You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Divided into two parts, Cultures of the Death Drive has a double project. First, Esther Sánchez-Pardo wants to foreground melancholia as fundamental to Melanie Klein's work. The focus here is naturally enough on the “depressive position,” that stage in which the child seeks to internalize the ambiguous objects that have given rise to its earlier anxieties, the chief of these objects being the mother's breast. This process may involve both mourning and melancholia. Mourning requires the successful internalization of a lost object in its “good” aspect, and thus is a positive act of possession in the very heart of loss. When that internalization fails, the result is melancholia. It fails because of an excess of aggression and anxiety directed toward the object, which is seen as “bad,” an annihilating force that reflects the child's own destructive impulses. This, according to Klein, is how the death drive manifests itself within the psyche. Yet the death drive is not only an internal dynamic but also an external, social one. Entire societies may exhibit aggression and anxiety toward whatever is felt to be outside them - whether these are different ideologies, or races, or sexualities. The resulting “cultures of the death drive” resonate with the primal melancholia, which may in any adult be intensely revived by later, social, events. Sánchez-Pardo contends that early 20th-century modernity was