Dean, Jodi. “Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics, Economy, Sovereignty, and Capture” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. number 2, 2010. 2-15.
The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained (Žižek 2000: 291). In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process of not reaching it. Failure (the thwarting of the aim, the missing of the goal) provides its own sort of success insofar as one cannot not enjoy. Such failure or thwarting is key to sublimation, itself premised on the providing of the drive with a satisfaction different from its aim (Lacan 1997: 111).
In drive, one doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive.
Explaining the difference between desire and drive via Lacan’s objet a, Žižek adds a second feature to the notion of drive, namely, loss.
He writes: ‘Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,
while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself – in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss” – the gap, cut, distance – itself.’ (Žižek 2008: 328). Drive is a kind of compulsion or force. And it’s a force that is shaped, that takes its form and pulsion, from loss. Drive is loss as a force or the force loss exerts on the field of desire.
A third feature of drive important for the argument here is Lacan’streatment of drive as ‘a will to create from zero, a will to begin again’ (Lacan 1997: 213). Even as the drive is destructive, ‘a challenge to everything that exists,’ it is also an opening to something new. Dolar extends the idea of drive as creative destruction to the political, positioning drive as a force of negativity that makes politics possible (Dolar 2009).
[Drive is] an excess that subverts all attempts to reduce politics to the proper arrangement of subjects and institutions, drive prevents an order from permanently stabilizing or closing in upon itself. It marks the crack in the social that opens the way to politics.
For Dolar, then, psychoanalysis contributes to political theory a view of politics as necessarily a dis-locating, a shifting of relations, rather than only or primarily an ordering and its reproduction.
The very attempt to inhibit sovereign power, to reduce sovereignty’s domain by treating the market as an autonomous site of truth with laws immune to sovereign direction, enables the intensification and spread of biopolitics. Biopolitics is thus a by-product of the limitation of sovereignty, a set of mobilized effects of its interiorized critique, limitation, and redirection. Biopolitics takes its form as the loss of sovereign political power, more specifically, in the circumscription of the authority of the people as a collective who thereby come to be passively rendered as the population, a target of multiple, shifting interventions. Drive enables us to understand how it is that the people are captured in the population, a capture that neoliberalism amplifies and extends.
A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a common but not a whole and not a unity, makes use of the distinction between desire and drive. The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, as an active common.
The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.