Thanatos and Civilization: Lacan, Marcuse, and the Death Drive

During the 1950s and 1960s two thinkers, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Lacan, were conducting a ‘return to Freud’ for very similar reasons. If the differences between them are often advertised, their affinities are less so. In this article, I examine how their ‘return to Freud’ and fidelity to psychoanalysis serves as a common ground to read each in conjunction with the other. Specifically, the Freudian figure of the death drive marks a deep homology within Marcuse and his ethic of ‘The Great Refusal,’ with Lacan's notion of living in-between ‘two deaths.’ Reading each as the dialectical complement of the other, this article concludes by provocatively reversing Marcuse's thesis in Eros and Civilization: ‘Today the fight for death, the fight for Thantos, is the political fight.’