Discourses on Death and the Death Drive: Freud, Lacan, and Heidegger

This essay is a comparative examination of three discourses on death and/or the death drive. From Beyond the Pleasure Principle onwards Freud builds and rebuilds the hypothesis of the death drive. His initial idea is profoundly conservative as well as dualistic. It suffers substantial changes as he turns the death drive into an aggressivity working against “the Nirvana principle.” Still, the conservative character of the drive remains, for the pleasure of aggression means the taming of the death drive by Eros, at least in the masochistic subject. Lacan, likewise, explains the death drive in several different ways. It lies in the signifying chain as the cause of “aphanisis” (the disappearance of the subject); it suggests itself in various attacks on the human Gestalt resulting in imagos of the fragmented body; or it expresses the ontological “limit” of the historical subject as the returning past. Seemingly Lacan moves on from Freud’s biological conservatism, but things are ambivalent due to the everydayness of the function of the Lacanian death drive. It might even be said that, in comparison, Freud has more clues to the radical withdrawal from mundane modernity. Lacan’s invocation of Heidegger with regard to the “limit” is justified only to a limited extent. Heidegger promotes, as Freud and Lacan do, the idea that life and death (or nothingness) belong together. Yet the possibility of death, for the German philosopher, is also the sole source of Dasein’s singularity and authentic Being. An “anticipation” (Vorlaufen) of death makes Dasein free from its own tenaciousness at the same time as it renders Dasein’s “Being-with” (communality) authentic. These differences notwithstanding, the three discourses on death deliver insights into the negativity that introduces rupture and rejuvenation into life’s progress.