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It is unlikely that the concepts Freud deploys in his collective psychology to bind psychoanalysis and culture together are sufficiently precise to be scientifically useful today. More precisely, the psychoanalytic critique of culture has probably been incorporated into our “critical culture” so that it now appears there more as something that needs to be explained rather than as something that explains it. To break this vicious circle we must trust in the speculative potential of the death drive. Not only does the “work of culture” ( Kulturarbeit) help to throw a different light on the chances of individuals faced with the deadly effects of social life, but a certain twisting inflicted on the very notion of the death drive opens up the perspective of thinking afresh about the Evil that is coming, and the present meaning of psychoanalysis in an evolving culture.