| Abstract: | AbstractThe essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction. |
