Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis

9. Beyond Bare Life

223 9 Beyond Bare Life Life versus Death The contemporary geopolitical landscape is largely divided between those who privilege life and those who privilege death. This struggle pits the advocates of modernization and global capitalism against the fundamentalist alternative that seeks to resist the effects of modernization (if not modernization itself). The central idea of psychoanalysis—the death drive—reveals a path out of this seemingly intractable opposition. The insistence on the death drive marks a rejection of both the celebration of life and the apotheosis of death. The death drive represents the bringing together of life and death in a way that confounds the adherents of both sides. As early as 1996, Osama bin Laden himself put the struggle between modernity and fundamentalism in the terms of life against death. In his fatwa of that year entitled “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” he tells his American enemy, “These [Muslim] youths love death as you love life.”1 In his statement after the September 11 attacks, bin Laden again framed the conflict in the same way, and commentators drew considerable attention to this formulation. Though Western leaders rejected almost the entirety of bin Laden’s political philosophy, they almost universally accepted the way of framing the opposition between global capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Indoingso,theyfollowatraditionthatprevailswithinmuchcontemporary thought and even within psychoanalytic political philosophy. Erich Fromm, who tried to bring psychoanalysis and Marxism together in order to form a new political program, saw within psychoanalysis an embrace of the love 224 Society of life and a struggle against the love of death. He called these phenomena “biophilia” and “necrophilia.” As Fromm notes in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, “Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution .”2 While we naturally love life, the interruption of this love leads to a devotion to death and a consequent aggressive bent. Later in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm identifies Hitler as a particularly obstinate case of necrophilia, and he would undoubtedly have done the same with bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalists, had he lived to see them. The problem with this opposition is the way that it constrains our thinking . On one level, recognizing an opposition between those who love death and those who love life represents anaccurate appraisal of the contemporary political landscape, but it does not exhaust the political possibilities. If we look at things like this as George W. Bush would have us do, either we are with the capitalist West or we are with the terrorists. But psychoanalysis helps us to see the falsity of this opposition, to see that hidden between the contrast of life and death is a third possibility—death in life, or the death drive. An insistence on the death drive marks an option beyond what seems possible on the contemporary political landscape. The implications of this other path will emerge through the following examination of the widespread opposition of life and death. On the level of common sense, this opposition is not symmetrical. What thinking person would not want to side with those who love life rather than death.3 Everyone can readily understand how one might love life, but the love of death is a counterintuitive phenomenon. It seems as if it must be code language for some other desire, which is how Western leftists often view it. Interpreting terrorist attacks as an ultimately life-affirming response to imperialism and impoverishment, they implicitly reject the possibility of being in love with death. But this type of interpretation can’t explain why so many suicide bombers are middle-class, educated subjects and not the most downtrodden victims of imperialist power.4 We must imagine that for subjects such as these there is an appeal in death itself. Those who emphasize the importance of death at the expense of life do so because death is the source of value.5 The fact that life has an end, that 225 Beyond Bare Life we do not have an infinite amount of time to experience every possibility, means that we must value some things above others. Death creates hierarchies of value, and these hierarchies are not only...