Eros and Thanatos? not so fast…

Recently I came across a review by Slavoj Žižek of Catherine Malabou's latest book, and other than my growing interest in Malabou and the many things that Žižek has to say about this text (as yet available only in French) one thing jumped out at me. Why? Simply that Žižek manages to really nail an issue that I've always felt a bit uncomfortable about. Now firstly, for those who don't know, Freud never published anything wherein he called the death drive "Thanatos" - that term comes instead from Ernst Jones and purportedly Freud repeated it back to him in their correspondence, using it as Jones did as a synonym for the death drive. Be that as it may (I would like to see this correspondence myself), Freud does pose Eros against the death drive at one point & this is the problem. Malabou does not use the word "Thanatos" but I've been running into talk of Eros/Thanatos a good bit lately so it's on my mind. Here is Žižek:

So, ironically, when Malabou opposes Freud and Jung, emphasizing Freud's dualism of the drives against Jung's monism of (desexualized) libido, she misses the crucial paradox: it is at this point, when he resorts to the dualism of drives, that Freud is at his most Jungian, regressing to a premodern mythic agonism of opposite primordial cosmic forces. How then are we to grasp properly what eludes Freud and pushed him to take recourse in this dualism? When Malabou varies the motif that, for Freud, Eros always relates to and encompasses its opposite Other, the destructive death drive, she--following Freud's misleading formulations--conceives this opposition as the conflict of two opposed forces, not, in a more proper sense, as the inherent self-blockade of the drive: "death drive" is not an opposite force with regard to libido, but a constitutive gap that makes drive distinct from instinct (…), always derailed, caught in a loop of repetition, marked by an impossible excess. (…) Eros and Thanatos are not two opposite drives that compete and combine (as in eroticized masochism); there is only one drive, libido, striving for enjoyment, and "death drive" is the curved space of its formal structure.

Žižek, following Lacan's practice - or maybe it is Hegel's practice in his History of Philosophy - is taking the thinker in question (Freud) "more seriously than he took himself" that is, being more rigorous in uncovering and extending the most radical of his insights and not allowing him to slip back into weaker stop-gap positions like this cosmic yin-yang of opposed forces.