In 1920, two books came out that seemed to divide the field of knowledge in half. On the one side, this world, i.e. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel. On the other side, the netherworld, whatever it may be, i.e. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an essay written by a mature and almost elderly Freud. Despite his age, Freud was also making a debut in his own way: no longer as a doctor (albeit of souls) but as a speculative philosopher. I insist on the word ‘speculative’ because it is crucial and appears at the exact midway point of the book, in the first line of the fourth of seven chapters: ‘What follows is speculation.’ What does Freud mean by this? Something very similar to what Kant means when he says that there is a fate of reason, a kind of disastrous or beneficial destiny that pushes it to go beyond the boundaries it has set itself.

In a book published the following year – Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, which like Freud's and Fitzgerald's works drew on material from the war (and in this case on imprisonment) – Wittgenstein concluded that on this theme of the limit one simply must remain silent. The philosopher thus inaugurated a sad and paradoxical era in which everyone, from physicists to bloggers, can speculate on the highest and most important systems (as they should) while philosophers have to be content with questions of detail that are mostly devoid of interest (and this is really unfair). This era is now coming to an end after a philosophical century that suffered greatly from this interdiction. Beyond the Pleasure Principle can serve as the viaticum for this new season of philosophy – let's not forget that some of the most remarkable philosophical expressions of the past century owe a great deal to Freud's little book. For example, Derrida dedicated a seminar to him which was published in 1980 under the (unsurprising) title ‘To Speculate on Freud.’

So what is speculation about? Death, of course, and a secondary effect of death that is particularly evident, pressing, needy, harassing – that is, life. For much of his reflection Freud was, despite himself, a monist and an optimist: drives are essentially linked to Eros, and therefore to life and its perpetuation. Pleasure is the way in which these drives express themselves, chasing us during the day and manifesting themselves in the night in our dreams.