Putin cock-a-doodle-doo by ZHUK. Photograph: Art Residency in Occupation (The Guardian 23/07/2022)
The reflection that follows is driven by our own ongoing effort to understand the crises of our time, which now include the war in Ukraine, as well as being inspired by a video interview with Catherine Malabou, which we share at the end of the post.
References to the work of Sigmund Freud may appear to some to be outmoded. It is not our conviction.
___
Caught in the whirlwind of these war times, without any real information or any perspective upon the great changes that have already occurred or are about to be enacted, lacking all premonition of the future, it is small wonder that we ourselves become confused as to the meaning of impressions which crowd in upon us or of the value of the judgments we are forming.
Sigmund Freud
These opening words of Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay Reflections upon War and Death could be ours. The context has changed. His horror before the violence of WWI is not ours. Yet war, poverty, plague, famine, ecological collapse and a seemingly endless string of calamities haunt our horizons as well. And if Freud could speak of the disappointment of his contemporaries in the face of previously unfathomable destruction, a disappointment in the evident failures of progress and education, of civilisation itself, to keep the murderousness of war at bay, our jaded cynicism and trivialised narcissism also reveal fissures, at least before the onslaught of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Journalists endeavoured maladroitly to express the general consternation, and inadvertently, succeeded.
Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen”. – Charlie D’Agata, CBS News
“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed every day.” To which the journalist answered, “I understand and respect the emotion.” – BBC interview of a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine
“We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.” – Phillipe Corbé, BFM TV
“Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!” – ITV journalist reporting from Poland
“Looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous … I’m loath to use the expression … middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees looking to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa.” – Television news anchor, Al Jazeera
“They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.” – Daniel Hannan, The Telegraph
Our “shock” at the invasion of Ukraine was more parochial than the trauma of WWI. Whereas the latter seemed to herald the end of a civilisation – the Belle Époque, as some were to call it –, the former has been felt along racial-ethnic-political fractures: it is one thing for the darker hoi polloi of the world to slaughter each other, it is another for “us”, in these times, to do it to “ourselves”. How shockingly unlike us! And what kind of example does this set for the Others? If shame had not died some good few years ago, we might even have been tempted to say that it is all so shameful – and this while “darker” and non-Christian refugees were being prevented from escaping from Ukraine.
Freud said very much the same of the disappointment of his time, but with the critical aim of unmasking that same disappointment.
We expected that the great ruling nations of the white race, the leaders of mankind, who had cultivated worldwide interests, and to whom we owe the technical progress in the control of nature as well as the creation of artistic and scientific cultural standards – we expected that these nations would find some other way of settling their differences and conflicting interests. …
But the war in which we did not want to believe broke out and brought – disappointment. It is not only bloodier and more destructive than any foregoing war, as a result of the tremendous development of weapons of attack and defence, but it is at least as cruel, bitter, and merciless as any earlier war. It places itself above all the restrictions pledged in times of peace, the so-called rights of nations, it does not acknowledge the prerogatives of the wounded and of physicians, the distinction between peaceful and fighting members of the population, or the claims of private property. It hurls down in blind rage whatever bars its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace after it is over. It tears asunder all community bonds among the struggling peoples and threatens to leave a bitterness which will make impossible any reestablishment of these ties for a long time to come.
It has also brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn from the other with hate and loathing. … But who is privileged to step forward at such a time and judge in his own defence?
(Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
In answer to his own question, Freud in effect says that no one is privileged to step forward because no one is innocent. Between the ruling nations of the “civilised white races” and “primitive nations”, there is no moral superiority to be attributed exclusively to one side; or if there were, then the latter, the “primitive”, would fare better in any comparison.
For Freud, the disappointment experienced by so many with the war was born of an unjustified illusion: first, either that human beings are ultimately good by nature (which Freud dismisses) or, second, that through education and culture – the famed German bildung – moral perfection is possible, with evil inclinations to be replaced by good ones. The tragic flaw in the latter is that there is no such thing as eradicating evil.
What psychoanalytic investigation has demonstrated, according to Freud, is that at the deepest level of a person’s character lie impulses, impulses shared by all and which in themselves are neither good nor bad. They and their manifestations are instead morally classified “according to their relation to the needs and demands of the human community”. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death) And it is those rejected by societies that come to be designated as “evil”.
This is not however a mere baptismal exercise. Basic impulses are mastered, successfully or not, through inhibitions and/or diversions, combined and separated, channelled to other areas and objects, thereby changing and moulding the person in turn. This is a process that occurs over the life span of every individual. The illusion is that in so changing and re-directing impulses, that the impulses marked as evil can be supplanted by good impulses, when in fact we carry with us the history of the process, and whatever impulse is now accepted is haunted by ambivalences of feeling. We may both intensely love and hate who or what is before us.
What we call the character of a person does not really emerge until the fate of all these impulses has been settled, and character, as we all know, is very inadequately defined in terms of either “good” or “evil.” Man is seldom entirely good or evil, he is “good” on the whole in one respect and “evil” in another, or “good” under certain conditions, and decidedly “evil” under others. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Two mutually reinforcing agencies operate to transform “evil” impulses. Internally, the individual’s need for love, for attached belonging, alters selfish impulses into social impulses. Externally, education synthesises culturally a civilisation’s demands. In the end, whether the animating impulses which find expression are good in themselves or not is irrelevant. Society “is satisfied if a man adapts his conduct and his actions to the precepts of civilization and asks little about his motives.” (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Civilization is based upon the renunciation of impulse gratification and in turn demands the same renunciation of impulses from every newcomer. During the individual’s life a constant change takes place from outer to inner compulsion. The influences of civilization work through the erotic components to bring about the transformation of more and more of the selfish tendencies into altruistic and social tendencies. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
For Freud, however, society’s success at “civilised obedience” engendered blindness towards our own natures.
Encouraged by this success, society has permitted itself to be misled into putting the ethical demands as high as possible, thereby forcing its members to move still further from their emotional dispositions. A continual emotional suppression is imposed upon them, the strain of which is indicated by the appearance of the most remarkable reactions and compensations. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
These reactions and compensations reveal themselves in neurosis and “distorted characters” only too willing to gratify their inhibited impulses whenever the opportunity permits. Hypocrisy becomes the norm, as there are “more civilised hypocrites than truly cultured persons”. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
For these reasons, we may temper our disappointments before the horrors of our own making.
These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behaviour of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed. In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never really rose as high as we had believed. The fact that states and races abolished their mutual ethical restrictions not unnaturally incited them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses. In doing so their relative morality within their own national life probably suffered no rupture. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
There was nonetheless, for Freud, a second source for disappointment among his contemporaries, a feeling of strangeness, a disturbance – one that we may also project into our own time –; “the disturbance in our former attitude towards death”.
In our civilised manners, we try to push death aside, to divorce it from life. Death remains of course, in thought, the termination of life, but it is one thing to think this and another to live it. It is impossible to imagine our own deaths; we can only do so as spectators. And as far as the death of another person goes, aside from children, no mention is made of it. To do otherwise would appear harsh, macabre. Death is not thereby of course deferred and when it does occur, it is dreadfully painful, above all when the deceased is a close relation. In its most extreme form, loss and mourning undermine life itself. Or, stated differently, life “becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked.” (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
War, according to Freud, or least WWI with its parade of death, could not but sweep away this civilised treatment of death.
Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it. People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
To fill out this contention, Freud proposes a comparison with two other attitudes towards death, that of primitive man and that which remains interred “in the deeper layers of our psychic life”.
Primitive man held a contradictory attitude towards death. If he could not imagine his own, as we are unable to, he was equally unable, unlike us, to drive it into hiding. It was in the death of a loved one that this contradiction played itself out. Both loving and hating those closest to one – the ambivalence of feeling already mentioned –, primitive man both tasted the pain of loss, while refusing to acknowledge it, because equally unable to imagine himself dead.
From this emotional conflict psychology arose. Man could no longer keep death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased, but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of a future life after apparent death. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
In an extraordinary exercise of historiography, Freud reads the origin and development of religious consciousness from the “experience of death” of primitive man. But independently of its adequacy, what is significant in the narrative is that this “religious consciousness” and its denial of death will become the ground of the modern conventional or civilised denial of death. Primitive man was incapable of exiling death, the death of loved ones, who would then continue on as spirits, ever present in the world of the living. The metamorphoses of spirits into souls, immortal souls, gods, God, moral law – which extended grief to the death of the stranger, even the enemy – all contributed, over time, to obfuscate death itself, rendering us thereby civilised.
The uncivilised savage was however no remorseless murderer, for he feared the avenging spirits of the fallen. Murder in war required expiation through difficult penance. If primitive man could kill the stranger or enemy, he did so in fear and trembling. We kill indifferently, or can do so, without fear, because the spirits no longer speak to us. Having rendered death almost abstract, behind the ever greater reifications of otherworldly agents and principles, all that remains is our own inability to imagine our own death. The civilised walk the earth as “immortals”, against which others, strangers and enemies, are unimportant, or worse, resources to be used or obstacles to be removed.
Without idealising “primitive man”, Freud saw in civilisation a malaise that divorced “good” and “evil”, thereby making any satisfactory psychological development extremely difficult. The flight from death could only produce a narcissistic monster unrestrained by murder.
The mass murder of WWI, Freud believed, made that flight from death no longer possible. The question then became what might the attitude towards death become, what should it become, in light of the violence of modern warfare?
Freud here turns to the “psychoanalytic investigation” of the unconscious, to try to unveil its attitude towards death. And for Freud, what characterises the unconscious attitude towards death is that it acts as if it were immortal.
What we call our unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a negative content. The idea of death finds absolutely no acceptance in our impulses. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Herein resides the impulsive source of heroism and our murderous psychic desire to kill those who would stand before us. Our unconscious “knows no other punishment for crime than death, and this not without a certain consistency, for every injury done to our all-mighty and self-glorifying self is at bottom a crimen laesae majestatis.”
From the perspective of our unconscious wishes, “we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers, just like primitive man.”
The two contradictory attitudes towards death – acknowledging it as the destroyer of life and denying it as real – come into conflict, as with primitive man, in the loss of those we love. The latter are a part of us, “a constituent of our own selves”, but equally, they are also in part strangers, even enemies. Out of this ambivalent conflict, “primitive man” created a culture in which neither side of the tension was repudiated. “Civilised man”, in contrast, is torn asunder in a violent and impossible refusal of the ambivalence of love and death, which in either instance brings death.
It is tragically unclear (can we still speak of “tragedy”?) whether war can strip away the deposits of civilisation and allow primitive man to reappear, as Freud thought. The First World War would be followed by even greater horrors and the violence which threatens us today leaves many indifferent.
Freud thought that war could not be abolished “as long as the conditions of existence among races are so varied and the repulsions between them are so vehement.” The question then becomes whether we simply “yield and adapt ourselves to it”, which in our time risks the extinction of the human species, or whether we abide and endeavour to live in the truth, the truth of our mortality.
Shall we not turn around and avow the truth? Were it not better to give death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts and to reveal a little more of our unconscious attitude towards death which up to now we have so carefully suppressed? This may not appear a very high achievement and in some respects rather a step backwards, a kind of regression, but at least it has the advantage of taking the truth into account a little more and of making life more bearable again. To bear life remains, after all, the first duty of the living. The illusion becomes worthless if it disturbs us in this.
We remember the old saying:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you wish peace, prepare for war.
The times call for a paraphrase:
Si vis vitam, para mortem.
If you wish life, prepare for death.
(Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Leo Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich, the meaning of whose life collapses before his inescapable death, consequence of an accident, is the story of “everyman”, of someone who “knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.”
He will finally do so, but only at the very moment before his death, when he discovers that it is nothing. Yet at that same moment, life ceases.
Tolstoy speaks of this instant as one of joy, of light, for Illich’s anxiety and pain end in release.
What lies before us, by contrast, is the task of earthly happiness, of a life of joy and pain with death as our companion.
The black flag of anarchism, symbol of death, of misery and struggle, social struggle undoubtedly, anti-authoritarian struggle above all, is in its utopian austerity the appeal to defend a life stalked by death.
The history of the cry “Viva la Muerte” is the exemplary metaphor of the two possible destinies of the death drive. Viva la Muerte was the rallying cry of the national uprising of the Spanish against Napoleon (May 1808). Despite the formidable disproportion of numbers between the autochthonous guerrilla and the imperial troops, the war would go on for five years without the resistance being subdued and the French being expelled from Spain. It was already a libertarian cry. It was taken up again by the Spanish anarchists, a half century later as a revolutionary cry against a life of injustices. And it was then turned around by the Francoists against the anarchists, as the other destiny of the death drive, its destiny as deadly destruction.
Reading war and anarchy with Sigmund Freud
The reflection that follows is driven by our own ongoing effort to understand the crises of our time, which now include the war in Ukraine, as well as being inspired by a video interview with Catherine Malabou, which we share at the end of the post.
References to the work of Sigmund Freud may appear to some to be outmoded. It is not our conviction.
___
Caught in the whirlwind of these war times, without any real information or any perspective upon the great changes that have already occurred or are about to be enacted, lacking all premonition of the future, it is small wonder that we ourselves become confused as to the meaning of impressions which crowd in upon us or of the value of the judgments we are forming.
Sigmund Freud
These opening words of Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay Reflections upon War and Death could be ours. The context has changed. His horror before the violence of WWI is not ours. Yet war, poverty, plague, famine, ecological collapse and a seemingly endless string of calamities haunt our horizons as well. And if Freud could speak of the disappointment of his contemporaries in the face of previously unfathomable destruction, a disappointment in the evident failures of progress and education, of civilisation itself, to keep the murderousness of war at bay, our jaded cynicism and trivialised narcissism also reveal fissures, at least before the onslaught of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Journalists endeavoured maladroitly to express the general consternation, and inadvertently, succeeded.
Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen”. – Charlie D’Agata, CBS News
“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed every day.” To which the journalist answered, “I understand and respect the emotion.” – BBC interview of a former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine
“We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.” – Phillipe Corbé, BFM TV
“Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!” – ITV journalist reporting from Poland
“Looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous … I’m loath to use the expression … middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees looking to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa.” – Television news anchor, Al Jazeera
“They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.” – Daniel Hannan, The Telegraph
(from The Guardian, 02/03/2022)
Our “shock” at the invasion of Ukraine was more parochial than the trauma of WWI. Whereas the latter seemed to herald the end of a civilisation – the Belle Époque, as some were to call it –, the former has been felt along racial-ethnic-political fractures: it is one thing for the darker hoi polloi of the world to slaughter each other, it is another for “us”, in these times, to do it to “ourselves”. How shockingly unlike us! And what kind of example does this set for the Others? If shame had not died some good few years ago, we might even have been tempted to say that it is all so shameful – and this while “darker” and non-Christian refugees were being prevented from escaping from Ukraine.
Freud said very much the same of the disappointment of his time, but with the critical aim of unmasking that same disappointment.
We expected that the great ruling nations of the white race, the leaders of mankind, who had cultivated worldwide interests, and to whom we owe the technical progress in the control of nature as well as the creation of artistic and scientific cultural standards – we expected that these nations would find some other way of settling their differences and conflicting interests. …
But the war in which we did not want to believe broke out and brought – disappointment. It is not only bloodier and more destructive than any foregoing war, as a result of the tremendous development of weapons of attack and defence, but it is at least as cruel, bitter, and merciless as any earlier war. It places itself above all the restrictions pledged in times of peace, the so-called rights of nations, it does not acknowledge the prerogatives of the wounded and of physicians, the distinction between peaceful and fighting members of the population, or the claims of private property. It hurls down in blind rage whatever bars its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace after it is over. It tears asunder all community bonds among the struggling peoples and threatens to leave a bitterness which will make impossible any reestablishment of these ties for a long time to come.
It has also brought to light the barely conceivable phenomenon of civilized nations knowing and understanding each other so little that one can turn from the other with hate and loathing. … But who is privileged to step forward at such a time and judge in his own defence?
(Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
In answer to his own question, Freud in effect says that no one is privileged to step forward because no one is innocent. Between the ruling nations of the “civilised white races” and “primitive nations”, there is no moral superiority to be attributed exclusively to one side; or if there were, then the latter, the “primitive”, would fare better in any comparison.
For Freud, the disappointment experienced by so many with the war was born of an unjustified illusion: first, either that human beings are ultimately good by nature (which Freud dismisses) or, second, that through education and culture – the famed German bildung – moral perfection is possible, with evil inclinations to be replaced by good ones. The tragic flaw in the latter is that there is no such thing as eradicating evil.
What psychoanalytic investigation has demonstrated, according to Freud, is that at the deepest level of a person’s character lie impulses, impulses shared by all and which in themselves are neither good nor bad. They and their manifestations are instead morally classified “according to their relation to the needs and demands of the human community”. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death) And it is those rejected by societies that come to be designated as “evil”.
This is not however a mere baptismal exercise. Basic impulses are mastered, successfully or not, through inhibitions and/or diversions, combined and separated, channelled to other areas and objects, thereby changing and moulding the person in turn. This is a process that occurs over the life span of every individual. The illusion is that in so changing and re-directing impulses, that the impulses marked as evil can be supplanted by good impulses, when in fact we carry with us the history of the process, and whatever impulse is now accepted is haunted by ambivalences of feeling. We may both intensely love and hate who or what is before us.
What we call the character of a person does not really emerge until the fate of all these impulses has been settled, and character, as we all know, is very inadequately defined in terms of either “good” or “evil.” Man is seldom entirely good or evil, he is “good” on the whole in one respect and “evil” in another, or “good” under certain conditions, and decidedly “evil” under others. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Two mutually reinforcing agencies operate to transform “evil” impulses. Internally, the individual’s need for love, for attached belonging, alters selfish impulses into social impulses. Externally, education synthesises culturally a civilisation’s demands. In the end, whether the animating impulses which find expression are good in themselves or not is irrelevant. Society “is satisfied if a man adapts his conduct and his actions to the precepts of civilization and asks little about his motives.” (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Civilization is based upon the renunciation of impulse gratification and in turn demands the same renunciation of impulses from every newcomer. During the individual’s life a constant change takes place from outer to inner compulsion. The influences of civilization work through the erotic components to bring about the transformation of more and more of the selfish tendencies into altruistic and social tendencies. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
For Freud, however, society’s success at “civilised obedience” engendered blindness towards our own natures.
Encouraged by this success, society has permitted itself to be misled into putting the ethical demands as high as possible, thereby forcing its members to move still further from their emotional dispositions. A continual emotional suppression is imposed upon them, the strain of which is indicated by the appearance of the most remarkable reactions and compensations. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
These reactions and compensations reveal themselves in neurosis and “distorted characters” only too willing to gratify their inhibited impulses whenever the opportunity permits. Hypocrisy becomes the norm, as there are “more civilised hypocrites than truly cultured persons”. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
For these reasons, we may temper our disappointments before the horrors of our own making.
These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behaviour of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed. In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never really rose as high as we had believed. The fact that states and races abolished their mutual ethical restrictions not unnaturally incited them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses. In doing so their relative morality within their own national life probably suffered no rupture. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
There was nonetheless, for Freud, a second source for disappointment among his contemporaries, a feeling of strangeness, a disturbance – one that we may also project into our own time –; “the disturbance in our former attitude towards death”.
In our civilised manners, we try to push death aside, to divorce it from life. Death remains of course, in thought, the termination of life, but it is one thing to think this and another to live it. It is impossible to imagine our own deaths; we can only do so as spectators. And as far as the death of another person goes, aside from children, no mention is made of it. To do otherwise would appear harsh, macabre. Death is not thereby of course deferred and when it does occur, it is dreadfully painful, above all when the deceased is a close relation. In its most extreme form, loss and mourning undermine life itself. Or, stated differently, life “becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked.” (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
War, according to Freud, or least WWI with its parade of death, could not but sweep away this civilised treatment of death.
Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it. People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
To fill out this contention, Freud proposes a comparison with two other attitudes towards death, that of primitive man and that which remains interred “in the deeper layers of our psychic life”.
Primitive man held a contradictory attitude towards death. If he could not imagine his own, as we are unable to, he was equally unable, unlike us, to drive it into hiding. It was in the death of a loved one that this contradiction played itself out. Both loving and hating those closest to one – the ambivalence of feeling already mentioned –, primitive man both tasted the pain of loss, while refusing to acknowledge it, because equally unable to imagine himself dead.
From this emotional conflict psychology arose. Man could no longer keep death away from him, for he had tasted of it in his grief for the deceased, but he did not want to acknowledge it, since he could not imagine himself dead. He therefore formed a compromise and concealed his own death but denied it the significance of destroying life, a distinction for which the death of his enemies had given him no motive. He invented spirits during his contemplation of the corpse of the person he loved, and his consciousness of guilt over the gratification which mingled with his grief brought it about that these first created spirits were transformed into evil demons who were to be feared. The changes wrought by death suggested to him to divide the individual into body and soul, at first several souls, and in this way his train of thought paralleled the disintegration process inaugurated by death. The continued remembrance of the dead became the basis of the assumption of other forms of existence and gave him the idea of a future life after apparent death. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
In an extraordinary exercise of historiography, Freud reads the origin and development of religious consciousness from the “experience of death” of primitive man. But independently of its adequacy, what is significant in the narrative is that this “religious consciousness” and its denial of death will become the ground of the modern conventional or civilised denial of death. Primitive man was incapable of exiling death, the death of loved ones, who would then continue on as spirits, ever present in the world of the living. The metamorphoses of spirits into souls, immortal souls, gods, God, moral law – which extended grief to the death of the stranger, even the enemy – all contributed, over time, to obfuscate death itself, rendering us thereby civilised.
The uncivilised savage was however no remorseless murderer, for he feared the avenging spirits of the fallen. Murder in war required expiation through difficult penance. If primitive man could kill the stranger or enemy, he did so in fear and trembling. We kill indifferently, or can do so, without fear, because the spirits no longer speak to us. Having rendered death almost abstract, behind the ever greater reifications of otherworldly agents and principles, all that remains is our own inability to imagine our own death. The civilised walk the earth as “immortals”, against which others, strangers and enemies, are unimportant, or worse, resources to be used or obstacles to be removed.
Without idealising “primitive man”, Freud saw in civilisation a malaise that divorced “good” and “evil”, thereby making any satisfactory psychological development extremely difficult. The flight from death could only produce a narcissistic monster unrestrained by murder.
The mass murder of WWI, Freud believed, made that flight from death no longer possible. The question then became what might the attitude towards death become, what should it become, in light of the violence of modern warfare?
Freud here turns to the “psychoanalytic investigation” of the unconscious, to try to unveil its attitude towards death. And for Freud, what characterises the unconscious attitude towards death is that it acts as if it were immortal.
What we call our unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a negative content. The idea of death finds absolutely no acceptance in our impulses. (Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Herein resides the impulsive source of heroism and our murderous psychic desire to kill those who would stand before us. Our unconscious “knows no other punishment for crime than death, and this not without a certain consistency, for every injury done to our all-mighty and self-glorifying self is at bottom a crimen laesae majestatis.”
From the perspective of our unconscious wishes, “we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers, just like primitive man.”
The two contradictory attitudes towards death – acknowledging it as the destroyer of life and denying it as real – come into conflict, as with primitive man, in the loss of those we love. The latter are a part of us, “a constituent of our own selves”, but equally, they are also in part strangers, even enemies. Out of this ambivalent conflict, “primitive man” created a culture in which neither side of the tension was repudiated. “Civilised man”, in contrast, is torn asunder in a violent and impossible refusal of the ambivalence of love and death, which in either instance brings death.
It is tragically unclear (can we still speak of “tragedy”?) whether war can strip away the deposits of civilisation and allow primitive man to reappear, as Freud thought. The First World War would be followed by even greater horrors and the violence which threatens us today leaves many indifferent.
Freud thought that war could not be abolished “as long as the conditions of existence among races are so varied and the repulsions between them are so vehement.” The question then becomes whether we simply “yield and adapt ourselves to it”, which in our time risks the extinction of the human species, or whether we abide and endeavour to live in the truth, the truth of our mortality.
Shall we not turn around and avow the truth? Were it not better to give death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts and to reveal a little more of our unconscious attitude towards death which up to now we have so carefully suppressed? This may not appear a very high achievement and in some respects rather a step backwards, a kind of regression, but at least it has the advantage of taking the truth into account a little more and of making life more bearable again. To bear life remains, after all, the first duty of the living. The illusion becomes worthless if it disturbs us in this.
We remember the old saying:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you wish peace, prepare for war.
The times call for a paraphrase:
Si vis vitam, para mortem.
If you wish life, prepare for death.
(Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death)
Leo Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich, the meaning of whose life collapses before his inescapable death, consequence of an accident, is the story of “everyman”, of someone who “knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.”
He will finally do so, but only at the very moment before his death, when he discovers that it is nothing. Yet at that same moment, life ceases.
Tolstoy speaks of this instant as one of joy, of light, for Illich’s anxiety and pain end in release.
What lies before us, by contrast, is the task of earthly happiness, of a life of joy and pain with death as our companion.
The black flag of anarchism, symbol of death, of misery and struggle, social struggle undoubtedly, anti-authoritarian struggle above all, is in its utopian austerity the appeal to defend a life stalked by death.
The history of the cry “Viva la Muerte” is the exemplary metaphor of the two possible destinies of the death drive. Viva la Muerte was the rallying cry of the national uprising of the Spanish against Napoleon (May 1808). Despite the formidable disproportion of numbers between the autochthonous guerrilla and the imperial troops, the war would go on for five years without the resistance being subdued and the French being expelled from Spain. It was already a libertarian cry. It was taken up again by the Spanish anarchists, a half century later as a revolutionary cry against a life of injustices. And it was then turned around by the Francoists against the anarchists, as the other destiny of the death drive, its destiny as deadly destruction.
Nathalie Zaltzman, La pulsion anarchiste
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