Beyond the Entwurf: (A Preliminary) Project for a Scientific Death Drive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the conceptual thresholds of psychoanalysis as they have been laid out over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, specifically focusing on the tensions between Sigmund Freud and two of his many heirs, viz., Jean Laplanche and Jacques Lacan. First, I extricate Freud's visionary text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), from Laplanche's condemnation of the text as either whimsically metaphyical or simply a return to Freudian seduction theory. I argue that neither categorization has the capacity to contain the argumentative force of Beyond. Second, by attending to Lacan's theorizations of the philosophy of science apropos of psychoanalysis, I speculate on the possibility of a psychoanalytic future, one that incorporates scientific rigour into its theories practices. By accounting for the materiality of the death drive (through Timothy Morton's object-oriented interpretation of molecular processes), I show how the death drive was never necessarily metaphorical and thereby acts as an discourse-altering facet of psychoanalysis in a way that neither Laplanche nor Lacan could have anticipated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".