Culture in the age of death drive

Abstract

‘Culture in the Age of Death Drive’ discusses the Freudian term kultur as it relates to forms of cultural production. Freud’s theorizing of death drive posed critical problems for the psychoanalytic project; this chapter examines how culture mediates between the destructive desires of the citizen-subject and the society that they inhabit. We extend the term ‘culture’ to read psychoanalysis itself as a ‘a work of culture’, the designation given to it by Freud and that would direct the psychoanalytic project in his absence, ultimately leading to the expulsion of Lacan from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) on the grounds of his alleged theoretical heresy. Our final section develops these dual understandings of culture to consider contemporary production in late capital and its illumination of the architecture of restriction upon the individual, in light of Freud’s theorizing of death drive