Drives Are Myths, Myths Are Drives: Thinking Body-mind With Lacan’s Lamella and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Stoma

Drives are the space that allows us to approach the limit of mind and body, a door to the mystery of the speaking being, our ontology, and relation to the material world. The drive is also the space where we most courageously look at the hostile impulses and cruelty of humanity, and where we meet the life force of the erotic (Lacan, 2008). This conceptual essay is a close reading of the myth of the Lamella of Jacques Lacan (2018) and the myth of Stoma (Hymne Stomique) of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (2023), in conversation with other authors of the Lacanian tradition (Barnard, Soler, Verhaeghe, Žižek). Such tradition has from its Freudian beginnings paid attention to the link between the mythical and our understanding of the drives. The myths tell the story of our species, of what we are and come from. Lacan and Nancy give us different and courageous responses to this question. By imagining a dialogue between Lacan and Nancy’s philosophy, the essay explores how their myths break linear temporality and historicity. Instead, with the myth of the Lamella and the myth of Stoma, Lacan and Nancy produce interrupted myths of birthing, pulsation and latency, where the origin has already always occurred. These revolutionary myths are complementary and particular, if Lamella is a myth of loss and splitting, organ libido, and surfaces (Barnard, 2002) , Stoma is a myth of relation, of ‘with’ and exposure. But there is no ‘with’ without scansion and no separation without relation. Lacan and Nancy take our millenary mythical history and transform it from within; their emphasis moves from tragedy to the poetic, from ancestry to the real and the obscurity and strangeness of our organs/bodies. This turning towards the just poetic and the real opens new imaginations of how to live in this world of cruelty and tenderness. Both myths tell a story which dilutes divisions of language and matter, mind, and body. Lamella and Stoma approach a beyond, the crossing and traces of life and death, they expand our understanding of the drives Eros and Thanatos, and help us approach the manifestations that drives have in our personal lives and in our world.