The death drive doesn’t exist, but their continued use of it to mimetically explain all violence, which means they double turn themselves

The death-drive theory has not found wide acceptance among Freud's followers. With significant exceptions like Melanie Klein, it has been explicitly denounced as misconceived biology, unsubstantiated speculation, logically incoherent and/or without evidence. It has also been attributed to Freud's own painful personal circumstances: the death of his daughter, the death of a grandson, his own illness (cancer), and his lifelong preoccupation with death. Of those who have been sympathetic to the idea, most have tended to tame it - as indeed did Freud himself. One move was to rewrite the instinct as largely an instinct of aggression. But for Freud the aggressive aspect of the death drive had been secondary; the instinct was primarily self-destructive. Sadism derives from a more primordial masochism, which means in effect that human aggression is, originally, self destructiveness. Of all subsequent theorists of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan takes the death drive most seriously, and most contemporary psychoanalytic attention to it comes via him. To his credit, Lacan does not underplay or tame the death drive, and he locates Freud firmly within the Western tradition when he remarks that Freud questioned life as to its meaning and his answer was not that it had none 'which is a convenient way of washing one's hands of the whole business' - but that life has 'only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by death' (Ecrits, p. 277). According to Lacan, the Freudian world is one not of things, nor even of being, but rather of desire. More so even than Freud, Lacan finds in desire 'the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need'. Although this distinction has been 'always obvious to moralists worthy of the name', psychoanalysis nevertheless misses the point by pursuing an obscurantist reduction of desire to need (p. 286). And that, for Lacan, is a cardinal error. This distinction belween desire and need leads him to dwell on something else in both Freud and earlier writers, moralists and otherwise: the relation between desire and lack. In modern psychoanalysis we find a secularized, intensified version of an existential perception that goes back a long way, even though the immediate influences here are Heidegger and Kojeve: Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. (Lacan, Seminar, 11.222-3) For Lacan, death is the name for a primordial absence intrinsic to presence; as John Forrester puts it, 'presence includes as its very condition the limit beyond which is its absence' (p. 176).16 To bind desire so resolutely into lack and absence means that it inevitably becomes a kind of essential negativity (Lacan, Seminar, 1.146)*' - something premised on an initial failure of satisfaction and which, as such, comes to exist only by virtue of its own alienation; as Juliet Mitchell puts it, 'Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that, in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself (Lacan. Feminine Sexuality, p. 6). One consequence of this is a radical fragmentation of the human subject.18 In one respect Lacan recasts the familiar metaphysical idea that life is rooted in death: 'it is death that sustains existence' (Ecrits, p. 300). In his development of this idea he combines diverse elements of the Western tradition of desire's impossibility: a theology of desire as death, crossed with something more romantic if no less severe - desire as annihilating excess, a primordial discord. The two elements are fused in those places where, for example, he speaks of 'that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct' (p. 104). These ideas then get reworked according to structuralist and linguistic preoccupations, as when he speaks of the 'frenzy' of desire 'mocking Ihe abyss of Ihe infinite', and of how this amounts to 'no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails - eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy. Hence its "perverse" fixation at the very suspension-point of the signifying chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified' (p. 167). In the same vein Lacan suggests that it is from death that existence takes on all the meaning it has; the lack which is at the heart of desire is also the price that human beings pay for their admission to language and culture. Death makes life possible in that it makes meaning and representation possible; it is not only before speech but 'primordial to the birth of symbols' (pp. 104-5, 300). Hence Lacan's most well-known formulation, that the unconscious is structured like a language, and his claim to have demonstrated 'the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech' (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 20; Merits, p. 101). Richard Boothby regards this as the most radical and innovative aspect of Lacan. I remain unconvinced.19 Lacan's invocations of death's centrality to life are more derivative than their complex, often obscure, formulations suggest.20 When he declares that All that life is concerned with is seeking repose as much as possible while awaiting death. This is what devours the time of the suckling baby at the beginning of its existence... Life is concerned solely with dying {Seminar. 11.233) we can hear Freud and Schopenhauer most closely, but also Montaigne (especially in that last assertion - 'Life is concerned solely with dying'), who also, incidentally, consolidated his own perception of this truth with extensive citation of classical sources. In the giving over of the newborn child to death we might hear too the early Christian Fathers. Lacan does not exactly disguise his precedents; the passage just cited continues with a reference to Hamlet's 'to die, to sleep, perchance to dream' and to the idea developed by philosophers in antiquity that it would have been better not to have been born. But (and this recalls Freud's own evasive acknowledgment of his influences) in Lacan these allusions to the past are fleeting, in passing, almost secretive; the implication is that these past writers anticipate something which can only properly, and only now, be understood through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, whose complexity is, at the same time, almost guaranteed to defeat the attempt. Some at least of that complexity is obscurantist. In the wake of contemporary cultural developments, including the perceived failure of sexual radicalism and the trauma of AIDS, there are those who have turned to Lacan for a more honest view of desire, and, via him, are reconsidering a severe account of human desire. I should not speak for them; what I find in Lacan is an overtheorized expression of something more significantly and relevantly expressed elsewhere (in Freud and before). It this respect I believe he is symptomatic of a much wider tendency in (post-) modern theory. But in terms of his influence alone Lacan remains significant for this study. By crossing Freud's death drive with the philosophy of lack and nothingness derived from Kojeve's version of Hegel (itself influenced by Heidegger), he continues to drive death ever further into being; now, perhaps more inexorably than ever before, death is the lack which drives desire. In doing that he also exemplifies another significant tendency in modern thought which I have already remarked, namely the antihumanist wish to decentre 'man' in the name of a philosophy which is truly adequate to the complexity of being, yet which seeks to retain a residual human mastery in the very effort of articulating this complexity. As we have seen, the philosophical bid to comprehend the truth of being was always a form of intellectual empowerment - even, or rather especially, when issuing in the declaration that life, desire and the world have to be renounced. But modern theory, having lost faith in older philosophical notions of truth, now half-settles for the mastery of a new kind of complexity which it partly produces in order to enable this performance of mastery. Phoenix-like, the omniscient, masterful and above all complex analytic of the modern theorist rises above his sacrifice of 'man' to death.