LAUSR

The death drive is nobody’s image. As readers of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan know, the drive—a structuring (and destructuring) principle of the psyche—is not to be conflated with images or representations of death; it is the underside of ideation, conducting us towards the horror that is the Real. The theater, by contrast, is a workshop of Imaginary fantasy. An ongoing critical tradition conceives live performance as holding mortality itself up to view, but theater’s very staginess would seem tomake it a particularly unpromising field in which to pursue the famously recessive drive—always “something in the background” that “escapes detection,” except where eros drags it into the light. I want to propose, nevertheless, that theater does offer a particular kind of access to the death drive—not through its deathly spectacles but through its specific mediality, the uneasy conjunction of prescription and live performance. I’ll argue that it’s precisely where theater offers its “live” present as the enactment of repetition and representa-