Crash’s accident-based pleasure is nonperverse because it is denuded of meaning

Evidence

Dysfunction is no longer possible in a universe of the accident - therefore no perversion is either. The Accident, like death, is no longer of the order of the neurotic, the repressed, the residual or the transgressive, it is the instigator of a new mode of nonperverse pleasure (contrary to the author himself, who speaks in the introduction of a new perverse logic, one must resist the moral temptation of reading Crash as perversion), of a strategic organization of life that starts from death. … Thus one, Kafka’s machine, is still puritan, repressive, “a signifying machine” Deleuze would say, whereas the technology in Crash is shining, seductive, or dull and innocent. Seductive because denuded of meaning, and because it is the simple mirror of torn-up bodies. And Vaughan’s body is in its turn the mirror of bent chrome, of crumpled fenders, of sheet iron stained with sperm. Bodies and technology combined, seduced, inextricable. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Explicit contrast with Kafka’s Penal Colony ‘signifying machine’ — the divide between signifying/repressive and non-signifying/seductive technology. Also silently differentiates Baudrillard from Deleuze’s own reading. — connects to: Crash reads body-technology fusion as empty inscription, not repressed psychosexuality — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 367; Trauma loses its external character once folded into psychic meaning-making — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 850; Crash depicts sex as irreducibly fantasmatic and cultural rather than brute — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 172

Broader Connections

• Trauma loses its external character once folded into psychic meaning-making #complicates (0.78) — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 850