Abstract

This paper aims to make an immanent critique of Freud's work. Its main hypothesis is that the anthropological Hobbesian concept of the state of nature, as the war of all against all, influences Freud and produces some critical impasses in his work: the impossibility to create a clinical practice beyond suggestion and the impossibility to think an atheist social bond, i.e., not regulated by guilt. To carry out this encounter between Freud and Hobbes, this paper resorts to Roberto Esposito's concept of paradigm of immunization. In this sense the paper shows, with Rene Girard's reading of Totem and Taboo, that the Freudian concept of sacrifice, far from appeasing the totemic law, produces it retroactively. The consequence of this inverted relationship between law an sacrifice has being characterize, by Esposito, as the inevitable thanatopolitical drift of modern liberalism: to preserve life, one has to sacrifice it; to preserve the law, one must found and re-found it with illegitimate violence. Therefore, once the work of Freud assumes the Hobbesian anthropological presuppositions, it remains trapped between the specter of the destructive return of the pre-social savage, and the superego law, which, although seems to be the only way to control the savage, in fact it perpetuates its violence and the need to repeat the sacrifice.