Precarious life

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Miriam Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Germ Cell ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Perfect Model ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

In …Pleasure Principle, Freud juxtaposes his discussion of the life and death instincts in “elementary organisms” to the tragic drama he sees enacted in his grandson’s fort-da game. Freud’s insights into the death drive are given an added tragic dimension in Lacan’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus. Here Lacan establishes the anti- or even post-humanist credentials of tragedy by insisting that it is the death of the subject which is Sophocles’ ultimate preoccupation. By placing Greek tragedy’s confrontation with the death drive in dialogue with the instincts of the “germ-cell”, the chapter demonstrates how psychoanalysis offers a perfect model for understanding antiquity’s contribution to posthumanism.

scholarly journals Vida e morte em Fechner e Freud

2021 ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
ANDRÉ SANTANA MATTOS
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Physical Principle ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
General Conception ◽  
The Common

 As concepções de vida e morte de Freud e de Fechner se entrelaçam no momento em que o primeiro, em Além do princípio do prazer (1920), aclimata ao seu arcabouço teórico o princípio fechneriano da tendência à estabilidade, tomado a partir de então como um princípio mais geral ao qual se subordina o princípio da constância (ou princípio do Nirvana). O princípio de Fechner, contudo, é destacado por Freud de uma obra publicada em 1873, onde seu autor o formula como um princípio físico que se insere em uma concepção geral sobre a vida — sobre a sua origem e o seu desenvolvimento, mas também o seu ocaso —, concepção que difere sobremaneira da visão científica usual, à qual Freud se filia. No entanto, a visão sobre a vida e a morte dos dois autores conflui a partir do ponto em comum representado pelo princípio da tendência à estabilidade, que, em Fechner, leva os organismos progressivamente ao estado inorgânico e, em Freud, parece poder ser entendido como o fundamento da pulsão de morte, que naturalmente se esforça por alcançar este mesmo fim.Palavras-Chave: Freud. Fechner. Vida. Morte. Life and death in Fechner and FreudABSTRACTFreud's and Fechner's conceptions of life and death are intertwined when the former, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), acclimatizes to his theoretical framework the Fechnerian principle of the tendency to stability, taken from then on as a more general principle to which the constancy principle (or Nirvana principle) is subordinated. Fechner's principle, however, is highlighted by Freud from a work published in 1873, where its author formulates it as a physical principle that fits into a general conception of life — about its origin and its development, but also the its sunset — a conception that differs greatly from the usual scientific view, to which Freud adheres. However, the vision of life and death of the two authors converges from the common point represented by the principle of the tendency to stability, which, in Fechner, leads organisms progressively to an inorganic state and, in Freud, seems to be understood as the foundation of the death drive, which naturally strives to achieve this very end.Keywords: Freud. Fechner. Life. Death.

Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis: ‘A Problematic Proximity’

Derrida Today ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Trumbull
Keyword(s):  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Analytic Treatment ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Post Card ◽  
Compulsion To Repeat ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This essay explores Derrida's work on repetition in psychoanalysis and what Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, called the ‘compulsion to repeat’. Revising the model of the psyche that had to that point dominated his theory, Freud began in 1920 to ascribe greater significance to experiences of trauma and unpleasure, and to their recurrence in the analytic treatment. This type of repeated repetition ultimately suggested to Freud the existence of a ‘death drive’ antithetical to life. I examine here how Derrida re-reads Beyond in The Post Card, analysing the way uncontrollable effects of repetition repeatedly undo Freud's efforts to make any progress on what lies beyond the pleasure principle. Another ‘logic’ of repetition, other than the one Freud invokes, inhabits Freud's text, threatening the fundamental opposition between the life drives and the death drive. But in reading Freud in this way, Derrida himself cannot quite ‘do justice to’ Freud, to the ambivalence at work in Freud's text. At certain key moments in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I show, Derrida seems to restrict an ambiguity in Freud's thinking around the relation between life and death. What Derrida's reading makes legible in part, then, is Derrida's resistance to psychoanalysis, the tension inhabiting Derrida's dealings with Freud in The Post Card and beyond.

The Posthuman Promise of the Earth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Lynes
Keyword(s):  
Living Organism ◽  
Pure Form ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Strategy Building ◽  
Living Present ◽  
General Economy

In the last interview before his death, Derrida claimed that the concept of survivance or living-on informed the entirety of his work. This chapter attempts to develop this notion in order to designate an ethics of ecological relationality extrapolated from Derrida’s infrequent but highly important references to the Earth, along a strategy building on Derrida’s use of ‘general economy,’ which I call general ecology. Through an ex-propriation of three temporalities of life, Husserl’s living present, Heidegger’s auto-affective temporalization of Dasein, and Freud’s death drive, the chapter suggests that all three for Derrida rest upon a certain decision concerning the restricted ecological reappropriations of life and death and their relations to the subject, the human, the individual: the Living Present as the pure form of absolute subjectivity, auto-affective temporalization as the proper of the human and its death, and the death drive as the detour within the ecology of immanence in the individual living organism. The chapter concludes by proposing the an-archic temporality of the promise of the earth as opening onto an-other thought of sharing the earth more justly in the life death we share with its others.

The Speculative Turn

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-98
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

This chapter argues that Sigmund Freud’s 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a watershed in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud not only speculates in this text, he also speculates in a way that is far-reaching and far-ranging: his speculation takes him back to the origin of consciousness and the beginning of life. But what does it mean, this chapter asks, for Freud’s speculation to culminate in the hypothesis of a death or destructive drive? Indeed, what does it mean for Freud’s hypothesis of the repetition compulsion and the death drive to breathe new life into psychoanalytic theory? It is here, this chapter argues, that we must take Freud’s speculative play seriously and rethink not only psychoanalysis’s relation to philosophy (i.e., speculation) but also its relation to Plato. For Plato, more than any other philosopher in Freud’s work, plays a vital—literally a life-and-death—role in Freud’s theory of the drives.

scholarly journals The Search for Satisfaction: A Journey Through Drive, Jouissance And Repetition Incorporating Neuroscience

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mila Boyanova Petkova ◽  
Elena Carolina Díaz Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Compulsive Behavior ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Level Of Satisfaction ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Reward Functions

Understanding drives is essential because they tell us about that original encounter in which a somatic stimulus encounters the mental representations. This paper is an attempt to recollect previous research and construct a parallel of psychoanalytic concepts and neuroscientific findings such as the correspondence between drive and libido and the dopaminergic seeking system. We are mind, body and language.In our research we present the hypothesis that there are three existing paths of obtaining certain level of satisfaction – pleasure, jouissance and death drive, led by the pleasure principle of partial satisfaction and the Nirvana principle of (impossible) complete satisfaction.In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reviews his own drive theory incorporating a new term - death drive. Freud theorized about compulsion repetition, a cycle in which a behavior is carried out repeatedly and repressed material is lived instead of remembered, let alone elaborated. He observes that some are not guided by the principle of pleasure seeking, which reveals a complacency of the subject with the suffering of his symptoms, beyond their conscious yearning for healing. While the goal of the life drives is self-preservation, sexual satisfaction, creation and procreation, the final goal of the death drive appears to be to completely reduce tensions and return the living individual to the inorganic state of stillness and repose which is unachievable.When Jacques Lacan introduces the concept of jouissance (enjoyment), he refers to this mythical state of complete satisfaction before the barrier of the castration as such.The way to achieve this state of minimum tension, can as well be mediated by addiction and/or compulsive behavior as we have seen before, suppressing the internal tension of stimulus and surrendering to the principle of Nirvana and the death drives – complete reduction of any tension.Now we know that the frontal cortex is responsible for regulating the instinctual reactions and puts them in social context. But when one appears to be struggling to achieve satisfaction by harmful or unpleasant actions this can be common consequence of the dopaminergic reward functions, resulting in a paradoxically dysfunctional behavior. Repetition is an important brain function. Repetition is involved in learning processes and improves performance. In this theoretical research we would like to review and differentiate between efficient, rewarding repetition and repetition compulsion in order to further clarify how satisfaction can be achieved and up to what point.

‘A Country Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: Alexander Luria, Death Drive and Dialectic in Soviet Russia, 1917–1930

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Lev Vygotsky ◽  
Soviet Russia

Alexander Luria played a prominent role in the psychoanalytic community that flourished briefly in Soviet Russia in the decade following the 1917 October Revolution. In 1925 he co-wrote an introduction to Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle with Lev Vygotsky, which argued that the conservatism of the instincts that Freud described might be overcome through the kind of radical social transformation then taking place in Russia. In attempting to bypass the backward looking aspects of Freud's theory, however, Luria and Vygotsky also did away with the tension between Eros and the death drive; precisely the element of Freud's essay they praised for being ‘dialectical’. This article theoretically unpicks Luria and Vygotsky's critique of psychoanalysis. It concludes by considering their optimistic ideological argument against the death drive with Luria's contemporaneous psychological research findings, proposing that Freud's ostensibly conservative theory may not have been as antithetical to revolutionary goals as Luria and Vygotsky assumed.

Schopenhauer and the Unconscious

2020 ◽  
pp. 496-516
Author(s):  
Stephan Atzert
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sabina Spielrein

This chapter explores the gradual emergence of the notion of the unconscious as it pertains to the tradition that runs from Arthur Schopenhauer via Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer to Sabina Spielrein, C. G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud. A particular focus is put on the popularization of the term “unconscious” by von Hartmann and on the history of the death drive, which has Schopenhauer’s essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual” as one of its precursors. In this essay, Schopenhauer develops speculatively the notion of a universal, intelligent, supraindividual unconscious—an unconscious with a purpose related to death. But the death drive also owes its origins to Schopenhauer’s “relative nothingness,” which Mainländer adopts into his philosophy as “absolute nothingness” resulting from the “will to death.” His philosophy emphasizes death as the goal of the world and its inhabitants. This central idea had a distinctive influence on the formation of the idea of the death drive, which features in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

scholarly journals THE WORLD OF IMAGES IN SANTTU KARHU’S POETRY

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-257
Author(s):  
Natalia Valerievna Chikina
Keyword(s):  
Language Poetry ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Systemic Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Symbolic Images ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Folk Poetry ◽  
Original Concept

The paper analyzes the works of a well-known poet and rock musician S. Karhu, who writes in the Karelian language. The aim of the study is to highlight the author’s artistic system of images. The following tasks were set for the study: to formulate the poet’s original concept, to scrutinize and comment on the images in Karhu’s lyrics. The object is verses from the first and so far only volume. The subject of the study is the specific ethnic traits of Karhu’s poetry, as seen in the system of images. Literary-historical and comparative methods were used in the analysis. The scientific novelty is in the absence of similar studies on the poet’s works. Systemic analysis of the ethnic sources, the evolution and genre choices of the Karelian language literature associated with the changing artistic consciousness are coming to the foreground in this time of global change, when preserving the people’s cultural heritage is especially important. The poet’s personal background has brought him into the sphere of artistic creativity, enabled him to verbalize the world of ethnic life that had been opened up to him. The article points out some specific features of the world of images, language and culture of the Karelian people. Karelian literature shows a tendency to use folklore heritage. The transformation of folk poetic symbolic images is arguably the most characteristic trait of folklorism in contemporary Karelian-language poetry, where folk poetry symbols tend to be equaled with the image of the native land. Karhu’s philosophical verses increasingly pose and confidently resolve the questions of good and evil, happiness and pain, life and death. It is essential for him that the character retains the folklore origins, for he deems it to be the spiritual source of modernity.

Jewish Martyrdom in the Works of Adolf Rudnicki

1998 ◽  
pp. 247-262
Author(s):  
Józef Wróbel
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S

This chapter discusses the theme of Jewish martyrdom in the works of Adolf Rudnicki. Without losing sight of the universal dimensions of the theme he was taking up, Rudnicki enriches the subject-matter with characteristics that are specifically Jewish. First, the situation of Jewish society during the occupation differed from that of other nations. Jews were pushed to the very bottom of the invader's hierarchy. Their life and death depended not only on Germans but also on the aid of Poles among whom they lived, which was not always forthcoming. A second specific feature is derived from Rudnicki's chosen artistic genre, which monumentalized the suffering of Jews by including them in the biblical circle and the almost 2,000-year history of the Diaspora, the wandering and persecution with which God tries his chosen people. This problem dominated the writing of Rudnicki for at least ten years. Undoubtedly, the literary situation in the first half of the 1950s was decisive in Rudnicki's abandonment of the theme, since the subject of the war was quickly recognized as outdated. The chapter then studies occupation literature.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document