Hi! I've (finally) had a chance to give this a closer look, and I think I'm more or less in agreement with you about a lot of things here.
Firstly, I totally agree that pragmatism is the right framework for thinking through the thought-world relationship, in the sense that it rejects the premise shared by (modernist) universalism and (postmodernist) scepticism - i.e. that the credibility of knowledge depend on the authority of the view-from-nowhere. I always liked this point made by Rorty: for the pragmatist, to say that we can never get at the world except through our (culturally conditioned) conceptual frameworks is no more insightful than to say that elephants grasp things with their trunks. It's not false, but the truth is trivial - all it means is we have to start from where we are.
That said, I do think there may be something of value left in metaphysics as an activity, if only because it seems to be something we can't not do - i.e. we're doing it implicitly all the time anyway. So perhaps what a good metaphysics would do is tell us what it is we're doing when we describe things as real or use the copula (which may not be what we think we're doing). In pragmatic terms, I tend towards the view that our use of the concept of reality is deeply entwined with the social constitution of value, and so to do metaphysics is in a sense to always also be doing a kind of transcendental sociology (but I may have just overdosed on Baudrillard).
Anyway, the point being that while I do think there's some value in metaphysics I also think that these sort of Spooky New Ontology moves can be a little thin without some detailed analysis of what they might actually mean in practice. Like, I can fully understand the rise of new materialism/speculative realism/OOO etc as a response to the perceived idealism of postmodernism. It makes total sense to say "hey, if the world is just cultural projection then that means we can never surprise ourselves" - a metaphysical characterisation of postmodernism which I think actually maps quite well onto the economic/semiotic structure of the postmodern condition - "so we should return to matter as the outside of culture, the source of unanticipated potentials and undecidable futures." Which is fine - but... without mapping this onto an economic/semiotic strategy it can just seem a bit empty and faddish. I think that's perhaps what you're getting at too.
On the Eros-Thanatos point, I wonder if it might be helpful to tunnel into the interpretation of this a little. One thing I'm always keen to stress when talking about this is the kind of reciprocity I have in mind is absolutely not the cyclical exchange of certain affects with their opposites, as if the exchange between Eros and Thanatos was about having a balanced diet of vibes, like, I dunno, for every night you spend getting loose at the main stage you have to do a few hours in the healing fields. This is just the unchecked liberation of affect again, except rather than Stein's hippies or Land's terminators this time the aesthetic polarity keeps switching - to me this just looks like the cultural logic of capitalism.
Insofar as Thanatos negates Eros it is a negation of affect as such. And the true negation of affect is not another affect, but a rule - the higher principle which inhibits it. As I see it, the re-inclusion of Thanatos is equivalent to the reinstatement of the normative. (In my latest post I've tried to argue that this is best viewed as a technical problem before it is viewed as a spiritual one.) There's a point of convergence here with Kant's idea that we achieve autonomy not by being free from constraint so that we can act on every desire we have, but in our capacity to bind ourself to a rule which may conflict with and override our primary impulses and whims - in this sense we achieve the material capacity to act on higher desires, on e.g. moral commitments and political visions.
I think maybe this could dovetail with your point that the transcendental subject is worth holding onto. And also with your final metaphor - this idea that the act of love is not so much the experience of or acquiescence to a feeling, but rather the (quite possibly very painful) inhibition of that feeling for the higher principle: the preservation of one another's autonomy.
That was a long-winded way of agreeing with you - can be helpful to triangulate points in different ways, I think. Certainly helpful for me!
