The Passion of Lovers: Goth and the death drive

Goth has a "romantic" relationship with death. Goth is obsessed with the beauty of decay. The dark poignancy of loss and lack and absence. The haunting specter of blackest desire.

Goths understand the sexiness of death. Arguably, the whole subculture is built around the link between sexuality and death. That is the essence of the morbid fascination with death. Why else do so many cute bois and grrls where cute skulls and bones? As evidenced by...

this image:

Source: Vampire Freaks

and this one:

Source: Vampire Freaks

and one last one:

Source: Vampire Freaks

...and I could go on and on. Sex linked with death is ubiquitous in the Goth subculture. Death is sexy. Sex is deadly. But why is that?

From the Goth perspective first, Goth scholar Catherine Spooner writes that Goth is about 'the production of pleasurable fear (p. 30).' In music, art, fashion and literature, Goth is about the thrilling chill, the frisson that shimmers and shivers across the skin and brain like a love bite just on the edge of pain. 'Pleasurable fear' works on the body because it doesn't de-claw and de-fang death, even as it makes it more consumable in the symbolic form of vampires, erotically charged wasting illnesses, scantily clad zombies, handsome dark demon lovers, etc. But the 'pleasurable fear' isn't just in the ciphers but also in death itself which we find deliciously seductive. 

Why do we take this pleasure in fear? In pain? In death? Just why does death haunt us like the specter of sexuality always there in the background from puberty onwards?

Death and the Maiden by Travis Louie Source: Roq La Rue Gallery

 

 

The death drive may provide at least a partial answer--are there any other kinds?--to the puzzling sexiness of death. The death drive is the life-confounding impulse to return to the original state--before birth which is just like death--the state of non-existence, of infinitude, of oblivion. It manifests itself in and complicates life in multitudinous ways. Sigmund Freud first witnessed the death drive while watching children and patients continuously and compulsively relive traumatic experiences. Rather than avoid obviously painful events, memories or fantasies, they returned to them again and again and again. This led Freud to conceptualize a death drive as a self-destructive urge and inherent masochism tainting even the most positive and life-affirming aspects of human life. Like sexuality.

The 'inherent masochism' of the death drive reveals a lot. What if masochism is about more than spanking? What if sex is inherently masochistic? Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips makes this startling argument: 'What masochism makes possible is the pleasure in pain [not startling yet]; or rather what masochism reveals is the capacity to bear, the capacity to desire the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to [in sexuality]. In this sense the masochistic is the sexual, the only way we can sustain the intensity, the restlessness, the ranging of desire (p. 94).' The individual self is a weak creature structured by boundaries. Sex breaks those boundaries in every possible way. Sex is about the destruction of the self. Sex is painful. The desire for sex is the desire for pain--for the death of the self. Sex is linked with death because in Phillips' words sex is 'death-in-life' (p. 95)!

Orgasm isn't called the 'little death' for nothing. Just read the following lines from Samuel Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner':

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-Mare Life-In-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Ok, so She is called Life-In-Death here. But Life-In-Death, Death-In-Life, what's the difference? This is a literary distillation of cumming in terror. That's what matters. Like the best poetry, as you read it--you feel it! Coleridge gives a perfect sample of sexy Death.

Black Virgin by Sylvia Ji Source: Roq La Rue Gallery

In summary, sex is masochistic to its core reveling as it does in the dissolution of the self. And this masochism is part of the 'inherent masochism' that is essential to the death drive. That urge to engage in self-destructive behavior to find completion in nothingness. Sound familiar? A possible link between sex and death then is the ultimate similarity of the drives behind them. Too simple, yes. But still quite revealing...

And where does Goth fit into this? Well, back to the beginning...Goth is obsessed with death...Goth in all its twisted titillating forms is the existential embodiment of the death drive. Goth bodies, fashion, practices, etc. are the texts that express the death drive. Goth is the death drive. The death drive is Goth.

What more can I say?

Source: The Zed Word