Secondary literature 2023

Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive

Julie Reshe

by Julie Reshe (2023)

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Synopsis

Julie Reshe's Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (2023) argues that psychoanalysis has betrayed its own most radical discovery — the death drive — by subordinating it to a therapeutic, salvation-oriented logic inherited from religion. The book's central wager is that Freud's 1920 introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle inaugurated a genuinely tragic, anti-therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis that his own clinical framework, and every subsequent tradition from ego psychology to Lacanian jouissance, has systematically domesticated. Drawing on Catherine Malabou's concept of "destructive plasticity" and radicalising it beyond her own restricted application, Reshe proposes that all subjectivity — not merely the clinically traumatised — is constituted by irreversible destructive formation: we are all, without exception, "living dead." The book then extends this negative anthropology to society, arguing that the social bond is grounded not in positive enjoyment but in shared lack and constitutive trauma, engaging and ultimately criticising Todd McGowan's death-drive politics for re-importing enjoyment as its telos. A parallel chapter on evolution, reading Zupančič, Zapffe, Nietzsche, and post-Darwinian biology together, universalises the argument to nature itself, framing evolution as a thanatogenous process of monstrous failure rather than adaptive progress. The book culminates in an "Epilogue: No Salvation" that refuses any practical consolation, insisting that the genuine negative insight cannot be converted into a programme without betraying itself. Throughout, the work is punctuated by three dialogues — with Malabou, McGowan, and Zupančič — that dramatise the theoretical debates and locate the book's distinctive "negative psychoanalysis" in contrast to its interlocutors.

Distinctive contribution

Reshe's most distinctive move is the universalisation of destructive plasticity. Where Malabou carefully reserves her concept for pathologically wounded subjects — PTSD survivors, patients with brain lesions, concentration camp survivors — and where Žižek repatriates a version of this negativity back into the Lacanian barred subject and the dialectics of jouissance, Reshe collapses the norm/pathology distinction entirely. For her, destructive plasticity is not a threshold phenomenon but the constitutive ontological process of any identity formation whatsoever: "We are fully entirely the result of the work of destructive plasticity" (p. 51). This move is simultaneously a continuation and a subversion of Malabou's project, and it generates a genuinely novel negative anthropology that has no precise counterpart in the Lacanian secondary literature.

The book's second distinctive contribution is its sustained critique of jouissance as a concept that allegedly escapes but in fact re-anchors psychoanalysis in the pleasure principle. Reshe argues that jouissance — precisely because it dialectically presupposes pleasure as the governing term, and because it conceptualises suffering only as an admixture of pleasure's obstruction — cannot account for pure suffering, for the subject as Homo Dolorum. This is a pointed intervention into Žižek-inflected Lacanianism, which tends to treat jouissance as the clinching concept for anything "beyond the pleasure principle." By insisting that jouissance always returns the discussion to pleasure's orbit, Reshe clears space for a negative psychoanalysis that takes suffering seriously on its own terms, without the compensatory alibi of enjoyment.

A third contribution is the book's unique generic form: alternating analytical chapters with recorded dialogues (Malabou, McGowan, Zupančič). These conversations are not merely supplementary; they perform the book's argument about the impossibility of a settled positive conclusion, staging the theoretical disagreements as unresolved and ongoing. This dialogic structure, combined with an opening phenomenological prose poem of the living-dead experience and an epilogue that explicitly refuses consolation, makes the book operate affectively as well as analytically — enacting its thesis that genuine negative insight cannot be packaged as a programme.

Main themes

The death drive as constitutive negativity irreducible to the pleasure principle
Destructive plasticity as universal ontological condition of subjectivity
Critique of therapeutic and positive-psychological culture as collective defence mechanism
The social bond grounded in shared lack and trauma rather than positive enjoyment
Jouissance as insufficient to escape the pleasure principle framework
Philosophical pessimism and depressive realism as epistemically superior orientations
Evolution as thanatogenous monstrous failure rather than adaptive progress
The impossibility of a 'negative psychoanalysis' that retains any positive telos
Ideology's structural incapacity to acknowledge constitutive lack
The living dead as universal human condition rather than clinical exception

Chapter outline

Introduction: Welcome to Hell — p.1-24
The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity — p.17-54
Destructive Plasticity, War, and Anarchism: A Conversation Between Catherine Malabou and Julie Reshe — p.47-56
Dead Together: Love Hurts — p.57-93
The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe — p.87-107
A Tragic Fairy Tale of Evolution: Zupančič, Zapffe, and Other Monsters — p.101-127
Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupančič and Julie Reshe — p.121-139
Epilogue: No Salvation — p.133-139

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Welcome to Hell (p.1-24)

The introduction opens with an extended phenomenological description of the 'living dead' state — a first-person account of existence as a ghostly, speechless dwelling in one's own absence — before contextualising this experience theoretically. Reshe identifies two competing intentionalities within psychoanalysis: a 'positive' therapeutic inheritance that promises to reduce suffering and transform it into bearable unhappiness (citing Freud's famous line from Studies on Hysteria: 'transforming your neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness'), and a 'negative' sacred dimension that opens with the death drive in 1920 and culminates in the tragic late Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents. She argues that despite Freud's ambitions to distance psychoanalysis from both church and medical establishment, psychoanalysis largely replicated religion's salvational logic, and contemporary therapeutic culture is its direct heir.

The chapter then turns to Peter Wessel Zapffe's 1933 essay 'The Last Messiah' as a more radically honest expression of the negative insight Freud gestured toward but could not fully sustain. Zapffe's 'depressive realism' — the position that depression is not a distorted perception but a more accurate one, and that inner pain is not foreign to human existence but its most constitutive quality — becomes the methodological touchstone for the book. Reshe argues that Zapffe could go further than Freud precisely because he was not 'bound by a chain of therapeutic intention.' The apparatus of conventional psychology and psychiatry, on this reading, performs a 'comforting function' by alienating suffering from the subject, reframing it as pathological deviation rather than existential truth. The introduction announces the project of a 'negative psychoanalysis' that would embrace rather than flee the disaster of human existence.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Pleasure Principle, Negative Psychoanalysis, Depressive Realism, Therapeutic Culture, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Freud, Studies on Hysteria — 'neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness'; Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as the rupture point; Zapffe, The Last Messiah (1933); Kristeva's description of 'death before dying' in Black Sun

The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity (p.17-54)

This is the book's central theoretical chapter. It opens by articulating a 'negative psychoanalytic-existential' ontology: the subject's innermost core is constitutive non-being, identity and life-narrative are compensatory illusions masking a foundational void, and existence itself is repetition compulsion — a serial re-encounter with one's own non-existence. 'Life seen from this perspective is an enfoldment of repetition compulsion. It is a series of retraumatisations where we repeatedly encounter our being as a non-being' (p. 25).

The chapter then traces Freud's evolving theory of trauma from the 'foreign body' model (Fremdkörper) of the Studies on Hysteria through the 'residual infiltrate' reformulation, to the death drive of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Each revision, Reshe shows, edges closer to acknowledging trauma as constitutive rather than remediable, but Freud never takes the final step: he always 'softens' the death drive by denying it the capacity to form its own structures independently of Eros. Malabou's critique is then introduced: Freud failed to recognise 'a beyond of the beyond' of the pleasure principle because he could not conceptualise the psyche's capacity for total, irreparable collapse. Malabou's concept of 'destructive plasticity' — form-generating destructiveness that is irreducible to any logic of cure, compensation, or symbolic mediation — is presented as the corrective. The 'living dead' are those formed by destructive plasticity: subjects who have died while remaining alive, who have changed beyond recognition, for whom 'consolation is absurd.'

Reshe extends the critique to neuroscience, which employs an exclusively positive understanding of plasticity. Drawing on Chialvo and Bak's argument that long-term depression (LTD) is the fundamental mechanism of neural learning rather than long-term potentiation (LTP), she inverts the standard hierarchy: destructive processes are not secondary auxiliaries to generative ones but the core of plasticity as such. The chapter then presents Žižek's response to Malabou: the Lacanian barred subject is already a 'living dead' formation, destructive plasticity is already thinkable within psychoanalysis via the death drive as transcendental gap, and jouissance captures what escapes the pleasure principle. Reshe rejects this move: jouissance, she argues, re-anchors psychoanalysis in the pleasure principle because it can only conceptualise suffering as an admixture of obstructed pleasure. The chapter's culminating move universalises Malabou's concept against her own intentions: destructive plasticity is not a threshold phenomenon limited to pathological cases but the constitutive process of all subjectivity — 'We are fully entirely the result of the work of destructive plasticity' (p. 51).

Key concepts: Destructive Plasticity, Death Drive, Pleasure Principle, Trauma, Repetition, Jouissance, Real, Splitting of the Subject, Negation Notable examples: Freud's foreign body / infiltrate distinction in Studies on Hysteria; Malabou's The New Wounded and critique of Freud; Žižek's response to Malabou in The Parallax View / Living in the End Times; Chialvo and Bak, 'Learning from Mistakes' (1998); Neuroapoptosis, synaptic pruning, LTD as primary plasticity mechanisms

Destructive Plasticity, War, and Anarchism: A Conversation Between Catherine Malabou and Julie Reshe (p.47-56)

This dialogue extends the theoretical work of the previous chapter into political territory. Malabou explains the origin of 'destructive plasticity' through the example of neurological disease, in which a new personality emerges from trauma with no continuity to the previous one — a phenomenon neurologists observe but fail to theorise as formative. She clarifies her relationship to Freud: not that psychoanalysis failed to identify destructive plasticity, but that Freud accurately perceived it yet was unable to give it autonomous form independent of Eros, leaving the death drive illustrated only by sadism and masochism, which remain 'tributary to the pleasure principle.'

The political implications are addressed through Malabou's recent work on anarchism, which she proposes as the most adequate conceptual framework for a renewed critical opposition to capitalism — superior to traditional Marxism or Žižek's communism, which she finds exhausted. She acknowledges limitations in her earlier work: the category of trauma may be too wide and insufficiently attentive to differential recognition (noting, for example, that racialised exclusions determine who counts as 'traumatised'). The dialogue ends with both interlocutors agreeing on the urgent need for new clinical and philosophical categories — though Malabou expresses pessimism about achieving genuine cooperation between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

Key concepts: Destructive Plasticity, Anarchism, Trauma, Ideology, Surplus Repression Notable examples: Malabou's anarchism project; Ukrainian war trauma and racialised recognition; Foucault on micropowers; Žižek's communism as target of Malabou's critique

Dead Together: Love Hurts (p.57-93)

This chapter applies the negative anthropology developed in Chapter 2 to the social bond. The core claim is that sociality is grounded not in positive enjoyment or mutual satisfaction but in shared lack, constitutive trauma, and the death drive: 'Lack is what dis/connects us and what we most genuinely hold in common' (p. 64). The Lacanian subject of lack is presented as the starting point — the subject's fundamental absence precedes her presence, her identity is a substitute illusion attempting to fill an original constitutive void, and anxiety is the only affect that 'never lies' (citing Lacan via Heidegger).

Reshe engages McGowan's account of the social death drive, developing and then criticising it. McGowan's two-stage model (individual trauma first, then social bond formed by shared sacrifice of lack) is questioned: it implies the possibility of a pre-social subject, preserving an individualist residue. Reshe's counter-proposal is a negative dialectics in which neither individual nor society has ontological priority; both are constituted through mutual negation, and the social bond is structurally non-existent, held together only by the unfillable rupture of the death drive. She draws on attachment theory (Bowlby, Winnicott) and social cognitive neuroscience (Lieberman) to displace individualism empirically before radicalising those findings: what neuroscience calls 'social need' is better understood as constitutive, unfillable lack — 'traumatic social pain that is not a need to be satisfied but the very substance of subjectivity and sociality.'

The chapter's political section argues that ideology and politics are structurally incapable of acknowledging constitutive lack; their defining gesture is to externalise suffering, locate its cause in an enemy, and promise salvation. Freudo-Marxist 'negative psychoanalysis' (Jacoby, Marcuse) is criticised for sharing this positive telos: negative affects are instrumentalised as a temporary revolutionary measure, preserved as 'an interim sacrifice on the way to future common happiness.' McGowan's version is more faithful to the late Freud but ultimately betrayed by its recourse to 'realistic enjoyment' as the endpoint of the psychoanalytic political project. A genuinely negative psychoanalysis must abandon all such rewards — it functions as a non-redemptive, 'comic-tragic' witness to irrevocable loss.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Lack, Ideology, Dialectics, Jouissance, Splitting of the Subject, Symptom, Sublimation, Fantasy Notable examples: McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have (2013); Bowlby's attachment theory; Winnicott's 'there is no such thing as an infant'; Lieberman, Social (2013); Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975); Marcel Mauss on sacrifice and gift; Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative

The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe (p.87-107)

This dialogue deepens the exchange with McGowan begun in the previous chapter. McGowan articulates his attraction to the death drive as the concept with the most explanatory power for self-destructive behaviour that cannot be consciously intended — 'you can't consciously intend to be self-destructive because then that destruction becomes something positive.' He defends the death drive as a political concept against Lee Edelman's anti-political reading (No Future), arguing that the challenge is precisely to think politics with and through the death drive rather than abandoning politics to it. He develops the idea that sacrifice — drawing on Mauss and Girard but ultimately on Freud — creates social bonds and structures of enjoyment through absence: value is created by what is sacrificed, and the death drive is the primordial logic of capital.

Reshe presses McGowan on the existentialist tradition, arguing that Heidegger's being-towards-death and Kierkegaard's despair gesture toward the death drive without naming it, but always betray it by offering a compensatory benefit (authenticity, overcoming bad faith). McGowan agrees, noting that Heidegger never mentions the unconscious. The conversation arrives at art as the one domain where the death drive allows a benefit that is faithful to its own logic — not a reward that comes after, but 'the beauty of the very process itself.' Reshe endorses this but acknowledges the irony: even beauty is a benefit. The dialogue stages the irreducible tension between the demand for genuine negativity and the impossibility of sustaining it without some remainder of positivity.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Repetition, Sacrifice, Ideology, Sublimation, Anxiety, Alienation Notable examples: Lee Edelman, No Future; Mauss, The Gift; Heidegger's being-towards-death as crypto-death-drive; Kierkegaard's despair; Sartre's authenticity / bad faith; Art as immanent self-destruction

A Tragic Fairy Tale of Evolution: Zupančič, Zapffe, and Other Monsters (p.101-127)

This chapter expands the negative anthropology to the level of nature and evolution. The conventional tale of evolution is identified as 'positively oriented': it narrates progress, adaptation, and the triumph of life over death. Reshe proposes an alternative 'tragic fairy tale' in which evolution unfolds through destructions and deviations, and species are 'instances of monstrous failure.' The opening move draws on Zupančič's reading of Nietzsche and Lacan: humans are not fully or properly animals ('Etwas Halbes' — something half-made), and this abortiveness is not compensated by culture but constitutively preserved. The Lacanian parallel is that there is no foundational layer of a healthy, naturally adapted animal in humans from which the human deviation subsequently diverges.

The chapter then introduces Zapffe's tragic anthropology as a radicalisation: for Zapffe, human overdeveloped consciousness is 'a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity,' and causes humans to feel 'the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.' Reshe identifies two readings of Zapffe — one that makes human absurdity exceptional relative to a more normal animal world, and an alternative reading she endorses: nature itself is thanatogenous and monstrous, and humans are not exceptional in being aborted but typical of evolution's constitutive destructiveness. Nietzsche's Chaos sive Natura supports this: chaos is the defining feature of nature, and order is merely one of its transient forms.

The chapter's final sections turn to post-Darwinian evolutionary biology. Reshe argues that mainstream Darwinism, like conventional thinking generally, privileges the ordering principle of selection over the chaotic force of variation. Drawing on Forterre's critique of selection-centred evolutionism and on recent microbial genomics (horizontal gene transfer, viral evolution, chimerism), she argues that living organisms are chimeric mosaics with no single common ancestor and no ideal prototype — a biological confirmation of the thesis that destructive, chaotic variation is primary and ordering is secondary. The 'hopeful monster hypothesis' (Goldschmidt, Gould) further supports the idea that evolutionary novelty emerges through catastrophic deviation rather than gradual adaptation.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Adaptation, Repetition, Lack, Destructive Plasticity, Negation, Real Notable examples: Zapffe, The Last Messiah — 'brotherhood of suffering between everything alive'; Zupančič on Nietzsche's 'Etwas Halbes'; Nietzsche, Chaos sive Natura; Forterre on Darwin's variation vs. selection; Goldschmidt's hopeful monster hypothesis; Gould, Wonderful Life; Chimeric genomes and horizontal gene transfer

Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupančič and Julie Reshe (p.121-139)

Zupančič opens by disentangling the concept of 'the animal' from the philosophical tradition that uses it as the organic baseline from which human spiritual 'excess' departs. She endorses the Nietzschean reading that humans are not more-than-animals but less: they lack something to be fully animals, and whatever is distinctively human is constituted at the point of this foundational lack rather than as a supplement added to a complete animal substrate. She explicitly connects this to Lacan's account of the human animal as initially half-finished, without an inner adapted layer that functions on autopilot.

The conversation moves to positive psychology and the social imperative of happiness. Zupančič develops a Pascalean/Althusserian critique: positive psychology's prescription to 'think positively' relies on the material efficiency of ideology — repeat the rituals of happiness and the state will follow. She finds this comical in a philosophically serious sense: it reveals how intimate affective states can be mechanically induced from outside. She then connects this to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (noting that Freud's first intended title was 'Unhappiness in Civilization') and to the psychoanalytic discovery that people do not simply want to be happy. The social imperative of happiness creates its own dialectical misery by setting an unliveable standard. The dialogue closes with Zupančič arguing that the suppression of negative affects and the foreclosure of the unconscious through pharmaceutical and positive-psychological interventions causes the Real to return with a vengeance — in social explosions of aggression and, at the environmental level, in climate change as a figure of the surplus waste that was dismissed and is now returning.

Key concepts: Anxiety, Ideology, Sublation, Real, Repression, Symptom, Adaptation Notable examples: Pascal's wager as model for positive psychology; Althusser on ideological state apparatuses; Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents — original title 'Unhappiness in Civilization'; Climate change as figure of the Real's return; Zupančič, The Odd One In — comedy and the death drive

Epilogue: No Salvation (p.133-139)

The epilogue is a deliberate anti-conclusion. Reshe argues that a genuinely negative insight cannot be converted into practical advice or a programme without betraying itself: 'It is from this insight that we flee into any doing, helping, strategising, improving, and solving.' She acknowledges the irony that even Zapffe — the most radical pessimist in her pantheon — offers a negative salvation (the voluntary cessation of human reproduction), which is still a messianic position, still a way out. The book resolutely refuses to join him.

Nevertheless, Reshe performs a brief, self-aware exercise in deriving practical implications — as an illustration of how the default positive orientation of thinking inescapably converts negative insight into consolation. These implications are offered across three dimensions (individual, social, world), but always with the caveat that each represents a flight from the negative core rather than a genuine inhabitation of it. The epilogue ends not with resolution but with the affirmation that the proper response to the living-dead condition is a kind of parody — a comic-tragic dwelling in the impossibility of salvation that neither pretends to overcome it nor collapses into inaction.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Negative Psychoanalysis, Sublimation, Fantasy, Ideology, Lack Notable examples: Zapffe's 'negative salvation' — voluntary extinction as messianic position; Parody and comic-tragic dwelling as authentic response

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded
Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have
Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative
Alenka Zupančič
Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Heidegger, Being and Time
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun
Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
John Bowlby
Donald Winnicott
Matthew Lieberman
Friedrich Nietzsche
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Position in the corpus

Reshe's book occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of Lacanian clinical theory, post-Hegelian continental philosophy, and philosophical pessimism. It shares closest ground with Todd McGowan's Enjoying What We Don't Have and Slavoj Žižek's engagements with Malabou (particularly in Living in the End Times and The Parallax View), but diverges from both by refusing the recourse to jouissance or enjoyment as the ultimate telos of a psychoanalytic politics. It is a natural companion to Catherine Malabou's The New Wounded and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, extending and universalising her framework in ways she herself resisted. Readers coming from Lacan's Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) or Seminar XX (Encore) will find Reshe's critique of jouissance a productive counter-position. The book is also in conversation with Alenka Zupančič's The Odd One In on comedy and the death drive. Its engagement with Nietzsche, Zapffe, and evolutionary biology makes it unusual within the Lacanian secondary literature and links it to a broader tradition of philosophical pessimism (Schopenhauer, Zapffe, Ligotti) rarely integrated with clinical theory.\n\nReaders new to the corpus should encounter Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and at least a general introduction to Lacan before approaching this text, as Reshe's critiques presuppose familiarity with both. Malabou's The New Wounded is an essential prerequisite for Chapter 2. McGowan's Enjoying What We Don't Have should be read before or alongside Chapters 4–5 to appreciate the depth of Reshe's engagement and departure. The book would productively be read after, and in critical dialogue with, Žižek's The Parallax View and Zupančič's What Is Sex? — works that represent the targets of Reshe's critique of jouissance-centred Lacanianism. It would also pair well with Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism for readers interested in the political dimensions of psychoanalytic pessimism.