Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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- Accepting the death drive is bad—it dissolves all potential for community
AT: Death DriveDeath drive is a reductive, dogmatic theory that doesn’t explain behavior – their assertions reify violenceCarel 06 – Havi Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. (“Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger”) The notion of the death drive is on the one hand too wide, explaining all types of aggression as well as the putative urge towards complete rest. This leads the notion to be economically incoherent, as will be discussed in the next section. But a prior point must be examined: are all types of aggression the same? Freud suggests a positive answer, but as a psychological taxonomy this approach seems to erase important differences. For example, if both sadism and masochism stem from the same aggressive source, should they be classified as belonging to the same group? Should they be clinically approached in a similar fashion? The answer to both these questions seems to be no. The problems and symptoms characterising sadism are very different from the ones characterising masochism, as is their treatment. Another example, group aggression and individual aggression: should we attempt to describe or treat the two as belonging to the same cluster? Again, the answer seems to be negative. As to the second point, one could justifiably ask: what does the death drive mean? Because it is so general, the notion of the death drive is vague. The death drive cannot explain a given situation because it itself becomes meaningful only as a collection of situations. On Freud's account, any behaviour meriting the adjective 'aggressive' arises from the death drive. If we take a certain set of aggressive behaviours, say, sadistic ones, the death drive would come to signify this set. If we take another set of masochistic behaviours, the death drive would mean this set. As it stands, the significance of the notion seems entirely dependent on the observed phenomenon. If Freud were never to meet any masochists, would his notion of the death drive exclude masochism? Any science relying on observation and empirical data relics on this data and should be willing, in principle, to modify and update its concepts in accordance with new empirical observations. The opening paragraph of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes describes this process. We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone [...]. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed Accepting the death drive is bad—it dissolves all potential for communityRHIZOMATICK 2012 (I am a Belgian philosophy student from Leuven university, “A POLITICS OF THE DEATH DRIVE,” Sep 22, http://rhizomatick.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/a-politics-of-the-death-drive/) Can we then just do away with repression and lead lives under the sign of the death drive? No, this would perpetuate the violence of the trauma of nature. The breaking of community in the disintegration of meaning cannot be completed, but remains to-come. This disintegration is always a scream and a scream is a scream-to-someone. The scream adresses itself to someone (this someone is more exactly an anyone, since we don’t care whom exactly is adressed). The scream presupposes a broken community, but a community nonetheless. We cannot perform the scream (death drive) nor hear it (the uncanny) without standing in community. We can make this more concrete with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. While the protagonists await death (in the form of Godot, the utopia they dream of), they await it together. While the play is an allegory for the loss of communication and the breaking of community, it is also the appearance of a community in this breaking, a communication of communication itself (the scream speaks the speaking). The result of this politics of the death drive is a baseless community, a community without anything in-common, without a shared culture. 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