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Published online: 20 March 2023
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023
Drawing on Derrida’s concept of writing, Rosaura Martínez Ruiz sets out to explore the beyond of the Freudian death drive and ‘the fissures in the sovereignty of the pleasure principle’ (p. 3). This exploration is ontological, political and ethical, aiming to contribute to contemporary debates about how to envisage more peaceful and non-violent ways of being with others.
Martínez invites us to rethink the pharmacological nature of the drive, starting from the basic Freudian assumption that human nature is ambivalent, destructive and antisocial, but also creative and erotic. But rather than accepting the antagonistic nature of the drives as a limit condition, Martínez adopts deconstruction as a privileged position ‘from which to glimpse the horizon where the limit becomes a site of possibility’ (p. 4). Gradually, then, what she calls ‘erotic fractures’ (p. 3) emerge as a field of operations through which Eros can prevail, but only to the extent that we make the cultivation of Eros a permanent ethical-political pursuit. Eros requires constant work. Shifting social and political attitudes (such as hostility to the other, aggression, fearful defences, violence) requires constant work. What Martínez demonstrates in this book is that such an undertaking has sound philosophical and psychoanalytic underpinnings. The latter can be clearly located in Freud’s work.
Eros: Beyond the Death Drive is a complex intellectual journey, starting from the principle of deconstruction and the affinities between Derridean writing and Freudian memory. It is worth following this initial syllogism closely. Deconstruction is defined as an operation which ‘discloses the lack of ontological foundation for all socio-political and cultural practices that seek the exclusion and annihilation of the other, of alterity’ (p. 16). In terms of ontology deconstruction demonstrates that being is not pure or