DYING ONE’S OWN DEATH

Abstract

Discussions around the meaning and validity of Freud’s notion of Todestrieb (the “death-drive” or “death-instinct”), as it was introduced in the essay from 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, later inscribed in the center of the so-called “Second Topography” of the unconscious, and finally applied to an interpretation of the “discontent” of our civilization, are proliferating. Either they concentrate on the clinical genealogy and the articulation with the remaining factors of the psychic conflict, or they disseminate towards a metaphysics of life and death, coupled with an analysis of the destructive element of culture. This essay tries a different and complementary approach: while elucidating as precisely as possible how the hypothesis relates to the moment of war (1914–18) in which it is “invented,” we seek an understanding of the political and existential elements intrinsic to the theory. In following this thread, we find the necessity of singling out a symptomatic formula, which is like an ethical opening, oddly inserted in a psycho-biological discourse: “the organism wants to die in its own way.” Its remarkable similitude to and difference from a verse in Rilke’s poem The Book of Poverty and Death (1903) provides a hypothetic clue.