Drive to Drive: The Deconstruction of the Freudian Trieb

Senatore, Mauro

doi:10.3366/drt.2019.0197

Drive to Drive: The Deconstruction of the Freudian Trieb

Senatore, Mauro

Authors

Mauro Senatore

Abstract

In the essay ‘To Speculate – On “Freud’”, which is published in The Postcards: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980) and draws upon the last part of his unedited lecture course on La Vie la mort (taught in 1975), Jacques Derrida engages a close reading of Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This article focuses on the deconstruction of the Freudian concept of drive (Trieb) that Derrida unfolds across his reading. It traces the analysis of the movement of autotelicity (auto-télie) that, according to Derrida, underpins the drive's relation to itself, and argues that the French philosopher interprets a specific drive evoked (but not thematized) by Freud, the drive to power (Bemächtigungstrieb), as the figure of the deconstruction of that autotelicity. Furthermore, the article suggests that the implications of this argument extend beyond Derrida's early reading of Freud, since they cast a new light on the argument for replacing the concept of sovereignty with that of the drive to power, which Derrida elaborates in his late political analyses.

Citation

Senatore, M. (2019). Drive to Drive: The Deconstruction of the Freudian Trieb. Derrida Today, 12(1), 59-79. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2019.0197

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	May 1, 2019
Deposit Date	Oct 17, 2018
Publicly Available Date	May 10, 2019
Journal	Derrida Today
Print ISSN	1754-8500
Electronic ISSN	1754-8519
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	12
Issue	1
Pages	59-79
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2019.0197

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Copyright Statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Derrida today. The Version of Record is available online at: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/drt.2019.0197