All the salient features of Antoinetta Angelidi’s film Thief or Reality (2001) converge on a contemplation of death. The references are abundantly clear in the film: death as a ritual in reference to the afterlife and religion; death as loss of a loving person; death as free will in suicide. However, the controversial concept of the death instinct, inaugurated by Sigmund Freud in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), indicates a new perspective in the aesthetic analysis of Angelidi’s film: death as life, the dynamic of destruction.

From a Freudian point of view, death is more than just a biological outcome antagonistic to life. It is identified as a destructive instinct that ‘works subtly as a force inside us’, so as to reach an earlier inorganic state of minimum excitation. From this perspective, the death instinct represents a conservative force that opposes change. Furthermore, Freud was compelled to say that as ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’, then it seems that ‘the aim of life is death’. Life ‘is regarded as only a circuitous route to death’, a type of evolutionary detour. Teresa de Lauretis regards the conception as a paradox. ‘In the “circuitous path to death”, the human drives to self-preservation, selfassertion and mastery, which appear to us as the guardians of life moving us towards change and progress, actually work in the service of death.’ Moreover, Freud goes as far as to declare that ‘the pleasure principle seems to serve the death instincts’. It is not easy to unravel the contradictions of this paradox. It amounts to saying that ‘only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts – Eros and the death instinct – never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life’.