Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Contra Lacan, the sole dimension of one`s being to be sacrificed in a properly political gesture is the axis of individuality qua selfish, mortal animality; through this gesture, Badiou claims, an immortalization-effect transpires in which one thereby becomes a fragmentary moment of eternal justice for all, in which one fully lives. (In Logiques des mondes, Badiou defines true life as more than mere existence as a non-subjectifed person embedded within the statist transcendental regime of a truthless world; Ž is quite sympathetic to this Badiouian definition of what it is to live.) Rather than destroying one`s subjectivity, passing through the act (in this case, through answering the call of a political event) makes one into a more-than-finite, more-than-mortal subject. 156-157
Todestrieb, instead of designating something thoroughly bound up with the human animal`s physical finitude, is a psychoanalytic term referring to certain immortal, “metaphysical” facets of psychical being operating with a supreme, serene disregard for the finite, mortal animality of the human individual`s weak flesh. This death drive is a sort of “vanishing mediator,”… Todestrieb … is a name for subjectivity qua the void of a radical negativity irreducible to any and every form of positive inscription or representation, Ž insists on distinguishing between “subject” (as this negative X) and “subjectification” (in this case, Badiou’s subject-of-the-event as a positivized incarnation of an event-driven truth-trajectory — with Ž alleging this to be a secondary crystallization, at the level of inscriptions and representations, of the subject-as-void) serving as a precondition for the positive instantiations of event-revealed truths embodied and enacted by subjects-of-events (i.e., those “subjectified” by the interpellation of events). 156-157