kswzue

[kswzue]

The Death Drive.

Freud theorized that living beings carry within them an ancient wish to return to an earlier, pre-life state. It’s like gravity for the soul – not suicide per se, but the deep inertia that resists life’s demands. However, the concept of death drive, seen as Thanatos, can’t exactly be separated from another strong entity – Eros. The two are linked and the most intense moments of life are usually fusions of the two. Sexual passion laced with aggression, a creative mind that destroys the self, a martyr who finds ecstasy in destruction. A beautiful paradox, isn’t it?

Let’s dive deeper into Lacan’s mind. His most interesting concept is the Real. For him, the death drive isn’t pain itself, but pure hunger. Our desires are never fully satisfied, so we get stuck in this loop – we desire, but the satisfaction is impossible. Human beings get frustrated by impossibility, so this could be our way of fighting it. In the end, do we put ourselves through pain only to feel something? A human being is an empty shell who wants to fill their self, even if it’s by putting their psyche through past traumatic experiences all over again. Would that really explain why some of us like toxicity? After all, what’s the point in something that brings us peace? Sure, we do find comfort in it – which is also why we like having routines. The ordinary makes us feel comfortable, but doesn’t allow us to think about the complexity of life – the reality. It doesn’t stimulate us in a way that truly fulfills us.

Paradoxically, desire isn’t about obtaining what we want. It’s about the persistence of wanting, something we could call “the endless reaching”. When we come to think about it, the minute we get something or somebody, it loses its magic. The object of desire is never stable, it’s a shifting fantasy that could be translated to a lack dressed in form. That’s why fulfillment always slips through. And so the circle goes on, again and again.

The human mind is a labyrinth of complexities. We search for meaning, but many truths resist explanation. Trauma is one of them. As seen previously, the death drive isn’t a longing for literal death. It’s the spiral around the void, more specifically an endless orbit around something lost, unreachable, or unspoken. In poetic terms, it’s a pattern of longing, a rhythm that haunts the soul. We’re drawn to intensity – we crave emotions that pierce. Whether joy or grief, we want to feel, and feel deeply, even if it burns. Some experiences, though fleeting, make us feel terrifyingly alive. We chase them.

But there’s a cruel asymmetry. We forget joy. We forget light. But pain remembers us.

Trauma stays. It fixes us in its spiral. To me, it’s an addiction to something we cannot grasp, something we cannot understand. It’s pure ecstasy itself. In trauma, time stops. For a moment, we’re thrown outside of the self into a space where the world becomes hyperreal. Your heart aches. You cannot wrap your head around anything. The pain becomes unbearable. Yet, it announces that you are real. You exist. And so, the spiral becomes a ritual. And so, trauma becomes a sacred scar. An open wound we keep going back to – as if we kept stabbing ourselves with a knife until we bleed out all over again. We cling to pain like an adored poison that we cannot live without.

Conclusion :

The death drive isn’t a march toward destruction, but a dance with the void. It’s a magnetic pull toward something beyond comprehension, where life and death, love and pain, merge into a single current. Freud named it Thanatos, but it’s not destruction alone. It’s the yearning for stillness after the chaos of being. Lacan’s Real intensifies this view. Desire is never for what is, but for what is always out of reach. We orbit around what we lack, endlessly chasing ghosts of fulfillment that vanish the moment we touch them.

Trauma, then, becomes a kind of truth. It marks us, scars us, reminds us that we are alive. In its haunting repetition, it offers a terrible kind of clarity : that pain, at least, is real. It isn’t peace we seek, but rupture. Not contentment, but intensity. The death drive isn’t about endings, but about returns – returns to the wound, the loss, the hunger. In this spiral, we are undone, and in that undoing, we are most ourselves.

Perhaps, in the end, the most human thing isn’t to heal – but to hurt beautifully.

— Kazue.

[kswzue]

i really wish i could live very far away from all this stress and hatred, as a hermit. i just want to be surrounded by the nature and animals as i would slowly forget that human beings exist.

[kswzue]

— Jasmine Gibson, from "Hot-Hand Fallacy," Don't Let Them See Me Like This (Nightboat Books, 2018) (via letsbelonelytogetherr)