Bedrock: Reading the Death Drive in the Time of the Anthropocene

Sigmund Freud's death drive tends to be invoked in ecocritical thought as a bedrock truth that explains how the drive for pleasure, mastery, and expansion within and for the human organism is inherently bound to aggression and destructiveness. But a close reading of Freud and the deviations and repetitions of drive suggests an ongoing relationship and collective alliance between life and death rather than any simple victory for destruction. This article argues that attending to the more-than-human form and force that underpins yet simultaneously resists all human projects - what Freud describes as the unanalysable "bedrock" of the death drive - offers ways of recasting the temporalities of Anthropocene imaginaries. Using the work of Catherine Malabou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lisa Baraitser, and Édouard Glissant, this article rethinks the resistant bedrock of the death drive and its complex interweaving of life with nonlife, as a way of decentering and "de-dramatizing" formations of the human. The article suggests that attending to how things come to matter over time opens up the possibility of suspending forms of action that mortgage the existence of many human and more-than-human others to the sustaining of a certain configuration of Life only, to produce instead a time where things might be able to die in their own fashion.