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Together with happy experiences, unavoidable grievances reinforce the innate conflict between love and hate ... In speaking of an innate conflict between love and hate, I am implying that the capacity both for love and for destructive impulses is, to some extent, constitutional, though varying individually in strength and interacting from the beginning with external conditions.
- Melanie Klein, 'Envy and Gratitude'
They wanted to know why I did what I did.
Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world.
- Bruce Springsteen, 'Nebraska'
Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression within the psyche, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social- and political-theoretical approaches that lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories understand the persistence of violence, misrecognition and aggression within contemporary societies (Brown, 2001; Oliver, 2004)? Ought they to follow Freud and depth psychology in asserting a structural ambivalence to the psyche, a struggle between love and hate that Freud colorfully described as the 'battle of the giants that our nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven'? (1989, p. 129). Or should critical social theory abandon a conceptualization of the death drive altogether, seeing it as a regrettable aspect of Freud's outdated biologism? Or - a third option - should these approaches conceptualize aggression from within an intersubjective, relational paradigm that tethers negativity to a project of social- and self-development?
Contemporary critical theory is internally divided by these competing approaches. Jürgen Habermas famously took the second option described above, abandoning Freud's concept of the death drive and turning towards the developmental psychology of Mead, Kohlberg and Piaget in order to lay the groundwork for his theory of communicative action. In leaving behind depth psychology and Freud's battle of the giants, Habermas argued, 'nothing of significance is lost' (1998, p. 427). Within the so-called 'third generation' of the Frankfurt school, however, Axel Honneth has renewed the linkages between psychoanalysis and critical theory, arguing - contra Habermas - that a critical theory of society is 'dependent on psychoanalysis' for its detection of social pathologies that distort the search for autonomy (2012, p. 194). In making this...