Beyond the pleasure principle is not, as one might tend to think, an ex negativo definition of the reality principle. Beyond the pleasure principle lies not reality, but death, or rather: the death drive. What Freud thus tried to circumscribe by negation - as if it were impossible to positively define the death drive by saying what it is, rather than what it is not -, with the formula "beyond the pleasure principle" is a drive that is pure negation itself; a drive that paradoxically persists on the complete extermination of life, and thus itself.
The German word Jenseits finally - and probably not coincidentally - is a synonym for the hereafter; or rather: it is a topographical metaphor (designating a space rather than a time) for whatever lies beyond death.
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