An Interview with Slavoj Žižek “On Divine Self-Limitation and Revolutionary Love” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2004 ” Joshua Delpech-Ramey
And here is Ž man strictly talking to Trieb in Berlin March 6, 2009 at the ICI which is where the journal Cultural Inquiry originates.
But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.
Death Drive insists beyond life and death: Immortality
Undead [From Berlin lecture March 2009]
Negative Judgements –> Negate a predicate: He is not dead. He is alive.
Infinite Judgements –> Assert a non-predicate: He is undead (doesn’t mean alive). He’s alive as dead, living dead, a 3rd domain, an endless undead, an immortal domain emerges. This is the domain of drive.
The object of drive is not getting rid of tension but the reproduction of tension as such. What brings you satisfaction is not getting rid of tension but endless repetition of tension. A strange bad infinity.
The post-Hegelian moment: is this weird repetition for which in a way there is no place in Hegel. It is not the progressive circularity or bad spurious infinity. Kierkargard and Freud meet at the topic of repetition. Repetition that generates precisely NO AUFHEBUNG.
On the one hand Mature Marx refers to Hegel. in Grundrisse, is a postive one, Marx claims Hegel process is mystefied, but a formulation of emancipatory revolutionary process.
But later in Capital something changes, it’s more Capital itself that is formulated in terms of subject itself. With “capital” money passes from substance to subject. it becomes self-reproducing. It is endlessly repetitive as a drive. The whole goal of circulation is the reproduction/expansion of circulation itself. Marx says “capital works as an automatic subject.” It is a Hegelian subject but caught in this endlessly reproductive repetition. Thus Marx might have moved beyond Hegel here.
Another line of thought: Elevate Todestrieb into a key to understand German idealist “self-relating negativity”. Todestrieb has to be elevated to this kind of transcedental principle.
Hegel’s dialectics: The dialectic of necessity and contingency. The way Hegel is usually read according to usual doxa, Hegel admits of contingency but only as a moment of necessity, it externalizes itself in nature but then this contingency is aufhebung into necessity. Negative and contingency are allowed but as a tactical retreat. The Absolute is playing a game with itself. Ž says the reversal, it is not only necessity of contingency, global necessity realizes itself through multiple contingencies, but there is also Contingency of Necessity.
There is a contingent process of how necessity emerges out of contingency. The French, rational-choice theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Drew attention to “something contingently becomes necessary”. It’s contingent whether a thing happens or not, but once it happens, it happens necessarily.
A new event retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. An impossible event takes place, once it happens it is instantly domesticated and retroactively appears as possible and is naturalized.
First I saw the film, Billy Bathgate I was disappointed by the film. After I saw the film, I saw how the film missed the novel, the film was a bad copy. Then I read the novel, the novel was even worse. The very repetition creates the 3rd point of reference. 1+1=3. First you have a shitty novel, then a shitty film, the bad copy of the novel retroactively creates the possibility of how it could have been a good film or novel.
Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition: Deleuze gives the best explanation to death drive that Žižek has ever read. Paradox of Freud: the renunciation of enjoyment generates enjoyment in the very act of renunciation. You renounce desire, but then you get libidinally attached to the very rituals of renouncing desire.
Death drive in Deleuze’s reading is not a specific drive, it does this self-sabotaging thing. The space of desire is curved. You don’t go directly at it. Death drive is nothing but the transcendental principle of “lust principe” What is human sexuality formally? It is not simple pleasure. But pleasure got in the postponement and return and repetition … for example if I keep repeating the shaking of your hand I don’t let go, the very repetition eroticizes it in an obscene way. Death drive doesn’t have an autonomous reality, it is not, “I want pleasure but secretly I want to torture,” Death drive is this transcendental distortion which complicates my access to pleasure.
Ž disagrees strongly with Freud here on eros/thanatos and says Freud really backed away from his discovery. Žižek says this good constructive Eros versus bad destructive death drive (Todestrieb) is total bunk. Love is a catastrophe, it’s totally destructive. One point of obsession and everything is ruined, literally out of joint. Love is totally paradoxical focusing all of your life, the whole world is thrown out of balance, love is radically destabilizing. I’m passionately in love and ready to risk everything for it. Insistence on a particularity, you are ready to go to the end.
Antigone is pure death drive: I insist on this particular point I am ready to put at stake everything for it. Death drive is the ethics at its zero level. It resides in this paradoxical domain where good coincides with radical evil. A detailed reading of Kant and Schelling later work on religion. Kant proposes there the notion of radical evil. He steps back though. First he proposes to read radical evil as diabolical evil. If for Kant you can be good out of principle. Then why cannot you be evil out of principle? Not just good, but evil as well. But then the whole distinction between good and evil falls apart. You are evil without any pathological possibility, you are just evil.
Mozart’s Don Giovanni: Commandatore, tells Giovanni, repent. Giovanni knows he will die, Commandatore tries to save Giovanni, if yo urepent you will be saved in after life. From standpoint of rational calculus Giovanni should agree. But Giovanni says no. He acts out of pure fidelity to Evil. It’s not pathological, no personal gain. This is the greatness of Kant, he goes very far in this direction.
Death drive is the radical non-pathological evil, which is transcendental apriori of every possible form of goodness.
Kant withdraws, says we don’t have diabolical evil only radical evil which is simply a tendency of human nature which is not fulfilling your duty. But Lacan reads Kant with Sade. The point of Lacan, Sade is a Kantian. The Sadian imperative of unconditional jouissance, it goes beyond the pleasure principle. It’s non-pathological.
Sade proposes purely Kantian idea of ‘radical crime’ that doesn’t simply follow natural impulses, but a crime which breaks with the chain of natural causality, a crime literally against nature itself. Freedom that breaks the phenomenal chain of natural causality. The paradox that Kant and Schelling struggle with is this obscure domain where radical evil is apriori condition of goodness.
Antigone: you must have this radical excess of evil if you want to go to the end. From the sympathetic human point it is Ismene who is human warm, Antigone is an aggressive bitch. Creon is right, he basically says, if we publicly do the funeral old hatreds will explode again, we’ll fall into civil war. Antigone’s counter-argument is so what? It is pure insistance. It is just pure insistence, “I want, I want“.
Žižek wants to present another Antigone, where she succeeds and Creon lets her bury her brother, the whole city is ruined, the last scene Antigone “I was created for love not for hatred” where blood and death is now all around her.
Stalinist version: Antigone and Creon are fighting and Chorus intervenes like a committee for public safety and proclaims a popular dictatorship.
Death Drive as radical evil as a condition of goodness.
Shraing Illusions: We make fun of soemthing, denounce illusions as illusions, but nonetheless they work.
Ž mentions Logic of Capital School at beginning of part II.
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Point two: The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou.
[But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations. You can prove it only from his own position. Only for a finite being do you have this infinite work, what he likes to describe, in Christian terms, this trinity of faith, hope, love. Faith that the event did take place, hope in the final state (in Christianity universal redemption, in Marxism I don’t know, communism at the end) and love as work, as what is between the two, fidelity to the event and so on.
But . . . when in his last work, Badiou tries to articulate the structure of totalitarian danger, he calls “forcing the event,” which means simply to ontologize the event, as if the event were not an infinite process whose place you have to discern in reality, as if the event totally permits its irrealities.
But the gap between event and reality, that which is covered up by totalitarianism, is precisely the gap of finitude—so there is something missing at this level in Badiou.
[…] there is a certain dimension of Christianity which … is missed, I think, by Badiou, because of his overall view that there is no place for finitude, as for example in his critique of Heidegger where he misses the point. He even goes into this mode where being-toward-death is just the animal level of being threatened . . . although I don’t identify Heidegger’s being-toward death with death drive, Badiou is also missing that, because he cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.