... to further my analysis of the pure experience of luxus, which exceeds any object that is always too base and objective to be truly luxurious, I seek to psychoanalyze Nero’s pursuit of the orgy of luxus through reference to Sigmund Freud’s discussion of Thanatos in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle...

..., for Foster, such “family friendly torture porn” or “apocotainment” is nothing but “televisual excrement” produced by and for a culture obsessed with death, not life, “dominated not by Eros, but by Thanatos . . . one of brutal fascistic pleasure, a culture at home with genocide, pain, death, torture...

... instinct. As intimated below, the mechanical repetition of factory discipline and its organization of labor as abstract simple labor power as exchange value align with repetition as symptom of Thanatos. The arithmetic model of the universe in technological rationality is then structurally homologous...

....” Random violence and hooliganism, however, are arguably driven by excessive rage and a nihilistic lust for destruction, theorized by Freud and Marcuse as Thanatos , thus fueling asocial behavior with strong impulses of both naked greed and aggression. 33 As with Breivik, the rioting young British...

... influence felt on the highest level of civilization. Trickster is the metaphorical figure in which elemental struggles of Eros and Thanatos (creative and destructive instincts), reason and passion, id and superego, civilized man and subhuman brute are still played out and unresolved. Trickster...

... feeling of middle-class social status as congenial but also to raise questions concerning luxus and other kinds of sociocultural primacy associated with Thanatos, or the death drive. Drawing on the psychoanalytical and philosophical writings of Sigmund Freud ([1920] 2001 ) and Georges Bataille ([1967...