The Anarchistic Drive

The anarchistic drive, a notion introduced by Nathalie Zaltzman (1979), operates within the context of the death drives. It is a drive of unbinding whose destructive exigency ruins any fixed relationship to the object when the libidinal tie is lived in the register of mastery, with the risk of self-nullification. As a current of the death drive with a liberating rather than deadly aim, this drive must be recognised for its function of individuation and self-preservation, for it seeks to open up a life solution where a critical situation is closing in on a subject and threatening him with death.

Zaltzman was interested in the analysis of the death drives in relation to the libidinal drives; she sees them as belonging to the register of self-preservation, distinguishing the register of need from that of desire. Thanks to the notion of anarchistic drive, she emphasises how important it is to recognise the patient's appeal at the level of need when a vital struggle is engaged against death, and deplores the misunderstanding regarding “libidinal taming”, which risks depriving the death drives of their destiny, one that cannot be reduced to a deadly aim. She points out that it would be a misunderstanding to deprive these drives whose aim is unbinding of their particular paths of elaboration that can open up in fantasy the space of many liberating possibilities; she rejects the “libidinal taming” that seeks to confine them too quickly within new forms of binding experienced as restrictive, reductive or totalising, and even deadly. It would thus be a misinterpretation to analyse predominantly anarchistic unconscious material, that is to say, involving a vital struggle against death, in the oedipal libidinal register. Forced libidinalisation, the “quilt of Eros” according to Zaltzman's expression, could endanger the self-preservative function of this type of death drive. She describes as “irreducible” patients whose lives are subordinated to survival and whose destiny is link