, Michael Ondaatje, and Glenn Gould represent the Lacanian Real as the corporeal body, as cause, and as a negative sublime respectively. It interrogates what I call the death drive of Canadian identity, a repetition of the symbolic pre-occupations of the nation state as an insensate insistence of the problem of non-being that continues to the detriment of the natural world upon which it is founded. Since its inception, the Canadian nation-state has been understood through the ideal of a limitless Northern frontier, and as Harold Innis warned, Canada's natural resources would be traded away on the basis of this spatial ideal. While a strong state is necessary to protect national interests, it is on this conceit that an imaginary Canada is erected and the material, subaltern condition of the country as a neo-colony of the United States is masked. I argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis best describes this problem of non-being governed by the logic of objects in a staples economy, a virtual move accelerating the abstraction of nature and labour. The theoretical importance of the death drive is that it both creates the imaginary nation as well as deconstructs ego-affirming nationalisms, while at the same time enabling the symbolic articulation of place necessary to forestall captivation in the image system supporting virtual capitalism. Each of the three texts studied, Crash, In the Skin of a Lion and The Idea of North reveal a different instance of the Lacanian real read via the death drive.