Throughout our analysis of Anti-Oedipus, Freud has played a pivotal role in highlighting what is unique in Deleuze and Guattari's argument. Deleuze and Guattari have consistently argued that psychoanalysis gives accurate assessments of the unconscious and desire. They also argue that the recoding of desire that takes place within the family under Oedipal constraints, and within society as a whole under capitalist constraints, is what makes Freud's theory so powerful. Where Deleuze and Guattari disagree with psychoanalysis, however, is the extent to which the recodings described by Freud are universal. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Oedipus is not universal, but the specific result of a historical process. What I would like to do in this chapter is show that the same argument applies to the death instinct as Freud describes it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This reinscription of the death instinct within history will allow us to reexamine Hegel's and Heidegger's conceptions of death.

Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle by examining an assumption of psychoanalysis, ‘that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle’. This assumption, however, is flatly contradicted by an even cursory examination of experience. ‘The most that can be said, therefore, is that there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency toward pleasure.’