Capitalism and the Death Drive. Byung-Chul Han

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Capitalism and the Death Drive - Byung-Chul Han


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(last accessed 3 December 2020).

      Excerpt from ‘Tur mir Leid, aber das sind die Tatsachen’ [I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts] by Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in Die Zeit, 5 (August 2014) © Die Zeit. Reprinted with permission of Die Zeit.

      What we nowadays call ‘growth’ is in reality random, cancerous proliferation. We are currently living through a frenzy of production and growth that seems like a frenzy of death. It is a simulation of vitality that conceals a deadly impending catastrophe. Production increasingly resembles destruction. Humankind’s self-alienation may have reached a point ‘where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.1 What Benjamin said of fascism is today true of capitalism.

      It is on account of our destructive rage that Arthur Schnitzler compares humankind to a bacterium. From this perspective, the history of humanity is like the progress of a deadly infectious disease. Growth and destruction become one and the same:

      Humankind is blighted by a deadly blindness. We can only recognize the simpler levels of organization; regarding higher orders, we are as blind as bacteria. Thus, the history of humanity is an ‘eternal battle against the divine’, which is ‘necessarily annihilated by the human’.

      Freud would have shared every ounce of Schnitzler’s pessimism. The human being, with his ‘cruel aggressiveness’, he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, is a ‘savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’.3 Humankind annihilates itself. Freud may occasionally speak of the capacity of reason to recognize higher orders, but ultimately the human being is dominated by drives. For Freud, the death drive is responsible for our aggressive inclinations.4 Only a few months after the completion of Civilization and Its Discontents, the Great Depression began. It would have provided Freud, one might think, with enough reasons to say that capitalism is that economic formation in which the savagery and aggression of the human being can best be expressed.

      Given capitalism’s destructiveness, it seems plausible to connect capitalism with Freud’s death drive. In his study Capitalisme et pulsion de mort [Capitalism and death drive], the French economist Bernard Maris, who was killed in the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, writes: ‘The great cunning of capitalism . . . lies in the way it channels, it diverts, the forces of annihilation, the death drive, toward growth.’5 According to Maris, capitalism uses the death drive for its own purposes, and this ultimately proves to be fateful. Over time, its destructive forces gain the upper hand and overwhelm life.

      The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; . . . To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way.9

      In this way the instinct [i.e. the death drive – DS] itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding.10

      Freud makes no distinction between human beings and other living beings when it comes to the death drive: the drive inhabits every living thing, as that being’s urge to return to the inanimate state. From the death drive, Freud deduces aggression, thereby making a connection between two very different impulses. An organism’s inherent tendency to resolve a tension and, ultimately, to die does not necessarily suggest a destructive inclination. If we understand the death drive as a gradual reduction in vitality, then we cannot infer from it any destructive impulse. In addition, because the death drive is common to all living beings, it cannot explain what is specific about human aggression. Humans, however, are especially aggressive and, in particular, cruel. No other living being is capable of blind destructive rage. Freud also deduces sadism from the death drive:

      The death drive inherent in every living being, the urge to return to the inanimate state, does not explain the decidedly narcissistic enjoyment that the ego takes in sadistic violence. In order to account for sadism, there must be an altogether different kind of destructive drive.


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