Retrieving the Paradox: Freud's Death Drive and the Originary Concept of Deferral.

In this paper I explore the idea that Freud's death drive, despite having its explanatory status and truth claims questioned, is an anthropologically astute concept that embraces the paradox of symbolic consciousness. Any theory of the human must accommodate the paradoxicality of human thinking, motivations, and cultural forms to generate useful theoretical insights. Even though some critical arguments against it are justified, as I show in my paper, the death drive captures something fundamental about human behavior, which I demonstrate by close-reading a short story, "My First Cousin," by Sergey Dovlatov. In addition, I also argue that the recent attempts to incorporate the death drive into cognitive theories based on predictive processing are not convincing because these theories are not paradoxical and thus miss something that is essential to Freud's metapsychological system. Finally, I argue that the death drive, coupled together with the life drive as a dual-drive model of the psyche, can be derived from the originary concepts of Generative Anthropology, that of deferral. The logic of deferral has the prolongation element that suspends the imminent threat of violence, and thus can be seen as life-preservative. But it must necessarily include the movement of the return to the point of deferral because deferral defers temporarily. Having deferred, we feel pressure on us to release the tension produced by the deferring gesture. I suggest that this direction of movement, which I call consolidation, corresponds to Freud's intuition of the death drive. The movement of consolidation is logically reversed and unconscious, but we can detect it in the paradoxical relationship between the narrator and narratee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]