Between Animal and Human: the Death Drive in Civilization and Its Discontents<\/i><\/p>\n
In his now classic study Civilization and Its Discontents <\/em>Freud takes on an age old distinction between the individual and collective and translates this distinction into one between an ego and the death drive. In particular what interests me is Freud’s discussion of the death drive which was \u00a0first introduced in an earlier work as that which is \u2018beyond\u2019 the pleasure principle. In what way can we say the death drive is \u2018beyond\u2019 in any sense? Going some way towards answering this, Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, <\/em>famously wonders aloud regarding the genesis of the animal versus human:<\/p>\n In the case of other animal species it may be that temporary balance has been reached between the influence of their environment and the mutually contending instincts within them, and that thus a cessation of development has come about. It may be that in primitive man a fresh access of libido kindled a renewed burst of activity on the part of the destructive instinct. There are a great many questions here to which as yet there is no answer.” (C&D<\/i> 70)<\/p>\n Freud draws a contrast here between homeostatic balance that results in the cessation of development (death) and paradoxically the death drive as inauguration of movement and a breakthrough to the human.<\/p>\n Hence stealing a page from Slavoj \u017di\u017eek’s work, I will make the argument that the Freudian death drive represents an important theoretical innovation for the analysis of politics and society and in particular the relation between the particular and universal.<\/p>\n I will also argue that in Civilization and its Discontents<\/em> Freud’s rebuttal of a humanist ethics, revealed in his critical reading of \u201cThou shalt love thy neighbour\u201d can be extended to critically formulate a possible outline for an ethical theory.\u00a0 In other words, the \u2018monstrosity\u2019 of the other that Freud only hints at can be made the basis for an ethical universality.<\/p>\n Overall this paper presentation will seek to offer a modest Lacanian inspired update to Freud’s classic text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Between Animal and Human: the Death Drive in Civilization and Its Discontents In his now classic study Civilization and Its Discontents Freud takes on an age old distinction between the individual and collective and translates this distinction into one between an ego and the death drive. In particular what interests me is Freud’s discussion of … Continue reading “July 1 abstract”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11399"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11411,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions\/11411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}