ABSTRACT
In 1983, Andre Green described, alongside life narcissism, a death narcissism, which “would be one of the most devastating forms of the death drive”. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, having witnessed the First World War, Sigmund Freud introduced, alongside the love and life drives, the death and destruction drives. Freud’s texts on destructivity strike people in their lucidity and visionary genius, even as their cold and distant tone perturbs people—when he writes, for example, in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”. Indeed, “the destruction of the soul would be the goal of every undertaking of enslavement and domination in the war that opposes it against the other: the stranger, the bad, the hated”. Andre noticed to what extent the disobjectalising function is still at work, and how the cultural relativism of today undermines civilisation’s possibilities of fighting against the power of destructivity.
