Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010.
Freud formulated his thesis on the death drive precisely in response to phenomena which could not be explained on the basis of the ‘pleasure principle’, phenomena that were ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, and its directive of self-preservation. In Žižek’s (CWZ 61) words:
“In trying to explain the functioning of the human psyche in terms of the pleasure principle, reality principle and so on, Freud became increasingly aware of a radical non-functional element, a basic destructiveness and excess of negativity, that couldn’t be accounted for. And thatis why Freud posed the hypothesis of death drive.”
How did man go from being a mere animal to a being of language bound by the symbolic order? How was the passage from a natural into a civil or cultural state brought about? The answer given by classical Political Philosophy is of course the famous narrative of the ‘social contract’.
But in Žižek’s (FTKN 205) view this is an inconsistent explanation insofar that “[…] the fiction of a ‘social contract’ presupposes in advancewhat is or should be its result, its final outcome – the presence of individuals who act according to rules of a civilized rational order […].” According to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 206), the passage from a natural to a cultural state cannot be accounted for in terms of a smooth continuous transition, something has to intervene between these two states. What the evolutionary narratives of social contract silently presuppose is, according to Žižek (TTS 36), a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ which is neither nature nor culture. So, what is this vanishing mediator? 193
Man did not become what he is through a “[…] spark of logos magically conferred on Homo sapiens[…].” Instead, Žižek’s (CWZ 80) claim is that the transition from nature to culture is enabled by a ‘malfunction’, a failure, in nature itself. As he (CWZ 65) puts it in one of his conversations with Glyn Daly: “We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong innature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize.”
As the last part of the quote suggests, and as Žižek (TTS 37) explicitly underlines in his discussion in The Ticklish Subject, the symbolic order of law (culture) is thus not, as it is usually asserted, aimed at controlling our natural instincts and inclination (nature) but, rather directed against something in us which is not natural, namely this moment of thoroughly derailed, malfunctioning, denaturalized ‘nature’.
Indeed in the effort to domesticate this malfunctioning (de)nature “[…] man’s natural propensities are, rather, on the side of moral law against the excess of ‘unruliness’ that threatens his well-being” (TTS 37). As Žižek (TTS 289) emphasizes later in the same book, one should never forget that the law is ultimately in the service of the ‘pleasure principle’ which dictates our daily functioning in accordance with the upholding of our welfare; that is to say, the law is not opposed to our natural instincts as it is claimed in the standard story of ‘nature versus culture’, rather the law and the natural instincts are united in their attempt to constrain the derailed (de)nature of man endangering his self-preservation.
This mediating moment of malfunction, this intersection between nature and culture, which made possible the transition between these two states, only to ‘vanish’ under the domesticating reign of symbolic law and the ‘pleasure principle’, is, according to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 207; CWZ 65), nothing less than the emergence of the (death) drive.