McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.
… psychoanalysis in fact represents a third way. Rather than championing life against death or insisting on death as the necessary limit on life, it focuses on the death that remains internal to life. This death within life is what Freud calls the death drive.
Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine … that uniqueness is the product of a primordial act of loss through which the subject comes into being. The subject emerges through the sacrifice of a privileged object that the act of sacrifice itself creates. This act is correlative to the acquisition of a name, which allows the subject to enter into a world of meaning and signification – a world that brings with it an indirect relation with the world of objects and with its privileged object.
With the acquisition of a name, the subject becomes a subject of loss.
The entire existence of the subject becomes oriented around its lost object, even though this object only comes into being through the subject’s act of ceding it. 236
This death that founds the subject creates in it a drive to return to the moment of loss itself because the originary loss creates both the subject and the subject’s privileged object. The only enjoyment that the subject experiences derives not from life nor from death but from the death-in-life that is the death drive.