"Sigmund Freud, Analyze This": Madonna Beyond the Pleasure Principle 77

David Sigler

“Sigmund Freud, Analyze This”: How

Madonna Situates “Die Another Day”
Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Madonna’s song “Die Another Day” was commissioned by MGM

Studios as the theme for the 2002 installment of the James Bond film
franchise. In a press release of 15 March 2002, Bond producers Michael
G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli announced: “We are thrilled that Ma-
donna, who is recognized as the world’s most exciting songwriter and
performer, has agreed to compose and sing the song for the first James
Bond movie of the new millennium” (“Die Another Day Main Title Song”).
Madonna co-wrote the song with Mirwais, her consistent collaborator
since the late 1990s. To help promote the movie, the single and its music
video were released in October 2002; the film Die Another Day opened
a month later in deliberate coincidence with the fortieth anniversary of the
first Bond film. The single hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3
in the U.K. It earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song.
The song later reappeared on Madonna’s American Life, lifting the album
to Platinum certification by the RIAA and #1 on the Billboard chart.
While none of these facts are likely surprising, the song itself is sur-
prising enough: disregarding the conventions of Bond minstrelsy, Ma-
donna fulfills the song’s promise to “avoid the cliché” by eschewing any
reference to things 007, instead opting to issue a startling injunction to the
founder of psychoanalysis (of all people) with the words, “Sigmund Freud,

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analyze this.”1 This is a most curious moment, and one that warrants our
further investigation: why, when called upon to sell another dose of James
Bond to an ever-willing public, would Madonna ignore the screenplay
and instead address Freud?
This essay takes Madonna up on her invitation to Freud, reading
“Die Another Day” alongside Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the revo-
lutionary and dense text of 1920 wherein Freud introduces the concept of
the death instinct. It seeks to understand why Madonna would call for
Freud in this song, and indeed why the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle specifically. Madonna’s demand and invitation to Freud marks
the end of the song’s introduction and gets us dancing in earnest; the rest
of the song is filled with resolutions consistent with Freud’s concept of the
death instinct, such as “I’m gonna delay my pleasure,” “I’m gonna destroy
my ego,” and “I’m gonna close my body now.” Does Madonna offer her
song as a challenge to psychoanalysis, as we might suspect when she
laughs somewhat diabolically and whispers “I need to lay down” into the
microphone? Or is she instead offering her song to the listener as analyzable
dream-imagery, as suggested by her opening line, “I’m gonna wake up,
yes and no”? This paper addresses these problems, and then concludes
with the claim that Madonna, either cannily or unconsciously, makes good
on her contract to MGM in referring us to Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple, insofar as Beyond is precisely the text that accounts for the plea-
sures of watching a Bond film. Madonna’s appeal to Freud, be it invita-
tion or dare or injunction, subtly constitutes the best of possible advertise-
ments for the film. Thus Madonna’s “analyze this” exploits a dare until it
functions as truth also.
We may wonder: has Madonna actually read Beyond the Pleasure
Principle? This seems possible, given the consistency with which the
song “Die Another Day” addresses issues raised by this one text. It is
beyond doubt that Madonna has something specifically Freudian in mind,
as she demands a Freudian reading of her song as explicitly as possible.
But the depth to which Madonna has studied Freud, and the rigor of that
study, is difficult to estimate or even ascertain. That issue, though, is im-

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material for my purposes here: in this paper, I am more interested in the

effect created by Madonna’s conversation with Freud than in its motiva-
tion. That is, I am interested in contemplating what Madonna’s gesture
might itself mean, not really what she means by it.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s most speculative work
and perhaps his most interesting. The text is famous not only for its theo-
retical daring but also because it ushers in the final topological phase of
Freud’s career and introduces the ever-controversial concepts of repeti-
tion compulsion and the death instinct. The body of scholarly work on
Beyond is staggering, having warranted book-length commentaries by
thinkers including Derrida, Lacan, and Laplanche.2 Beyond is a text about
repetition, desire, the binding and unbinding of the libido, the death instinct’s
struggle with the erotic instinct, about trauma, dreams, and mastery. This
is also the text where Freud discusses his young grandson’s game of “fort!”
and “da!”, one of the most immediately recognizable moments in Freud
even to non-specialists (Standard Edition XVIII: 14-17). It is a perplex-
ing text, even to the extent that Freud frequently undermines his own argu-
ments whenever objections spring to his mind. He even goes so far at one
point as to disclaim its revolutionary findings, insisting that he is not himself
persuaded by his new hypotheses, nor does he expect the reader to be
persuaded (SE XVIII: 59). And yet the implications of his speculations
here compel Freud to revise central tenets of psychoanalytic theory, and
he makes these revisions right here in this text: here for the first time, for
instance, he acknowledges that some dreams are not fulfillments of wishes,
and that there might be such a thing as primary masochism (SE XVIII: 32,
55). Freud has made a major discovery here, and only by a line of rea-
soning and self-doubt that would do even Descartes proud. He has
dared to inquire into the existence of another process, one independent of
the pleasure and reality principles, preceding them and more fundamental.
The discovery of the death instinct marks a genuine revolution in psycho-
analysis: no matter the disarming degree of uncertainty with which Freud
proposes the idea, he never backs away from the concept of the death
instinct in any of his later writings. Hence Beyond the Pleasure Principle

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is often read as the first text of the last phase of Freud’s career: texts as
central as The Ego and The Id, Civilization and its Discontents, and Group
Psychology follow from the premises introduced here. Partly because of
its stock of shocking new concepts and its strange habit of undermining its
own diabolical arguments as it presents them, Beyond is commonly num-
bered among Freud’s most difficult texts.
The speculations of Beyond the Pleasure Principle populate
Madonna’s song to a remarkable extent, and these carry with them sig-
nificant effects—even forcing us to reconsider what it might mean to “die
another day.” Die Another Day, like all Bond films, is an action picture
about espionage kept as courteous as possible in the face of international
skullduggery. Unlike many Bond films, though, the British intelligence
community has here been undermined from within: this time Bond has
been betrayed by a mole, suspended and disavowed by his employers,
and now he needs to act (mostly) alone to solve the horrifying mystery of
Colonel Tan-Sun Moon’s weapons-for-diamonds scheme.3 At its most
literal level, the title of the film refers to the physical transformation and
persistence of Colonel Moon, who has somehow survived his first brush
with Bond only to reappear, genetically altered, as the evil megalomaniac
Gustav Graves.4 Bond jests upon encountering his transformed nemesis
that Graves is finally ready to “die another day.” But viewers of the film
will sense as well that its title is also supposed to refer to James Bond’s
own fortitude and indestructibility: the title is a testament both to James
Bond’s wily charm and the character’s enduring public appeal. We sense
this because Die Another Day, even more than other Bond films, demands
to be read as either an homage to the venerable film franchise or a
postmodern exploitation of its signal motifs. The imagery and dialogue of
the film are filled with winking references to nearly every preceding film in
the series, suggesting that Bond himself—both in the plot of the film and in
twenty-first century culture—will not die until another day.
Madonna’s song attempts none of these self-congratulatory gestures,
and instead infuses the titular phrase with a whole range of new and spe-
cifically Freudian meanings: its “Die Another Day” is not a matter of en-

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durance but rather seems to refer to negotiation and deferral. Madonna’s

lyrics frame the song’s title and chorus in relation to an internally regulated
and flexible death instinct: “I think I’ll find another way . . . I guess I’ll die
another day.” In uttering these lines, Madonna speaks not as the voice
refusing death but as the organism committed to the singularity of its own
death. She will die another day because, as she puts it, “it’s not my time to
go.” Or, if one prefers Freud’s version, “the organism wishes to die only
in its own fashion” (SE XVIII: 39). In Freud’s theoretical model, the
pleasure and reality principles work to forestall the fundamental drive to-
ward destruction: even though “the aim of all life is death,” the erotic and
death instincts negotiate a compromise, one that Freud calls “a lengthen-
ing of the road to death” (SE XVIII: 38, 40, emphasis in original). In
Freud’s terms, “one group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the
final aim of life as swiftly as possible, . . . the other group jerks back to
make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (SE XVIII: 41). Accord-
ing to Freud, death is always an internal process: each organism finds its
preferred and proper way to die by deferring the impulse that would de-
stroy the organism immediately.
Freud calls this deferral “a short-circuit” (SE XVIII: 39), a meta-
phor that becomes grossly literalized at the end of the “Die Another Day”
music video. The video, directed by the Swedish advertising team Traktor,
redeploys several themes from the Die Another Day film, including imag-
ery of fencing and torture. It features four separate locations, each featur-
ing one or more Madonnas, and makes little attempt to connect them
through any overarching narrative. In one scene we see Madonna, dressed
in a tanktop and bedraggled by torture, thoroughly enjoying her sufferings
as she lip-synchs the words to the song; she has been captured by menac-
ing Asian men and is being prepared for death by electrocution. In an-
other scene we find two fencers dueling on a red carpet in a seeming
palace, the halls decked with suits of armor. In a third scene we see
Madonna, alone, dancing while shackled and confined in a small, dank
cell. In the fourth scene we find ourselves with Madonna amidst several
display cases that seem to hold glass collector’s items. The video alter-

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nates freely and rapidly between these scenes, suggesting their narrative
simultaneity, and interlaces them only incompletely toward the end of the
video when the fencers smash through a window in their palace and find
themselves in the fourth set, ready to destroy its collection as collateral
damage to their fierce struggle.
We can understand the music video as a series of dream-images,
especially since Madonna opens the song with the line, “I’m gonna wake
up, yes and no.” Her “yes and no” signals that we are squarely in the
domain of the unconscious, where “yes and no” are indistinguishable (such
is Freud’s position, at least, in his essay “Negation” [SE XIX: 235-39]).
Within these dream-images, mirrors are smashed, fetishized collectables
are dashed to bits, and Madonnas fight each other in a scene that recalls
Poe’s “William Wilson” more than any Bond film.5 By the end of the song
Madonna still hasn’t awakened: in an unusual effect even for dance mu-
sic, the canned string arrangement cuts in and out at the producer’s will,
even blending into Madonna’s own distorted voice, creating an effect com-
parable to a person’s intermittent ability to hear when falling asleep.6 For
these reasons, I read the electric-chair music video as a punishment dream.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud explains that punishment dreams
are indeed pleasing wish-fulfillments, in that “they merely replace the for-
bidden wish-fulfillment by the appropriate punishment for it; that is to say,
they fulfill the wish of the sense of guilt which is the reaction to the repudi-
ated impulse” (SE XVIII: 32). Appropriately, then, Madonna grimly ac-
knowledges in the lyrics that “for every sin I’ll have to pay,” and her laugh
here suggests an intense pleasure in this settlement. What we witness in
the music video is obviously pure jouissance.
Traktor’s video features different sets and different situations from
those of the movie, despite their shared thematic elements. The film’s open-
ing credits, choreographed to accompany Madonna’s song, are displayed
over a stylized montage of Bond being tortured with scorpions in a North
Korean prison. Unlike the torture montage from Die Another Day, the
music video’s torture chamber features neither scorpions nor hellfires; in-
stead we find a dingier, less “official” space of confinement featuring iron

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shackles and the 1950s-style electric chair. The imagery is not culled
from the film, despite occasional visual references to previous Bond vil-
lains (for instance, one of the executioners has metal teeth). Editing also
emphasizes the differences between these situations, as the film’s montage
sequence visually compresses time, suggesting fourteen months of gruel-
ing endurance within only a few minutes of screen time. The music video,
on the other hand, makes no similar attempt to document or celebrate
Madonna’s endurance, nor does it represent any slow, deliberate torture.
Its electric chair implies a very different mode of suffering than that which
the scorpions portend in Die Another Day. At the end of the video,
Madonna defiantly escapes from her torturer’s botched attempt to elec-
trocute her. Bond, on the other hand, makes no attempt to escape his
captors and in fact asks for his execution to be expedited even as he is
being allowed to simply walk away as part of a deal negotiated offscreen
between Britain and North Korea.7 The electric chair dominates the
music video with its ominous immediacy, implying a headlong rush into
death—death not in one’s own fashion, but in the fashion and time most
convenient for the state. Just when it seems that Madonna’s feisty tenure
has expired in the music video, she escapes the electric chair through its
unexpected “short-circuiting.” The electric chair of the music video pre-
sents itself as a figure for the immediate and overwhelming jouissance of
death, and it forces Madonna to portray a subject who must negotiate
around, and slip away from, this jouissance.
Thus Madonna’s vow to “delay my pleasure” makes psychoanalytic
sense in the context of the Freudian short circuit. For Freud, the reality
principle “does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure,
but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of
satisfaction . . . as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (SE XVIII:
10). Madonna wriggles away in a cloud of smoke, but a Bond-styled
blood-red graphic reminds the viewer that, in escaping the chair, Ma-
donna here has not escaped death altogether, but has merely been “length-
ening the road” toward it (Freud SE XVIII: 40). It seems that we have

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seen Madonna “struggling through, by roundabout paths,” to again em-

ploy the Freudian parlance (SE XVIII: 11).
But how does the electric chair come to impart its complicated form
of jouissance? One answer may reside in the binding that Madonna en-
gages in as a preparatory measure for execution: in Freud’s terms, “the
mechanical violence . . . would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation . .
.but, on the other hand, the simultaneous physical injury . . . would bind
the excess of excitation” (SE XVIII: 33). Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple carefully theorizes the binding and unbinding of cathected energies:
Freud sees the “binding” of the drive as a crucial step in the deferment of
death. In Freud’s model, the erotic drive diverts the headlong rush to
death by converting energy from a “freely flowing” to a “quiescent” state,
a conversion accomplished by a psychic binding (31, 30).8 Madonna,
alone with the electric chair, prepares herself for her pending electrocution
by binding her left arm in a leather strap. Despite her frantic pace, this act
of binding somewhat resembles that of the Morning Prayer in Kabbalah.
Whereas at first it was unclear why this prayer would be an apt prepara-
tion for either the electric chair or her subsequent escape from it, Beyond
allows us to read this performance as another literalization of a Freudian
motif. For Freud, the binding of erotic energy sublimates the deathly
jouissance into its own deferment. The process of binding, for both Freud
and Madonna, allows the organism to die another day.9
Madonna binding her arm in preparation for death foretells another
scene of binding—her cameo appearance in the film Die Another Day.
Madonna plays a sensuous fencing instructor named Verity, eager to test
James Bond’s athletic mettle. In one of her few lines, she asks Bond to
help her tie her corset, as it has come undone. Bond, played by Pierce
Brosnan, answers with enigmatic but flirtatious zeal, “Why not?” This act
of courtesy is quickly followed by Bond’s equally courteous but nonethe-
less frenzied duel with Gustav Graves, who is one of Verity’s charges.
The film features an extended fencing scene between Bond and Graves,
each dressed in white. But when the fencing theme is taken up again in the
music video, it appears with a twist: the duel is now between Madonna,

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dressed in white, and an anonymous adversary dressed all in black. A

second twist follows shortly thereafter: when the black-clad fencer is
unmasked, she too turns out to be Madonna. The black-clad fencer
opens her mouth in astonishment at this coincidence (as might the viewer),
before continuing the duel more aggressively than before.10 The final twist
is that, mysteriously, whenever either of them cuts the other, the wound
appears on a third Madonna’s body, this one imprisoned in the remote
torture chamber. This last Madonna, imprisoned and absent from the
duel, sustains its injuries remotely. It is obvious enough that Beyond the
Pleasure Principle could be read as staging a metaphorical “duel” be-
tween Eros and Thanatos, and it would be easy enough to cast the dueling
white-and-black Madonnas in these roles for the purposes of our read-
ing. But Freud’s uncertainty about the existence of the death instinct, and
the nonreciprocal relation that he posits between the pleasure principle
and its possible “beyond,” give me pause about making this association.
However, this fencing metaphor gets more interesting, and usefully rigor-
ous, when we understand the third, displaced Madonna as an implicit
illustration of the transference’s role in repetition compulsion, a topic that
Freud explores at length in Beyond.
Seeking an example that would convey the tragic weight of the com-
pulsion to repeat, Freud refers us to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. Freud
calls Tasso’s work “the most moving poetic picture of a fate such as this”
(SE XVIII: 22), “this” being repetition compulsion. In Freud’s account,
Tasso’s hero Tancred “unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while
she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight” (22). In this context
we cannot help but note the suits of armor that provide the background
for the dueling Madonnas in the music video: indeed the unveiling of the
black fighter in the music video carries with it a comparably uncanny,
unheimlich sense of striking something too close to home. But the part of
Tasso’s story that illustrates the compulsion to repeat comes next: Freud
says that Tancred “slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams
from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the
tree, is heard complaining” (22). Freud reads this second, arboreal at-

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tack as evidence of a compulsion to repeat the scene of a trauma “which

overrides the pleasure principle” (22).
Freud and Madonna each work through fencing metaphors to illus-
trate the pathos of repetition, and each tells this tale through a seemingly
supernatural series of displaced injuries and a duel with someone uncan-
nily too much at home. Certainly the film’s extensive use of fencing themes
and imagery, which provide the pretext for Madonna’s own cameo role in
the film, suggests fencing as an especially appropriate vehicle for Madonna’s
music video as well. But the video stages its fencing scene in a very
different—indeed, specifically Freudian—way. I want to understand this
element of the music video, then, as an illustration (however possibly un-
intentional) of repetition’s role in the transference. In describing repetition
compulsion as the symptom of trauma, Freud justifies the need for a “be-
yond” of the pleasure principle: “The compulsion to repeat also recalls
from past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure” (SE XVIII:
20). Madonna, consciously or not, illustrates the compulsion to repeat
rather adequately: in the course of a four-minute song, she resolves to
“die another day” no fewer than twenty-five times. For Freud, the com-
pulsion to repeat actions or phrases is a sign of the “transference neuro-
sis,” a problem that sometimes emerges within psychoanalysis and can
further complicate cases of trauma (SE XVIII: 18).
In introducing the topic of the transference neurosis, Freud describes
a scene not at the traumatic warfront, nor in dreams: instead, he invites us
into his office (SE XVIII: 18). Inhabiting this neurosis, Madonna places
herself in a similar situation, taking on the role of the neurotic analysand,
offering a defiant laugh and whispering “I need to lay down” into the mi-
crophone two-thirds of the way through the song. Addressed thus, Freud—
and indeed the listener, who, in hearing this confession, is temporarily
allied with Freud—becomes a master or father (thanks to the transfer-
ence) able to authorize and supervise Madonna’s “laying.” Madonna’s
utterance, at once sexually inviting and vaguely menacing, suggests that
she has adopted an hysterical stance in relation to Freud. In Freudian-
Lacanian thought, the hysteric is by definition coquettish, playful, subver-

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sive, and sweetly menacing; indeed she demands that the analyst/master
show his stuff in a seeming attempt to submit to the master’s knowledge,
but does so until the gaps or holes in the master’s knowledge become
readily apparent. Here we can note that Madonna does not simply pro-
pose that Freud “analyze this”; rather, she presents her demand repeti-
tively (“analyze this!/analyze this!/analyze this this this this this”) so as to
suggest an unending stream of “submissions” to Freud’s authority. “There’s
so much more to know,” sings Madonna resolutely, meanwhile promising
to “keep this secret.” The hysteric, Lacan explains, gets off on the master’s
knowledge; she is in search of a master who can be mastered.11 Thus
Madonna’s “I need to lay down,” replete with its sexual allurements, its
confession of weakness, and its demand for analysis, strikes a peculiarly
destabilizing chord for the analytic scene. Madonna, laughing equivocally
as she appeals to Freud for analysis, enacts both a “papa don’t preach”
act of defiance and a “justify my love” daughter’s seduction.
But Madonna’s willingness to strike a hysterical pose is itself under-
mined by her resolution to “die another day.” As Lacan notes, “The hys-
teric reaches the goal immediately. The Freud she is kissing is the objet a”
(Seminar XV, 21.2.68, X 9).12 The Madonna of “Die Another Day” is
indeed interested in flirting with Freud and demanding an exhibition of his
knowledge. But her resolutions to “delay my pleasure” and “destroy my
ego” suggest another stance, one that might extend beyond the satisfac-
tions of the pleasure-unpleasure/reality-unreality matrix. Madonna is, quite
precisely, refusing to reach the objet a immediately; she is toying with it,
rehearsing its acquisition, so as to master its satisfactions in her own proper
way. Lacan wrongly assumes that Freud was solely responsible for solv-
ing this problem for hysterical patients, even wondering “how was he able
to put in suspense in this radical way what is involved in love?” (Lacan,
Seminar XV, 21.2.68, X9). But Madonna, knowingly or unknowingly,
strips Freud of his responsibility by taking this act of suspension upon
herself.
Interestingly, Madonna’s whispered “I need to lay down” is pre-
ceded by an “uh . . . uh.” This “uh - uh” might be read as a modified “o-

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o”: “o-o-o-o” being the small child’s utterance that Freud interprets as
“Fort!,” or “gone!” (Freud SE XVIII: 15). This is supported by the music
video, in which Madonna grabs a razor-edged hat (one of the accoutre-
ments of Bond villainy) and throws it away. “Gone!” she announces with
her “uh uh,” just as she sends the hat away in a pleasurable display of
mastery. A children’s game: is this gesture not the fulfillment of her prom-
ise earlier in the song to find “A time to work, a time to play?” In Freud’s
account, children’s games such as fort-da are the very processes by which
we master and negotiate trauma and initiate repetition compulsion. And
so it seems almost inevitable that Madonna’s very next utterance assumes
the position of the analysand (“I need to lay down”) and then, by transfer-
ence, gets locked into an interminable compulsion to repeat: all she can
say for the remainder of the song are variations of “I guess I’ll die another
day” and nothing else. Moreover, the disco-style drum machine, which
through most of the song has enjoyed intermittent rests, now remains un-
interrupted; but even it is survived by the seemingly indefatigable synco-
pated string arrangement caught in an endless loop of repetition that outlasts
all of the other instruments.13 According to Freud, fixations about death
(or, as he puts it, “involving a risk to life”) approach hysteria in the “wealth”
of their symptoms, but also stretch somewhere beyond hysteria,
“surpass[ing] it as a rule” (SE XVIII:12).
Freud takes it upon himself to limit the repetitive utterances that
can emerge from such situations: he accepts that it is “the physician’s
endeavor to keep this transference neurosis within the narrowest limits: to
force as much as possible the channel of memory and to allow as little as
possible to emerge as repetition” (SE XVIII: 19). But Madonna has
already pointed her own way out of this fixation, and thus has indeed
“found another way”: her earlier promises to “close my body now” and
“suspend my senses” are fulfilled through her scenes of binding from the
music video, as described above. Freud, like Madonna, would have the
organism close its body by a process of binding so as to suspend its
senses; thus binding, somatic closing, and sensory suspension are inti-
mately linked processes in Madonna and Freud alike. In section IV of

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Beyond, Freud describes the binding of energies as a “crust” that forms

around the body that will dull the potentially traumatic impact of outside
stimuli (SE XVIII: 24-33). In the video, the cut that pierces the bodily
armor of the fencing Madonnas illustrates the impact of the cut as trau-
matic: indeed, Freud suggests that “we describe as ‘traumatic’ any exci-
tations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the pro-
tective shield” (29), a misfortune strikingly literalized in the music video
and protected against in the lyrics.14
Madonna’s tattoo in the video announces this complicated protec-
tion scheme against jouissance equally effectively, and even suggests that,
as Lacan claims, jouissance becomes alienated from the subject through
the appearance of the signifier. That is, the video features Madonna using
a signifier quite literally to shield herself from overwhelming jolts of enjoy-
ment, which she apparently associates with God, fatherdom, and prohibi-
tion. Madonna, binding herself frantically in preparation for the electric
chair, sports a faux-tattoo on her right arm in Hebrew lettering. Spelt with
the letters (right to left) “lamed,” “alef” and “vav,” (roughly, “LAV”), the
tattooed word is possibly an uncommon form of the Hebrew word for
“no,” or possibly “not”; it may also be one of the names of G-d.15 The no!
and name of the father combined punningly upon her body, Madonna
visually suggests that she has been marked by the letter but can still enjoy
the Other directly. This form of jouissance, which Lacan associates with
mystical religious ecstasy, is the reward for those (namely, women) who
can manage to be incompletely contained within the strictures of the Name-
of-the-Father. Lacan asserts that womanly mysticism is “something seri-
ous” even though its practitioners “know nothing about it”—which is a
formulation that may resolve the perceived contradiction that Madonna,
who claims to take Kabbalah very seriously, nevertheless has been ac-
cused of treating the mystical tradition somewhat unknowingly (Lacan
Seminar XX 76).
Her body supposedly pushed to its physical limits, the Madonna of
the music video erupts in a seemingly overwhelming and deathly enuncia-
tion of enjoyment that leads her to recognize pleasure as the bodily limit to

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endurable suffering.16 The enigmatic tattoo presents a literalized case of

the feminine jouissance that, as Lacan says, allows the Woman (the Lacanian
strikethrough indicating her relationship to the symbolic order)17 to enjoy
not only through the signifier but also in direct relation to the Other (Semi-
nar XX 64-77). As Lacan explains, some tattoos can be understood as
materializations of the libido, and they “certainly [have] the function of
being for the Other, of situating the subject in it, marking his [sic] place in
the field of the group’s relations” (Seminar XI 205-206). Noting their
“erotic function,” Lacan claims that with some tattoos, the subject “in
short circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds” in integrating subjec-
tivity and desire (Seminar XI 206). Madonna’s tattoo, in its direct asser-
tion of the dialectical subversion of the subject and of that subject’s direct
access to the Other, implies that even while Madonna may not have actu-
ally yet destroyed her ego, her ego nevertheless has been unseated, jeop-
ardized, and self-alienated.18 Fittingly, once Madonna vanishes from the
short-circuiting electric chair at the end of the music video, the letters from
her tattoo appear as if burnt into the electric chair itself.19 This fresh
mark of “no,” however, in this new context, seems to celebrate Madonna’s
prolonging the road to death more than it documents the Name-of-the-
Father: it appears as a marker of Madonna’s escape, and it appears
seemingly because we have just seen the white fencing Madonna of an-
other, seemingly unrelated scene shoot an arrow through the heart of the
black fencing Madonna (which could possibly be read as Eros staving off
Thanatos for awhile).20
In the lyrics, the music video, and the film, we see an intimate con-
versation emerging between Madonna and Freud. This conversation, we
must remember, is thoroughly commoditized, and it must serve commer-
cial purposes in a remarkably overdetermined way: the song is designed
to serve as a commodity in its own right (as a hit single), as an advertise-
ment for itself (in its music video), an advertisement for Madonna as con-
strued as a brand unto herself, an advertisement for the film, and as a
prominent part of the very film that it is supposed to advertise. In employ-
ing (and implying) concepts from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Ma-

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 "Sigmund Freud, Analyze This": Madonna Beyond the Pleasure Principle 91

donna has effectively made good on her promise to MGM by offering

listeners a subtle explanation of the pleasures awaiting audiences of the
Bond film. When people paid eight dollars to see the “new” Bond, they
weren’t getting anything new at all: indeed, the fact that Die Another Day
could gross over $160 Million at the box office despite offering audiences
only what they’d seen nineteen times before over the past forty years hints
at the powerful pleasures and potential for capital gain associated with the
compulsion to repeat. Freud, of course, would have had difficulty in un-
derstanding this phenomenon, which presents a challenge to his claim that
“[n]ovelty is always the condition of enjoyment” (SE XVIII: 35). But
nevertheless it is clear that film viewers, like readers, enjoy particular forms
of pleasure from following heavily plotted narratives. Here I’m drawing
from the work of Peter Brooks, who offers an account of readerly desire
in his classic study of narratology, Reading for the Plot. It should come as
little surprise that Brooks bases his model of narrative pleasure on a close
reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Brooks’s theoretical model
posits that viewers of a heavily plotted film such as Die Another Day
would take pleasure from balancing two instincts: one that aspires toward
the end of the film, and one that delays that ending by following a circui-
tous path toward it (Brooks 103-104). Seen in this light, when Madonna
reminds us of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, intentionally or otherwise,
she is gesturing toward the specific theoretical frame that can account for
the enduring appeal of James Bond for viewers. This form of pleasure
announces a marked contrast to the popular perception of Madonna’s
own career, which has been famously marked by countless personal rein-
ventions.21 While the filmic Bond character has slowly evolved over forty
years of wear, Madonna’s persona as a pop star has struck many main-
stream listeners as daring, unpredictable, and malleable over the latter half
of Bond’s career.22 But Madonna’s poses for “Die Another Day,” despite
being routed unexpectedly through Freud’s genuinely daring work, here
as usual serve the corporate interests of the culture industry primarily. The
effect of Madonna’s call for analysis ultimately produces a different sort of
objet a, specifically the sound of a ringing jackpot shared between Mav-

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92 David Sigler

erick, BMG, UMA, EON Productions, and MGM. But Madonna, in

pursuing this most consistent cause of her desire, has nevertheless re-
vealed that viewers can experience in Die Another Day a few of the
pleasures of the unconscious itself as they negotiate their way through
countless incarnations of the Bond myth.
David Sigler
University of Virginia

Notes

1
My understanding of the business aims and generic expectations for a
“normal” Bond theme song has been greatly enhanced by Jeff Smith’s essay “Cre-
ating A Bond Market.”
2
See Lacan’s Seminar II, Derrida’s The Post Card, and Laplanche’s Life and
Death in Psychoanalysis, which represent three of the most rigorous and influen-
tial commentaries on Beyond.
3
I hope that this brief statement of the premise of the film does not unfairly
neglect the important part played by Jinx (Halle Berry) in the saving of the world. I
confine my remarks to Bond’s situation only to highlight the main differences
between Die Another Day and the rest of the Bond oeuvre.
4
Bond’s efforts to correct and regulate flows of capital are consistent with his
role as corporate “company man,” to borrow Edward P. Comentale’s designation
and astute analysis of Ian Fleming’s Bonds. See Comentale’s essay “Fleming’s
Company Men,” especially pp. 9-11.
5
I wish to thank Keith E. Clifton for reminding me that Madonna attempts
similar dream-imagery in the music video for “Bedtime Stories,” and also for inform-
ing me that Madonna used the electric chair as a prop during her performances of
“Die Another Day” during her American Life tour in 2003.
6
Freud discusses this phenomenon briefly in the chapter of The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams entitled “The Stimuli and Sources of Dreams,” wherein he acknowl-
edges the importance of sensory receptors in shaping dream content but explains
that “[s]cientific enquiry, however, cannot stop there” (SE IV: 27). For a further
discussion of Madonna and her relation to dreams and psychoanalysis, see Daniel
Walden and Helena Poch’s article, “Psychoanalysis of Dreams: Dream Theory and

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 "Sigmund Freud, Analyze This": Madonna Beyond the Pleasure Principle 93

Its Relationship to Literature and Popular Culture: Freud, Billy Joel, Appelfeld, and
Abe,” Journal of Popular Culture, 32:1 (1998 Summer), pp. 113-20.
7
For an interesting discussion of Die Another Day’s representation of North
Korean-South Korean politics, North Korea’s relationship to the West, and the
film’s representation of the North Korean nuclear armament, see Alexis Albion’s
“Wanting To Be James Bond,” pp. 213-214.
8
For a rigorous Freudian interpretation of libidinal binding and anal eroticism
in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, see Comentale’s “Fleming’s Company Men,” pp. 13-
16.
9
Beyond The Pleasure Principle cannot adequately explain, however, why a
heavyset bearded man suddenly appears in the electric chair once Madonna has
escaped. Traktor decides to show us an image of this man only very briefly at the
end of the music video; the man seems to be enjoying the jouissance of the electric
chair as much as Madonna had been.
10
Uncanny doubles are, of course, not foreign to the Bond oeuvre: most
memorable, the Blofield clones and their cloned cats in Diamonds Are Forever
(1971). For an interesting psychoanalytic reading of anal eroticism, anxieties about
masculinity, and their expression through the Blofield clones, see Dennis W. Allen’s
essay “Alimentary, Dr. Leiter,” especially pp. 25-29. Incidentally, Diamonds Are
Forever shares much of its plot with Die Another Day, including an illegal trade in
African diamonds for the manufacture of a devastating weapon, a criminal master-
mind capable of radical self-transformations, and the use of scorpions as weapons
of political cruelty.
11
In this sentence, I am drawing upon Bruce Fink’s discussion of hysteria in
The Lacanian Subject, pp. 133-135.
12
Although Gallagher translates Lacan’s “objet a” as “o-object,” I have de-
cided to retain Lacan’s French usage here for the purposes of consistency, specific-
ity, and conformity with customary translation practices of Lacan.
13
Thanks are again due to Keith E. Clifton, who not only suggested this point
to me but also exemplifies strategies for reading Madonna’s instrumentation and
lyrics together in his persuasive article “Queer Hearing and the Madonna Queen”
in Madonna’s Drowned Worlds.
14
Freud’s meditation on the bodily crust as a shield against the shock of
jouissance reverses the strategy of Gustav Graves, the villain of Die Another Day,
who has devised for himself a metal exoskeleton capable of emitting high-voltage
electric shocks. On a less technological note, one is reminded also of the scorpions
that Bond endures at the beginning of the film.
15
The tattoo seems to resist easy interpretation, confounding several fluent
Hebrew speakers and even inspiring an explanatory note from Rabbi Yehuda Berg,
spiritual leader of The Kabbalah Center. I am gathering my reading of the tattoo

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94 David Sigler

from an interesting discussion of Madonna’s tattoo, posted on the blog “Ghost of

a Flea” and dated October 31, 2002 (“The Flea”).
See <http://www.ghostofaflea.com/archives/000169.html>. A later post to
this blog claims to have received an “official” explanation of the tattoo from Rabbi
Berg: according to the blog, Berg explains that “The ‘word’ on Madonna’s shoul-
der is not actually a word, but rather one of the names from the 72 Names of G-d.
Kabbalah explain that Moses used these names to split the Red Sea, and that we
can use them to create miracles in our own lives. Each name draws a particular kind
of energy. The name in the ‘Die Another Day’ video is for eliminating the ego.” See
Berg’s remarks at <http://ghostofaflea.blogspot.com/
2003_02_02_ghostofaflea_archive.html#88420317>. Thus, in an interesting further
literalization of a Lacanian motif, Madonna has not-all of the Name-of-the-Father
tattooed (temporarily) on her body. For another discussion of the meaning of the
tattoo, one that accuses Madonna of cultural appropriation, see Sashinka’s blog at
<http://sashinka.blogspot.com/2002_10_01_sashinka_archive.html#82966553>.
16
Torture can be construed as a form of enjoyment beyond the body, one that
forces the body to meet the limit of its jouissance in death. See, for example, Alenka
Zupancic’s discussion of “Fantasy within the limits of reason alone” in her Ethics
of the Real, pp. 79-82.
17
The term is written as barred in Lacanian theory to indicate that “The
Woman” as such is not entirely contained within the symbolic order; she is, as
Lacan puts it, “not-whole” and therefore she can but be excluded” by “the nature of
words.” That is why any reference to the universal category of “Woman” can only
be written under erasure if it is to be somewhat accurate; as Lacan states, “Woman
can only be written with a bar through it” (Lacan, Seminar XX 72-73).
18
Here my understandings of jouissance, the ego, and the signifier are routed
through Lacan’s influential essay from Écrits, “The Subversion of the Subject.”
19
This inexplicable event seems to revise a Freudian formula from the New
Introductory Lectures: where she was, there her signifier shall be. See Freud SE
XXII: 80.
20
The film’s evil fencing champion character Miranda Frost, played by
Rosamund Pike, also dies by being impaled through the chest.
21
Several sophisticated scholarly responses to these reinventions have been
collected in Madonna’s Drowned Worlds, a collection edited by Santiago Fouz-
Hernandez and Freya Jarman-Ivens. This collection establishes that Madonna’s
reinventions are a matter deserving better theorization and even begins this work in
earnest.
22
Bond’s gradual transformations have been discussed often and well; among
the most interesting of these discussions are Jeremy Black’s The Politics of James
Bond (especially pp. 159-168), Tara Brabazon’s “Britain’s Last Line of Defence,”

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 "Sigmund Freud, Analyze This": Madonna Beyond the Pleasure Principle 95

and Jim Leach’s “The World Has Changed.” Madonna’s commitment to self-rein-
vention has been well discussed in Steven Spencer-Steigner and Britta Wheeler's
"Madonna, the Libertine?", Lynne Layton's "Who's That Girl? A Case Study of
Madonna," and Lynn O'Brien Hallstein's "Feminist Assessment of Emancipatory
Potential and Madonna's Contradictory Gender Practices," as well as in the afore-
mentioned Madonna's Drowned Worlds.

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