Crash reads body-technology fusion as empty inscription, not repressed psychosexuality

Evidence

No affect behind all that, no psychology, no flux or desire, no libido or death drive. Naturally, death is implicated in an unlimited exploration of the possible violence done to the body, but this is never, as in sadism or masochism, with an express and perverse aim of violence, a distortion of meaning and of sex (in relation to what?). No repressed unconscious (affects or representations), except in a second reading that would still reinject a forced meaning, based on the psychoanalytic model. The non-meaning, the savagery, of this mixture of the body and of technology is immanent, it is the immediate reversion of one to the other, and from this results a sexuality without precedent - a sort of potential vertigo linked to the pure inscription of the empty signs of this body. Symbolic ritual of incision and marks, like the graffiti on New York subways. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 367

Categorization

• XREF: Baudrillard explicitly rejects the psychoanalytic model (libido, death drive, castration) he would elsewhere be accused of importing. The subway graffiti simile is itself a simulacrum-culture image. — connects to: Crash’s accident-based pleasure is nonperverse because it is denuded of meaning — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 369; Sexual acts in Crash occur within reflected automotive surfaces mediated by gauges — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 373; 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fantasmatic and cultural rather than brute — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 172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

• Crash’s accident-based pleasure is nonperverse because it is denuded of meaning #corroborates (0.92) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 369
• Sexual acts in Crash occur within reflected automotive surfaces mediated by gauges #expands (0.88) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 373