ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two other works by Freud dedicated to developing a theory of the drives, adding the death drive to the sexual drive: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents. From the analysis, we find that the sexual is a repressed energy that returns to disturb the logical consequence of Freud’s own thought. In fact, in these texts, the sexual drive is presented as Eros; that is as a relational and conservative drive, in opposition to the earlier definitions of drive in Three Essays. But then, between the folds and in the notes of the texts, the sexual drive itself returns in the guise of the death drive, as the dissolutional force that brings the civilized ego to symbolic suicide, dragging the ego into a wild region that the subject refuses to recognize as their own. According to this interpretation, the civilization’s discontent also derives from the unassimilability of the sexual to the social, and from its projection onto abject subjects—sexual and racial minorities—that become its representatives.
