What Freud aimed at with his notion of death-drive — more precisely, the key dimension of this notion for which Freud himself was blind, unaware of what he discovered, is the “non-dialectical” core of the Hegelian negativity, the pure drive to repeat without any movement of sublation/idealization.
The paradox here is that pure repetition (in contrast to repetition as idealizing sublation) is sustained precisely by its impurity, by the persistence of a contingent “pathological” element to which the movement of repetition remains stuck.
In the Kierkegard-Freudian pure repetition, the dialectical movement of sublimation thus encounters itself, its own core, outside itself, in the guise of a “blind” compulsion-to-repeat.
And it is here that one should apply the great Hegelian motto about the internalizing of the external obstacle: in fighting its external opposite, the blind nonsublatable repetition, the dialectical movement is fighting its own abyssal ground, its own core;
in other words, the ultimate gesture of reconciliation is to recognize in this threatening excess of negativity the core of the subject itself. This excess has different names in Hegel: the “night of the world,” the necessity of war, of madness, etc.
And perhaps, the same holds for the basic opposition between the Hegelian and the Freudian negativity: precisely insofar as there is a unbridgeable gap between them (the Hegelian negativity is idealizing, mediatizing/”sublating” all particular content in the abyss of its universality, while the negativity of the Freudian drive is expressed as being-stuck onto a contingent particular content),
the Freudian negativity provides (quite literally) the “material base” for the idealizing negativity — to put it in somewhat simplified terms, every idealizing/universalizing negativity has to be attached to a singular contingent “pathological” content which serves as its “sinthom” in the Lacanian sense (if this sinthom is unravelled/disintegrated, universality disappears).
The exemplary model of this link is, of course, Hegel’s deduction of the necessity of hereditary monarchy: the rational state as universal totality mediatizing all particular content has to be embodied in the contingent “irrational”figure of the monarch.