Even those uninterested in psychoanalysis will turn to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the death drive at times of deepening crises and human destruction. And at this moment especially, when people are trying to understand the unfolding genocide of Palestinians and the accelerating fascist ascendancy in the United States, the death drive seems to be an irresistible analytic. [1] What makes the death drive so seductive is that it gives us a way of explaining violence and authoritarianism: To invoke the death drive is to concede that there exists a force in us so dark and so evil that self-destructiveness and savagery are, yes, extremely upsetting, but, for the enlightened citizen, ultimately understandable. By showing that what appears to be incomprehensible can actually be conquered by reason, the death drive demystifies brutality; as long as we accept that it is made of and for ruination, human destructivity becomes expectable – and for that reason, also something one has to reluctantly accept. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians, but, if you are well-read, you know that brutal excesses are to be expected in the death-driven regimes of “war”; [2] yes, we are wrecking the planet and extinguishing other species, but what can you do – this is, after all, how the death drive works. [3] Paradoxically, then, while the death drive aims to describe the force behind destructiveness, insofar as it is offered as an explanatory framework, it has a pacifying effect and an exonerating potential: Extreme violence is no longer exceptional but is the mere expression of a universal human potential.

But, while history is full of examples of people falling into destructiveness, it is also rife with instances of people risking themselves to resist oppression, to oppose fascism, and to valiantly participate in anti-colonial struggles. This is not just something that the death drive cannot account for (and why should it?); the pacifying work of the death drive actively obstructs the possibilities of thinking about resistance. Put more sharply, thinking through the death drive can block our capacity to imagine, let alone engage, in what I call the revolutionary impulse: the impulse to give oneself over to actions that stand to disrupt violence and to resist oppression – actions that involve true risk for the person undertaking them, such as participating in protests, work stoppages, and blockades. The capacity for revolutionary action derives from the insurgent, more anarchic qualities of the libidinal current, [4] whereas the Freudian death drive problematically cleaves aggressivity from sexuality. Daring political theorizing does not suffer from this separation (of the violent from the sexual); a series of philosophers, like the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, gave us tools that can take us to the revolutionary impulse and to revolutionary action.

Popularly understood as a force opposing Eros, the death drive is seen as drawing us toward death and destruction. But well before Freud, other thinkers were already wrestling with the problem of human destructiveness. Convinced that human beings are by nature selfish and capable of the worst evils, social contract theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, variously argued for the importance of societal structures. Hobbes, one of this movement’s most emblematic thinkers, argued that only the rule of law and the threat of punishing its transgression could keep our Machiavellian natures in check. Life outside organized society, he famously argued, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” [5] Hence the necessity for a social contract whereby we all trade our freedoms for a sovereign’s protection. In a series of steps I don’t have the space to track here, this line of theorizing eventually gave us the fantasy that the nation-state can protect its citizens, sheltering us from how, left unchecked, death-driven individuals would tear each other apart.

What these political theorists did not anticipate, however, and what we experience in far too frightful ways today, was how the nation-state would become the purveyor of death, the vector of necropolitics. [6] With Walter Benjamin’s insight that history does not naturally evolve toward justice or revolution, [7] with Michel Foucault’s formulation of biopolitical power whereby the state optimizes populations by making live and letting die, [8] and with Jasbir Puar’s exposition that the state controls populations not through killing but through debility (what she calls “the right to maim”), [9] it has become impossible to trust governments to protect us from our own destructiveness and from each other. Nor is it enough just to scale up from individual psychology to the nation-state and simplistically argue that necropolitics is but a manifestation of how the nation itself has been besieged by the death drive, as if the complex operations and interrelations of power could be reduced, psychologized we might say, to an impersonal force for which no one is responsible but human nature.

How, then, might we think about this problem otherwise?

Many readers will be surprised to learn that Freud’s 1920 formulation of the death drive, proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, [10] was not a furtherance of his thinking but, in fact, a sharp turn away from one of his earlier, most radical ideas. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud had introduced psychosexuality as a force that encompasses cruelty, aggression, even sadism. [11] When he later introduced narcissism, however, Freud unified the sexual drives under the ego, placing them under the self-preservative functions. [12] This effectively meant that he resituated Eros in a more domesticated, docile terrain, at a distance from his original emphasis on sexuality as contrary and hostile to the ego. In doing so, he defanged the erotic, making it into a less fierce concept, disconnected from the destructive and destabilizing aspects of sexuality. As for the recently excised, demonic aspects of sexuality, Freud would now need to relocate them elsewhere – hence the new conceptual space that he carved in 1920, proposing the death drive, thereby recasting sex and death as warring forces. Jean Laplanche caustically referred to this newly desexualized concept as the “so-called” death drive to highlight the untenability of such a dichotomy. [13]

Is this not psychoanalytic hair-splitting, you may wonder. Why should we care? Because this distinction has grave implications that we ignore at our peril. Western political philosophy has routinely imagined participation in political life as requiring the abolition of the destructive potential of sexuality and the pacification of the body’s hedonism. But as Oliver Davis and Tim Dean have explained in Hatred of Sex (2022), and as the Marquis de Sade long before them theorized in his pornophilosophical novels penned around the French Revolution, we cannot afford to leave the sexual out of political theorizing. To remand the sexual to the domain of privatized erotic relationships is to cultivate an exaggerated optimism about a desexualized civilization ruled by reason (of the kind imagined by Hobbes when he envisioned a sovereign’s authority) and to generate an enthusiasm for progress, about which Freud himself was enduringly ambivalent [14]– and which Benjamin warned us against. If the sexual appears in the domain of the political today, it is either under the rubric of identity – for instance, when we advocate for legislative protections for queer people – or via moral panics around sex and gender. [15] The panic over trans issues, for example, involves the demonization of trans women as a sexual threat or what so-called gender ideologues describe as the “grooming” of children into believing they are trans. But while the sexual is often harnessed for political instrumentalization, it is rarely acknowledged as a resource for political thinking. Despite its potential, libidinality’s polymorphousness and its imbrication with the more demonic and anarchic elements in the unconscious are not brought to bear on theorizing political life and political resistance.

One of the most insistent authors on how the erotic and politics entwine, [16] Sade gives us a way to think about the dangers of desexualization. In constantly putting political critique, authoritarian fantasy, and sexual entanglement side by side, he showed us how authoritarianism works and how authoritarianisms are enabled by the eclipsing of the sexual dimension. To suggest that there is something dangerous in desexualization may seem startling – and all the more so in connection to Sade, whose reputation as a depraved libertine precedes him. [17] But while most psychoanalytically informed political thinking attaches libidinality to the rise of authoritarianism, [18] Sade helped us see how the erasure of the libidinal plays a key role in disabling our capacity to resist fascism. For Sade, desexualization and turning away from the sovereignty of eroticism prepare the ground for substituting the reparative for justice (1795). Indeed, the reparative nowadays operates as propaganda for a life where injustice is not something we suffer and may fight against, but something to come to terms with and learn to live with. [19] In interpersonal relations but also in our relations to the state, the reparative is part of the ideological apparatus that conditions us to accept our circumstance, systematizing an acquiescent passivity to injustice and harm. Nowhere in psychoanalytic thinking do we see this as starkly as we do in the work of the principal theorist of repair, Melanie Klein.

In her writings on reparation, Klein works with a post-1920 form of aggression, that is, with an aggression cut off from sexuality. Laplanche challenged Klein on precisely that point. Klein’s theory, he argued, assumes a sadistic current that is strangely non-sexual, disaggregated from the “demonic, attacking” aspects of sexuality. [20] This desexualization matters greatly. Why? At a time when most political theory continues to be committed to projects of democratic repair (e.g., in Wendy Brown’s recent work on reparative democracy), a foregrounding of reparation – and its mandate that relationships be preserved no matter how harmful or unjustly organized – is both politically problematic and ethically dubious.

If the Kleinian infant repairs the damage she has caused (in her fantasmatic attacks against the mother) by extending reparative gestures that the mother accepts (to solidify the child’s sense of her own inner goodness), the reparative sets the norm for how relationality can triumph over instinctual and primitive sadism (that is, over the death drive). Klein thus gives us a different way than Hobbes to think about how our brutish nature might be managed: not through the social contract but through object-related love.

But things are not so simple, nor is psychoanalysis so innocent. [21] David Eng notes that the Kleinian infant repairs not out of love, but selfishly, to not deprive the ego of its object, which it needs. [22] Pointing us to an unexpected leap in Klein’s argument that aligns the infant to the colonial explorer, he shows reparation to be “neither anxiety nor ambivalence toward an injured other, but the disavowal of responsibility in a history of colonial war and violence.” [23] Put differently, repair is not concerned with the damage caused to the other but with repairing the aggressor, especially the aggressor’s sense of their own goodness.

Joshua Chambers-Letson similarly calls attention to how reparation “has historically been implicated in short-circuiting rather than successfully realizing attempts to break with the world as it is in order to create equality.” Continuing, he argues that “insofar as Klein and her patients work through and repair the damage they have done to the self by way of […] violent tendencies towards […] racial others,” Kleinian reparation functions “to shore up whiteness.” [24] Carolyn Laubender shares these concerns about reparation’s ethico-political failures. In Klein’s account of her work with her child patient Richard, [25] Klein describes his achievement of the depressive position as “best exemplified by his identification with Nazi Germany.” [26] How is it, asks Laubender, that we have missed that at the heart of Klein’s theory of reparation lies the assumption that psychic maturity involves the capacity to identify with one’s aggressor even “at the height of a genocidal extermination”? [27]

Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi add to these critiques by turning to Palestine. Their work shows how repair participates in the ideological production of a partners-in-peace mentality that “is ideologically misattuned in the context of settler colonial and racial domination.” [28] The fact that these critical interventions problematizing repair span such a varied range of historical and political contexts slows us down; it makes us see repair anew and as joltingly out of sync with ethics and justice. “[F]ascism lives on in the techniques of repair,” [29] writes Jack Halberstam, in yet another context, one that traces the connections between white supremacy and queer deflationary histories.

The reparative models developed in Klein’s wake involve nothing less than the imposition of the reparative process on the harmed object. Consider, for example, how Israel’s occupation of Palestine is presented as a form of reparations owed to the Jewish people by an antisemitic world that remained inactive for too long while Nazi Germany genocided them. We see that repair is not only a dodge but that it also works to keep us tied to the same unchanged and unjust social contract.

To say no to the forms of destructiveness that the concept of the death drive leads us to shrug away as “only human,” we need the revolutionary impulse. We need it in order to stand up to power, in order to withdraw our consent from unjust social contracts, and to resist what Foucault described as “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” [30] At times of brutal violence and fascist acceleration, it is tempting to want to turn to reparation. But that’s precisely why we should not. The reparative disarms us, taking away our capacity to resist. “To improve our position in the struggle against Fascism,” Benjamin famously wrote, “our task is to bring about a real state of emergency.” [31] Neither the death drive nor reparation can help us bring about a Benjaminian state of emergency. To bring about a real state of emergency we need to be able to tap into the revolutionary impulse: We need to be able to think not through the death drive but through the inseparable circuitry of destructiveness and libidinality. Only in this way can we begin to have conversations that go beyond critique, that go beyond merely dissecting the conditions that have led to the rise of fascism and to the genocide of the Palestinians and to come to oppose them by practicing resistance. This is about more than just generating new discourses or new debates (though it most surely would generate those too); it is about daring to cross the line beyond thinking and taking action. What this looks like is speaking up against violence even when doing so will upset people and will, no doubt, cost us relationships; protesting injustice even when it means we may be criticized, attacked, or arrested; boycotting even when we may be falsely accused of being antisemitic; withdrawing from institutions that remain complicit even when we may be seen as naïve or, worse, hostile; giving up professional opportunities even when they may be hard-earned; refusing awards even when this means losing something; and so on. Indeed, if such actions feel risky, it is because they are: You cannot bring about a state of emergency without putting anything on the line, without giving anything up. There is no way around it: For those of us who refuse to turn a blind eye to ethnonationalism and to fascism, for those of us who do not want to be counted as silent bystanders, for those of us who want to work toward bringing about a state of emergency, our stance will cost us. These kinds of resistive actions are not simple expressions of an ethical stance and cannot be arrived at simply by mobilizing our will: Because they cost us so much and because they require the galvanizing of anarchic and entropic energies within us, they rely on the activation of our libidinal force.

One can, of course, choose to stand back and do nothing. One can, in other words, sit silently while the world burns, marveling at how right Freud was to theorize human destructiveness. It is, at the end of the day, up to each of us. It is, at the end of the day, up to you.