Thanatos

In his lectures on Kant's Critique of pure reason Adorno urged his students not to brush contradictions in theoretical constructions aside too easily. Understanding them, understanding why they are necessary and not always caused by superficiality of the author, leads us to understanding the object the author is struggling with.

I believe those fractures and contradictions are far more magnificent than uniformity. The life of truth itself is expressed in those fractures and contradictions. It is quite easy to brush aside contradictions and engage in superficial synthesising.

Every serious theory is contradictory, and the contradictions reveal a grinding of mind against matter. Only the banal can be free from contradiction. Contradictions are especially noteworthy because all theoretical work strives to be free of them. When the fabric of theory is thin, when the strands can not be woven together, we are moving towards the limits of that theory, and the life of the object shines through the gaps. Grasping the inability of a theory to capture its object is the first step to dialectically transcending it.

Let us look into a concept I have already mentioned, Freud's death drive, what he poetically called Thanatos (being poetical is a frequent method by theorists to divert attention from contradictions, as I should know full well) or sometimes nirvana drive. He believed the human psyche has a tendency towards eliminating all stimuli, which is manifested in its most extreme form as a desire for death. It is easy to show that his reasoning is flawed: as experiments have shown the body finds the absence of all stimuli unbearable, within a short while of such deprivation experimental subjects would start hallucinating, that is producing the craved for stimuli themselves, few could bear this state for even an hour. Furthermore the theory Freud developed prior to his conceptualization of a death drive is able to explain self-destructive tendencies: when libido is turned towards an object (what we call love), the desire for self-preservation is significantly reduced. He already applied this line of reasoning to socially desirable behaviour - it happens when the ideal self becomes the object of previously narcissistic libido - and mass psychology - the leader of the mass takes the place of the ideal self. What is most likely to have caused this shift in Freud's thinking is the monstrosity of world war 1 (one might wonder how he might have reacted had he seen the horrors of world war 1 pale in comparison to the horrors of its sequel), which he thought can not be explained sufficiently by his previous theory.

His instinct was right on: the whole of his previous theoretical work, while it might have been able to explain the particular psychical deformations involved in mass slaughter, was unable to account for the extent of destructive energies let loose upon the world. At once he was dead wrong: the explanatory incapacity of his theoretical construction had nothing to do with shortcomings in understanding purely psychical phenomena. What he failed to take into account was that social reality can not be reduced to individuals and that social processes are qualitatively distinct from and not to be explained via psychical processes. Rising nationalism, which found fertile soil among the petite-bourgeoisie fearing to tumble to the position of proletarians - that is to say was a consequence of the social distribution of frustration - the failure of socialist leaders to substitute class for nation as a mode of collective identification, imperialism of the grand bourgeoisie, which is a systematic trait of capitalism (human desire is but a component in the whole machinery of capitalism, pertaining to the use value of commodities), the industrialisation of warfare (quite a fine example of the consequences of competition) are but a few instances that show how a purely psychological explanation can provide us with merely a few pieces of the puzzle that is global imperialist war. The metaphysical patch - Thanatos - does but point us in the direction of this initial shortcoming of Freud's theoretical work