The year 2025 was just days old when footage from the blazes ravaging Los Angeles flickered across screens all over the world, bringing home with unprecedented clarity that even privileged locations cannot be protected from the existential threat posed by the climate disaster. These and other dystopian images illustrate how quickly objects of desire turn into the opposite: the good life is suddenly life-threatening, and what was constructive becomes destructive. In many countries, democratic systems are also reaching a tipping point. Promises of prosperity that have long gone unfulfilled fuel a growing resentment of politics, and relief is sought out in fantasies of destruction directed against specific individuals or government institutions, the sociologist Oliver Nachtwey argues. Fascist and authoritarian ­movements have been capitalizing on such destruc­tive affects with increasing success. Developments like these have led Nachtwey to identify destructiveness as the “hallmark of our time.”

The title of this issue, “Death Drive and Sublimation,” highlights two psychoanalytical concepts. The former serves in an effort to describe our ­historical moment; the latter brings a process into play that allows for aggression to be channeled into creative work rather than violence.

In the face of the most recent escalation of capitalist and military destruction, the death drive may initially seem an overly simplistic explanatory paradigm. The concept is all too often applied when a destructive force begins to encroach on one’s reality, even becoming its defining feature. The historian Quinn Slobodian, for example, has proposed that Elon Musk is driven by destructive impulses. But if we can understand the death drive as representing neither a psychological determinism nor an anthropological constant of the sort that would anchor a universal theory of culture, it can actually be quite productive for a critical engagement with modern excesses of violence, as Helmut Draxler underscores in this ­issue by subjecting the concept to a ­discursive stress test. Although he maintains that any unambiguous definition of the death drive will fall short, he finds the term serviceable in that it affords us a way to talk about the transitions ­between life and death as well as the violence that is currently unfolding in so many places.

Historically speaking, Sigmund Freud conceptualized the death drive as he studied the impact of the experiences of violence during the First World War: clinical observations of compulsive repetition, which he interpreted as a reaction of traumatized soldiers, compelled him to refine his theory of the drives, complementing the life instinct with the death drive. The idea of a dualistic principle between pleasure and pain, however, comes not from him but from Sabina ­Spielrein. Yet Freud dedicated no more than a single ­footnote to her work, as Daniel Birnbaum points out. As he highlights in his contribution, ­Spielrein was the first to recognize the ­paradoxical fact that there is something at the core of our ­being that turns its back on life.

Many commentators explain contemporary destructive fantasies and behaviors through feelings of resentment. In Here Lies Bitterness (2023), Cynthia Fleury portrays resentment as the motor of destructive social tendencies. The danger it poses, she explains, proceeds from a two-step mechanism: aggression first hurts the individual before being directed outward in search of relief from pain. In conversation with Isabelle Graw, Fleury responds to the critical objection that she underestimates structural problems and saddles the individual with sole responsibility. ­However, she maintains that these negative emotions cannot be left unchecked if action to tackle social inequalities is to be effective. Political struggle therefore requires work on the self.

Fleury emphasizes the importance of action with an aesthetic orientation, including art as a praxis that allows for the sublimation of suffering. Arielle Friend discerns such a working-through in the oeuvre of Unica Zürn, based on the artist’s experiences of childhood and motherhood in Nazi Germany. Yet Friend focuses her contribution on the strategy that Zürn employed later on, when the stability of her subject position was called into question: the semiotic play in which the shifting of signifier and signified allows for the reality of the latter to be redetermined. Rearranging the semantic order, Zürn produced works that combine critical acumen with humor – for ­instance, by replacing the conventional signature as a token of her authorship with a drawing of a cat.

But by performing sublimation, art – and culture, more generally – can disguise violence as well, as Francesca Raimondi shows in an analysis of a video by Jelena Jureša. Raimondi ­develops her argument by zooming in on one of the work’s main figures: Srđan Golubović, who, under the alias Max, committed crimes as a member of ­Arkan’s Tigers, a Serbian paramilitary group during the Yugoslav Wars, though this did not ­prevent him from rising to prominence as a DJ in Belgrade’s club scene. With Freud, Raimondi synthesizes the ostensible antagonism between violence and culture in a “culture of violence.” Jureša’s work offers something in opposition to it: the transfor­mative power of rage described by the feminists Audre Lorde and María Lugones. Such “counter-­sublimation,” Raimondi argues, creates an opportunity to not just redirect but overcome violence.

Nils Fock proposes that another way to counter destructive forces is through a specific idea of death. In Georges Bataille’s theory of art, the death of the bourgeois spirit allows for all the life that that spirit excludes as contrary to nature, as base or perverted, to assert itself – at least for an instant. Fock’s choice to highlight this anti-bourgeois potential through the example of P. Staff’s art is not a coincidence. The discrimination against trans people that Staff addresses in works such as HHS-687 (2023) is often life-threatening and bound to become sharply worse under Trump’s presidency.

Mortality is also an issue for Madonna, though from a very different position. Her incantation in “Easy Ride” (2003) – “What I want is to live forever” – is proving true: if fans were swept off their feet by her life-affirming energy for decades, she now perturbs people with what Peter Rehberg interprets as a repression of death. She even seems to have found a snappy Instagram-able shorthand for it: “Art = Survival.” In that sense, the music she recently announced on social media may be thought of as another strategy to stay a pop icon in perpetuity.

What one might be tempted to dismiss in Madonna as a defense against her own finitude points to something more fundamental: confronting fears and destructive affects enables art not only to put them at a distance, however ­temporarily, but also to harness them in an effort to chart new ways of engaging with reality.

Isabelle Graw, Leonie Huber, Antonia Kölbl, and Anna Sinofzik

Translation: Gerrit Jackson