Carel, Havi. Born to be Bad: Is Freud’s Death Drive the Source of Human Evilness? Department of Philosophy, University of Essex download here
McGowan, Todd. A Violent Ethics: Mediation and the Death Drive Février 2009
McGowan, Todd. Violence of Creation in The Prestige. 2007 International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol 1.3 download here
In her essay Carel examines Freud’s initial debate with Einstein and pointing out that Freud made use of the death instinct to incorporate a notion of an aggressive drive that needs be pointed outwards, otherwise it directs itself against the subject in a form of repetitive masochistic self-harm. Therefore Carel ends the first part of her essay detailing how it could easily be taken that Freud falls into a more pessimistic stance, detailing the horrors of war and how this instinctual death drive is behind human aggressiveness. However the central point of Carel’s essay is the moment he questions this conclusion:
“This theory of the death drive has been conceived as the height of Freud’s pessimism, as admitting that we are indeed born evil. But is this the only ethical position that can be deduced from the death drive? This same death drive, I claim, can actually offer a solution to the problem of innate aggression.” What is Carel’s answer? Through sublimating the death drive we can control its aggressive nature, and thereby strengthen the superego. Here Carel moves to Freud’s well known treatise on the battle between Eros and Thanatos in her book: Civilization and its Discontents (1920). Carel here states that: human “aggression is innate, but nonetheless not uncontrollable.” Carel’s intention is to show how we can interpret Freud’s take on instinctive aggressiveness, not as strictly a doom and gloom scenario, but can actually turn it around.
“In this sense the ethical question is not whether aggression can be abolished from the human psyche, but rather how this aggression can be channelled to non-destructive activities and turned into a positive energy source, a will to power. We can conclude that the thesis of inherent aggression does not necessarily lead to ethical determinism. Aggression can be regarded as neutral energy, which can be used for various purposes. This idea is reinforced by abandoning the dualistic model, so the death drive is no longer a destructive force whose antidote is Eros, but rather a fundamental human force.”
Carel’s Ethics of Finitude
Psychoanalysis has an ethics, it is to reduce suffering, mitigating the self-blame and harsh talk coming from the superego, the analyst works with the analysand to reduce suffering, the increase a level of acceptance and faithfulness to oneself, regardless of whatever is Truth, the Good etc.
“Freud’s ethical imperative, as stated in the 1915 essay Thoughts for the Times on War and Death is: “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death”. This is the imperative to prepare for the possibility of loss and mourning, for disappointment and failure. For Freud the death drive is not only the final fact of finitude, our ceasing to exist, but the many forms of loss and transience experienced within life.”
“The ethical imperative inscribed in the death drive is one of tolerance, patience, and acceptance. These are not to be confused with resignation, cynicism or despair. The ethical imperative is to learn the lesson of ambivalence, that life is made out of good and bad, fulfilment and disappointment, and moreover, that the two are inseparably intertwined.”
Todd McGowan is well known as a Lacanian film theorist. But his taste for developing a comprehensive politics based on the teaching of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He starts out his article on violence and the death drive by first drawing our attention to the fact that we are born, that is, our subjectivity emerges out of a violent tearing, or negation of our base, complacent being.
“Violence, and the rupture it suggests, marks the foundation of our subjectivity, and it is necessary for the subject’s sustenance. In his commentary of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève makes precisely this point. He notes, ‘Man is not a being that is: he is a Nothing that annihilates by the negation of being.’ Through the violent act, we tear ourselves out of undifferentiated being and emerge as subjects.”
McGowan continues:
“This negating gesture is the positive condition for subjectivity, which remains inseparable from it. Our existence as subjects is thus a thoroughly violent existence. Obviously, the violence that Kojève theorizes is not identical to what we usually think of as violence — fighting, the use of weapons, and so on — but actual acts of violence are a manifestation of the original violence that gives birth to subjectivity. Actual acts of violence repeat and sustain this original negation.”
Here McGowan is talking about the original violence. Is it that 4 years later in his 2013 book, <em>Enjoying What We Don’t Have</em>, he slightly modifies this from violence to loss? Or is this still the same? Perhaps, since I still can not his emphasis on the emergence of subject via a traumatic, originary and constitutive loss.
For McGowan violence is foundational. For socialists, conservative and liberals and utopians alike, they see violence as the result of some other cause: poverty, lack of life chances, poor education, decline in morality etc. McGowan states, “In each case and in numerous others, there is an explanation for violence in other foundational disturbances. … There are few who try to theorize violence itself as foundational. Even one of the great thinkers who attempted to do so, Sigmund Freud, took a long time to accede to this conception.”