ABSTRACT
Sex continues to fascinate and obsess human subjects, even if, as Hy Freedman suggests, it holds little mystery for animals. Roger Caillois posits a network of associations, an implicit linkage between the praying mantis, religiosity, food and orality, blood-sucking vampires, the mother who feeds the child, cannibalism, the vagina dentata, the devouring female, the femme fatale, the mechanisms of automatism, and the female android. The voluptuous sense of disquiet engendered by and as lust disarrays and segments the resolve of a certain purposiveness, unhinging any determination of means and ends or goals. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Sigmund Freud raises the question of the necessary binding or linkage of the pleasure principle with the death drive. The death drive is not simply a "new discovery" made by Freud in his later writings, for it is already inscribed in his understanding of the pleasure principle even in his earliest psychoanalytic texts.
