Editorial

This special issue on the ‘death drive’ follows on from last year's special issue on Beyond the Pleasure Principle (17(2), ), in which we published the new critical edition of the different manuscript versions of that text, prepared by Michael Schröter and Ulrike May, along with May's extensive commentary on the genesis of Freud's drafts. In the course of that work it became clear that here was a text - indeed texts - that was still not settled, which would perhaps never settle. This is not a question of scholarship. Schröter and May clearly achieved their goal of producing the first critical edition of a major text by Freud, one in which ‘every phase of the writing’ from the manuscript through to its final published form has been taken into consideration, and ‘all alterations to which the text has been subjected’ have been documented (Schröter, 2015, p. 143). It concerns rather how one settles or stabilizes the meaning of this work by reading it in its various contexts - biographical, historical, in relation to the developing psychoanalytic movement, the history of medicine or of psychological ideas, or even more broadly than that, in relation to twentieth century culture and society. For this is a text that continues to be reread, both against the grain, and in search of its grain, and continues to be harnessed to new insights and initiatives in philosophy, social and political theory, aesthetics and of course psychoanalysis itself. More than Freud's other major works it refuses to lie still, or, in a certain sense, to be understood, and the ‘death drive’ which is the focus of this present issue, is of course only one of its children.

At the turn of the millennium Todd Dufresne took issue with the maddening delirium that had accumulated around Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Dufresne, 2000). The more it was critiqued, denied, or deconstructed, the more it loomed formidably as the text to be reckoned