The Vesicles of Death. There are moments in Freud’s writing
where one suspects that the human being itself is simply a symptom of some deeper, more nebulous, cosmic pathology,
the play-thing of drives, instincts, and other obscure forces that precede the
human beings emergence into an illusory or even delusory self-consciousness. “If
we are to take as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies
for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the
aim of all life is death’ and looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed
before living ones.’
For instance, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud picks apart the presumption that human life is governed by the search for pleasure over pain, and happiness over unhappiness. “It must be pointed out,” he notes, “that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.” The search for happiness at the core of the pleasure principle is, in Freud’s words, “at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.” After all, he asks, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult, barren of joys, and if so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”
Then what keeps us going? What keeps us going is certainly not “us,” not anything inherent in our psyche or our convoluted rationalizations for our motives and actions, but something more nebulous, “an urge inherent inorganic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity had been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.” The so-called death drive. Freud also defines it as “the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life,” and it underscores primordial nature: “ . . . it must be an old state of things, and initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return . . .” The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving- the pull towards something “old”.
[and is this notion not embedded in Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of the commodity and the ceaselessly reactionary character of its political productions?]
In these moments, the human being the human being is turned inside out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a big-brained neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multilayered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.
In his essay Freud seems acutely, even anxiously aware of the pessimistic tone of his theory: “It may be difficult, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I can not see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved.” ( Adding: “The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals.”)
. . . . . . . . . .
In his book Thacker does not treat Freud as a ‘full-fledged’ pessimist, much less, though Freud suffered immensely in his last years, a patron saint of pessimism. Freud’s whole life and work runs counter to that judgment. Perhaps the author would put Freud under the definition of a pessimist as a well-taught optimist.
Saintly status is reserved for folks like Philipp Mainlander:
“ Presaging an idea that would become central to Nietzsche’s thought, Mainlander asserts that everything that exists is the result not of a beneficent Creator, but the death of God: ‘God is dead and his death was the life of the world.”
More than this, God doesn’t die accidentally, but kills himself. In this self-cadaverization of God, Mainlander suggests that the world, life, our very selves, are all the rotting residue of God’s suicide.”
Most of the characters revealed in this book, even Mainlander, hover in a netherworld between the two poles- pessimism and optimism- ultimately unable to entirely renounce either. Even Thacker himself reports with great excitement studies which suggest pessimists, for all their world weariness, live longer than optimists.
I have to say, the 15 pages Thacker devotes to Kierkegaard in the second part of the book brings the man to sharper light than Joakim Garff’s 900 page plus biography, and probably any other. The direct examination of pessimism and its proponents is no exercise in futility.
For instance, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud picks apart the presumption that human life is governed by the search for pleasure over pain, and happiness over unhappiness. “It must be pointed out,” he notes, “that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.” The search for happiness at the core of the pleasure principle is, in Freud’s words, “at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.” After all, he asks, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult, barren of joys, and if so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”
Then what keeps us going? What keeps us going is certainly not “us,” not anything inherent in our psyche or our convoluted rationalizations for our motives and actions, but something more nebulous, “an urge inherent inorganic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity had been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.” The so-called death drive. Freud also defines it as “the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life,” and it underscores primordial nature: “ . . . it must be an old state of things, and initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return . . .” The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving- the pull towards something “old”.
[and is this notion not embedded in Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of the commodity and the ceaselessly reactionary character of its political productions?]
In these moments, the human being the human being is turned inside out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a big-brained neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multilayered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.
In his essay Freud seems acutely, even anxiously aware of the pessimistic tone of his theory: “It may be difficult, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I can not see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved.” ( Adding: “The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals.”)
. . . . . . . . . .
In his book Thacker does not treat Freud as a ‘full-fledged’ pessimist, much less, though Freud suffered immensely in his last years, a patron saint of pessimism. Freud’s whole life and work runs counter to that judgment. Perhaps the author would put Freud under the definition of a pessimist as a well-taught optimist.
Saintly status is reserved for folks like Philipp Mainlander:
“ Presaging an idea that would become central to Nietzsche’s thought, Mainlander asserts that everything that exists is the result not of a beneficent Creator, but the death of God: ‘God is dead and his death was the life of the world.”
More than this, God doesn’t die accidentally, but kills himself. In this self-cadaverization of God, Mainlander suggests that the world, life, our very selves, are all the rotting residue of God’s suicide.”
Most of the characters revealed in this book, even Mainlander, hover in a netherworld between the two poles- pessimism and optimism- ultimately unable to entirely renounce either. Even Thacker himself reports with great excitement studies which suggest pessimists, for all their world weariness, live longer than optimists.
I have to say, the 15 pages Thacker devotes to Kierkegaard in the second part of the book brings the man to sharper light than Joakim Garff’s 900 page plus biography, and probably any other. The direct examination of pessimism and its proponents is no exercise in futility.
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