Everything that lives, dies. Equally – for it doesn't follow – everything that dies will have lived. Rather than being opposites, therefore, it's fairer to say that living and dying depend on each other, each the other's condition. Although we might think of death as standing at the end of life, as its destination or terminus, it had to be there from the start – life wouldn't have been able to get going unless it had agreed to come to an end. Life and death make up the two sides of a same coin – not two different coins – and, whichever is face up, they belong together.

So why, if everything that lives, dies, might death want a ‘drive’? If life will die anyway, why this supererogatory drive towards death? Even if it never steps on the gas at all, life will crash, and crash fatally; in fact, if it presses the brakes all the way, the same result ensues. For the living, death can't be avoided, so why append to it this apparently gratuitous force? Which isn't to assume we have any proof of a death drive, like we have proof of death. It's just a theory, a hypothesis or a speculation, and Sigmund Freud himself, with whom ‘the death drive’ is most closely associated and around whom this book is based, sought, even as he proposed it, to distance himself somewhat. Of the death drive, nothing empirically reliable may be said, and in this sense it can be waved away as superstition.