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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Capitalism and the Death Drive’ appears for the first time in this volume.
‘Why Revolution Is Impossible Today’ was first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 September 2014.
‘The Total Exploitation of the Human Being’ was first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 June 2016.
‘Inside the Digital Panopticon’ was first published in Der Spiegel 02/2014.
‘Only What Is Dead Is Transparent’ was first published in Die Zeit 03/2012.
‘Dataism and Nihilism’ was first published in Die Zeit 40/ 2013.
‘Torturous Emptiness’ was first published in Die Welt, 30 December 2015, under the title: ‘Quälende Leere: Narzissmus ist der Grund für Selfies und Terror’ [Torturous Emptiness: Narcissism Is the Reason for Selfies and Terror].
‘Jumping Humans’ was first published in Die Zeit 04/2016.
‘Where Do the Refugees Come From?’ was first published in Der Tagesspiegel, 17 September 2015.
‘Where the Wild Things Are’ was first published in Die Welt, 8 September 2015.
‘Who Is a Refugee?’ was first published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 January 2017.
‘Beauty Lies Yonder, in the Foreign’ was first published in Die Welt, 24 November 2017, under the title ‘Deutsche sollten Deutsche bleiben’ [Germans Should Remain Germans].
‘The Big Rush’ was first published in Die Zeit 25/2013, under the title ‘Alles eilt: Wie wir die Zeit erleben’ [The Big Rush: How We Experience Time].
‘In Your Face’ was first published in Blau: Ein Kunstmagazin No. 9, March 2016, pp. 13–14.
‘The End of Liberalism: The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Consequences’ appears for the first time in this volume.
‘It Is Eros That Defeats Depression’ was first published in Philosophie Magazin 05/2012 © Philosophie Magazin, Berlin 2012.
‘Capitalism Dislikes Silence’ was first published in 1. Spielzeitheft der Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz 2013/14 © Florian Borchmeyer and Thomas Ostermeier, Berlin 2013.
The interview ‘Byung-Chul Han: COVID-19 Has Reduced Us to a “Society of Survival”’ by Carmen Sigüenza and Esther Rebollo was first published on EURACTIV in May 2020 © EFE with EURACTIV.com. Reprinted with permission of EURACTIV. At https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/interview/byung-chul-han-covid-19-has-reduced-us-to-a-society-of-survival (last accessed 3 December 2020).
Excerpt from ‘Tur mir Leid, aber das sind die Tatsachen’ [I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts] by Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in Die Zeit, 5 (August 2014) © Die Zeit. Reprinted with permission of Die Zeit.
Capitalism and the Death Drive
What we nowadays call ‘growth’ is in reality random, cancerous proliferation. We are currently living through a frenzy of production and growth that seems like a frenzy of death. It is a simulation of vitality that conceals a deadly impending catastrophe. Production increasingly resembles destruction. Humankind’s self-alienation may have reached a point ‘where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.1 What Benjamin said of fascism is today true of capitalism.
It is on account of our destructive rage that Arthur Schnitzler compares humankind to a bacterium. From this perspective, the history of humanity is like the progress of a deadly infectious disease. Growth and destruction become one and the same:
Is it then not conceivable that, for some higher organism that we are incapable of grasping in its totality, and within which humankind finds the condition, necessity and meaning of its own existence, humankind represents an illness that tries to destroy that organism and – the further it develops – must destroy it, the same way a bacterium seeks to annihilate the human individual who has been ‘taken ill’?2
Humankind is blighted by a deadly blindness. We can only recognize the simpler levels of organization; regarding higher orders, we are as blind as bacteria. Thus, the history of humanity is an ‘eternal battle against the divine’, which is ‘necessarily annihilated by the human’.
Freud would have shared every ounce of Schnitzler’s pessimism. The human being, with his ‘cruel aggressiveness’, he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, is a ‘savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’.3 Humankind annihilates itself. Freud may occasionally speak of the capacity of reason to recognize higher orders, but ultimately the human being is dominated by drives. For Freud, the death drive is responsible for our aggressive inclinations.4 Only a few months after the completion of Civilization and Its Discontents, the Great Depression began. It would have provided Freud, one might think, with enough reasons to say that capitalism is that economic formation in which the savagery and aggression of the human being can best be expressed.
Given capitalism’s destructiveness, it seems plausible to connect capitalism with Freud’s death drive. In his study Capitalisme et pulsion de mort [Capitalism and death drive], the French economist Bernard Maris, who was killed in the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, writes: ‘The great cunning of capitalism . . . lies in the way it channels, it diverts, the forces of annihilation, the death drive, toward growth.’5 According to Maris, capitalism uses the death drive for its own purposes, and this ultimately proves to be fateful. Over time, its destructive forces gain the upper hand and overwhelm life.
But is Freud’s death drive really the right explanation for capitalism’s destructive trajectory? Or is capitalism propelled by an altogether different kind of death drive, one that lies outside of Freud’s theory of the drives? Freud’s death drive has a purely biological basis. At some point in time – so he speculates – the properties of life were evoked in inanimate matter by a strong force acting on it. This introduced into the previously dead matter a tension that had to be resolved, and thus living beings came
