I would like to present a series of non-conclusive remarks on Freud's legacy regarding "death" in psychoanalysis and more especially death drive -- in German Todestrich. Since this group is devoted to a kind of comparative study of Lacan's and Hartman's handling of Freud's legacy, I am going to focus on the ways they dealt with the death drive which was often received by psychoanalysis as a somewhat uncharitable bequest. I'll not make too many comparisons between Lacan and Hartman, leaving them to discussion. I just want to emphasize what seems to be the most characteristic traits of each of their conceptions, then present you with some speculations of my own.

First let me remind you of the three aspects of death Freud encountered in the course of his inventing psychoanalysis.

Freud witnessed the death of his father. And they both knew that the illness he suffered from some eight months before he died would be the last one. And when he died on October 1896, he was surrounded by his family, in his house, knowing he was dying.

"Yesterday, wrote Freud to Fliess, we buried the old man. He bore himself bravely to the end, just like the altogether unusual man he had been..." and although up until the very day of his father's death, Freud seemed to have taken the situation somewhat lightly, he confesses to Fliess in the following phrase of his letter: "All of it happened in my critical period, and I am really quite down because of it."

Critical period or not, Freud began mourning his father. He acknowledged his suffering from it, instead of denying it, as we are expected to do nowadays, he withdrew from social responsibilities and even, for a while, stopped writing to his beloved Fliess.

- What does mourning mean?

- It is the time necessary to symbolise death, that is to say: to gather a certain number of signifiers to replace the missing body, to fill the gap its disappearance has left, to bring together memory traces of the lost one, "facilitations" to use the terminology of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology: that is to say a "system of differences" constituting memory. But a "system of differences" is precisely the definition of the signifiers. This among other things, led to Lacan's definition of the unconscious structured as a language.

A constellation of signifiers, "a floating field of signifiers," as Michèle Montrelay would say, where the signifiers of his father would be mixed with Freud's own signifiers. We all know the product of Freud's mourning the death of his father. We have access to the constellation of signifiers he gathered to symbolise his father in his absence: it is The Interpretation of Dreams:

What was undoubtedly the most poignant discovery of this loss, was the discovery, while mourning his father, that fantasmatically speaking, the father was already dead, for Freud, when he actually died and that he had died many years before, when Freud was still a child and when he wished him dead. The most poignant discovery brought about by this loss was the discovery of the Oedipus complex with its central figure: the dead father. The mourning of Jacob Freud by his son Sigmund was all the more poignant because it was the deferred action of a death which had taken place almost thirty-five years earlier.

For if the death of Freud's father was a mere fact, its being the most important event of a man's life was because, first of all, it had been a Symbolic Death essential to the structuration of the Subject. In other words, Freud could symbolise the death of his father by writing the Interpretation of Dreams because he had already symbolised it many years before during the Oedipal crisis.

This is the first of the three deaths I want to introduce you to: Symbolic Death. The death of the father, the dead father of the Oedipus complex.

The second aspect of death was introduced by Freud almost twenty years later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He was then reflecting on early repressed memory traces and was wondering if when they were reappearing, the return of the repressed was necessarily dependent on or related to the Pleasure Principle, or not. This reflexion brought him to the conclusion that a certain type of neurosis -- namely: war neurosis, traumatic neurosis and fate neurosis -- were in fact dependent on a compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungzwang) which was not necessarily linked to the Pleasure Principle but which seemed to be the fundamental characteristics of all drives "which is to tend toward the restoration of an earlier state of things..." "an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its developments lead. If we are to take it 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 life is death and looking backwards, that inanimate things existed before living ones" (p. 38). Thus taken radically drives tend toward death but toward two different deaths. Let us say that sexual drives which have somewhat turned away the subject from inanimate primordial state, tend toward death while differing it in order that life could prevail for a while; whereas death drive tends back toward the inanimate, non-living original state.

If it could be isolated, death drive would simply be the compulsion to repeat in its purest form, it would act without restrain, without thrust, it would silently bring back the animate to the inanimate, the living to the non-living, the organic to the inorganic -- or if one does not wish to think stubbornly in a biological fashion -- and if we wish to take into account the psychical dimension of this force: the subject to the non-subject. Death drive would then be a desubjectivising force. It would belong to the category of the Real. (Let's mention that Freud does not go that far and seems to remain on the seemingly more solid ground of the biological metaphore. One mustnot forget that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he explicitely uses biological examples as metaphores of what he is trying to say.

Curiously enough, shortly after he introduced the death drive as a drift toward the non-living, Freud stepped back on the radical novelty of his thought. Probably influenced by some of the mediocre minds that surrounded him and who were horrified by the idea of a Todestrich. In rather little known essays Mikhail Bakhtine, the great Russian critique, has fiercely criticised as early as 1925 the reactionary ideological influences of his closest disciples on Freud's revolutionary ideas. Whatever motives might have caused Freud's reason to step back (reason -- it is well known since Heidegger -- being the most eager contradiction of thought) before the new and radical openings of his own thinking. The study of sadism and masochism led Freud to reduce the newly invented concept of "death drive," and to transform it into a much more common destructive and/or aggressive drive. Although we must not underestimate the fact that he always maintained the idea of a silent component which would constantly bring the subject to drift away toward an inanimate state, toward inorganicity.

I don't know too well the seminal work of the founders of so-called Ego-Psychology: Hartman, Kris and Loewenstein. Therefore, I am not going to present you with their understanding of the concept of "death drive," the reasons which brought them to it and why they replaced it with the notion of aggression. I will simply raise a question of terminological ethics in the field of translation and, more specifically, the translation of Freud's concepts.

In a collective paper first published in 1949 in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (3/4-9-36) entitled "Notes on the Theory of Aggression," the three authors confide that they don't know what to do with what they call Freud's "assumptions concerning `life' and `death' instincts." "We feel, they say, that at least a part of the considerations on which Freud bases his speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle refers to questions to be discussed and probably to be decided within biology proper, possibly with the help of experimental biologists." And they consider that such biological considerations do not "facilitate neither the fitting together of existent propositions, nor the formulation of new ones..." in psychoanalysis. They "therefore do not enter into a discussion of Freud's biological speculation, and all that will be said concerning the nature of aggressive drives is independent of Freud's hypothesis according to which manifestations of aggression directed against the world without one externalization of the `death instinct'" (p. 58).

Then, a little bit further (two pages away) they make a terminological remark: "Since we have become used to thinking of the psychic apparatus in terms of three structural organizations: the id, the ego and the superego, it has become possible to differenciate between `instinct' as it is used generally in psychology, and especially in animal psychology, and `instinctual drives' (or `drives' as they often use) by which we have come to refer to `Trich' as used by Freud. The distinction is the more desirable since English translations of Freud's writings originally rendered Trich as `instinct' and while some critics had early pointed to possible misunderstandings (Mitchell, 1921), the usage has survived until recently, not without giving rise to various uncertainties. However this distinction between `drive' (for Trich) and `instinct' (for Instinkt) not only eliminates a terminological confusion, it also permits a differenciation of concepts which in essential points clarifies Freud's views and resolves contradictions in psychoanalytic theory." Therefore, whatever is an instinct can be left to the good care of biologists while whatever is a drive is a specific object of psychoanalysis.

It would therefore seem perfectly logical -- if not legitimate -- to get rid of the aporia of what they call "death instincts" by giving it back to the biologists, like they do... "But Aye, there is the rub!" for in German, Freud almost never talked (up until his will: The Outline) of Todesinstinkt which could rightly be translated into English by "death instincts" but almost constantly and very consistently of Todestrich which -- according to the very terminological choice of our authors -- should always be translated as death drive. A nasty trick if ever but it helps to understand why their pupils always prohibited in the U.S. the study of Freud's texts in German.

Why did they do that? Many reasons come to mind some of which have been violently denounced by Lacan:

Regarding the death drive, Lacan's position is quite different from Kris', Hartman's and Lowewenstein's.

As early as 1954 -- in Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis -- Lacan presents quite vigorously his own interpretation of the death drive as a compulsion of repetition on the one hand and on the other hand - in "the prolongation of Freud's poignant discovery of the function of the dead father in the oedipal structuration of the subject" -- as a crucial element in the advent of the subject to the Symbolic order.

But it is rather amusing to notice -- while reading Function and Field -- how Lacan is hampered by the name "instinct de mort" which was still (in 1954) commonly used to translate Todestrich, although "pulsion" was already available.

The idea of a polar relation between life and death being familiar to biologists (Bichot, Cannon) would not pose a problem if the death instinct was a mere biological notion. But Lacan needs the concept of "death instinct" and to turn around the difficulty, he elevates it to the dignity of a myth -- that is to say a sort of prototype of what could become, if it is handled with care, a fully developed psychoanalytic concept. "A myth that can only be understood in the subjectivity of modern man by its elevation to the negativity of the judgement in which it is inscribed."

Taking up where Freud remained somewhat stunned by the discovery that within the Oedipus structure the father's function was that of a dead father, Lacan shows that in fact the possibility for a human being to become a human subject -- that is to say to advent to speech and language, to the symbolic order which will be sealed by the Oedipus complex -- depends greatly on the death drive as a compulsion to repeat. To do so he re-reads in a most brilliant manner the game of the Fort/Da described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Read P. 103.

As magnificent as Lacan's first understanding of the death drives may be, I feel uneasy with his superior way to discard the "outworn notion of primordial masochism." For without it the death drive as it was presented by Freud in its most radical definition as a drifting away of the subject toward non-living remains unexplained and somewhat useless. It seems, on the contrary, that a careful study of what masochism really is (i.e. a process and not a structure) could lead us toward clinical manifestations of the death drives beyond the point of birth of the symbol (from the subject's point of view).

Clinical papers on masochism as a full process are rather rare. The only one I know had a tremendous impact on me. It is a paper written by French psychoanalyst Michel de M'Uzan more than 15 years ago. It has been translated into English for the infamous and lengendary issue of Semiotext(e) on Polysexuality. Those who might have read this text as any other text on masochism know that the masochist is defined as someone who is pursuing jouissance through physical -- and to a lesser degree moral -- pains, inflicted upon him by a "sadist." But a sadist who would never freak out when he accomplishes what he is expected to do to the masochist is a rare thing to find, commented Mr. M., especially when they both reach the final stage of ultimate sex where jouissance is linked to death. You'll find in de M'Uzan's paper a quite extraordinary list of the tortures which different sadists inflicted upon Mr. M. and upon his wife who was also a masochist. It appears quite clearly, when one examines closely de M'Uzan's text, that there is a progression in the tortures which are inflicted upon Mr. M.'s body:

The whole masochist process could be seen as the manifestation of the combination of both series of drives, here intimately linked to each other: on the one hand, sexual drives tend repetitively toward a reactivation of a primary jouissance, they haul (original meaning of Holung) the subject toward jouissance, a man-phallic one and most probably a jouissance which has to do with maternal jouissance or, to be more precise, with the jouissance of the woman who is hidden -- as das Ding -- inside the mother, the maternal Other. This would be the dimension proper to this primary masochism which is already alluded to by Freud as early as 1895 in a strange remark of the Project to the effect that at the very beginning: sexual excitation is a sort of pain.

On the other hand, the augmentation of intensity of the inflicted pain is parallel to the progressive disappearance of the use of speech. During the masochist rituals which lead -- after years of practice -- to severe mutilations of the body, these tortures are acted out in absolute silence, only broken by the noises of the instruments of torture on the masochist's flesh and bones, and sometimes a sort of moan on the masochist part. I understand this gradual progression of the intensity of pain not only as a mean to reach sexual jouissance, but also as a mean to undo the link of the human subject to the signifier, a mean of de-subjectivation, a mean to return temporarily to an earlier state of things, to a pre-subjective position, in other words, a manifestation of death drive.

But in fact the intrication of sexual and death drives in the case of masochism renders difficult to isolate the manifesttions proper to death drives. I'll briefly bring in three illustrations of what death drives might produce when they act alone.

In Storms of Steel, a biographical war novel written by Ernst Jünger shortly afer First World War, I have found a quite extraordinary passage. It takes place somewhere in France, after three years of the most horrifying kind of war: trench warfare. Three years spent in the midst of trenches waiting. Waiting to fight or to be killed. This interminable wait created a sort of inner tension which would burst from time to time into spontaneous attacks against the enemy trenches a few hundred meters away. Jünger describes one of them. Everybody has been waiting for days an order to attack which never came. Suddenly an officer jumped out of his trench, half-drunk and in a state of frantic narcissistic and erotic excitation, screaming to the top of his lungs. Through a sort of libidinal contagion all the soldiers of Jünger's group and Jünger himself were somehow seized by an urge to attack linked to a sort of sexual exultation: screaming, laughing, exciting each other with obscene words, they attacked the enemy lines in a state of total frenzy. The description of the scene goes on for several pages. The attack appears to be a manifestation of a sexual perversion of aggression. I refer here to the mechanism of anaclisis in which a drive can manifest itself in search of its satisfaction by using an instinctual behavior, which it perverts, as a support.

As he was reaching the climax of his excitation, Jünger's helmet was hit by a piece of metal. It did not hurt him, but it suddenly short-circuited the libidinal excitation which disappeared along with aggression. Stunned by the change itself he started to drift away on the battle field, in full view of the enemy lines and walked aimlessly as in a daze, unable to think, to speak or even to understand the screams of his soldiers telling him to lie down. He was then shot for good, almost to death. Death drive was not present during the attack, it only appeared after the short-circuiting of the anaclisis of the sexual drives on aggression, after their temporary disappearance. It manifests itself in the drifting away of Jünger on the battle field toward a non-subjective state. I insist on the word drift. To drift is one of the primary meanings of treiben, the verb form which Trich originates.

AIDS is an illness in which the presence or absence of libido plays a fundamental role in the prognostic and the length of survival.

Case of Jean: - meningitis, 1983;

3) A Song

A musical illustration Cold Song.