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DDeath Drive
FFuturist Fascism
EEternal Return
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Reenactment of the Futurist
Manifesto, 1909, F.T. Marinetti
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FREUD: Origin of the Death Drive
theory: Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (from Wikipedia)
From Wikipedia: Death Drive
It was a basic premise of Freud’s that “the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle…[associated] with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure”.[13] Three main types of conflictual evidence, difficult to explain satisfactorily in such terms, led Freud late in his career to look for another principle in mental life beyond the pleasure principle—a search that would ultimately lead him to the concept of the death drive.
The first problem Freud encountered was the phenomenon of repetition in (war) trauma. When Freud worked with people with trauma (particularly the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from World War I), he observed that subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences: “dreams occurring in traumatic have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident”,[14] contrary to the expectations of the pleasure principle.
A second problematic area was found by Freud in children’s play (such as the Fort/Da [Forth/here] game played by Freud’s grandson, who would stage and re-stage the disappearance of his mother and even himself). “How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?”[15]
The third problem came from clinical practice. Freud found his patients, dealing with painful experiences that had been repressed, regularly “obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of … remembering it as something belonging to the past”.[16] Combined with what he called “the compulsion of destiny … come across [in] people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome”,[17] such evidence led Freud “to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat—something that would seem more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides”.[18]
He then set out to find an explanation of such a compulsion; in Freud’s own words, “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection”.[19] Seeking a new instinctual paradigm for such problematic repetition, he found it ultimately in “an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things“[20]—the inorganic state from which life originally emerged. From the conservative, restorative character of instinctual life, Freud derived his death drive, with its “pressure towards death”, and the resulting “separation of the death instincts from the life instincts”[21] seen in Eros. The death drive then manifested itself in the individual creature as a force “whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death”.[22]
Seeking further potential clinical support for the existence of such a self-destructive force, Freud found it through a reconsideration of his views of masochism—previously “regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject’s own ego”—so as to allow that “there might be such a thing as primary masochism—a possibility which I had contested”[23] before. Even with such support, however, he remained very tentative to the book’s close about the provisional nature of his theoretical construct: what he called “the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses”.[24]
Although Spielrein’s paper was published in 1912, Freud initially resisted the concept as he considered it to be too Jungian. Nevertheless, Freud eventually adopted the concept, and in later years would build extensively upon the tentative foundations he had set out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he would develop his argument to state that “the death instinct would thus seem to express itself—though probably only in part—as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world”.[25] The following year he would spell out more clearly that the “libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards …. The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power”,[26] a perhaps much more recognisable set of manifestations.
At the close of the decade, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud acknowledged that “To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way”.[27]
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Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Eternal Return of the Same
From Wikipedia: Eternal Return
The concept of “eternal recurrence”, the idea that with infinite time and a finite number of events, will recur again and again infinitely, is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.[4] As Heidegger points out in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s first mention of eternal recurrence, in aphorism 341 of The Gay Science (cited below), presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than postulating it as a fact. According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the question of eternal recurrence—whether or not such a thing could possibly be true—that is so significant in modern thought: “The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the ‘greatest burden’ [of eternal recurrence] makes it clear that this ‘thought of thoughts’ is at the same time ‘the most burdensome thought.’ “[5]
The thought of eternal recurrence appears in a few of his works, in particular §285 and §341 of The Gay Science and then in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The most complete treatment of the subject appears in the work entitled Notes on the Eternal Recurrence, a work which was published in 2007 alongside Søren Kierkegaard‘s own version of eternal return, which he calls ‘repetition’. Nietzsche sums up his thought most succinctly when he addresses the reader with: “Everything has returned. Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all things will return”. However, he also expresses his thought at greater length when he says to his reader:
“Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time, avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature of light. – Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, – a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:– and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon”.[6]
This thought is indeed also noted in a posthumous fragment.[7] The origin of this thought is dated by Nietzsche himself, via posthumous fragments, to August 1881, at Sils-Maria. In Ecce Homo (1888), he wrote that he thought of the eternal return as the “fundamental conception” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[8]
Scene of Nietzsche’s inspiration: “by a massive, pyramidally piled up block not far from Surlei“.
Several authors have pointed out other occurrences of this hypothesis in contemporary thought. Rudolf Steiner, who revised the first catalogue of Nietzsche’s personal library in January 1896, pointed out that Nietzsche would have read something similar in Eugen Dühring‘s Courses on philosophy (1875), which Nietzsche readily criticized. Lou Andreas-Salomé pointed out that Nietzsche referred to ancient cyclical conceptions of time, in particular by the Pythagoreans, in the Untimely Meditations. Henri Lichtenberger and Charles Andler have pinpointed three works contemporary to Nietzsche which carried on the same hypothesis: J.G. Vogt, Die Kraft. Eine real-monistische Weltanschauung (1878), Auguste Blanqui, L’éternité par les astres[9] (1872) and Gustave Le Bon, L’homme et les sociétés (1881). Walter Benjamin juxtaposes Blanqui and Nietzsche’s discussion of eternal recurrence in his unfinished, monumental work The Arcades Project.[10] However, Gustave Le Bon is not quoted anywhere in Nietzsche’s manuscripts; and Auguste Blanqui was named only in 1883. Vogt’s work, on the other hand, was read by Nietzsche during this summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria.[11] Blanqui is mentioned by Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), a book closely read by Nietzsche.[12] The eternal recurrence is also mentioned in passing by the Devil in Part Four, Book XI, Chapter 9 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which is another possible source that Nietzsche may have been drawing upon.
Walter Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche may have encountered this idea in the works of Heinrich Heine, who once wrote:
[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again…[13]
Nietzsche calls the idea “horrifying and paralyzing”,[citation needed] referring to it as a burden of the “heaviest weight” (“das schwerste Gewicht“)[14] imaginable. He professes that the wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ [The Gay Science, §341]
To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, “love of fate”:[15]
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.[15]
In Carl Jung’s seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Jung claims that the dwarf states the idea of the eternal return before Zarathustra finishes his argument of the eternal return when the dwarf says, “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.'” However, Zarathustra rebuffs the dwarf in the following paragraph, warning him against over-simplifications.[16]
