Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Apathy, and Hope: A Response to Harris and Howard

ABSTRACT

This article contemplates the tension between apathy and hope, between the dystopic and the utopian as drivers of the human condition, and our theories about it. I look, more specifically, at how these two tendencies manifested in the aftermath of WWI; the dystopic in Freud’s invention of the death drive, the utopian in Ernst Bloch’s exploration of hope. I argue that our present poses a challenge similar to that posed by WWI; a collapse of the frameworks around which subjectivities and societies are organized, and a potential for the development of both better and worse outlooks. I argue that as was the case then, psychoanalysis has crucial theoretical and ethical choices to make. I suggest that rather than follow Freud’s death driven fatalism, we should seek inspiration in Bloch’s view of hope as a driving force of human experience and destiny. I contemplate these ideas as I record events taking place in the world and in my practice during the weeks just before and after the 2020 elections in the US.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• WWI
• death-drive
• hope
• collectivity
• subjectivity
• Ernst Bloch

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See Rozmarin (2020a) for a fuller account.

² As I have written elsewhere (Rozmarin, 2020b), it is my belief that the second culprit in the constant pull toward ossification in Psychoanalysis, despite its better angels, is its being founded under the social-political ontology of nationalism.

³ Such as, for example, the formidable yet until recently disregarded contributions of Franz Fanon (1952/2008).

⁴ Harris (2008) writes beautifully about how this devastation reached her doorstep in Canada in the figure of a Scottish Nanny who has left Europe because there were no men left to marry.

⁵ I am referring here to the nickname given to Vienna after the end of WWI, when after the first democratic elections, the social democratic party came to power in that previously conservative, imperial capital, initiating innovative social policies, most notably in the areas of public health and housing, making the city a socialist model throughout Europe. (For example see Gruber, 1991.)

⁶ For further exploration of Benjamin’s messianism see for example, Butler (2013). One time traverses another, Benjamin’s Theologico-Political Fragment. A lecture given as part of the European Graduate School Video Lectures Series. https://youtu.be/LA8hiT2nIAk.

⁷ See Ziv (2012) on stubborn trauma.

⁸ I am evoking André Green for his life long engagement with the concept of “the negative” (See for example Green, 1993/1999), and Spielrein for her famous engagement with the question of destruction and death, one that anticipated (and influenced) Freud, in her “Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being.” (Spielrein, 1912/1994).

⁹ I explore this question of the parallels between social-political forms of organization and our concept, self-concept, and experience of subjectivity in greater detail in Rozmarin (2020b).

¹⁰ Elsewhere, I anchor this apparent apathy in Freud on gender, on how gender limits the relations between the generations, especially between fathers and sons (Rozmarin, 2020a).

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Eyal Rozmarin

Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D., is Co-Editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and Associate Editor of the journals Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, and presented his work widely. His research takes place at the intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory, and explores the relations between subjectivity and the collective forces that mold human experience. He teaches and practices from New York.