During the 1950s and 1960s two thinkers, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Lacan, were conducting a "return to Freud" for very similar reasons. If the differences between them are often advertised, their affinities are less so. In this article, I examine how their "return to Freud" and fidelity to psychoanalysis serves as a common ground to read each in conjunction with the other. Specifically, the Freudian figure of the death drive marks a deep homology within Marcuse and his ethic of "The Great Refusal," with Lacan's notion of living in-between "two deaths." Reading each as the dialectical complement of the other, this article concludes by provocatively reversing Marcuse's thesis in "Eros and Civilization": "Today the fight for "death," the fight for "Thantos," is the political fight." (Contains 10 notes.)