David Cronenberg's Having to Make the Word be Flesh‪.‬

In an interview, David Cronenberg told the French critic Serge Grunberg: "I have to make the word be flesh, and then photograph the flesh, because I can't photograph the word" (DCE 97) (1). This moral imperative refers not only to his practise as an "auteur" who writes a screenplay and then makes it come alive in the flesh before filming it, but also to what he calls his project of aesthetics (DCE 106-07). As I have argued elsewhere, this project can be read as a moral mission which aims at calling into question the values of Western thought by creating utopias in which to try out other aesthetic and ethical systems. This paper is more metafictional in its approach as I try to determine Cronenberg's relationship to his work. The main idea defended here is that the creative drive is a desire for oneness that, as it cannot be satisfied, as creation is always re-creation and utopias are doomed to become dystopias, produces a destructive desire which ensures that re-creation will recommence.