The maternal death drive: Greta Thunberg and the question of the future
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The maternal death drive: Greta Thunberg and the question of the future Lisa Baraitser Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
The centenary of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920a/ 1955) falls in 2020, a year dominated globally by the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the effects of the pandemic has been to reveal the increasingly fragile interconnectedness of human and non-human life, as well as the ongoing effects of social inequalities, particularly racism, on the valuing of life and its flourishing. Drawing on earlier work, this paper develops the notion of a ‘maternal death drive’ that supplements Freud’s death drive by accounting for repetition that retains a relation to the developmental time of ‘life’ but remains ‘otherwise’ to a life drive. The temporal form of this ‘life in death’ is that of ‘dynamic chronicity’, analogous to late modern narratives that describe the present as ‘thin’ and the time of human futurity as running out. I argue that the urgency to act on the present in the name of the future is simultaneously ‘suspended’ by the repetitions of late capitalism, leading to a temporal hiatus that must be embraced rather than simply lamented. The maternal (death drive) alerts us to a new figure of a child whose task is to carry expectations and anxieties about the future and bind them into a reproductive present. Rather than seeing the child as a figure of normativity, I turn to Greta Thunberg to signal a way to go on in suspended ‘grey’ time. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-02000197-y Keywords: time; temporality; Greta Thunberg; death drive; motherhood; future
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society www.palgrave.com/journals
Baraitser
Time
And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? (Greta Thunberg) This paper is late. Not just a little late but seriously forestalled. There is some pressure – an urgency produced by the centenary of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle falling in 2020 – and the desire and pleasure in partaking in a collaborative, timely celebration of the work. There are the ordinary repetitions that are holding this up: a chronic relation to my own thoughts, veering towards and away from the satisfactions and disturbances of ideas connecting or linking; the chronic overwhelm produced by the difficulty of saying ‘no’ and resisting the temptations of an overloaded life; and the realities of overload brought on not by a chronic relation to limits but by their obliteration by the institutions and systems that govern our lives. Then, of course, as 2020 has deepened, there have been the temporalities of illness, care and grief; of the suspension of time under conditions of lockdown; the stop-start of uncertainty and helplessness. For some, it has been a time of permanent and dangerous work; of intolerable waiting for others; and of th
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