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This special issue celebrates the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and appears in the midst of unprecedented times. The two first decades of the 21st century have witnessed the reemergence of fascism in many parts of the world: the persecution of religious, sexual and racialized minorities; the criminalization of migrants; and the demeaning of local and global politics of equality. In these circumstances, it has seemed urgent to reread this revolutionary psychoanalytic text and to ascertain if it can still give us a figuration for resisting and, a fortiori, battling an apparently insurmountable drive to destruction and annihilation of alterity.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud equates the death drive with a tendency inherent not only to the psyche but to all forms of the living, to life itself. Although the great majority of the psychoanalytic establishment of the time chose to dismiss the idea, the death drive eventually became a sign of epistemologically justified nihilism or, paradoxically, a model of repetitive and creative survival. From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, while the manuscript introduced the question of violence as intrinsic to life and psychically insurmountable, positing a challenge to philosophy and the social sciences, the radicalism of the death drive did not entirely reduce Freud to despair. For example, Freud ends his letter to Einstein regarding war and the possibilities of building a world in peace on a note of optimism: “Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war”.1 At the same time, a close reading of Beyond teaches us that life and death, not only as substances but as tendencies or drives, relate to each other in a complex and even paradoxical manner. The death drive, writes Freud, does not work alone and goes always hand in hand with Eros. It is silent but not lonely.2
This enigmatic formulation of the psychic economy remains an open invitati