Death drive

pulsion de mort

Worked through in 6 videos · 12 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani links the death drive to the late Freud, and he regards it as a discovery more fundamental than the pleasure principle1. He understands it as life's tendency to return, by roundabout paths, to an earlier state, the inorganic: death understood as extinction, not as carnage2. In it, desire ultimately aims at its own release, a return to inert matter that he calls a radical materialism3. He also describes it as a boundary too closed to the outside, which lets the inside waste away, and he connects it with amnesia. He often takes up the formula that the death drives "progress in silence": if the drive is fulfilled, it does away with all the other drives4. In 2022 he applies this formula to the threat of war, which grows in what goes unspoken5. In music, he sees Wotan and Tristan as figures of this drive, and he asks whether instrumental music, as a way of keeping silent, does not play its game6.

Summary produced automatically from 12 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Series · 20 Jul 2022Wagner: the truth of pure music

0:21A discovery of the late Freud, more fundamental than the pleasure principle; it progresses in silence, in the unsaid immanent to expression.
12:52Making instrumental music, a way of keeping silent, can be playing into the hands of the death drive.

Cycle 10 · 24 Mar 2022#11 Ukraine: mathematics unites men, politics divides them (Aristotle)

2:46"Death drives advance in silence": the danger of war grows in what is left unsaid; the session aims to give speech to this silence.
15:21Variation "silence, murder in progress": the Freudian formula, one of the deepest in psychoanalysis, proves fruitful.

Cycle 10 · 8 Dec 2021#10.6 War and peace: “The death drives advance in silence…” (Freud)

15:26It progresses in silence; if it is fulfilled, it is by liquidating all other drives, first the libidinal ones: this is its vertiginous side, the promise of the end.
52:58The death drives move in the direction of amnesia.

Cycle 9.2 · 18 Feb 2021#9.15 How can sciences of history be real?

50:11Wotan wants "the end" before Freud: every drive aims at its own extinction; desire aims at release rather than excitation.

Series · 11 Dec 2020#5 Happiness versus the death drive in music

51:14What painters flee toward the harsh light; Tristan goes furthest into this drive in music.
59:21In Freud, desire ultimately aims at its own extinction, the return to inert matter: radical materialism; it develops especially since romanticism.

Cycle 6 · 10 Nov 2019#6.1 Prelude: Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”

4:19A slide toward the extinction of all drives and tensions, toward an inert state where there is no more desire, as opposed to restorative sleep.
58:53Life seeks to return by detours to an earlier state, the inorganic: the end of all life is death, understood as extinction and not as carnage.
1:29:09It corresponds to a limit too closed to the outside, which lets the inside wither.