In his paper “On Death-Work” J-B Pontalis ponders the puzzling double faced nature of the death drive:
Is it aggressive and destructive behaviour… above all self-destructive, or is it a state of apathy?
Is it unrestrained violence or the temptation of nirvana (each generation finding or rediscovering its own)?
Is it an overabundance, an excess of excitation inducing a devastating acting out, or a scarcity of excitation inducing the feeling of non-existence, a void of thoughts and of affects?
Is it for Narcissus, a fascinated self-sufficiency or an omnipotent and raging hold over the object?
Is it zero or infinity?
(Pontalis 1981 p. 190)
This issue of Sitegeist amply demonstrates both these faces. To start with, the editorial collective began by regretting the choice of the death drive as a theme for the issue. What we expected and hoped would be a stimulating choice was followed by silence and drought! There was discussion of abandoning the issue. However, when the submissions did arrive, they proved to be indeed inspired and fluent and all touch on the two facets of the death drive.
Rebecca Reynolds paper “Water in Water” takes a swooping course through a range of philosophical considerations to offer a radically new way of conceiving the death drive. Her central concern is to show, by reference to Bataille, how death and life drives are integrated in the manner of tides, where there is constant movement without it ever being possible to say where one ends and the next begins. She relates this figure, in a way which makes of theory something akin to poetry, to the work of accelerationist Land, to Hegel, and many others, as well as centrally to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Rob Weatherill, who has made the death drive a major research topic since his book The Sovereignty of Death , draws in the collective, societal aspect Laplanche highlights. He starts with a past generation's appalling collision with the death drive in the shape of First World War, and goes on to consider our current rediscovery of it in the anarchy of Brexit. The current state of psychoanalysis, especially in the Lacanian part of it, is seen as part of the same descent. Weatherill's paper too is enriched by references to many and varied texts and authors.
Ben Hooson, on the other hand, offers a close, meticulous reading of Freud, setting against one another his early text The Project for a Scientific Psychology and Beyond the Pleasure Principle . Both of these notoriously difficult works are treated with a wry humour in a fresh and surprising approach. Hooson concludes with a surprise too: the death drive is the saviour of our sanity!
We received an unusual number of book reviews this time, and with them two innovations for Sitegeist. Two of the reviews are of books from psychoanalytic giants, Jung and Laing, rather than newly published books, combining book review with personal assessment of these figures. And for the first time too, we have been asked to publish a response to a past book review, Chris Oakley's of Rob Weatherill's book The Anti-Oedipus Complex , in our last edition. This we were pleased to do and Weatherill's response is included here. It is always a special pleasure to publish reviews of books by Site authors, and there are two here: one of Julie Walsh's co-edited volume Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community and the other Christina Moutsou's new book Clinical Fictional Narratives in Relational Psychoanalysis. The latter was the subject of the second in Sitegeist's series of occasional events. Watch out for the third, scheduled for November.