Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010
In … in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, there has been an unfortunate tendency to translate both ‘drive’ (Trieb) and ‘instinct’ (Instinkt) as instinct (Evans 2010, 46). However, as Žižek (like many others before him) repeatedly insists, we must not ignore this important distinction made by Freud. ‘Instincts’ have to do with biological needs such as the need to eat or the need to propagate. Another key feature is that instincts are relatively fixed and directly related to their objects (Evans 2010, 85). Furthermore, and most importantly, an instinct can be satisfied, for instance by eating or copulating, thus once a need is fulfilled the instinct finds peace (OB 94). In contrast to biological instincts, ‘drives’ are not directly bound to a specific object. As Dylan Evans (2010, 46, cf. OB 93-94) puts it: “The drives differ from biological needs in that they can never be satisfied, and do not aim at an objectbut rather circle perpetually around it.”
Moreover, as Žižek also importantly explains in his discussion of the neurosciences, the possibility condition for the death drive to emerge is the not-All character of reality itself. It is the incompleteness of being/nature that makes possible its own derailing/malfunctioning. As Adrian Johnston (2007d, 8) puts it in his review of the book: “Relatively early in The Parallax View, Žižek appeals […] to a notion of being as shot through with holes and void; […] This perforation of being provides the minimal opening needed for the introduction of the psychoanalytic motif of conflict into ontology itself […].”
Another serious mistake in the reception of the notion of death drive is, according to Žižek, to read it in terms of Freud’s own dualistic framework of Thanatos and Eros as part of a conflict between two different forces. As he stresses in his discussion of Catherine Malabou’s book Les nouveaux blesséson Freud and neuroscience: “When Malabou varies the motif that, for Freud, Eros always relates to and encompasses its opposite Other, the destructive death drive, she […] conceives this opposition as the conflict of two opposed forces, not, in a more proper sense, as the inherent self-blockade of the drive: ‘death drive’ is not an opposite force with regard to libido, but a constitutive gap which makes drive distinct from instinct […].” For a reading inline with the one suggested by Žižek see Gilles Deleuze (2004, 18-19) Difference and Repetition.
according to Žižek (SOI 4): “[…] we have to abstract Freud’s biologism: ‘death drive’ is not a biological fact, but a notion indicating that the human psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automatism of repetition beyond the pleasure-seeking, self-preservation, accordance between man and his milieu.” 196
The inaccessible object becomes an ‘obsession’, something to which the rat is excessively attached, something to which it returns again and again seeking to obtain it. According to Žižek (OB 94), it is exactly this ‘closed loop’ of perpetual repetition of the same failed gesture which characterises the drive. It is this gesture of ‘stubborn attachment’ that makes man the maladaptive animal;
or, as Žižek (PV 231) underscores in The Parallax View: […] we should bear in mind the basic anti-Darwinian lesson of psychoanalysis repeatedly emphasized by Lacan: man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs. At its most radical, ’being-human’ consists in an ‘uncoupling’ from immersion in one’s environs, in following a certain automatism which ignores the demands of adaptation—this is what the ‘death drive’ ultimately amounts to. […]
‘death drive’ as a self-sabotaging structure represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior uncoupled from the utilitarian-survivalist attitude.
Although man is thus in a certain sense determined by a malfunction, a failure to adapt to his surroundings, it is, as implied in the last part of the quote, also (though it might seem counter-intuitive) this very mal-adaptive automatism of the death drive that due to its ‘uncoupling’ from the normal run of things, grounds a break with determinism and thus enables a genuine act of freedom 197