What is it? by Emmanuel Falque

But where does this game lead, and where does death go? This is the real question. For one can repeat endlessly the introduction to the death instinct on the side of or in combat with the ‘sexual drive’ understood as a life  instinct, one understands its emergence only by relating back to its originary state and final resting place – the ‘what’ of the ‘It’ that the  ‘death drive’ comes to designate – that is, the inorganic, or even better, the ‘anorganic’ or the ‘lifeless for which we are fated:

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons – becomes anorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘aim of life is death’ and, looking backwards, that the ‘lifeless’ existed before the living.’  (Beyond the Pleasure Principle)

Thus, the ‘anorganic’- rather than the inorganic – as originary is the content of the Id that is woven into me from the start and awaits me in the end: the ‘lifeless’ that I was before and that I will be afterwards. ‘What (then) is it? This absolute void, this hole, this hollow. It is nothing. Or at last nothing human, and yet the nothing that constitutes us as such – not in a nothingness that could still give meaning to my existence (Heidegger), but in an immemorial origin from whence we came and towards which we will return (Freud).


There is thus the underside of the ‘human’, as I have said, and that is ‘animality’. And there is the underside of ‘animality,’  as I have also stressed, and this is’ bestial.’ There is an underside of ‘bestiality,’ as I have just suggested, and it is the ‘brutal’ or ‘becoming brutal’ ( de Lubac). Yet now there is an underside of the ‘brutal,’ and that is the’ lifeless,’ the ‘anorganic’ or even the mineral as described here by Freud.  Death is not only ‘dust’ (Ecclesiastes) of the ‘disappearance of self’ (Heidegger) into nothingness that gives meaning to life, but rather it is resistance to the Ego, a magma or Neuter beyond all meaningfulness, a decent to the lowest rung on the ladder of being - from the human to the animal, from the animal to the vegetable, from the vegetable to the mineral: ‘What I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish. Sartre’s hero Antoine Roquentin as he looks into the mirror confesses in Nausea  in a manner so astonishingly close to Freud’s Id [Ca] that he even uses its name: ‘It [Ca] is alive, I can’t say it isn’t; but this was not the life that Anny contemplated .  .  .’

The lapidary, in all senses of the term – the stone, but also the cleaver – thus makes one feel oneself living as dead, even makes one no longer feel at all. Such is the odd experience that plagues every human. All attempts to elevate ourselves are only fictions or at least constructions, in respect to that to which we are tied to the self or by which we are afflicted within our very being. The church fathers of the desert (Evagrius of Pontus), of the Middle Ageas (Thomas Aquinas) and the Renaissance (Charles de Bovelles), all knew this, and gave it a name: acedia, sometimes wrongly translated as sloth or melancholy. Etymologically, acedia is the absence of care (akedeo), and it is a state rather than a feeling. In the ladder of being, it leads humans back or reduces them to the rank of a mineral, or in other words, to stone (lapis). A sort of forerunner to the death drive or to the reduction to the ‘anorganic’ in Freud: the monk reaches acedia, and thus  also a draining, as in the sense of the bay of Zuyderzee, he no longer senses, no longer senses himself, nor senses that one senses him – be it man or God. As Charles de Bovelles, then the canon of Noyons in the 15th century, notes:

Acedia places man at the last rank and makes him similar to stones. Just as these stones, which remain fixed at the last order, possessing nothing other than their being such that to them there is neither given the exercise of the least natural function, nor any power to move themselves, so also do those who possess this monstrous phenomena of acedia  sleep the dreamless sleep, separated from all work, and made immobile like stones, as if mother nature had given them only being without any manifest force nor any power to act in a commendable manner.


Thus can we state plainly: spirituality and psychoanalysis have something to exchange here, if we don not confuse the aspirations of the first (the soul’s straining towards God and its turning away from sin) with the specificity of the second (the quest solely for human depths). Like the death drive in Freud, the monk in the state of acedia is in somewhat held ‘outside of space and ‘outside of time’ – not at all in the sense of escaping space and time, but rather in feeling oneself entirely ‘invaded’ by space and time.  It is not only this ‘void’ or emptiness that causes suffering, because in the final analysis desire is always still present, or at least the possibility of filling it up. But it is above all the ‘fullness,’ or even the over-fullness (not of God but of self) that produces laziness, weariness, and  exhaustion in the monk – to the point that nothing makes any sense, including the idea of sense and nonsense. Presence is no longer a gift but rather a resistance.

In the ‘resistance of presence,’ the very idea of an absence as such becomes impossible, and so too does the impulse of desire. Acedia takes us ‘outside of time, or its makes time endure in a duration that is not eternity, but is on the contrary, an infinite ‘persistence’ that can never be suppressed or at least experienced as if it were written in temporality. Evagrius of Pontus, the initiator and founder of this sort of spirituality, says:

The demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon, is the most oppressive of all demons. He attacks the monk at the fourth hour and besieges his soul  until the eighth hour. First of all, he makes it appear that the sun moves slowly or not at all, and the day seems to be fifty hours long.

In regard to both acedia and the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one would be wrong to interpret the Freudian ‘organic elasticity’ – which stretches the drive when it is directed towards life (life-drive)  and relaxes it when it is directed towards death (death drive) – as a simple return to a stable state, a sort of absolute equilibrium, a state of repose or Nirvana – interpretations for which the father of psychoanalysis was wrongly reproached. This is the case because the question of the death drive does not refer to anxiety about tomorrow’s death or yesterday’s coming to life, and thus not  about the worry engendered by the future or nostalgia for the past, but rather is about living in the present time that I traverse as a living or dying being, and thus as a being belonging or already no longer belonging to life: ‘We can live (in a melancholy manner) as if we were already dead . . .We just add now that even if the drive for repetition did not have as its goal this state of minimal tension associate with death, it can very well have another sort of death as an effect, namely, that of the stifling of all creativity and thus the meaning of life. (Bernet, Force-pulsion-desir)

In short, have we understood this much: ‘What is it? In 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? It is certainly a force of life that is also opposed to a force of death or  auto-destructivity. But only in this way does life ‘always tend toward death,’ and thus towards the Neutral, the mineral or the anorganic. – naturally inscribe in the organic, and sometimes more accidentally arising in the psychic. The ‘Id’ stands there before  me, or better, below me, and supports the Ego. More radical than the ‘Khora” as simple resistance (Derrida), more unformed than ‘raw nature’ as element (Merleau-Ponty), the “Id” in someway is now turned toward ego, toward me. It is looking at me or concerns me, it stares at me, it defies me, and it leads my Ego.