(...) By conservative, Freud can only mean life preserving and life restoring.
I want to underscore this last idea. Despite what his critics and proponents alike say (and I realize the heretical-sounding nature of my counterclaim), Freud's concern in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is exclusively with life and not with death. This also applies to the death instinct itself, which after all represents "the aim of life," and which, moreover, has a life all its own (and, surprisingly,has no way to take death in its aim—more on that in a moment). "The instinct to return to the inanimate state," which is to say the death instinct, "came into being," and it is the emergence of this impulse that is of keenest interest to Freud. The death instinct has its vicissitudes, and it is these that are of primary concern, their curriculum vitae, and nothing else. That is why Freud can happily say about his image of the death drive that it gives us the very "picture of life": the instinct for death is bound up at one and the same time with "the origin and aim of life." Somehow, Freud wants to say, the death drive is, as it were, instinct with life, the very source of life and of life's strivings. Technically, the death instinct is difficult to distinguish from a libidinal force, which is to say from "a surplus of unsatisfied libido." Logically, the death represented by the drives cannot be the supreme telos of life, let alone something entirely distinct from life and standing outside of it, because death is actually "immanent" to the living organism, not beyond it but within it and constitutive of it. As Freud writes elsewhere, "The struggle [between Bros and death] is what all life essentially consists of." Life consists precisely in the struggle between the two principles, not in the vindication of one or the other.
Now, it is a plain but consistently ignored fact that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud is uninterested in self-elimination as anything other than a goal or tendency that is aimed at but not arrived at, indeed as anything other than an unreachable goal—if it is even a goal. "Direction" might be a better way of describing this tendency, although, as we are beginning to see, the direction the death drive takes is not pointed at death but instead traces a pattern of life. Small wonder, then, if Freud should offer no examples of self-elimination in his treatise on the death drive, and indeed, no examples of death, let alone of death as an outcome of the death drive—with one possible exception: only here, the "sacrifice" in question, which seems to involve self-annihilation, is driven entirely by the instinct for life: (it has to do with what Freud calls the “narcissism” of germ cells acting on a libidinal impulse). For a work purportedly about death, Freud’s treatise has remarkably little to say about its subject matter! The essential confusion to avoid here is that Freud's death instinct is not a death wish. It is not aimed at death because, qua instinct, at the very least it is aimed at its own satisfaction, however this comes to be defined, and at most it is aimed at some psychic representation of death, which is one reason why the death instinct never appears in a pure form, but only in a "displaced” form. The death instinct is arguably a paradigm of satisfaction resulting from missing an object. Consequently, if we wish to say that death in some literal sense is the object of an instinct or that it is what defines what an instinct does, then we will have to acknowledge that death in this form is a representation: it is a purely psychical entity, and a phantasmal one at that. Keeping this representational content within (or else out of) view just is what a living subject does; it defines the most basic activity of the living.
If this is right, I think it helps to explain why the apparent struggle for death, for Freud, is in fact a struggle against death and a sign of life. (...)
