Julie Reshe, Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023; 144 pgs. ISBN: 978-3-031-31200-7
everet smith, Emory University
Julie Reshe’s Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive (2023) offers an alternative to psychoanalytic parameters and practice. Traditional psychoanalysis, Reshe accuses, presents a twofold problem. First, as a practice that advocates for overcoming trauma, psychoanalysis traffics in a problematic utopianism which promises that our lives may one day be free from strife. Second, this “positive” bent of psychoanalysis misunderstands the human condition in assuming that negativity––embodied most strongly in the death drive––is a problem to overcome. Reshe extends Freud’s insights on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, although Reshe’s version of the death drive claims loyalty to its pioneer, Sabina Spielrein (8). Accordingly, Reshe’s challenge to psychoanalysis is that negativity is a feature, not a bug, of human experience; the death drive is central to all life, human or otherwise. Reshe argues that the death drive––in turns referred to as negativity, destruction, lack, nothingness, and emptiness––is central to the subject, society, and nature. The book consists of three original essays (plus an introduction and conclusion) that advance Reshe’s thesis regarding negativity and three interviews with Reshe’s favored interlocutors: Catherine Malabou, Todd McGowan, and Alenka Zupančič.
The first chapter argues for the priority of negativity in biological processes. Expanding Catherine Malabou’s theory of destructive plasticity “into a more general negative-anthropological model that would be accurate to describe anyone’s life” (19), Reshe critically addresses prevailing understandings of psychology and neuroscience that maintain a “positive” orientation (4-5). To reorient this understanding, Reshe positions negativity as central for subject-formation, which she claims has been frequently disavowed. “At best,” she writes, “when destructive processes are discussed, [this] corresponds to the theologically understood Hegelian dialectics” (27). This “theological” dialectic recuperates destructive tendencies into “a higher positive formulation” (27). Contrarily, out of destructive processes, such as the death of synapses in the human brain, emerge “living figures of death” (Malabou 2012a, 198). Whereas according to Reshe the Hegelian dialectic prioritizes the positive at negativity’s expense, destructive plasticity grants the death drive “a form of its own” (Reshe, 26). Psychoanalysis has “failed to grasp” the importance of such destructive figures, which Reshe maintains are not positive but are negative in character: living forms of the death drive, “alterity with no remedy” (26).
The trouble with the positive orientation of psychoanalysis is that it “precludes seeing the destructive processes in subject [sic], society, and nature as being central and formative,” rendering negativity merely a “necessary deviation to be overcome by positive formation” (28). This is the theological and teleological perspective touted by Hegelianism and neuroscience, among others, which disavow negativity’s formative function for subjectivity. Offering a correction to this over-valuation of positivity in the realm of neuroscience, Reshe provides three destructive correlates to the positive processes identified as central to the field (29). Since these occur alongside neurosciences’ three positive foci, “one could equally claim that destructive processes are central and define plasticity” (31) rather than the opposite, that the positive processes are central. Reshe therefore concludes that “neurobiologically, failure and destruction are dominant, while positive products are their optional by-products” (31).
The book’s middle section (chapter three and an interview with Todd McGowan) expands the territory of negativity to include the social world. Just as the subject is constituted by a negative core on the level of its psychology and the literal formation of its living tissue so is the social bond. Reshe advances theorizations of the death drive that relegate it to the realm of subjectivity, building on McGowan’s theorization of the “social death drive” to argue that society is also essentially “constituted by the death drive” (57). Contrary to McGowan, however, Reshe is critical of the centrality of the psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment, or jouissance, for the death drive. Enjoyment for Reshe is simply positivity by another name, aligning McGowan’s theory of the social death drive with the “psychoanalytic self-help” she rails against and which is ultimately a hedonistic, masochistic discourse “that teaches the art of enjoyment through suffering” (60).
Reshe emphasizes the failure of our most well-loved psychoanalytic concepts to truly “realise [sic] the suffering of the other” (60). This precludes “compassion,” or “sharing the tragedy of the other,” which requires understanding suffering as void of meaning and as something that does not lead by necessity to enjoyment. Reworking the Lacanian formulation of the death-driven but enjoying subject, Reshe argues that society and the subject are co-produced in a “negative dialectic” (62), wherein neither exists but each acquires the semblance of existence through the apparent existence of the other (65). This tautological relationship between society and the subject elides the constitutive nothingness of their emergence. Moreover, for Reshe, jouissance supports this semblance of existence by obscuring the nothingness at the heart of life. This lack of basis for either the subject or society is universally shared, insofar as our mutual feeling of nothingness weaves the fabric of the social world, binding us to one another in a shared experience of emptiness that is rarely acknowledged but is devastatingly and non-redemptively painful.
Reshe’s fifth chapter continues her project of widening the reach of the death drive, extending into the natural realm. Psychoanalysis has tended to enshrine the death drive as something we peculiarities of nature are uniquely afflicted with, resulting in a characterization of the human as not-quite-natural. Reshe references Nietzsche’s definition of humans as “more ill, uncertain, changeable and unstable than any other animal” (103-104), solidifying the human being’s place as a fallen creature whose purity was lost when it attained knowledge of itself as a thinking being. This discourse, from Nietzsche to Freud to Lacan, consists of “a rumination about the animalistic health that was lost by humans after they diverged from naturalness” (103). This is also the story of what Reshe calls “the profane version” of evolution that understands evolution as the survival of the fittest and, accordingly, abides by the same theological and teleological terms encountered in Reshe’s early criticisms of neuroscience (101).
With the help of Zupančič’s work in What is Sex? (2017), Reshe argues that rather than being a story about genetic triumph and adaptation, nature is full of genetic mutations and abortions. Animals, be they human or non-human, share in nature’s constitutive lack: “The difference between [animals and humans] is not the difference between whether or not they are more adapted or less adapted; they rather differ by the types of failures they are” (108). Turning to the depressive realism of philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, Reshe offers that the human’s special form of failure is an “acute awareness” that makes us “unsuitable for life” (108). The tragic over-acuity of humans is the actualization of nature’s central nothingness, the destructive disorder at the heart of all things living. Like humans and society, nature also has a death drive: “The human death drive is not a rupture from nature; it is the most radical inclusion into the inner rupture that constitutes nature” (111). Nature’s truth has not been accounted for by psychoanalysis, Reshe accuses, and when it approaches doing so the motivating negativity of nature risks being covered over by the terminology of enjoyment and the positive outlook that Reshe believes buttresses everything from natural science to philosophy to psychoanalysis.
If these fields have fallen short of their potential by disavowing negativity, what is to be done? Reshe declares her refusal to answer this question on multiple occasions, since to remain negative her practice must avoid offering programs, solutions, and ameliorations of any kind (vii, 133). Regardless, in scattered moments Reshe offers suggestions as to what her negative insight might contribute; for example, the ability to realize the suffering of others and oneself. This is the foundation of what Reshe calls “compassion” or, at other times, love. In being dead together, Reshe identifies the possibility of a “pro-social self-negation,” something that is “in the form of nothing” and is, ultimately, wasteful in its meaninglessness (62). This traumatic-yet-loving suffering, on an individual level, bonds us to the other compassionately and allegedly in the absence of enjoyment. Politically and clinically, this means that a “negatively oriented psychoanalysis inherently resists the very possibility of a healed, harmonious non-suffering society” (75). Reshe claims this puts her negative practice at a remove “from all sorts of political and psychological projects” (75), since these trade in “positive political agendas focused on the praxis of facilitating positive social change” (75).
Reshe’s work leaves us with a handful of problems. Some are internal to her philosophical pessimism and her attempt to delimit a novel form of “psychoanalytic” practice, while others emerge in her discursive exchanges with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political theory. The most acute issue, the status of the death drive, is no surprise given its centrality to Reshe’s argument. The character of the death drive has been, of course, widely debated in psychoanalytic discourses within and outside of the clinic (maybe most especially there). The chief problem with Reshe’s use is its imprecision; Reshe’s philosophical pessimism uses “death drive” interchangeably with such disparate terms as “nothingness,” “negativity,” “destruction,” “self-destruction,” and even “suicide.” This conceptual flimsiness stems from her unilateral rejection of desire, evidenced in her criticisms of the Lacanian subject, whose enjoyment/jouissance she proclaims is “hedonist” and “masochistic” (60). Reshe takes issue with Freud and Lacan’s apparent yoking of the death drive to the pleasure principle, since “this is problematic [because] you still bring up the [sic] pleasure … [jouissance] is attached to pleasure” (48). This rejection of desire and Reshe’s equivocation of desire with pleasure and sex may be found across her work (2017).
Reshe demands a death drive free from enjoyment for reasons consistent with her self-declared project of decoupling negativity from positivity. The death drive cannot both enjoy and be negative, since enjoyment, whether achieved by orgasm or other means, gives the death drive a positive bent in which it overcomes itself by attaining (or failing to attain, as is often the case) its desire. “The concept of jouissance implies that pleasure is all we want or what we are destined to be looking for,” she criticizes, and as such this position falls “back under Hegelian dialectics” (38). Thus, Reshe demands that we reject enjoyment, insisting that we lean into the emptiness of the death drive. Yet, Reshe commits the cardinal sin of attaching negativity and positivity at every turn––such is the structure of argument and, indeed, of thought, as Hegel noted throughout his work. To stake a claim as to the primacy and purity of negativity, Reshe repeatedly argues that negativity is what constitutes the subject (and society, and nature; cf. pgs. 25, 27, and 43). In other words, negativity builds and creates––hallmarks of the positivity that is inherent in the movement of the negative. Reshe is compelled to demonstrate this positive underbelly of the negative whenever she appeals to its centrality with regard to subject-formation, the structure of society, and the evolutionary development of species. Reshe does not see that one can have positivity and productivity (that is, one can desire) without yoking oneself to a “theological” or “teleological” worldview that sweeps destructive impulses under the rug, insisting that they are perversions that offer only roadblocks to human perfection. In a manner consistent with the dialectical problem of opposites, Reshe offers a theology of the negative that is just as one-sided as its opposite: the positive orientation that plagues philosophy, psychoanalysis, and natural science. Nothingness is already Being; disavowals of this fundamental relationship leave one turning in circles, as Reshe certainly does throughout this book.
The conceptual vacuity of the death drive also affects the internal consistency of Reshe’s project. Insofar as she defines life as the death drive, which she equates with meaninglessness, this creates a conceptual problem for her work whenever she attempts to articulate an upshot to seeing the world as she does. For example, Reshe harbors a hope (dare I say, a desire) for her project: that her negative practice can overcome the preclusion of “compassion,” which she describes as “sharing the tragedy of the other” (60). Reshe repeatedly characterizes the subject as tragic while simultaneously defining life as meaningless. The very idea of tragedy is, however, deeply imbued with meaning––particularly for psychoanalysis. That something (a life, say) is tragic cannot be stated in a vacuum; we are compelled to determine what it is about that life that makes it so (mistakenly killing your biological father and fathering children with your biological mother, say). Refusing to determine the precise manner in which a life is tragic evacuates the conceptual significance tragedy, something Reshe cannot in good faith commit to, since the idea of tragedy is fundamental to her depressive realism.
Moreover, in making the death drive so profoundly and flatly negative, Reshe is forced into some strange positions. For example, Reshe takes issue with Žižek’s discussion of the trauma of the wars in Sudan and Kongo (Žižek 2008, 11), claiming that it renders people from Sudan and Kongo as belonging “to the group of the living dead, while ‘we’ are those who are only haunted by the spectre of occasional trauma” (40). For Reshe, the trauma of lack is what we “most profoundly share” (61), and so it is an absurdity for Žižek to make any statements about the specific traumas of, say, the experience of a civil war. Life is meaningless suffering; to delimit it in any more specified terms covers over the emptiness that constitutes the social bond. Yet, is it not precisely by virtue of Reshe’s ontological flattening of the death drive qua suffering into a single, continuous flatline that suffering is rendered meaningless? In declaring all of our suffering to be ontologically indistinguishable, the world certainly does appear to be a vast, endless expanse of identically pointless suffering.
I agree with Reshe: life is suffering. Yet, “because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred” (1977, 284). Hegel’s declaration in the Phenomenology is an early iteration of what Lacan would define as the forced choice, the tragedy, of human existence. Yes, we suffer, but we do not all suffer in the same way; yes, we lack, but our individual and collective paths to either address or avoid this lack have actual, concrete consequences in the world. These consequences generate different kinds of suffering. We can always suffer differently––such is the odyssey of the death drive, of jouissance, our chosen paths to death. Adjudicating whether we want or how we will execute that different kind of suffering can only occur in the fraught space of meaning-making, namely politics and/or the clinic. In the absence of politics, which Reshe evacuates of any effectiveness in her project, the suffering generated out of the conflict in Sudan is granted the same weight as the personal suffering experienced by an academic publishing lectures on her Patreon. Suffering may be a natural part of living, but flattening suffering into a universal ontological state risks naturalizing disparate, sometimes incommensurable sufferings––a consequence highlighted in one of Malabou’s responses to Reshe in her interview, where Malabou contends that creation and destruction coincide, making peace and terrorism indistinguishable (51-52). In the vacuous space of abstraction Reshe has created, terror and peace, destruction and creation certainly do become indistinguishable, even apolitical. This is the danger of a project like Reshe’s, which at every turn denies the political dimensions of creation and destruction in its rejection of desire and disavowal of how our interests appear in the world as always already politicized.
Works cited
Hegel, G. W. F.. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press.
Malabou, Catherine. 2012a. New Wounded. New York: Fordham University Press.
Reshe, Julie. 2017. “Love is Tender: A critical approach to pansexualism” in The Materiality of
Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice eds. Anna Malinowska & Michael Gratzke.