A guiding thread through this proposal is how theories made possible by the discovery of the death drive are united in their investment in behaviors that test the limits of sociality while unsettling purportedly fixed social identities and our social milieu. Martínez Ruiz, for example, proposes the concept of “waste subjectivity” to describe self-perception among populations pushed to the margins of social life and who make the decision to engage in illegal and/or violent behaviors. Reviewing testimonies from young men who worked for drug cartels in Mexico and members of gangs distributing crack in East Harlem during the 1990s, she identifies two themes: (1) these individuals were born into populations abandoned by state protection and rejected by hegemonic social structures; and (2) they expressed feelings of worthlessness and disposability before entering illegal businesses, perceiving themselves as waste. From a Freudian perspective, she argues that waste subjectivity embodies a thanatic sexuality, wherein the pursuit of desire is perceived as urgent and must be satisfied immediately, regardless of limits or considerations for others.

Tyler considers how queer theory has taken up the death drive, parting from Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani to inject discourses of the queer antisocial with a feminine ethics that would resemble the sublime. Edelman’s sinthomosexual and Bersani’s masochistic aesthete claim the death drive’s radical negativity. This is a masculine ethics, which preserves the fantasy of the Other who enjoys fully. If the neurotic suspects this Other steals their fair share, the pervert turns thief by making the Other's Good Nothing. Edelman’s mantra “Fuck the child” is at once critique and Sadean command. Where the masculine ethics insists “you can because you must,” Lacan’s feminine ethics of the drive proposes an “I can’t” that nonetheless can. Conflating All with Nothing, a queer Antigone dies alone in tragic sublimity. Settling for less than Nothing, Sygne de Coufontaine dies for the wrong man in a grotesque melodrama — the death drive as Not-All, impure, social.

Suárez Morales follows Adrian Johnston on the question of the relationships between humans and nature, noting that our species’ enframing of the entire world for technical processes turns out to be a redeployment of Freud’s death drive by searching for a homeostatic equilibrium that would render the world inert, and which ultimately puts the very notion of both the human and non-human social into doubt. His presentation discusses how Sergio Chejfec’s Mis dos mundos (2008) allows us to think through our civilization’s current death instincts. This literary exploration illuminates both the drive to render a world fully inert under the yoke of technics and, at the same time, the unruly character and constitutive tensions that undo this project.

Finally, Runnels turns to French psychoanalyst Nathalie Zaltzman’s provocative claim that the death drive is, in fact, anarchist. His paper proposes that the anarchist drive serves as a vital negativity in the contemporary era characterized by increasingly authoritarian states, the complete subsumption of every aspect of life to market logics, and the Anthropocene. These are what Zaltzman terms “limit experiences,” situations where a subject is thrust into a state of emergency which threatens their survival but that appropriates the death drive and negates it in service of a refusal of domination. This refusal draws its energy from the struggle for life that can only be achieved by proximity to death. The anarchist drive has an antagonistic relationship to sociality given that it eschews ideological pressures in favor of its refusal of capture that leads to a sense of freedom.

This panel boasts two scholars with academic monographs on the death drive as well as two junior scholars who engage with anarchist and neo-material approaches. Additionally, to include a range of perspectives, we have taken care to achieve gender parity, as well as including a scholar from outside the US. Each panelist will have ~13 minutes to present, allowing 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.