Freud does not conceive of this outpouring of self, perceiving in its place an affirmation of inferiority and the consolation it offers to a feeble or tenuous ego. By Rolland’s approximation, however, the ‘oceanic’ is quite contrary to the desire for eternal self-preservation: it is a situation of intense contact and free vital upsurge, a state of constant flux opposed to the immortalization of the “I” and, as such, a limit of reason rather than its opposition.
Fort/Da
Following Rolland, Freud associates the ‘oceanic’ with religious sentiment, but I suspect it also shares profound affinities with Freud’s most speculative concept. Introduced nearly a decade earlier in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive marks a crucial turning point in the drive theory through the positing of an aim whose deferral sustains the entire psychic economy. And yet, despite the fact that he postulates the aim of the death drive as a restoration of a primordial situation of non-existence, Freud draws out no relation with the ‘oceanic.’ We might attribute this to his scepticism on the matter or to the fact that he associates the ‘oceanic’ with psychic content of some sort whereas death, he maintains, has no place in the unconscious.Still, the unboundedness of the ‘oceanic’ – wherein the individual is no longer discernable as such – also seems to connote a collapse or dispersion of the ego and its objects. However in the place of the “zero” associated with the death drive, it describes a situation of pre-ambivalent fullness or oneness.
It would seem that here, in the absence or dissolution of its object and mode of inquiry, the enterprise of Freudian psychoanalysis begins to disintegrate. But I would argue that such a disintegration is not a mark of theoretical failure, but a position in and of itself. The irrepresentability of death need not present a fixed limit. Rather, we might take this irrepresentability as death’s characteristic feature: a situation of silence or impossible closure accessible only as the forfeiting of language and subjectivity, that is to say the forfeiting of individuality as a function of difference. In other words, the loss of the discursive subject can only be articulated as the impossibility of articulation.