You are interested, I know, in the prevention of war, not in our theories, and I keep this
fact in mind. Yet I would like to dwell a little longer on this destructive instinct which is
seldom given the attention that its importance warrants. With the least of speculative
efforts we are led to conclude that this instinct functions in every living being, striving to
work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed, it might well be
called the “death instinct”; whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on.
The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain
organs, it directs its action outward, against external objects. The living being, that is to
say, defends its own existence by destroying foreign bodies. But, in one of its activities,
the death instinct is operative within the living being and we have sought to trace back a
number of normal and pathological phenomena to this introversion of the destructive
instinct. We have even committed the heresy of explaining the origin of human
conscience by some such “turning inward” of the aggressive impulse. Obviously when
this internal tendency operates on too large a scale, it is no trivial matter; rather, a
positively morbid state of things; whereas the diversion of the destructive impulse toward
the external world must have beneficial effects. Here is then the biological justification
for all those vile, pernicious propensities which we are now combating. We can but own
that they are really more akin to nature than this our stand against them, which, in fact,
remains to be accounted for. (Freud , letter to Einstein)
“Death, the ‘proper result’ and therefore the end of life, the end without end, the strategy without finality of the living — all of this is not solely a statement of Schopenheur’s. It also coincides almost literally with several Nietzschean propositions that we had attempted to interpret: on life as a very rare genre of that which is dead (Joyful Wisdom), a ‘particular case’ and ‘means in view of something else’ (Will to Power), this something necessarily participating in death; and finally on the absence, in the last analysis, of anything like an instinct of conservation. The unconscious port of registry, at the distance of this generality, also will have been Nietzschean.”
(Derrida , “To Speculate — On ‘Freud’” , The Post Card 269 )
The new world-conception.– The world exists; it is not something that
becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it
passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from
passing away–it maintains itself in both.– It lives on itself: its
excrements are its food. (Nietzsche)
All this may give you the impression that our theories amount to species of mythology
and a gloomy one at that! But does not every natural science lead ultimately to this–a sort
of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical sciences?
The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no
likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy
corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man
desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggression or
constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk.
The Bolshevists, too, aspire to do away with human aggressiveness by insuring the
satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between man and man. To me this
hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments, and their hatred of
outsiders is not the least of the factors of cohesion among themselves. In any case, as you
too have observed, complete suppression of man’s aggressive tendencies is not in issue;
what we may try is to divert it into a channel other than that of warfare.
(Freud, letter to Einstein)
“Here, I am asking questions in the dark. Or in a penumbra, rather, the penumbra in which we keep ourselves when Freud’s un-analyzed reaches out its phosphorescent antennae. Reaches them out the unexpected structure of this text, of the movements within it which, it seems to me, do not correspond to any genre, to any philosophical or scientific model. Nor to any literary, poetic, or mythological model. These genres, models, codes are certainly present within the text, together or in turn, exploited, maneuvered, interpreted like pieces. But thereby overflowed. Such is the hypothesis or the athesis of the athesis.”
( Derrida , “To Speculate — On ‘Freud’” , The Post Card 278 )
–And how many new gods are still possible! As for myself, in whom the
religious, that is to say god-forming, instinct occasionally becomes
active at impossible times–how differently, how variously the divine
has revealed itself to me each time! (Nietzsche)
From our “mythology” of the instincts we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect
method of eliminating war. If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we
have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment
between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote. These ties are of two kinds. First,
such relations as those toward a beloved object, void though they be of sexual intent. The
psychoanalyst need feel no compunction in mentioning “love” in this connection; religion
uses the same language: Love thy neighbor as thyself. A pious injunction, easy to
enounce, but hard to carry out! The other bond of sentiment is by way of identification.
All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling
of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of
human society. (Freud , letter to Einstein)
What then does the principle of this relation consist of? Unpleasure would correspond to an increase and pleasure to a diminution of quantity of (free) energy. But this correlation is neither a simple correlation between two forces, that of the sensations and that of the modification of energy, nor as a directly proportional ratio. this non-simplicity and indirectness promise, on the threshold of the “loosest” hypothesis, an inexhaustible reserve for speculation. This reserve does no consist of substantial riches, but rather of additional turns, supplementary angles, differential ruses as far as the eye can see. Time must be of the party. Time is not a general form, the homogenouse element of this differentiality — rather, it must be thought in return on the basis of this differential heterogeneity — but it has to be reckoned with. It is probable, remarks Freud, that the “decisive” factor here is the amount of increase or diminution in time, “in a given period of time.”
(Derrida , The Post Card, 280)
So many strange things have passed before me in those timeless moments
that fall into one’s life as if from the moon, when one no longer has
any idea how old one is or how young one will yet be–I should not doubt
that there are many kinds of gods– There are some one cannot imagine
without a certain halcyon and frivolous quality in their makeup–
Perhaps light feet are even an integral part of the concept :god– Is it
necessary to elaborate that a god prefers to stay beyond everything
bourgeois and rational? and, between ourselves, also beyond good and
evil? His prospect of free–in Goethe’s words.– And to call upon the
inestimable authority of Zarathustra in this instance: Zarathustra goes
so far as to confess: “I would believe only in a God who could dance”–
(Nietzsche)
As you see, little good comes of consulting a theoretician, aloof from worldly contact, on
practical and urgent problems! Better it were to tackle each successive crisis with means
that we have ready to our hands. However, I would like to deal with a question which,
though it is not mooted in your letter, interests me greatly. Why do we, you and I and
many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of
life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural thing enough, biologically sound and
practically unavoidable. I trust you will not be shocked by my raising such a question.
For the better conduct of an inquiry it may be well to don a mask of feigned aloofness.
The answer to my query may run as follows: Because every man has a right over his own
life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into
situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will; it
ravages material amenities, the fruits of human toil, and much besides. Moreover, wars,
as now conducted, afford no scope for acts of heroism according to the old ideals and,
given the high perfection of modern arms, war today would mean the sheer extermination
of one of the combatants, if not of both. This is so true, so obvious, that we can but
wonder why the conduct of war is not banned by general consent. Doubtless either of the
points I have just made is open to debate. It may be asked if the community, in its turn,
cannot claim a right over the individual lives of its members. Moreover, all forms of war
cannot be indiscriminately condemned; so long as there are nations and empires, each
prepared callously to exterminate its rival, all alike must be equipped for war. But we will
not dwell on any of these problems; they lie outside the debate to which you have invited
me. I pass on to another point, the basis, as it strikes me, of our common hatred of war. It
is this: We cannot do otherwise than hate it. Pacifists we are, since our organic nature
wills us thus to us thus to be. Hence it comes easy to us to find arguments that justify our
standpoint. (Freud , letter to Einstein)
“First response then: the pleasure principle, as its name indicates, is a principle, it governs a general tendency, which tendentially then, organizes everything, but can encounter, external obstacles. These obstacles do sometimes prevent it from coming to its conclusion or from triumphing, but do not put it into question as a principial tendency to pleasure, but on the contrary confirm it as soon as they are considered as obstacles.”
(“To Speculate — On ‘Freud’” , The Post Card, 282)
In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the ever-living fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. It builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hubris but the ever-newly-awakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being. (Nietzsche)
How long have we to wait before the rest of men turn pacifist? Impossible to say, and yet
perhaps our hope that these two factors–man’s cultural disposition and a well-founded
dread of the form that future wars will take–may serve to put an end to war in the near
future, is not chimerical. But by what ways or byways this will come about, we cannot
guess. Meanwhile we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural
development is working also against war.
With kindest regards and, should this expose prove a disappointment to you, my sincere
regrets,
Yours,
SIGMUND FREUD
… a structure of alteration without opposition. That which seems, then, to make the belonging — a belonging without interiority — of death to pleasure more continuous, more immanent, and more natural too …
(a sentence which condemns to death and an interruption suspending death)
(Derrida — “To Speculate — On ‘Freud’” , The Post Card, 285)
We believe that humanity’s growth has troubling aspects too, and the greatest humanness that there can be, if this notion is viable, would be the one that most vigorously represents in itself the contradictions of its existence, glorying in this existence and remaining its sole justification . . .
(Nietzsche)
mark forshee 