Capitalism and the Death Drive. Byung-Chul Han

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СКАЧАТЬ excellence. The compulsion of production abolishes negativity. Love is also accommodated to the capitalist process; it withers, becoming mere sexual desire. The other becomes just a sexual object for the narcissistic subject to use to satisfy its desire. Once the other is deprived of otherness, it can only be consumed.

By negating death, capitalism follows in the footsteps of metaphysics. Capitalism expresses a materialist metaphysics that strives for infinite capital. Plato already dreamt of a city without the dead. His ideal state rigorously discriminates against the dead. Any arable land, it says in Laws, should be free of graves. Graves have to be placed so as not to inconvenience the living. The dead may only be kept in the house for a maximum of three days, and only for as long as is necessary to rule out cases of suspended animation. Plato does not allow the living any symbolic exchange with death. Death is to be repressed, and the dead are a reminder of death. They are thus treated like waste that must be disposed of swiftly. But life that avoids death as if it were a pollution will suffocate in its own excrement.

      Adorno opposes death-negating metaphysics with a form of thought that ‘takes up in itself the undiminished, the nonsublimated awareness of death’.²⁶ Our repressed knowledge of death must be made conscious in all its severity. Human consciousness is mortal consciousness. Adorno knew that life that negates death as something purely destructive must itself develop destructive traits, that health is an ideology of capital – an illness, even. The hysteria of survival at all costs disfigures life. Adorno opposes the ugly cancerous growth of undead life with beauty that is innervated by the negativity of death:

      Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself. Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypostasized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, insolence and braggadocio. To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.²⁷

      Liveliness is friendliness. That life is friendly that is able to die.

      Despite his ambivalent relationship with death, Freud is perfectly aware of the necessity of reconciling life with death. The unconscious repression of death must give way to the conscious acceptance of death:

Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which it is due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems an advance to higher achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step – a regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again.²⁸

      To affirm life means also to affirm death. Life that negates death negates itself. Only a form of life that returns death to life will liberate us from the paradox of undead life: we are too alive to die, and too dead to live.

NOTES

      1 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (Second Version), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 19–55; here p. 42.

      2 2. Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967, pp. 177f.

      3 3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton, 1962 [1930], pp. 58f.

      4 4. Transl. note: following James Strachey’s translation of Freud’s works, and according to Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis, the English term for ‘Todestrieb’ is ‘death instinct’. Here, I shall use the term ‘death drive’. There are two reasons for this: it is by now more common in general academic usage, and it allows retaining the difference between ‘Instinkt’ (instinct) and ‘Trieb’ (drive).

      5 5. Gilles Dostaler and Bernard Maris, Capitalisme et pulsion de mort, Paris: Albin Michel, 2010, p. 9. [‘La grande ruse du capitalisme, nous le verrons, est de canaliser, de détourner les forces d’anéantissement, la pulsion de mort vers la croissance.’]

      6 6. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1920], p. 46.

      7 7. Ibid., p. 47 (transl. modified).

      8 8. Ibid.

      9 9. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 66.

      10 10. Ibid.

      11 11. Ibid., p. 68.

      12 12. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 47.

      13 13. Cf. Luigi De Marchi, Der Urschock: Unsere Psyche, die Kultur und der Tod, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988.

      14 14. Georg Baudler, Ursünde Gewalt: Das Ringen um Gewaltfreiheit, Düsseldorf: Patmos, 2001, p. 116.

      15 15. E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 34, 1927, p. 31; quoted after Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, New York: Continuum, 1962, p. 251.

      16 16. Adalbert von Chamisso, The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl, London: Peter Hardwicke, 1861 (transl. amended), at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21943/21943-h/21943-h.htm (accessed 26 March 2020).

      17 17. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Los Angeles: Sage, 1993, p. 127.

      18 18. Transl. note: ‘denn er bringt das Leben ums Leben’. ‘Ums Leben bringen’ is an expression that also means ‘to kill’.

      19 19. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, p. 350.

      20 20. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 177 (transl. amended).

      21 21. Ibid., p. 37 (transl. modified).

      22 22. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959, p. 284.

      23 23. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986 [1957], p. 239.

      24 24. Ibid., p. 11.

      25 25. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 156.

      26 26. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974, vol. 2, pp. 181f.

      27 27. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London: Verso, 2005 [1951], pp. 77f.

      28 28. Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, Standard Edition, Vol. XIV, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957 [1915], pp. 273–302; here p. 299.

Why Revolution Is Impossible Today

      At a recent debate between me and Antonio Negri at the Schaubühne in Berlin, two ways of critiquing capitalism clashed head-on. Negri was enthusiastic about the possibility of global resistance against the ‘empire’, the ruling neoliberal system. He presented himself as a communist revolutionary and called me a ‘sceptical professor’. He emphatically invoked the ‘multitude’, the networked revolutionary masses and protest groups, apparently in the belief that this multitude could bring down the СКАЧАТЬ