Reanimating the Death Drive: A Criminological Reflection

• In Event: Back from the Dead: Old Concepts for New Times

Abstract

In the aftermath of the First World War, Sigmund Freud announced the arrival of a new psychoanalytic concept, the Death Drive, as a response to what many had seen as the senseless mass slaughter of industrialized warfare. He argued that human beings are not only moved by an erotic drive but also by a drive to destruction, whether of others, the self or both. It is arguable that Freud’s Death Drive was first incubated in a wider late-nineteenth century cultural milieu when a fin-de-siècle obsession with fatality, degeneration and death influenced forms of thought in art, literature and science. It is also arguable that the Death Drive has a genealogy in more distant political formations. This paper will explore the Death Drive, its cultural milieu, its political genealogy and its criminological implications and will in the process seek to demonstrate how this moribund concept can be given a new life.

Author

• Phil Carney, University of Kent