DEATH DRIVE NATION
Patrick Blanchfield

The complete article is here.

I am also indebted to Donald Trump and his movement for helping to make it clear--once and for all--that psychopathology is not simply a condition or state of being of individuals--but that profound psychopathology is inherent within the structures of society.

Richard Koenigsberg
 

PLEASE CLICK THE LINKS BELOW TO READ SEVERAL PUBLICATIONS I'VE AUTHORED THE TOPIC OF COLLECTIVE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
 

"COLLECTIVE DELUSIONS/SHARED PSYCHOSIS"

"HISTORY AS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: CAN ENTIRE GROUPS BE INSANE?"

"THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE HUMAN RACE"
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DEATH DRIVE NATION
Patrick Blanchfield

Precisely written a century before the plague year of 2020, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is many things—a clinical examination of the “war neuroses” (what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a revision of his own theory of mind and his account of human motivation, and a plangent reflection, however oblique, on the failure of the European Enlightenment project.

But the feature that most scandalized Freud’s contemporaries, and that still befuddles his interpreters today, is the idea of a death drive (Todestrieb), a self-consciously mythical and hard-to-pin-down concept that straddles biology, psychology, and what could be called a kind of entropics of culture.

Unlike our drives to reproduce, to connect, and to survive, which Freud variously associates with dynamics of fusion, creation, and sustenance, the death drive is visible in aggressiveness, in physical violence, self-destruction, and self-sabotage.

Whereas in his earlier theory of mind Freud saw the psyche as fundamentally oriented towards pleasure, the satisfaction of various desires, and the discharge of built-up unpleasant feelings, what he saw in World War I and its aftermath led him to imagine a force within the psyche that seemed preoccupied with pleasure’s opposite.

Some subsequent interpreters of Freud (most notably Jonathan Lear) have argued that trauma nightmares are the exception that proves the rule of the pleasure principle, artifacts of a “damaged” or “shocked” psychic apparatus. 

And Freud himself seemed to tarry with this possibility, suggesting that the “compulsion to repeat” in such dreams was in fact the mind’s effort, albeit stalled out, to “master” the traumatic experience, to somehow make it pleasurable through the fact of repetition.

But Freud also ventured something more radical, pushing for something further, something beyond (jenseits) the pleasure principle itself: a countervailing tendency to go back and repeat no matter the psychic cost, an imperative almost inhuman in its indifference to pleasure or even life itself. He dubbed this the “death drive” and saw it as operative not just in pathological conditions that manifested on his couch, but in the most basic building blocks of biology, putting it right alongside—and over and against—the instincts for self-preservation and reproduction.

If the primary outputs of the sexual drive were, for Freud, the fostering of bonds between people, sublimation into creativity and the arts, and, in the mode of sexual reproduction, the production of new life, the terrain of the death drive is about severing ties, breaking things to pieces, and even suicide.

And rather than being oriented towards change, or situated towards the present or the future, the death drive is oriented, viciously, towards stasis and the restoration of a kind of deadened past. It encompasses, he wrote, “[t]he expression of the inertia inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.” 

Put simply: The death drive is expressed in a kind of tragic drama wherein change is less preferable or even less imaginable than staying the same, even if the status quo is lethal, all the way to the bitterest of ends. Quickened and most visible in the wake of trauma, the death drive is more broadly the desperate, terminal need to return to an anterior state prior to any loss, prior to any trauma, prior even to life itself. It is the ineluctable siren’s call of a “normal” that never existed in the first place—or rather, a normality that is inseparable from the death and ruin which that normality itself produced.                         

Perhaps more than any other psychoanalytic concept, the death drive offends certain basic pieties of American life. We pride ourselves, after all, on progress, on “service” with a smile, and on staying upbeat. We are in many respects still the nation that welcomed Freud on his one visit stateside with such wild cheeriness, even as he brought us “the plague.”

Looking back at 2020, when Freud’s words seem all the more prescient, we might justifiably wonder if Americans are in fact fairly copacetic with literal plagues, and that the real thing we don’t like is just being made to think or do too much about them. Which is also to say that Freud was more right than even he knew.

For much of the world, and the US in particular, 2020 was an object lesson—and exercise—in the death drive. To see this, a certain clarification is in order. Even as US media have hyperbolized facile talk of “crime waves,” it is undeniable that 2020 saw marked increases in both homicide and overdose rates (although not suicides).

But we would be mistaken to see the death drive as something that can be perceived clearly in such empirical case data. This challenge is why most psychoanalysts—like most people—have found the death drive too strange, too outlandish to take seriously.

The person who seems compelled to end all their therapeutic relationships in aggressive blowouts, the person who piles up acts of self-sabotage until their careers implode, the person who gambles through bankruptcy after bankruptcy—these behaviors all unfold on multiple levels of symbolism, and require that a person navigate complex human interactions and institutions with various degrees of sophistication and intentionality.

As Freud saw, the real opposite of both love and hate is in fact something else altogether: indifference. And here lies the true horror of the death drive: it is an indifferent principle of destruction. Insensate and unsatisfiable, it may well pulse within you, and undo you, but It Does Not Care About You. Your suffering and your symptoms signify; they ramify personally and in your relationships. The death drive, in its indifferent purity, operates on another order of scale entirely, liquidating you and them alike.

It may kill you, but It Is Not About You. To be sure, the death drive is present in murder, war, and our desires to dominate, exploit, and destroy. But we betray ourselves when we call such things examples of “inhumanity,” since they are obviously human, all too human. The death drive both gives a name to this paradox and resolves it by suggesting that we exist at the mercy of an entropic principle that is in-the-human yet downright unhuman in the purity of its indifference to humans and human affairs more generally. It is a kind of dark sublime in the shadow of which our activities unfold and dissolve.

Turning again to 2020, the death drive reveals itself in the simple fact that, rather than dramatically change collective behaviors to prevent carnage and save lives, America doubled down on them. COVID merely intensified pre-existing, starkly differential calculi of exposure to premature death, workplace risk, and general immiseration.

A nation founded on a continent decimated by settler plagues, cleansed by genocidal war, and fructified by chattel labor unsurprisingly became the same nation where Indigenous peoples, poor people of color, and more recent immigrants from our colonial possessions bore the brunt of COVID at vastly disproportionate rates.

From the very start, even in the first months of the year, the ubiquitous cry for a return to “normal” clearly expressed a demand to return to a status quo of working people to death and otherwise destroying their bodies as the cost of doing business. That the “new normal” meant they might have to die a little quicker was something the rest of us could apparently learn to live with.

But not just that: from the dismissal of concerns over childhood infection rates to the casual, matter-of-fact indifference to the deaths of America’s elderly, to the very idea of “herd immunity,” many Americans apparently embraced a fatalism whereby even their own deaths and the deaths of those they loved were more tolerable than having to contemplate the discomfort of social reorganizations that would make life different.

From the first moments of the outbreak in the US right through to the present, the apparently ubiquitous appeal emanating from politicians, media, and more than a few everyday people alike, has been for a “return to normal.” For some—and for politicians especially—returning to “normal” has meant undoing the few protections that were put in place in 2020, from eviction freezes to stimulus checks. In other words, it has meant pushing people back into “normal” precarity, proclaiming the end of a pandemic as though it were over and not still ongoing, as though it had been banished instead of made—as it increasingly appears—endemic.

Our inertia was lethal, and it remains lethal, but the need to consume even up to the point that we are ourselves consumed remains non-negotiable. At the close of 2021, some 750,000 Americans have died of COVID, and the dying continues, but still the wheels need to keep turning. Services must be provided, even if that means serving ourselves up, too. With all the indifference of the death drive, capitalism insists on the repetition of the same, no matter what.

Any idea of arresting our forward momentum, no matter the human cost, has apparently become either unthinkable or impracticable or both. That our headlong rush into a grim future of yet more death has been precipitated by people clamoring for the return to a nostalgic, fantastical past should not be surprising. Nor should we be surprised that the workers who have been described as “essential” are also apparently the most disposable.

They were always essential precisely insofar as they were disposable, and the past was “normal” precisely because it depended on the ongoing foreclosure of so many human futures. This is the logic of the death drive, distilled and accelerated, to which we cling all the way to the very bitterest of ends.

PATRICK BLANCHFIELD is a freelance writer and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. His book, Gunpower: Breaking the Cycle of 500 Years of American Violence, is forthcoming from Verso Books.
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