Contingência e repetição : ensaio sobre a pulsão de morte a partir de uma articulação entre psicanálise e materialismo especulativo

Abstract

The inclusion of the concept of death drive in psychoanalysis takes place amidst an intricate argument. It is not a surprise that there are several interpretative efforts to provide coherence to the concept. However, in this attempt, many commentators elide important aspects that helped Freud justify its introduction. It is true that the link between the death drive and the repetition compulsion seems unequivocal. But the same does not seem to occur, at least in many of the interpretations we find, with an accidental character linked to such concepts, even though it is present in Freud’s argumentation. We believe that this situation is mainly due to the fact that the idea of “accident” remains a more or less vague notion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. With this in mind, our aim was to rescue the importance of the accidental character in defining the concepts of repetition compulsion and death drive through the concept of contingency. Thus, we defend the thesis according to which the concept of death drive is an intertwining of contingency and repetition. In order to support our thesis, we trace the following path. Initially, we reconstructed the Freud’s argument regarding the death drive, presented representative perspectives in the literature and pointed out ambiguities, and possible interpretations. This step enabled us to isolate the components that seemed most relevant to the conceptual field of the death drive. Next, we discussed the epistemological reformulation of the repetition compulsion proposed by Lacan, which has an unavoidable theoretical robustness in the history of psychoanalysis. This proposal is characterized by dialogue with the cybernetic movement and a discussion of themes such as chance, causality, determinism, and symbolic structure. Subsequently, we realized how much the Lacanian approach to repetition compulsion seems to associate it with a kind of “subjective law” analogous to the laws of nature. This soon led us to ask whether the repetition compulsion is a necessary subjective law, as the laws of nature are traditionally conceived. We then found ourselves at the heart of the philosophical problem of induction, which forced us to examine it. We identified an author in the contemporary philosophical landscape who has gained a certain relevance in the treatment of the subject. Quentin Meillassoux recovers the ontological aspect of the problem of induction; he refutes the necessity of the laws of nature, despite their stability, and proposes the thesis according to which the only necessity is that of contingency. We worked with the concept of contingency based on Meillassoux's philosophical project to extract implications from the adoption of his thesis to psychoanalysis. As a result, we could no longer ensure that the repetition compulsion was a necessary subjective law. We argue that the repetition compulsion is not only contingent, despite its stability, but has an intimate relationship with a traumatic contingency.