Serial instincts

Abstract

This article assumes that instinct proposes an expeditious solution for contemporary culture, homogenizing multiple manifestations from the protective intensity of the maternal and the irremissible loss of the sexual, to the unstoppable murderous yearning. Our hypothesis holds that this category is conformed as a “semiotic scaffolding” whose function would be to translate human irrationality. In dialogue with the semiologist Yuri Lotman and the philosopher Michel Foucault, we will say that artistic texts such as TV series will be a fertile ground for questioning how hypothetical instincts are reactivated, around a notion of “anomaly” and the complex mechanisms that ensure their domestication and control. We will analyze The Fall, narrative where the polyhedral construction of an instinct in the fictional figure of the serial killer does not flow in an isolated manner, since sexuality appears to conform a complex instinctual order. In this sense, the story captures that the problem of instinct recalls individual and collective identities, as well as regimes that sustain them. Based on this, instinct would be partially detached from its biological character, becoming semiotic category of analysis: textual operative that allows to attend to cognitive domains, and to show ethical aspects in a deterministic understanding of subjectivities on which each cultures inscribe meanings.