MARKETING & PSYCHOANALYSIS

1. Smoke your brains out: Death drive as interpretive framework for compulsive
consumption acts
38th
Annual Macromarketing conference, Toronto, Canada 4-7 June 2013
George Rossolatos, University of Kassel
http://uni-kassel.academia.edu/georgerossolatos
The theoretical constructs of death drive and repetition compulsion, as laid out in Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, constitute speculative milestones in psychoanalytic
theory. Despite the abundant criticisms that have been voiced against the validity of
these constructs from post-Freudian psychoanalysts, their interpretive value has been
endorsed by scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and the socials
sciences, with Lacan ranking prominently among them. The scope and aim of this paper
is not to address the multifaceted implications of these key constructs in the wider
context of Freudian psychoanalysis, but to highlight their interpretive value in making
sense of compulsive consumption experiences, such as smoking. This endeavor
hopefully responds to Laplanche and Pontalis’ (1973) call for anchoring the constructs in
concrete phenomena, it is oriented towards charting a smooth, non-linear and non-
striated consumptive space (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms), certainly not in a clinical
context and far from being intent on ascribing a ‘pathological’ tag. To this end, I am
briefly canvassing the key tenets that underlie the constructs of death drive and
repetition compulsion, within the theoretical contours of Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
as well as Lacan’s appropriation and qualification of these constructs in the context of
his call for a return to Freud. In parallel, I am pointing out how the constructs may be
applied as an interpretive backdrop for making sense of the consumptive phenomenon
of smoking, which may be used as a theoretical adjunct in ethnographic studies (i.e.
participant observation) or with view to formulating research hypotheses that may be
further explored through, for example, in-depth interviews.
The notion of death drive1
, as a primordial force underpinning the very dialectic
between Eros and Thanatos, was propounded by Freud in one of his seminal later
1
In line with Lacan, I am employing the term death drive, rather than death instinct, but I am
retaining the term death instinct in direct quotations of existing translations of Freud’s original
texts: “Trieb and instinct have nothing in common; the discord becomes so impossible at one
point that the implications of a sentence cannot be carried through by translating Triebhaft by

2. period essays, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). “The death instinct makes the
destructive tendency, as revealed for example in sado-masochism, into an irreducible
datum; it is furthermore the chosen expression of the most fundamental principle or
psychical functioning” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 102). The construct was recruited
with view to tentatively accounting for destructive impulses that mitigate the pleasure
principle and that may not be attributed to the reality principle. The death drive was
operationalized primarily in biological terms, since Freud was grappling at that time with
issues of legitimacy of his psychoanalytic school amidst a community of scholars that
favored naturalistic explanatory perspectives to the formation of psychic phenomena. As
will be shown, Lacan’s later appropriation of the concept, which was filtered through
Hegelian phenomenological idealism and Heidegger’s existential analytic, dislocated the
concept from its biological contours, an interpretive twist that was ingrained in Freud’s
original account.
The death drive emerged in Freud’s argumentation about the causes behind the
formation of traumatic neuroses. “We describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from
outside which are powerful enough to break through the [my note: ego’s] protective
shield” (ibid.: 3732). Excessive levels of ‘excitation’ from the external environment cause
displeasure, in line with the pleasure principle. The instinctual tendency towards the
maximization of one’s pleasure, as Freud argues, is mitigated by the confrontation of the
ego with the reality principle or circumstances that lie beyond one’s control and impact
adversely on the satisfaction of a pleasure-driven organism. But the reality principle is
not sufficient in accounting for all phenomena, where the pleasure principle is
compromised. “There can be no doubt, however, that the replacement of the pleasure
principle by the reality principle can only be made responsible for a small number and by
no means the most intense or unpleasurable experiences” (ibid.: 3717). In order to
account for such highly intensive instances, in which the reality principle may not
account for how the pleasure principle is compromised, Freud sought recourse to the
mode of formation of traumatic neurosis. Traumatic neurosis, in Freudian theory,
emerges as a result of an intensely lived accidental experience, such as inflicting a
wound during a war.
The lack of anticipation of the lived experience that gives rise to a trauma,
according to Freud, is responsible for the inability to frame a traumatic experience in
instinctual […] the word Trieb is much more revealing of urgency than the word instinctual. Trieb
gives you a kick in the arse, my friends, quite different from so-called instinct” (Lacan 1998: 49)

3. terms of either anxiety or fear. At the same time, by virtue of the intensity of the
experience, the ego is not capable of tackling and framing it in an adequate manner.
Moreover, there is no isomorphism between the intensity of a traumatic experience and
the recollection of the event of the lived experience or the original encounter between an
intense and threatening to the homeostasis of the ego stimulus and its encapsulation by
the defense mechanism of the ego. The original event that gives rise to its memory is
always already incommensurably recollected. As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) put it
“the compulsion to repeat is an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As
a result of its action, the subject deliberately places himself in distressing situations,
thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype”. “The
compulsion to repeat must be ascribed to the unconscious repressed” (Freud 1920:
3724). The original traumatic event surfaces beneath the level of conscious recollection
in the form of a repetition compulsion and hence its symptoms bear considerable
similarity, but are not necessarily reducible to, neurotic phenomena.
But how is the pleasure principle related to the death drive? Freud addresses this
relationship through the paradoxical concurrence of a double movement, viz. the
experiencing of pleasure and displeasure at the same time, insofar as the repeated
traumatic event (even if it surfaces in different manifestations that are obliquely linked to
the original event that may have caused them remotely) yields displeasure, as
experienced by the system of the ego, but also satisfies the demand of the unconscious:
“unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other” (ibid.: 3725).
What is the event or the (even obliquely alluded to) object of repetition in a
compulsively repeated event? “Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a
compulsion to repeat- something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more
instinctual than the pleasure principle which it overrides” (ibid.: 3727). Freud
progressively distances his argumentation from concrete events that may have
instigated the formation of a trauma by opening up the ‘thing’ that obliquely caused
(whence stems Freud’s stylistic convention that favors the use of italics) the formation of
a trauma to a locus originarius in terms of a primordial instinctual impulse: “It seems,
then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things
which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external
disturbing forces: that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the
expression of the inertia inherent in organic life” (ibid.: 3739). This being-towards-inertia
(as a de-ontologized reading of Heidegger’s Being-towards-death as a condition of

4. Dasein’s possibility for ec-sistence) constitutes the death drive. “The pleasure principle
seems actually to serve the death instincts” (ibid.: 3762).
In these terms, if the inorganic functions as a causa finalis that guides psychic life
and by implication the death drive as the silently working underpinning of the pleasure
principle in a mixed pleasurable/unpleasurable consumptive act, such as smoking, then
death is the key consumption driver behind smoking. This would probably sound to
someone not versed in psychoanalytic discourse as being tantamount to claiming that a
smoker actively seeks his suicide by smoking. This is a crucial area where
psychoanalytic theoretical constructs may be employed for adding interpretive depth to
observed consumptive phenomena. The consuming subject is not making a conscious
choice of smoking in this instance (at least regarding the smokers segment in a roughly
defined smokers vs non-smokers market). Rather, it is the unconscious that places a
demand on the smoker, who engages in a consumptive act that is self-destructive
(literally). A prominent consumption occasion for tobacco products further corroborates
the interpretive value of the death drive. This consumption occasion is smoking in
waiting rooms or in specially designated areas in airports, while awaiting a flight’s
departure. Freud’s contention that unconscious processes are extratemporal is a crucial
aspect of the ‘thing’ that surfaces in compulsive repetition. Freud conceives of
temporality allegedly in Kantian terms, as a pure form of intuition. By implication, one
may argue, either unconscious processes are atemporal or they are of another temporal
order than time as a pure form of intuition and as part of the machinery of Reason (in
Kantian terms). For the sake of the argument, let us adopt the first prong of the above
analytical divide, viz. that the unconscious has no time. This point of view (all ontological
and dialectical issues of temporality aside) at least coheres with the quasi-biological
conception of ‘death’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as inorganic life (which, certainly,
may be contested by reading Freud’s sparse remarks about the relationship between
‘mental life’ and the inorganic as sublated teleological substrate of inner psychic
workings). Let us, thus, retain argumentation at the level of death as biological
phenomenon. A waiting predicament essentially freezes time in anticipation of what is to
come. If what is always already imminent in an anticipatory predicament as latent and
atemporal substrate is the death drive, then smoking while waiting may be conceived of
as an inscription of the inorganic in life and hence as lending credence to Freud’s claim
about the double movement of dis/satisfaction in the face of compulsively repetitive acts,
such as smoking. “This time of pure duration is the time of the pure object: the object

5. defined by nothing more than its duration” (Forrester 1990: 171). Waiting at an airport,
while smoking, is thus a perfect example of how the death drive in fact conditions an (un)
pleasurable consumption experience, such as smoking.
Lacan’s ontologization of the death drive (and its relationship to inextricably
linked concepts, such as repetition compulsion) opened up new interpretive ground. The
concept was tackled multifariously in various phases of the deployment of Lacan’s
thinking. In line with Freud’s tying up the death drive with an unforeseen and absolutely
random encounter, Lacan contended in the Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI) that the Real is equivalent to the return of what persists in
the automaton and what is repeated in the signs. The repetitive act of smoking as an
automatic repetition of the fort/da game that attracts and repels at the same time what is
threatening and desirable at the same stroke, evokes the original trauma of the subject’s
split and its entry in the order of the symbolic by virtue of that traumatic moment that
resides foundationally in absentia, in another time, a time that suspends time in the act
of repetition. “Repetition first appears in a form that is not clear, that is not self-evident,
like a reproduction, or a making present, in act” (Lacan 1998: 50). Lacan’s incorporation
of repetition in his tripartite Symbolic-Real-Imaginary orders system (let us recall that, for
Lacan, roughly speaking, the same psychic phenomena may be viewed at the same
time from different angles based on the order from which they are addressed) and his
positing that what is essentially repeated in every act is always already a relational
encounter with the order of the Real (an act that he emphasized and capitalized qua
Act), affords to elucidate what is repeated in the automatically repetitive consumptive act
of smoking, viz. the Act of the encounter with the order of the Real. As symbolic
(conventionalized) act, the consumptive act of smoking evokes the inorganic substratum
of life, primarily in two ways: (i) as a simulacral ‘freezing’ in time of the random and
elusive encounter with the Real by inscribing the encounter in an automatic act (the
fort/da movement of a smoker’s hand that orients the cigarette in and out of the mouth)
(ii) as the manifestation of the Real’s demand for being (impossibly) manifested in the
Symbolic as a latent death-wish engraved in the unconscious endorsement of the self-
destructive effects of smoking. Thus, Lacan’s dictum from Seminar II “the death drive is
nothing but the mask of the symbolic order” (“l’instinct de mort n’est que le masque de
l’ordre symbolique” [SIl, 375].- in Cloro 2002)] may also be read the other way round, viz.
as the symbolic order’s being nothing else, but the mask of the death drive. The notion
of the Act (with capital A) of repetition as encounter with the Real behind an act of

6. symbolic consumption, as was put forward in Lacan’s later Seminar XI, affords to
legitimate this parallel inverse reading.
The syntagmatic ordering of the consumptive act of smoking may be further
complemented by the opening and closing of the mouth, which may be reduced to the
same principle of the encapsulation (or ‘freezing’ and enshrinement, preservation) in an
automatic act of the fleeting encounter with the elusive order of the Real. “What goes out
from the mouth comes back to the mouth, and is exhausted in that pleasure that I have
just called, by reference to the usual terms, the pleasure of the mouth” (Lacan 1998:
167-168). Behind what Lacan calls the ‘pleasure of the mouth’ lies the threat of the
inhaled smoke. The unconsciously repeated death drive is masked in the pleasurable
act of smoking or the Act of the death drive is enacted in the consumptive act of
smoking.
References
Cloro, J.P. (2002). Le vocabulaire de Lacan. Paris: Ellipses.
Forrester, J. (1990). The seductions of psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In Freud, S., Collected Works, Ivan
Smith 2006, pp. 3715-3762.
Lacan, J. (1998). Seminar XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. New
York: W.W.Norton.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.B. (1973). The Language of psychoanalysis. London:
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.