In Catherine Malabou's article, "Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle," she examines the relevancy of Freud's theory of death and libidal drives, and a human's attraction to repetition.

Freud never uses the words "plastic" or "plasticity" to characterize the work of the death drive. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive is said to be "a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it in another way, the expression of inertia inherent in organic life" [36]. An elastic material is able to return to its initial form after undergoing a deformation. Elasticity is thus opposed to plasticity to the extent that a plastic material retains the imprint and thereby resists endless polymorphism. As we recall, what is said to be imperishable in psychic life is the permanence of form, not the absence of form. But instead of bringing into play the two opposite meanings of plasticity within the same phenomenon—the permanence of form—Freud sets to work, contradictorily with what he is looking for, a pure opposition between plasticity and elasticity. Instead of a fascinating face-to-face between creative plasticity and destructive plasticity, we have a disappointing contrast between plasticity and elasticity. Form means life. Death is without form. Life and death lose their similarity.

Freud states, however, that the profound meaning of the death drive is that death is immanent to life. It means that life forms its own destruction. That is why Freud affirms that "the organism only wishes to die in its own fashion" [39]. The organism fashions or forms its own death. There may be an elasticity of inorganic matter, but it is attained only as the result of a formative process: the process of repetition. But Freud does not succeed in characterizing the proper—the temporal—form of the death drive. There is finally no plastic work of the death drive.

In Wes Andersen's film, The Royal Tenenbaums, Richie's character chooses the process by which he hopes to die.



The suicide attempt is a failure, but he is later rewarded for his actions, and his aggression toward himself is then transferred to mutual affection for Margot.



It appears that plasticity can only characterize the good shape of the form, if I may say so. Plasticity means health, the ability to cling to a form without getting destroyed by it. As soon as the libido loses the right measure between attachment and detachment, it also loses its plasticity. Once again, there is no plastic work of negativity. Elasticity appears as the natural limit, or boundary, of plasticity.

Richie's love for Margot was not initially elastic, which came close to destroying him because there was not a balance between drives.

Loss of vitality, destruction of objects, repeated impossibility of loving are analyzed in terms of tenacity, adhesiveness, or elasticity. They never appear as negative plastic tendencies, as destructive forms. The intermediary state between life and death that Freud is looking for dissolves itself in what appears to be a poor opposition between life and death. Deprived of its form, the tendency to restore a previous state of things, to return to the very first moment, remains inexplicable. A mysterious natural elasticity contaminates the plasticity of life.

As Malabou questions, we witness the natural and eventual bend toward elasticity with Margot and Richie. The two characters reach a moment of clarity and understanding. And that sudden elasticity, to return to a balanced state is inexplicable.

Works Cited
Catherine Malabou. "Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle." diacritics 37.4 (2007): 78-86. Project MUSE. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 13 Apr. 2010 .