Freud
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1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle
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Instincts for the Inanimate things, and Inorganic Capitalism
Let us suppose, then, that all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism's life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death'. and, looking backwards, that 'inanimate things existed before living ones'.
Insofar as we live, a part of our mind is occupied by the conservative desire for self-preservation.
The argument that our conservative aspiration refuses change and progress as a defence against the possibility of death develops into the thesis that we should seek a stable way of life. Hegemony has always responded to such existential tensions; in our age, capitalism likewise appears as the very answer—an objective arrangement of inorganic exchange.
Upon the objective, inorganic base where all things are commodified, priced and thereby relativized as economic units, we can gain unprecedented stability. The objective world of exchange knows neither friction nor pain; it moves with the smooth indifference of an inorganic system.
We organic beings feel calm within the inorganic system. For, as Freud suggested, our true “hometown” is the inorganic world.
That is to say, we who desire inorganic capitalism are fascinated by Thanatos.
In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. (...) These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us today with the picture of the phenomena of life. (...) The implications in regard to the great groups of instincts which, as we believe, lie behind the phenomena of life in organisms must appear no less bewildering. (...) The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism's puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death.
We, who may be regarded as the myrmidons of death, demand the inorganic world in the name of self-preservation; the present expression of the idea that death—the inorganic, inanimate state—makes possible the stability of nothingness is typically David Benatar’s antinatalism.
His asymmetry argument, which provoked a sensational reaction in contemporary philosophy, can be read as declaring the salvation of nothingness. Its ethical conclusion is that we ought not to exist—a position that resembles a desire for 'Thanatos'.
The issue must be attributed to Deleuze's philosophy. He has liberated Thanatos from the materialistic argument.
Freud interprets the death instinct as a tendency to return to the state of inanimate matter, one which upholds the model of a wholly physical or material repetition. Death has nothing to do with a material model. (...) Death does not appear in the objective model of an indifferent inanimate matter to which the living would 'return'(...). It is not a material state; on the contrary, having renounced all matter, it corresponds to a pure form(...).
Difference-and Repetition (1968)
Thus, in the modern age, radical pessimism that reached the apex in human history signifies the rise of the death drive through the medium of capitalism. To select a commodity through inorganic exchange is to admit one's own death drive itself. The anti-natalist movement emerged in the era of late capitalism, and Thanatos runs through both.