Precarious life

By Miriam Leonard. Antiquities Beyond Humanism, 2019

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In …Pleasure Principle, Freud juxtaposes his discussion of the life and death instincts in “elementary organisms” to the tragic drama he sees enacted in his grandson’s fort-da game. Freud’s insights into the death drive are given an added tragic dimension in Lacan’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus. Here Lacan establishes the anti- or even post-humanist credentials of tragedy by insisting that it is the death of the subject which is Sophocles’ ultimate preoccupation. By placing Greek tragedy’s confrontation with the death drive in dialogue with the instincts of the “germ-cell”, the chapter demonstrates how psychoanalysis offers a perfect model for understanding antiquity’s contribution to posthumanism.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology

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