The instinct to strive for survival is built into the aim for mastery of environment. Every lifeform needs to manage its environment, from the basics of moving towards light to photosynthesize to hunting prey or synthesizing genetic vaccines and/or nuclear weapons.
Mastery of environment is the base drive. Once it is operational, survival follows without further volition. As the base drive, the drive for mastery is quite tricky. It is largely unconscious and has a flip-side. Obsessive compulsive behaviour arises from this drive, because the drive for mastery really is obsessive and compulsive, only usually that's a good thing, not pathological like OCD. For example, the urge to master a puzzle can become problematic when it interferes with other tasks. It can easily get out of control because of its unconscious dimension.
In life, the drive to master environment can spill over into invading others' environments. Whether this is called pathological or fair-game warrior behaviour is a moot point. Freud wrote about the (obsessive) repetition compulsion and Thanatos, the death (war) drive. Derrida took Freud's theories further in The Postcard, specifically in the essay To Speculate--on "Freud", an extended commentary on Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the essay Derrida concluded that Freud's death drive is the flip-side of the life drive and drew equivalences to Nietzsche's Will to Power.
Here is a quote from To Speculate--on "Freud". It's rather late in the essay so a lot of context is lost. Nevertheless, some flavour :-
Now, if such a drive for power exists, if it sees itself attributed a
specificity, then it indeed has to be admitted that it plays a very
original role in the most "meta-conceptual," "metalinguistic,"
precisely the most "dominant" organization of Freudian discourse. For
it is indeed within the code of power, and this is not only
metaphorical, that the problematic is lodged. It is always a question
of knowing who is the "master," who "dominates," who has "authority,"
to what point the PP [pleasure principle] exercises power, how a drive
can become independent of it or precede it, what are the relations of
service between the PP and the rest, what we have called the prince
and his subjects, etc. The "posts" are always posts of power. And
power is exercised according to the network of posts. There is a
society of drives, whether or not they are communally possible, and in
the passage to which we have just referred (chapter VI), the dynamics
of sadism are dynamics of power, dynamics of dynasty: a component
drive must come to dominate the entirety of the body driven, and must
subject this body to its regime; and if this suceeds, it is with the
aim of exercising the violence of its domination over the object. And
if this desire to dominate is exercised within as well as without, if
it defines the relation to oneself as the relation to the other of the
drives, if it has an "original" root, then the drive for power can no
longer be derived. Nor can postal power. In its autoheterology, the
drive for postal power is more originary than the PP and independent
of it. But it equally remains the only one to permit the definition
of a death drive, and for example an original sadism. In other words,
the motif of power is more originary and more general than the PP, is
independent of it, is its beyond. But it is not to be confused with
the death drive or the repetition compulsion, it gives us with what to
describe them, and in respect to them, as well as to a "mastery" of
the PP, it plays the role of transcendental predicate. Beyond the
pleasure principle—-power. That is, posts. But even so, we will not
say, despite the transcendental function to which we have just
alluded, beyond the death drive-—power—-or posts. For it is equally
the case that everything described under the heading of the death
drive or the repetition compulsion, although proceeding from a drive
for power, and borrowing all its descriptive traits from this drive,
no less overflows power. This is simultaneously the reason and the
failure, the origin and the limit of power. There is power only if
there is a principle or a principle of the principle. The
transcendental or meta-conceptual function belongs to the order of
power. Thus there is only différance of power. Whence the posts.
Beyond all conceptual oppositions, Bemächtigung indeed situates one of
the exchangers between the drive to dominate as the drive of the
drive, and the "will to power."
(The Postcard, 1987, pages 404-405)
My comments are echoed in Robert Trumbull PhD dissertation, online here:
Derrida, Freud, Lacan: Resistances
The death drive ... is Freud’s attempt to envision a force present in
the living, but antithetical to life, a drive opposed to the drives
that sustain organic life. At the same time, Freud views this death or
destruction drive as a type of aggressivity central to the formation
culture. Tracking Derrida’s thinking on the death drive across his
work, I demonstrate how this figure and the notion of “life death” it
suggests come to be at the center of Derrida’s engagement with Freud.
Through close readings of Derrida’s work, I trace how he reads Freud’s
writing against itself, locating there something Freud himself does
not entirely think through.
