Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010
What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?
Žižek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive as a ‘self-sabotaging structure’ is what enables a break with the determinism of both our natural instincts and our ‘second nature’ in terms of the cultural dialectic of law and desire in service of the pleasure principle. This rupture with the normal run of things made possible by the death drive represents, as Žižek (PV 231) puts it, ‘the minimum of freedom’. So, according to Žižek, freedom in its most elementary form is a rupture, a break with determinism.
“I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me.” Thus, a free act is not simply what sets off a new causal sequence; rather it is the retroactive act of endorsing which causal sequence will determine me. 207
Žižek explains the retroactive character of this ‘second level reflexive causality’ through a useful opposition between what he terms the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’ and the notion of time displayed in a passage in Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion.
In the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’, possibilities precede their realization, whereas the Bergsonian notion of time is characterized by the assertion that an act (realization) retrospectively opens up its own possibility.
Rather than thinking of times as succeeding moments all loaded with multiple possibilities just waiting to be realized, according to the Bergsonian notion of time, an event only even becomes possible after it has happened, and so it is not determined by its past, rather it changes the past retrospectively by now appearing as a (realized) possibility. 207
In a brief excurse in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek offers two explanations for Badiou’s (mistaken) opposition to the notion of death drive. The first reason for Badiou’s reluctance is, according to Žižek, due to the fact that he relates the death drive to the ‘religious’ motif of finitude.
But, as we have just seen in the above, in Žižek’s view the death drive has nothing to do with the pathos of finitude and obsession with mortality, on the contrary. So, as Žižek (IDLC 395) puts it, “What Badiou misses here is the fact that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”
The second reason for Badiou’s dismissal of the death drive is, according to Žižek (IDLC 394), an all too crude opposition in Badiou’s (e.g. IT 62; D 91-92) philosophy between the rupture of the event as the introduction of genuine novelty and repetition as an obstacle for the rise of anything truly new.
As demonstrated by Adrian Johnston (2007d, 165) in an article on Žižek’s reading of Badiou, the heart of the matter in Žižek’s critique of Badiou’s hostility to the notion of death drive is not this hostility as such, but a more fundamental matter concerning the very core of Badiou’s theory of the subject, namely the question of how Badiou explains what makes a mere human animal, caught up in a life dictated entirely by its self-interests and desire, capable of suddenly taking the decision to be true to an event and thus becomes a subject of truth. Or, to put it in terms of Badiou’s Pauline formula of ‘not…but’:
What is it that enables the individual under the law to withdraw from (‘not’) the law, from the path of the flesh, in order to affirm (‘but’) the exception of the gracious event and thus becomes a subject, entering the path of the spirit? Žižek touches upon this matter in his extensive discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the differences between Badiou’s philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the section entitled ‘The Lacanian Subject’, Žižek (TTS 159) outlines what he takes to be the core of the matter:
“That is the difference between Lacan and Badiou: Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the positive establishment of a ‘new harmony’ […] while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity […] are
reduced to so many versions of ‘betrayal’ of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-event.” It is undoubtedly correct that Badiou, at least prior to Logics of Worlds, seems to describe any negative mode of relationship to an event as a disqualification for being a subject; that is, anyone who denies an event can of course never become a subject, and anyone who betrays his fidelity to an event is no longer a subject.
But, the question is, whether Badiou, as Žižek seems to imply, refuses negativity as such in regard to the subject. Nevertheless, Žižek (TTS 159) is completely right, when he in the succeeding paragraph states that: “This difference between Badiou and Lacan concerns the precise statusof the subject: Badiou’s main point is to avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive void of the structure […].” (BE 432; C 202-203; IT 86) Badiou has himself on more than one occasion declared this as the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and his own philosophy.
Žižek (TTS 159-160) elaborates further on this difference between Lacan and Badiou concerning the subject in the following way:
For Badiou […] the subject is consubstantial with a contingent act of Decision; while Lacan introduces the distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization: what Badiou […] describe[s] is the process of subjectivization – the emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event […] while the subject is the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the space of possible subjectivization.
In Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of the death drive […]
In other words, according to Žižek, Badiou wrongly equates the subject with the process of subjectivization, that is, to put it in Badiou’s terms, with the ‘operation’ of decision, fidelity and forcing by means of which we pass from being a mere human animal to becoming a subject of truth. What Badiou misses here is … the negative moment or dimension that grounds the decision to affirm the event, the dimension that makes it possible to engage in a fidelity to an event in the first place. And this dimension is precisely the self-sabotaging dimension of the death drive. (TTS 160)