Sommaire
The It War
Death wish and death drive are mistakenly confused. Very badly named in addition because they are neither desire nor impulse but solutions. Shockingly poor solutions, yes, but when you’re on a devastated battlefield, sometimes you liquidate the last opponent standing, which is yourself.
A battle, that’s what it is. Battle between unconscious impulses and conscious judgment, between the Animal and the Observer, between daily life and hoped-for destiny. All the Animal‘s impulses are of life, whether they pass through sex or other means of existence. They roar, powerful, and come crashing against the dike of reality. The real bars their way; few manage to pass.
Mental Terrorism
The conscious Observer, among the lucky ones, seeks to facilitate their passage. It channels the impulses, elevates them, illumines them, allows them to finally flood the thirsty reward centers. Among the unlucky, the Observer on the contrary reinforces the dike, making it impassable. The Animal causes too much trouble. It forces, attacks, gets punished, destroys the perspectives forged by the Observer. The conflict sets in, hardens. Like all hopeless battles, this one is a source of splendid poetic declamations, in which we must place the death wish and the death drive.
In the running are actually a desire to exist and a life drive. But when form strangles force they mutually annihilate and only emptiness remains. Absence called depression. More often the Animal and the Observer take turns winning battles, without winning the war. If one dominates too much, the other despairs, switches to terrorism. It sometimes comes to blow up the planet ‘I’.
The Cerberus and the Bully
The death drive is an Animal life instinct so thwarted by the Observer that it seeks to eliminate this all times unbearable Cerberus. It attracts towards all the drugs capable of putting it to sleep. Overconsumption is not a problem but a frank intention of the Animal. It will end up assassinating its damn Observer, this tyrannical master who is powerless to satisfy it.
The death wish is, on the contrary, the solution of the Observer, camped above the ruins of his life. The Animal devastated everything. It kicks and throbs again, threatening other nearby existences, other personal planets partly destroyed and ready to collapse. The timeless destiny imagined by the Observer can be further saved by removing the Animal.
Stifled in-lives
Drive and desire for death are indeed both thwarted, frustrated intentions, which seek to remove their chains. No death wish for itself, but to make room for inhibited intention. These are two intentions of life, of strangled in-life. The mind being a perpetual field of conflict, the battle is not a solicited death but a way of life. It leads to a restless life, where death is only an accidental side effect.
Sometimes the conflict loses its nervousness without having been resolved. The forces balance each other. Events are rare and no longer enliven the battlefield. A catastrophe for the spirit, which has lost its two intentions of life. The balance is a pit. The pit of a depression. Neither desire nor drive, it is a resignation to death.
Sui-destroyer and sui-signed
Which leads us to two very different suicidal attitudes, thwarted or collapsed life intentions. Let us call them ‘urge to destroy’ and ‘resignation to death’. From where would come a real in-life for death, for a complete absence that instinct cannot conceive?
The suicidal-Destroyer cleans up around him. He kills his family or any other target of his paranoid frustration, before killing himself. If he manages to commit suicide with such vigor, it is because it is not exactly himself he is murdering, but the world he is witnessing. He is the spectator who destroys the stage of the theater playing an unbearable play, dramatic beyond acceptable. Censorship-suicide.
The suicidal-Resigned has a terrible time taking action. He’d rather someone else take care of it. Euthanasia claimed without any health problem. The last embers of the vital fire barely glow, because the Observer of the resigned has carefully, and for a long time, smothered them. He has built a self-image that leaves no other alternative. This time it is the spectator who does not deserve to watch the scene. He is kicked out, gently, without violence. The world will go on without him.
SoliTary or soliDary
The suicidal-Destructor is a hyper-individualist. There is no other world than his, so destroying himself is ending the world. While the suicidal-Resigned is a great collectivist. The awareness of belonging to a Greater Whole, larger than himself, is omnipresent. A Whole so vast that it hardly needs him. He does a service by putting an end to his individuation. Extinction of a personal species. Dodo-suicide.
Which gives us the leads to help these two kinds of suicidal: to make the Destroyer travel in other worlds than his own, and to reindividualize the too diffuse world of the Resigned. Two radically opposite paths, make no mistake!
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