Course Description: This is a course about driving in theory, mostly psychoanalysis (the unconcsious, the symptom, the death drive) and deconstruction(dessimination, dstinerrance). In conjunction with a number of films variously involving driving cars, we will read works by Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida concerned with the way the compulsion to repeat, in Freud's terms, complicates oppositions between the human and the machine, between the organic and the inorganic, accident and destiny, oppositions we ordinarily take for granted.

The procedure of the American Indian who follows a trail by means of
imperceptible clues or the Australian who unhesitatingly identities
the footprints left by any member of his group (Meggitt) is no
different from our procedure when we drive a car and assess the moment
to pass or avoid a vehicle at a glance, by a slight turn of the
wheels, a fluctuation in the normal speed of the engine or even the
supposed intention of a look. This comparison is highly instructive,
however incongruous it may seem, for, what sharpens our faculties,
stimulates our perception, gives assurance to our judgments is, on the
one hand, that the means we command and the risks we run are
immeasurably increased by the mechanical power of the engine and, on
the other, that the tension resulting from the feeling of this
incorporated force exercises itself in a series of dialogues with
other drivers whose intentions, similar to our own, are translated
into signs which we set about deciphering precisely because they are
signs, and call for intellection.
His reciprocity of perspectives, in which man and the world mirror
each other and which seems to us the only possible explanation of the
properties and capacities of the savage mind, we thus find transposed
to the plane of mechanized civilization. An exotic observer would
certainly declare the traffic in the centre of a large town or on a
motorway to be beyond the scope of human faculties; and so in effect
it is, in as much as it is neither men nor natural laws which are
brought exactly face to face but systems of natural forces humanized
by drivers’ intentions and men transformed into natural forces by the
physical energy of which they make themselves the mediators. It is no
longer a case of the operation on an inert object, nor of the return
action of an object, promoted to the role of an agent, nor of a
subject dispossessing itself in its favour without demanding anything
of it in return; in other words, it is no longer situations involving
a certain amount of passiveness on one side or the other which are in
question. The beings confront each other ace to face as subjects and
objects at the same time; and, in the code they employ, a simple
variation in the distance separating them has the force of a silent
adjuration.
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (U of Chicago P, 1966), 222.

Notes: Drive (by) Drive--taking the test drive literally through the action film and routing it back through Freud's drive and Derrida's distinerrance before taking the last exit to Ronell. go to horsepower--animal and machine--the western, film noir intersection. station identification wagon. Cruise control.