22 - Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Summary

If there is anything beyond the pleasure principle, it can only be a certain time. ‘A certain time’ means first of all a particular moment. If there is anything beyond the pleasure principle, it can only be a certain moment of time. ‘A certain time’ also means a determined category of time. If there is anything beyond the pleasure principle, it can only be a certain category or concept of time.

The moment of time that Freud is looking for beyond the pleasure principle appears to be the very first, the earliest and most originary moment. This moment precedes the emergence of life, or of what Freud calls the living substance. Consequently, it precedes also the emergence of death. We must not forget that ‘death is a late acquisition’ of organisms (SE XVIII: 47). The very first moment is not the beginning but comes just before the beginning of life and death. It is the last stage of matter before it becomes animate. The very first moment is the last moment of inorganic matter.

The concept of time that Freud is looking for beyond the pleasure principle thus coincides with the notion of a pre-organic temporality, which appears as a post-organic temporality as well. If every living being departs from that age of inorganic matter, it returns to it when it dies. ‘In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state’ (SE XVIII: 38). Inorganic matter is both past and future. It is both the past and future of life and death.

This pre- and post-organic temporality is structured by the dual rhythm of life drives and death drive. ‘One group of instincts’, Freud writes in chapter 5, ‘rushes forward’ inorganic matter towards life (SE XVIII: 41). The other group seeks ‘to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has […] abandon[ed]’ (SE XVIII: 36). They seek to return to inanimate matter. This ‘earlier state of things’

must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return […]