"Driven by An Unseizable Force": Virginia Woolf and the Invention of the Death Drive.

This essay explores the kinship between Virginia Woolf's fiction from the early 1920s--especially Jacob's Room--and the death drive, which Sigmund Freud first theorized in 1920 based on his work with Great War veterans and trauma survivors. I argue that Jacob's Room anticipates what nearly one hundred years of psychoanalytic thinking would eventually see in Freud's theory: the fact that human subjectivity is constituted by an originary loss to which people are endlessly "driven" to return. Jacob's Room illustrates not only the human drive toward loss, but also our tendency to conceal this drive from ourselves. This tendency is as much the target of Woolf's elegy and satire as the generation of men lost in the Great War and the social institutions that shaped them. Finally, I propose that a theory of the death drive can expand our understanding of Woolf's sociopolitical commitments, particularly her critiques of normative sexual subjectivity and conventional mourning, and that Jacob's Room anticipates and remains relevant to a contemporary politics of the drive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]