I’ve always thought that because Lacano-analysis has a conference named “Lack,” a conference devoted to the work of Jean Laplanche could be called “More & More.”

Dominique Scarfone’s recent talk, The Sexual Drive for Power. The Passion for Ever More, held at the William Alanson White institute this last Friday only confirmed my joke; he would fit right in at the More & More conference, seeing how he even has the word “more” in the title of this paper. I attended this talk, took many notes and the following will be an attempt to represent the highlights of his lucid and engaging argument.

Scarfone follows Laplanche in his view that the death drive is a sexual drive, the drive in its most radical form. In Freud’s economic terms this is the tendency to zero which is opposed to the principle of constancy or homeostasis. Scarfone adds to these economic forces a third term: allostasis. This concept is often used in the discourse on addiction; it is a regulatory attempt left over from the infant’s inability to metabolize excitation, and can lead to ever greater demand; the passion for more and more. Freud’s neglected concept of the drive to power, or mastery (Bemächtigungstrieb) is here invoked as a means of locating allostasis in Freudian metapsychology; instead of a feedback loop of homeostasis, allostasis is a self-amplification, feed-forward loop, driven from satisfaction to satisfaction and ever eager for more in what Scarfone calls the allostatic spiral. Because the infant has been given a dose of omnipotent control by always having found their needs met by the all-powerful parent, the delusion of narcissistic omnipotence can develop in later life. The drive for ever greater mastery, when combined with the sexual drive, and the fantasy of omnipotence, results in a mixed drive, an addiction to mastery that Scarfone calls the sexual drive to power.

This drive is sexual because for Scarfone, per Laplanche’s reading of Freud, the primary process, that sliding of meaning and absolute discharge to zero that characterizes the unconscious, is formed in the infant only after being seduced by the unconscious desire of the parent, in which an unassimilable figment—the enigmatic signifier—circulates endlessly, and so forms the basic dynamo of the drive as such.

In Scarfone’s view the sexual drive to power (the drive of acceleration?) is the principle motive of modernity; both the scientific mastery of nature and capitalist progress—whose rule is grow or die—and of course for those certain persons clinging to positions of extraordinary state power (you may have heard of them). The desire for an illegal third term as president is motivated precisely by this sexual drive for ever increasing mastery in the allostatic spiral. And yet it is a desire that is bound to be thwarted eventually, for the delusion of omnipotence, fast-tracked by the excitations of libido and yearning for ever greater satisfaction, is just that, a delusion; just how much of the world will be destroyed by this accelerating delusion is to be seen.

Scarfone claims that the proper use of the sexual drive for power, diverted away from violence, is to pursue a quest into the realm of art, where excitations and narcissistic omnipotence may be sublimated into an aesthetic style, in what Paul Valery calls the infinite sensibility; the production of esprit.

As an aside Scarfone also notes that transference is by its nature allostatic: transference accelerates.