Thursday, December 9, 2010

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Green Porno

Sigmund Freud came up with a few ideas. Including one - later coined death drive - with which he revised his key notion of the pleasure principle. It goes more or less like this: At first Freud thought all humans innately acted upon a unique and repressed sexual drive (a drive to live and reproduce), he called the pleasure principle; a little later - after WW1's trench victims came back with their vivid trauma dreams and his daughter Sophie died - he proposed the more nuanced idea that human beings actually are ruled by a sex drive as well as the more self-destructive death drive directed at one's own organic end. 

As Rossillini demonstrates (wearing a few coloured leotards) seems like insects act out on both drives quite well:

The male 
bedbug stabs (death drive) his female counterpart in the abdomen to ejaculate (pleasure principle) in the wound. It is through her blood stream that his semen reaches her ovaries.  

To reproduce (pleas
ure principle), the 
praying mentis male gets his head eaten (death drive) before copulation is done by his female counterpart's 180 degree rotating head.



There isn't much sex for bees - it's hard to know where the pleasure principle and where the death drive begin or end. The Queen, only female bee of the colony who gets to do it, does it once, in mid air and lays eggs for the rest of her existence, while the 'lucky' male bee (drones) looses his penis (the ovipositer) in the process and immediately dies from the loss.