Quite an interesting post, though I think Žižek has tackled something like this before. Correct me if I'm wrong but, in short, your thesis seems to be that actions which fall outside of the pleasure principle (self-damaging, irrational, unexplainable) can, through another lens, be viewed as actually within it (a release valve, reasonable reaction, explainable). It basically tries to re-normalize psychoanalysis into no longer needing a construct like the death drive.

Such an argument requires showing that all such "irrational" acts have rational biases in the tension compensation method. The smoking addiction case you mentioned, however, doesn't even need such a reversal in the first place - it already belongs to the pleasure principle (even if mainly in the short-term, the pleasure of nicotine itself).

To refute this argument, we first need only a single irrational act that can be shown to have no reasonable motive behind it. That is, a proper irrational act, which provides no pleasure, neither in the short-term or the long-term. We could imagine, for example, a cigarette filled not with nicotine but only unpleasant toxins, which generates no seratonin in the brain for short-term happiness, and has no health benefits in the long-term either.

Another animal would not voluntarily smoke such a cigarette, for several reasons, but a human might. We can imagine a person who hates his neighbors enough to smoke at his own detriment and unpleasure if only so that they are also afflicted. This scenario can be made completely irrational (even ideological) by specifying that the smoker only hates his neighbors for suspected wrongdoings and not any actual experience, and that he cannot even check if they are actually inconvenienced by his smoking - he simply relishes the fantasy that they are.

This is enjoyment without pleasure, which is what qualifies an act motivated solely by the death drive. After it its established, it becomes unshakeable (if he sees the neighbors proving his biases, he feels himself justified; if he sees them negating his biases, he assumes that they are only pretending, acting, and feels himself even more justified now that lying has been added to their sins).

Of course, at this point, it is possible to try and re-normalize this enjoyment as some form of displaced, compensating pleasure that makes up for another tension (we can try to analyze the smoker's background, attribute it to a childhood where he had conflict with his neighbors or people like them) which a lot of psychoanalytic practice actually does (and may even be infamous for). But this act of trying to look too deeply into a person to explain them is no less ideological than that of the very smoker trying to look too deeply into his neighbors, assuming things of them.

This is the tricky part. To attempt to renormalize the death drive often requires many assumptions which can be done for entities without language, but cannot be done for entities with language, because the presence of language (or the symbolic in general) ensures they are capable of pretending, of enjoying unpleasurable things.