According to Derrida (1987) for instance, the only means of expressing the death drive, in psychic life as well as textual performance, is through the postponement of any conclusion. In “To Speculate – On Freud,” he proposes that the nature of the dynamic between the life and death drives, though not explicitly stated, is written into Beyond… through the textual movements by which Freud expresses the interdependence of the drives without ever positing it as such. According to Derrida, the text performs the impossibility of arriving at a destination as each example and explanation of the death drive given by Freud confounds itself and forces the text to begin again. But this is by no means intended as a criticism. Quite the contrary: it is this “diabolical” movement that allows the text to approach the subject at all, offering a conclusion of sorts precisely by not offering it as such. Therefore, according to Derrida, the thesis is actually the absence or deferral of a thesis – its athesis – as found in the unsettling rhythm of the text: the case for the repetition compulsion, itself caught in an interminable repetition.
Freud cautions the reader, qualifying what he attempts to put forth in Section IV of Beyond… as “speculation, often far-fetched speculation” (24). Derrida however defends speculation as a peculiar intellectual operation, radically different from hypothesis, theory, or observation in that it reflects a certain “aimlessness” of thought. But perhaps aim-inhibition would be more precise. Freud touches on this mechanism briefly in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), in which he puts forth the preliminary drive theory that is radically revised with the publication of Beyond… five years later. He describes as aim-inhibited those “processes which are allowed to make some advance towards instinctual satisfaction but then are inhibited or deflected” (122). Although Freud has not yet introduced the death drive at this point, he has clearly considered the idea of partial satisfaction of an aim-inhibited drive perpetuated through repetition, as also suggested by his 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating, Working-Through.” Like the libidinal and self-preservative drives later to be grouped under a common life principle, Freud’s theory itself seems to be demanding the death drive – a ‘first and final drive’ whose aim (i.e. ultimate satisfaction in the complete reduction of tension) is both thwarted and sustained by the life drives through which it seeks partial satisfaction, the