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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one's own self. The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he 'couldn't think beyond it' as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Capitalism and the Death Drive
Notes
Why Revolution Is Impossible Today
Notes
The Total Exploitation of the Human Being
Notes
Inside the Digital Panopticon
Notes
Only What Is Dead Is Transparent
Notes
Dataism and Nihilism
Torturous Emptiness
Notes
Jumping Humans
Notes
Where Do the Refugees Come From?
Notes
Where the Wild Things Are
Notes
Who Is a Refugee?
Notes
Beauty Lies Yonder, in the Foreign
Notes
The Big Rush
Notes
In Your Face
Notes
The End of Liberalism
Conversations
It Is Eros That Defeats Depression
Notes
Capitalism Dislikes Silence
Notes
COVID-19 Has Reduced Us to a ‘Society of Survival’
‘I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts’
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
Pages
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Capitalism and the Death Drive
Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
polity
Originally published in German as Kapitalismus und Todestrieb © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2019. All rights reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Excerpt from ‘Tur mir Leid, aber das sind die Tatsachen’ by Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in Die Zeit 5 (August 2014) © Die Zeit. Reprinted with permission of Die Zeit.
Interview ‘Byung-Chul Han: COVID-19 has reduced us to a “society of survival”’ by Carmen Sigüenza and Esther Rebollo, published on EURACTIV in May 2020 © EFE with EURACTIV. com. Reprinted with permission of EURACTIV.
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4502-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Han, Byung-Chul, author. | Steuer, Daniel, translator.
Title: Capitalism and the death drive / Byung-Chul Han ; translated by Daniel Steuer.
Other titles: Kapitalismus und Todestrie. English
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2021] | “Originally published in German as Kapitalismus und Todestrieb © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2019”--Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A leading cultural theorist examines the inherent destructiveness of capitalism”--Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020053305 (print) | LCCN 2020053306 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509545018 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509545001 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509545025 (epub) | ISBN 9781509547661 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Capitalism--Moral and ethical aspects. | Capitalism--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HB501 .H33413 2021 (print) | LCC HB501 (ebook) | DDC 330.12/2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053305
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053306
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Capitalism and the Death Drive’ appears for the first time in this volume.
‘Why Revolution Is Impossible Today’ was first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 September 2014.
‘The Total Exploitation of the Human Being’ was first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 June 2016.
‘Inside the Digital Panopticon’ was first published in Der Spiegel 02/2014.
‘Only What Is Dead Is Transparent’ was first published in Die Zeit 03/2012.
‘Dataism and Nihilism’ was first published in Die Zeit 40/ 2013.
‘Torturous Emptiness’ was first published in Die Welt, 30 December 2015, under the title: ‘Quälende Leere: Narzissmus ist der Grund für Selfies und Terror’ [Torturous Emptiness: Narcissism Is the Reason for Selfies and Terror].
‘Jumping Humans’ was first published in Die Zeit 04/2016.
‘Where Do the Refugees Come From?’ was first published in Der Tagesspiegel, 17 September 2015.
‘Where the Wild Things Are’ was first published in Die Welt, 8 September 2015.
‘Who Is a Refugee?’ was first published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 January 2017.
‘Beauty Lies Yonder, in the Foreign’ was first published in Die Welt, 24 November 2017, under the title ‘Deutsche sollten Deutsche bleiben’ [Germans Should Remain Germans].
‘The Big Rush’ was first published in Die Zeit 25/2013, under the title ‘Alles eilt: Wie wir die Zeit erleben’ [The Big Rush: How We Experience Time].
‘In Your Face’ was first published in Blau: Ein Kunstmagazin No. 9, March 2016, pp. 13–14.
‘The End of Liberalism: The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Consequences’ appears for the first time in this volume.
‘It Is Eros That Defeats Depression’ was first published in Philosophie Magazin 05/2012 © Philosophie Magazin, Berlin 2012.
‘Capitalism Dislikes Silence’ was first published in 1. Spielzeitheft der Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz 2013/14 © Florian Borchmeyer and Thomas Ostermeier, Berlin 2013.
The interview ‘Byung-Chul Han: COVID-19 Has Reduced Us to a “Society of Survival”’ by Carmen Sigüenza and Esther Rebollo was first published on EURACTIV in May 2020 © EFE with EURACTIV.com. Reprinted with permission of EURACTIV. At https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/interview/byung-chul-han-covid-19-has-reduced-us-to-a-society-of-survival (last accessed 3 December 2020).
Excerpt from ‘Tur mir Leid, aber das sind die Tatsachen’ [I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts] by Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in Die Zeit, 5 (August 2014) © Die Zeit. Reprinted with permission of Die Zeit.
Capitalism and the Death Drive
What we nowadays call ‘growth’ is in reality random, cancerous proliferation. We are currently living through a frenzy of production and growth that seems like a frenzy of death. It is a simulation of vitality that conceals a deadly impending catastrophe. Production increasingly resembles destruction. Humankind’s self-alienation may have reached a point ‘where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.1 What Benjamin said of fascism is today true of capitalism.
It is on account of our destructive rage that Arthur Schnitzler compares humankind to a bacterium. From this perspective, the history of humanity is like the progress of a deadly infectious disease. Growth and destruction become one and the same:
Is it then not conceivable that, for some higher organism that we are incapable of grasping in its totality, and within which humankind finds the condition, necessity and meaning of its own existence, humankind represents an illness that tries to destroy that organism and – the further it develops – must destroy it, the same way a bacterium seeks to annihilate the human individual who has been ‘taken ill’?2
Humankind is blighted by a deadly blindness. We can only recognize the simpler levels of organization; regarding higher orders, we are as blind as bacteria. Thus, the history of humanity is an ‘eternal battle against the divine’, which is ‘necessarily annihilated by the human’.
Freud would have shared every ounce of Schnitzler’s pessimism. The human being, with his ‘cruel aggressiveness’, he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, is a ‘savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’.3 Humankind annihilates itself. Freud may occasionally speak of the capacity of reason to recognize higher orders, but ultimately the human being is dominated by drives. For Freud, the death drive is responsible for our aggressive inclinations.4 Only a few months after the completion of Civilization and Its Discontents, the Great Depression began. It would have provided Freud, one might think, with enough reasons to say that capitalism is that economic formation in which the savagery and aggression of the human being can best be expressed.
Given capitalism’s destructiveness, it seems plausible to connect capitalism with Freud’s death drive. In his study Capitalisme et pulsion de mort [Capitalism and death drive], the French economist Bernard Maris, who was killed in the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, writes: ‘The great cunning of capitalism . . . lies in the way it channels, it diverts, the forces of annihilation, the death drive, toward growth.’5 According to Maris, capitalism uses the death drive for its own purposes, and this ultimately proves to be fateful. Over time, its destructive forces gain the upper hand and overwhelm life.
But is Freud’s death drive really the right explanation for capitalism’s destructive trajectory? Or is capitalism propelled by an altogether different kind of death drive, one that lies outside of Freud’s theory of the drives? Freud’s death drive has a purely biological basis. At some point in time – so he speculates – the properties of life were evoked in inanimate matter by a strong force acting on it. This introduced into the previously dead matter a tension that had to be resolved, and thus living beings came to possess a drive to return to the inanimate condition. The death drive was born: ‘“The aim of all life is death”, and, looking backwards . . . “inanimate things existed before living ones”.’6 Against the backdrop of the death drive, all instances of life appear as mere ‘myrmidons of death’. The drives of life have no aims of their own. Even the drives of self-preservation and mastery are partial drives whose function is ‘to ensure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself’.7 Every ‘organism wishes to die only in its own fashion’, and thus each organism resists any external influences that ‘might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly – by a kind of short-circuit’.8 Life is nothing but the organism’s own being unto death. The idea of the death drive apparently held a lasting fascination for Freud. Despite some initial hesitation, he retained the idea:
The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; . . . To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way.9
The source of Freud’s fascination was probably the fact that the idea of the death drive can help to explain human beings’ destructive drive. Within the living being, the death drive works to bring about the being’s dissolution. Freud interprets this processual death as an active self-destruction. Initially, then, the death drive expresses itself in the form of auto-aggression. It is only the drive towards life, Eros, that ensures that the death drive is directed towards external objects:
In this way the instinct [i.e. the death drive – DS] itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards would be bound to increase the self-destruction, which is in any case proceeding.10
Freud makes no distinction between human beings and other living beings when it comes to the death drive: the drive inhabits every living thing, as that being’s urge to return to the inanimate state. From the death drive, Freud deduces aggression, thereby making a connection between two very different impulses. An organism’s inherent tendency to resolve a tension and, ultimately, to die does not necessarily suggest a destructive inclination. If we understand the death drive as a gradual reduction in vitality, then we cannot infer from it any destructive impulse. In addition, because the death drive is common to all living beings, it cannot explain what is specific about human aggression. Humans, however, are especially aggressive and, in particular, cruel. No other living being is capable of blind destructive rage. Freud also deduces sadism from the death drive:
It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.11
The death drive inherent in every living being, the urge to return to the inanimate state, does not explain the decidedly narcissistic enjoyment that the ego takes in sadistic violence. In order to account for sadism, there must be an altogether different kind of destructive drive.
According to Maris, the driving force of capitalism is a death drive that serves the purposes of growth. But this does not tell us what brings about the irrational compulsion of growth itself: the compulsion that makes capitalism so destructive. What is it that forces capitalism blindly to pursue accumulation? At this point, death enters the frame. Capitalism rests on a negation of death. Capital is accumulated as a defence against death, against absolute loss. Death is what accounts for the compulsion of production and growth. Maris scarcely pays attention to death. Even Freud does not address death as such. The idea of the death drive, as a death wish, conceals the fear of death. Tellingly, Freud does not take into account the fact that every living being resists death. He remarks, somewhat oddly, that the idea of the death drive means ‘[w]e have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle’.12 It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that Freud’s idea of a death drive ultimately represents an unconscious strategy for repressing the fact of death.13
The specifically human form of aggression, violence, is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by a logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power [Tötungsgewalt] produces a feeling of growth, force, power [Macht] – of invulnerability and immortality. The narcissistic enjoyment human beings take in sadistic violence is based on just this increase in power. Killing protects against death. By killing, you arrest death. An increase in killing power means a reduction in death. The nuclear arms race also mirrors this capitalist economy of violence. Accumulating killing capacity is imagined as a way of accumulating a survival capacity.
The archaic economy of violence is exhibited in the spiralling violence of the blood feud. In archaic societies, every death is interpreted as the effect of a violent cause. Thus, even a ‘natural’ death may lead to revenge. The violence that led to the death is met with counter-violence. Every death weakens the group. Thus, the group must kill in turn in order to restore its feeling of power. Blood revenge is not an act of retribution, not a punishment. It is not a case of a perpetrator being held to account. Punishment is a rationalization of revenge; it stops revenge from escalating. Unlike punishment, blood revenge is undirected. That is the very reason it is so devastating. Sometimes, a group determined to avenge a death will kill individuals who were not involved in the death at all. Achilles took revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus by killing, and ordering killing, randomly. Not only enemies but also vast numbers of animals were slaughtered.
The etymology of ‘money’ points towards a connection with sacrifice and cultural rites. Money was originally the medium of exchange used for buying sacrificial animals. Those with a lot of money acquired a divine power to kill: ‘Looked at from the perspective of its roots in sacrificial cults, money is as it were frozen sacrificial blood. To throw money around, to let it flow and watch it flow, produces an effect similar to the flow of blood in fights or on sacrificial altars.’14 The hoarded money gives its owner the status of a predator. It immunizes him against death. At the level of depth psychology, this archaic belief continues to operate in the idea that accumulated killing capacity, and accumulated capital assets, will ward off death. Capital’s logic of accumulation corresponds exactly to the archaic economy of violence. Capital behaves like a modern version of mana. Mana is the name of that powerful, mysterious substance that one acquires through the act of killing. One accumulates it in order to create a feeling of power and invulnerability:
The warrior was thought to embody the mana of all those whom he had killed . . . The mana of the warrior’s spear was likewise increased with each death he inflicted. . . .; with a view to absorbing directly his mana, he ate some of his flesh; and to bind the presence of the empowering influence in battle . . . he wore as a part of his war dress some physical relic of his vanquished foe – a bone, a dried hand, sometimes a whole skull.15
The accumulation of capital produces the same affect as the accumulation of mana. Growing capital means growing power. More capital means less death. Capital is accumulated in order to escape death. Capital may also be seen as frozen time; infinite amounts of capital create the illusion of an infinite amount of time. Time is money: confronted with a time-limited life, we accumulate time-as-capital.
Adalbert von Chamisso’s novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte [The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl] can be read as an allegory of the capitalist economy. Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil in return for a bottomless bag of gold (that is, infinite capital). The pact with the devil turns out to be a pact with capitalism. Infinite capital makes the shadow – which stands for the body and death – disappear. But Schlemihl soon realizes that a life without a shadow is impossible. He walks the earth as the undead. The moral is: death is a part of life. The story thus ends with this admonition: ‘But you, my friend, if you want to live among mankind, learn to revere first your shadow, and then your money.’16
Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.
In capitalist societies, the dead and the dying are less and less visible. But death cannot simply be made to disappear. If, for instance, factories no longer exist, then work takes place everywhere. If mental asylums disappear, then madness has become normal. It is the same with death. If the dead are not visible, a rigor mortis has extended over all of life. Life freezes into survival: ‘In survival, death is repressed; life itself . . . would be nothing more than a survival determined by death.’17
The separation of life and death that is constitutive of the capitalist economy creates an undead life, death-in-life. Capitalism generates a paradoxical death drive; it deprives life of life.18 A life without death, which is what capitalism strives to achieve, is what is truly deadly. Performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies: these are manifestations of undead life. The undead lack any vitality. Only life that incorporates death is truly alive. The mania for health is the biopolitical manifestation of capital itself.
Capitalism’s striving for life without death creates the necropolis – an antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds and smells. Life processes are transformed into mechanical processes. The total adaptation of human life to mere functionality is already a culture of death. As a consequence of the performance principle, the human being ever more closely approximates a machine, and becomes alienated from itself. Dataism and artificial intelligence reify thinking. Thinking becomes calculating. Living memories are replaced with machine memories. Only the dead remember everything. Server farms are places of death. We bury ourselves alive in order to survive. In the hope of survival, we accumulate dead value, capital. The living world is being destroyed by dead capital. This is the death drive of capital. Capitalism is ruled by a necrophilia that turns living beings into lifeless things. A fateful dialectic of survival turns the living into the dead: the undead. Erich Fromm writes the following about a world ruled by necrophilia:
The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. . . . He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot. The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons,’ a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines.19
Undead, death-free life is reified, mechanical life. Thus, the goal of immortality can only be achieved at the expense of life.
The capitalist system represses life, and it can only be ended by death. Baudrillard turns the death drive against Freud, radicalizing the concept such that it comes to denote a revolt against death: ‘In a system that orders you to live and to capitalize life, the death drive is the only alternative.’20 By risking death, the revolt of death cracks open the death-negating capitalist system and exposes it to the symbolic exchange with death. For Baudrillard, the symbolic is that sphere in which life and death are not yet divided from each other. The symbolic is opposed to the imaginary
