I will here give a sketchy view of how Freud’s notion of death drive can be used as a political concept. First, I will have to analyze das Unheimliche as a kind of gateway to the death drive and its role in our social relations. Then I will give a quick summary of the origin of the death drive in order to end with a way of using it in a political context.
In our ordinary lives we live in “contexts of meaning”. There are certain standardized ways of interactions between people and between us and the world. A tooth brush is used for brushing your teeth, cars are meant for driving and humans express their feelings with their face. These modes of appearing are rule-governed in the sense that deviation is normally sanctioned as abnormal (try driving a tooth brush for example). Sometimes however these contexts of meaning are disturbed, sometimes the symbolic realm in which we live is interrupted by the crude materiality of things, their radical non-significance. This is what Freud called das Unheimliche. It is the return of something that should have remained hidden, but what does that mean? An example given by Freud is an epileptic attack. While we normally see a person’s body as a plane of expression, this is impossible for someone who witnesses an epileptic seizing. What he sees is the base materiality of the body, its “corpo-reality”. Meaning and subjectivity are suspended. This leads to a paradox: on the one hand the uncanny shows the non-signifying base of materiality, but on the other hand contexts of meaning demand of us to see meaning and expressivity. Even with an epileptic we are not capable of viewing his body as a mere thing. We still see expressivity and yet we see only non-expressivity. This aporia can be characterized as “the scream” (the abject in Kristeva’s works). A scream is a non-expressivity demanding to be heard as expressive. A scream is not a person, but the throat speaking, but the throat doesn’t speak a language. In stead the throat speaks the speaking, it speaks the materiality of that wich renders speech speech. In Lacan’s words, in the scream le sujet de l’énonciation is spoken in stead of le sujet de l’énoncé as in language.
The materiality of being is repressed by the contexts of meaning of our everyday lives and that’s the reason why the uncanny is the return of something hidden (materiality) that should have remained hidden. There are mutliple possible reactions:
1) We can reinstate meaning by making the scream meaningfull nonetheless. Freud calls this “animism”. We can, for example, say that the epileptic is possessed by the devil. This then opens new contexts of meaning and keeps the old preserved. This strategy is however repressive and only solves the problem temporarily. We identify unexplainable phenomena with concepts and refuse their non-identity. The result is that the non-identical will show up in other places, turning all the cracks in our contexts of meaning in massive gaps (an exception would be Baudrillard’s simulation theory, since he argues that there are contexts of meaning possible in which everyhting can be identified with a concept on beforehand).
2) The most popular solution is repulsion. We turn our heads in order not to see the cracks in our contexts of meaning. We modify the rules of these contexts so that we can preserve them better. This means that we create prohibitions where there is a possibility of transgressing the boundaries of the contexts of meaning and repulsive reactions (disgust for example) where the transgression has already taken place. The highly ritualized interactions with corpses and the tendency to vomit at the sight of a dead person are good examples. This is the most effective way of reinstating meaning, but it denies the scream in the sense that it doesn’t want to hear it.
3) The third possibility is the further desintegration of meaning. We can also finish the work the uncanny started. If we really listen to the scream, then we can only attack our contexts of meaning, since they block us from understanding the throat of the scream. This means that we break the community with others, because the other no longer manifests himself as a person, only as a material body. (This is why I use the concept of the scream and not the Levinasian face. The latter is community, although an asymmetrical one, while the former is the breaking of community. The face is the ethical demand that speaks through a phenomenal form, while the scream is only a phenomenal form without any speaking except the phenomenal form itself. While the face is then a transcendence referring to an Other, the scream is transimmanent referring to an other-in-the-world.) Freud called this demonic, active disintegration of our symbolic environment “death drive”.
Where does the death drive come from? According to Freud, the death drive is born in trauma. A trauma is an experience of helplesness (Hilflosigkeit) in pain. Such an experience cannot be given meaning, cannot be signified, because it presses us unto our material fnitude. Our contexts of meaning can’t help us in suffering, because the connections we ought to make to form a community with other people are broken. In pain we fall out of the community. This pain is inflicted on us by nature (Adorno), for the primal trauma is the violence of nature. Our first reaction is then to shrink into nothingness, to merge into material nature so that consciousness and the consciousness of pain disappear. We do this through repetition (Freud) or imitation (Adorno) of this natural trauma. We recreate the force of nature that crushed us in order to let the consciousness of the pain of this nature desintegrate together with the contexts of meaning that are formed by consciousness.
Suffering has in this context a double meaning: on the one hand there is the suffering of the trauma, but on the other hand there is the suffering of repression. One could even draw a link with Benjamin’s distinction between law-enforcing violence and divine violence. The death drive is the negation of this latter kind of suffering but repeats the first. It is this first characteristic, its defiance of repressive suffering, that makes Adorno say that every view of utopia in the present age resembles death (Beckett is his example). Utopian thinking wants to free the non-identical, that which doesn’t conform to our contexts of meaning, from identification and repression. It is in this sense that we can speak of a politics of the death drive. According to Adorno, the death drive is even an inescapable political fate. Our contexts of meaning dialectically turn into their opposite and become the violence of a “second nature” (i.e. a culture that we are so used to that we feel it as if it was our nature). The trauma of nature is repeated in the genocides of the 20th century, the oppression in the culture industry, etc. Freud knew that very well when he said that the ego tries to protect itself from the death drive ( and also from the force of nature) not only by repressing it, but also by deflecting its violence unto others. The agression of the fascist, the racist or the speciesist is the deflected agression of the death drive against the ego. For the fascist actually envies the image of the Jew as the non-person of a lower nature. The fascist himself wants to become a piece of nature.
Can we then just do away with repression and lead lives under the sign of the death drive? No, this would perpetuate the violence of the trauma of nature. The breaking of community in the disintegration of meaning cannot be completed, but remains to-come. This disintegration is always a scream and a scream is a scream-to-someone. The scream adresses itself to someone (this someone is more exactly an anyone, since we don’t care whom exactly is adressed). The scream presupposes a broken community, but a community nonetheless. We cannot perform the scream (death drive) nor hear it (the uncanny) without standing in community. We can make this more concrete with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. While the protagonists await death (in the form of Godot, the utopia they dream of), they await it together. While the play is an allegory for the loss of communication and the breaking of community, it is also the appearance of a community in this breaking, a communication of communication itself (the scream speeks the speaking). The result of this politics of the death drive is a baseless community, a community without anything in-common, without a shared culture.
rhizomatick 