Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010
It is this thrust to go (on) beyond biological life (and death) that Žižek (PV 62) identifies with human immortality: “The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s 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.”
Thus, in the most basic sense, what the strange assertion of immortality of man frequently advanced by Žižek in his more recent work refers to is this unnatural urge to live life in an excessive way beyond biological self-preservation, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, towards something which cannot be reduced to mere biological life. 199
Thus, paradoxically, in Žižek’s view the automatism of the death drive does not designate an additional kind of natural function determining the cause of man, rather it designates a dimension of autonomy in man that since Descartes has been associated with the term ‘subject’. 199
In his discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the transition from nature to culture, Žižek (TTS 37) underlines … the role of the law (culture) is, in service of the ‘pleasure principle’, to pacify, not man’s natural instincts, but “[…] his excessive love for freedom, his natural ‘unruliness’, which goes far beyond obeying animal instinct […]”, or in short, the death drive.
The law does this by prohibiting the object to which the drive is excessively attached, which forces open the closed loop of the drive, replacing the continuous circulation around one object with a successive movement from one substitute object to another.
Another way to put it is that the law’s prohibition of the object introduces a lack which constitutes what Lacan terms the metonymy of desire; that is, the infinite sliding from one substitute object to another, driven by the loss of the original object, which is in fact nothing but is own lack.
Desire, as the endless transgressing thrust toward the ‘Thing’ (Lacan’s term for the lost/forbidden object of desire), is therefore not prior to the law, but, as Paul already knew, instituted by the law itself (HTRL 42; Evans 2010, 99).
The law is thus not aimed at regulating man’s desire, rather desire is a product of the law’s attempt to regulate the drives and thus in a certain sense part of this regulation.
The metonymy of desire is furthermore sustained by the fantasy fostered by the law that the ‘Thing’ is not really impossible (nothing but lack), but merely forbidden, and that it therefore at some point will be possible to obtain it; or in short, the fantasy that desire might actually be satisfied. But, as Žižek (AF 80) underlines: “desire is […] always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want.
What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.”