Freud, Zizek, eros and thanatos

[Ian Livingston]

Sorry to be slow in responding to this. Got a little busy and am bound
to be a little busier for the next week, so I'll blurt as best I can
in the moment.

David Morris writes:
>Not a small one of the few things that I'm assuming you think Freud
>got more or less right.

>I don't really know much about Zizek, but that he's a Lacanian.  And
>I'm only slighty schooled (too strong a verb for my case) in Lacan.
>But Freud is also a major source for Lacan.  So, come on, Freud
>shouldn't be so harshly dismissed.

The quote from Freud I cited is not one with which I am ready to sign
on. I do think it applies to V. in particular and Pynchon's work
generally in varying degrees. It is also my suspicion that P. pokes
fun, not just at practitioners of psychotherapy, but also at Freud
specifically. I am not ready to qualify that suspicion in detail yet,
but in V. and CoL49 it seems to me he pans both therapists and theory.

I chose the clip of Zizek to point out specifically just how deeply
confused buying in to Freudian thought too earnestly can get one.
Zizek, in the clip, suggests a beginning point for existence. That
beginning point, according to him, is a catastrophic imbalance in a
field of harmonious charges. What begins must end, so he also posits
an end-point for existence, in which annihilation redresses the
imbalance. He names the imbalance "love" and proceeds to speak
passionately against his interpretations of the word "love".

All this is very Freudian. Freud, in BPP, offers as the two forces
that drive life as "eros" and "thanatos", and offers that the erotic
impulse is a response to an irritation experienced at an inanimate
stage, the irritation itself being that which generates life,
animation. The irritation persists in all which is animate, and all
animated matter desires an end to that irritation, so it seeks death,
"thanatos", in order to return to an inanimate state, free of the
irritation of love. In the drive to cease, all animate things seek to
reproduce, because..... Well, just why exactly? Because it feels good?
Because the irritation is pleasing? Because the act of complication
simplifies things?

No. Freud is clearly bonkers on this, and so is Zizek.

Science that focuses it's gaze on beginnings and endings is driven, at
its core, by religious postulations of creation and judgment.
Evolution on Earth seems necessarily to have begun at some point, but
that beginning is so very complex any of the attempts to describe it
with our current level of knowledge of how things work is really
nothing more than to postulate descriptive metaphors for what we
experience as self-aware (very) complex organisms. To confute love
(which leads to integration)--whether philos, agape, or eros--with
evil (that which causes dis-integration) only confuses, it doesn't
describe experience in a way that abets understanding. If we say that
death comes after love, that makes a certain simplistic sense; but to
aver that love therefore causes death is, well, a causal fallacy,
which can be mildly humorous. e.g., the leading cause of death is
life. The balance is implicit in the tension between eros and
thanatos, the infinitely divisible middle that we call existence,
time, evolution. If love and death cause one another, it is just in
this way: they provide polar definitions of the continuum between
them. It is a matter of metaphor, that is to say it is a sort of
cognitive map of reality--it is not the territory.

There are things Freud gets right, but I do not think this point is one of them.

-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."