of every kind. He even attributes a kind of subversive potential to terrorism. But a suicide bomber opposes the death-negating system with his real death. His violent end cannot open up the system to symbolic exchange with death. Terrorism is not a counter-image to the capitalist system; it is a phenomenon that is symptomatic of that system. The brutality and emotional coldness of the suicide bomber reflect the brutality and coldness of capitalist society. The attacker has the same psychogram as members of the general population. His suicide is a form of self-production, imagined as the ultimate selfie. The pulling of the trigger that detonates the bomb is akin to the push of the camera’s button. The suicide bomber knows that, immediately after the attack, his photograph will circulate in the media, and he will then receive the attention he had previously missed out on. A suicide bomber is a narcissist with an explosive belt. Thus, terrorism can be understood as the ultimate form of authenticity.
The revolt of death cannot unhinge the capitalist system. What is needed is another form of life, one that rescinds the division between life and death and reconnects the two. Every political revolution must be preceded by a revolution of consciousness, one that gives death back to life. The revolution must create an awareness of the fact that life is only truly alive when there is an exchange with death. It must demonstrate that the rejection of death destroys all living presence: ‘The war against death takes the form of a preoccupation with the past and the future, and the present tense, the tense of life, is lost.’22
Death, understood as the biological end of life, is not the only, or only true, form of death. Death can also be understood as a continuous process in which one gradually loses oneself, one’s identity, over the course of a lifetime. In this way, death may begin before death. The identity of a subject is a significantly more complex matter than is suggested by the stable name. A subject always keeps diverging from itself. The modern idea of death is based on biological functioning. Death is a matter of a body eventually ceasing to function.
Bataille understands death as an intense form of life. Death gives life intensity. It is an exuberance, excess, extravagance, indulgence, expenditure. Death provokes a rapture that is crucial in erotic experience: ‘If love exists at all it is, like death, a swift movement of loss within us.’23 Bataille opens his treatise Eroticism by stating: ‘Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.’24 While Freud opposed Eros to the death drive, Bataille invokes the proximity of death to Eros. If the impulse to live is intensified to the highest degree, it approaches the impulse to die, although, unlike Freud’s death drive, Bataille views the latter impulse as itself an expression of life. The exchange between life and death takes place in the medium of eroticism. As exuberance and expenditure, death represents the principle of an anti-economy. Death has a subversive effect on the capitalist system: ‘In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative.’25 Eroticism is an adventure of continuity. It breaks with the discontinuity of the isolated individual – the basis of the economy. Eroticism gives the self its death. Death is a losing-oneself-in-the-other that puts an end to narcissism.
The organization of capitalism depends on the desires and wishes that are reflected in consumption and production. Passion and intensity are replaced with comfortable feelings and consequence-free excitement. Everything is levelled out to fit the formula of consumption and enjoyment. Any negativity, such as pain, is removed in favour of the positivity of desire satisfaction. Death is the negativity par excellence. The compulsion of production abolishes negativity. Love is also accommodated to the capitalist process; it withers, becoming mere sexual desire. The other becomes just a sexual object for the narcissistic subject to use to satisfy its desire. Once the other is deprived of otherness, it can only be consumed.
By negating death, capitalism follows in the footsteps of metaphysics. Capitalism expresses a materialist metaphysics that strives for infinite capital. Plato already dreamt of a city without the dead. His ideal state rigorously discriminates against the dead. Any arable land, it says in Laws, should be free of graves. Graves have to be placed so as not to inconvenience the living. The dead may only be kept in the house for a maximum of three days, and only for as long as is necessary to rule out cases of suspended animation. Plato does not allow the living any symbolic exchange with death. Death is to be repressed, and the dead are a reminder of death. They are thus treated like waste that must be disposed of swiftly. But life that avoids death as if it were a pollution will suffocate in its own excrement.
Adorno opposes death-negating metaphysics with a form of thought that ‘takes up in itself the undiminished, the nonsublimated awareness of death’.26 Our repressed knowledge of death must be made conscious in all its severity. Human consciousness is mortal consciousness. Adorno knew that life that negates death as something purely destructive must itself develop destructive traits, that health is an ideology of capital – an illness, even. The hysteria of survival at all costs disfigures life. Adorno opposes the ugly cancerous growth of undead life with beauty that is innervated by the negativity of death:
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself. Beauty is such a curative sickness. It arrests life, and therefore its decay. If, however, sickness is rejected for the sake of life, then hypostasized life, in its blind separation from its other moment, becomes the latter, destructiveness and evil, insolence and braggadocio. To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.27
Liveliness is friendliness. That life is friendly that is able to die.
Despite his ambivalent relationship with death, Freud is perfectly aware of the necessity of reconciling life with death. The unconscious repression of death must give way to the conscious acceptance of death:
Would it not be better to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which it is due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems an advance to higher achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step – a regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again.28
To affirm life means also to affirm death. Life that negates death negates itself. Only a form of life that returns death to life will liberate us from the paradox of undead life: we are too alive to die, and too dead to live.
NOTES
1 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (Second Version), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 19–55; here p. 42.
2 2. Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967, pp. 177f.
3 3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton, 1962 [1930], pp. 58f.
4 4. Transl. note: following James Strachey’s translation of Freud’s works, and according to Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis, the English term for ‘Todestrieb’ is ‘death instinct’. Here, I shall use the term ‘death drive’. There are two reasons for this: it is by now more common in general academic usage, and it allows retaining the difference between ‘Instinkt’ (instinct) and ‘Trieb’ (drive).
5 5. Gilles Dostaler and Bernard Maris, Capitalisme et pulsion de mort, Paris: Albin Michel, 2010, p. 9. [‘La grande ruse du capitalisme, nous le verrons, est de canaliser, de détourner les forces d’anéantissement, la pulsion de mort vers la croissance.’]
6 6. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1920], p. 46.
7 7. Ibid., p. 47 (transl. modified).
8 8. Ibid.
9 9. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 66.
10 10. Ibid.
11 11. Ibid., p. 68.
12 12. Freud, Beyond