Eros: Political Limit of the Death Drive

I would like to present this piece as a humble response to Derrida's solicitude in his lecture, "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," given in a conference organized by Élisabeth Roudinesco and René Major in 2000. There, he addressed psychoanalysts and confronted them about their guild not having spoken out about cruelty in spite of the fact that, he says, after Freud's discovery of the death drive, nothing can be said of the phenomenon of causing pain for the sake of pleasure without psychoanalysis.

The death drive, writes Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), does not work alone and goes always hand in hand with Eros; it is silent, but not lonely. After the Freudian discovery of the unconquerable and invincible drive of Thanatos, that is, after presenting it as inherent not only to human nature but to Nature in general, the question that haunts any pacifist and lover of all eco-logical manifestations,¹ as Guattari understands ecologies (Guattari 2000), of living beings is, Must one be subjected to this idea without complaint, without resistance? Do we surrender? Do we give up the "weapons" because, in fact, we don't have any weapons with which to fight the forces of death and destruction? The answer to each of these questions is a definite NO! But, at the same time, the answer cannot be a simple "no." We have to find some theoretical foundations that might support the possibility of going beyond the death drive. We must do this not only for the purpose of epistolary exchange among scholars but, more urgently, to encourage us to go and search for other sorts of "armaments," to build them and to put them to use, knowing that this action is both right and possible to materialize. We must do this also with the intention of convincing more and more "friends" (as one would using persuasive speech, but also and if necessary, as would a "conqueror" in the political field, in the sense of seduction rather than colonization) so that the formation of a battalion, one I would call "erotic," also makes sense. And we must do this so that, on the horizon of this going forth together, one can glimpse a certain materialized friendship. As Marcuse says:

Does Eros, in spite all the evidence, in the last analysis work in the service of the death instinct, and is life really only one long "detour to death"? But the evidence is strong enough, and the detour is long enough to warrant the opposite assumption. Eros is defined as the great unifying force that preserves all life. The ultimate relation between Eros and Thanatos remains obscure.

(Marcuse 1974, 26)

I begin this paper by evoking friendship because what I have in mind as a, let's say, scenario, is the last chapter of Derrida's Politics of Friendship, specifically, his last words: "Oh, my democratic friends" (1997, 306). There Derrida addresses "my democratic friends" to show that democracy is fundamentally based on a certain equality: equality between brothers, and fraternity is one of the highest forms of friendship.²

I have suggested that we have to look for some theoretical foundations of the possibility of realization or materialization of more erotic, more peaceful, more just, and more democratic social organizations. It is necessary to clarify that by democracy I do not refer only to equality in terms of political or civil rights but to the same or a greater extent—and very urgently in the so-called "third world" countries, though also increasingly necessary in those alleged "Economic Superpowers"—to equality in economic and social terms. I just said, "to the same or a greater extent" because to be politically free it is essential, in the sense of a necessary condition, to cover not only the basic economic and social needs, as we hear in demagogic speeches especially from politicians in the third world, but the precise ones. Derrida writes: "When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which...