Freud’s trope of the ‘beyond’: On conditions, critique, and violence

Through an engagement with the notions of metapsychology and the death drive as presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this paper explores the significance and different dimensions of Freud’s trope of the ‘beyond’. Against readings that reduce it to a questioning of the dominance of the pleasure principle and the introduction of an opposing principle, the death drive, I propose to understand the ‘beyond’ as (1) the transcendental condition of possibility of psychic life and (2) the occasion to articulate a critique of violence, where violence is understood to entail the foreclosure or erasure of the ‘beyond’.