Status Updates From Mas Alla del Principio del ...

Two notes. (1) Many of the thinkers in this volume disagree with Freud, and some of them even disagree with the disagreements of others. That makes the book fascinating. (2) It takes a good deal of time to read this at night, then to reread bits and think them over and make notes in the morning. That’s one reason I’m making slow progress.

I’m reading this for a particular purpose and probably don’t need all the ancillary discussion. Still, I’m glad for it, because it’s much more illuminating than reading Freud’s essay alone would have been. And I’m encountering the work of many authors I’ve read little or nothing of before, such as Jacques Lacan and Norman O. Brown.

Freud, borrowing a term from a fellow analyst, sometimes uses “nirvana principle” to represent “the tendency of the death drive.” Not even practitioners of extinction Buddhism go so far as to seek death (that I know of), but Freud isn’t trying to speak for Buddhists in this usage.

Like Marx, Freud still matters. This recently published edition of BPP, from 2011, featuring a new translation and loads of related material (much like a Norton Critical Edition), is evidence of it.