The moment I came up with the obnoxious title for this review a little voice chirped in my head and said, "You need to kill yourself." I guess that's eros and "renunciation" in a nutshell. One part of me, like a baby, wants to smear my shit over the entire world until the boundary between me and the world dissolves. Another part, which is actually the voice of my mom scolding me when I was two, tells me that if I desist from literally smearing my shit on the world, I can enjoy the mild euphoria of metaphorically doing so by clogging a white porcelain screen with black letters. This is starting to sound all Sam Kriss-like...

Anyway, this is another classic whose ideas have seeped into the mainstream, so I'll just mention a few things I found interesting.

The first is that, almost a century later, this text is still very disquieting and radical in its implications. One of the things that I think attracted Mark Fisher to Freud is the way he thought his arguments through to logical conclusions that contravene our intuitions and disturb us; like, imagine how insane the idea of the "death drive," a secret wish to die, must have seemed when Freud started to propound it. So here he'll hit on the brilliant but pessimistic thesis that conscience, our better angel, is actually the after-effect of the renunciation of our aggression, a testament less to natural morality than the very unnatural penning in of our desire to fuck, consume, destroy, embrace, etc.

The other thing I liked about this book is the way it reads as if Freud were feeling his way forward in real time, leaving in the chapters all kinds of dead ends and offhand speculations for us to fondle; for instance, I'm not sure if it's been often noted that the famous "oceanic feeling" is mentioned often at the start but then dropped altogether, leaving it up to us to connect his later chapters back to that initial framework. And there's some wild stuff in the footnotes, like a suggestion that the origin of repression came when we "decided" to stand on two feet, thereby exposing our genitals to each other, which also has something to do with our transition from a dog- or pig-like olfactory-based libido to a visually-based one (?). Or another where he speculates the famous Promethean founding of civilization by taming fire originates in someone's renunciation of the obvious sexual pleasure of putting fires out by pissing on them, thereby giving fire a faint subconscious erotic-urinary connotation (???).

All in all, a very strong argument for the recreational use of cocaine.