I’ve spent much time recently thinking about the “death instinct”. It appears in a number of different forms and for a number of different purposes throughout Deleuze’s  corpus and his work with Guattari. While I am still cataloguing all of these, I wanted to highlight the following two quotations:

“The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine.” (Anti- Oedipus, p.8.)

“The sadism which is today everywhere springs from a desire for nothingness which is established deep within man, especially in the mass of men-a sort of amorous, almost irresistible and unanimous impatience for death.” (Logic of Sense p.326- note that Deleuze is here quoting novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline)

What can be gleaned from these two quotes? I would suggest that for Deleuze, the rejection of Freud extends only as far as Oedipus and that the death instinct or drive advanced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is of interest. While it is no means consistently thus, Deleuze (and Guattari) seems to regard the desire for disorganization, for nothingness, for the breaking off of social codes, as a form of death drive. The destructive desire for annihilation, for nothingness and the freedom from “the social” that would accompany it.

I have recently been thinking about this in relation to a famous quote from Frederick Jameson,

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”

Though it may not have been precisely what Jameson meant, the rank excesses of contemporary capitalism and the prevailing culture of what I can only term Corporate Social Irresponsibility. A corporate world where excessive Carbon Emissions (and cheating emissions tests),  animal testing, pollution, deforestation, fraud and deception (e.g. Enron, Worldcom), failing to pay workers a living wage, marketing products harmful to users, use of child labour, gender pay gaps and discrimination against women (re: glass ceilings, “motherhood penalties” etc.), discrimination against BME, LGBTQ+, the disabled and the elderly , cultivating climates of unnecessary stress, anxiety, burnout and “presenteeism” in organization, Union busting and denial of workers’ rights, making light of workplace deaths, deaths from overwork, war profiteering and the military industrial complex, insider trading and other morally dubious investing practices, attacks on Human Rights activists, punishing whistleblowers, enabling gross wealth inequality etc. etc.;  where all of this can be considered a norm can only be said to be irresponsible if not more aptly described as manifestly immoral. It is a corporate world that seems to be actively seeking out an end to capitalism by means of an end of the world; a system so unsustainable as to be inevitably stamped with an expiration date.

And yet, the popular press and corporate websites often bear out how good and ethical the contemporary corporation is. Students in contemporary Business Schools will frequently hold the idea that business ethics are important, that firms should be devoting resources to socially responsible projects and will celebrate “ethical businesses/leaders” in presentations and essays but will also seem to ignore this reality of corporate immorality. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about cases like Volkswagen which seem to indicate a fundamental paradox in our perception of the contemporary corporation, one that speaks to the existence of two seemingly mutually contradictory realities.

On the one hand, the contemporary corporation is destroying or complicit in the destruction of the planet and on the other, it is trying to save it. I debated with myself for some time about whether these represented contradictory positions at all; whether it was possible to for the corporation, in its plurality, heterogeneity and non-uniformity to have some of its members trying to destroy the corporation while others tried to save it. However, I reasoned that this was perhaps the core of the problem, that insofar as the corporation can be thought of as a person, its personality seems split between trying to save the planet (through socially responsible initiatives) and trying to profit maximize in ways that actively make life worse for its inhabitants (in gross shows of corporate social irresponsibility).

What I would suggest is that this paradox, this “divided-self”, is a reflection of the death drive. The corporate person, eager for death and disorganization, deludes itself  into believing that its actions are saving the planet in order to intentionally blind itself to the ways in which it is destroying it. That is to say, we represent social responsibility in order to distract ourselves from the sordid realities of corporate social irresponsibility. We do this because we secretly want irresponsible behaviour, because a profound eschatological instinct compels us towards the end, towards disorganization and nothingness. We do it because desire desires death also. Perhaps we are simply curious as to what an end to capitalism would look like. Regardless, since the most immoral actors are always the ones who have convinced themselves that they are acting morally, this strategy of self-deception towards death is certainly effective.

In his 1992 text, Pandemonium: Towards a Retro Organization Theory Gibson Burrell says the following: “our own total destruction is what humanity actually desires, rather than fears. It has become our goal. So endism is rampant.” (p.49). I could not agree more, but I have some more work to do on the death drive before I can fully articulate why.