Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.
The problem of the infinite is not how to attain it but, rather, how to get rid of its stain, a stain that ceaselessly pursues us. The Lacanian name for this parasitism is enjoyment [jouissance]. 249
The death drive is not a drive that aims at death. It aims neither at life nor at death. The drive can be ‘mortal’ precisely because it is indifferent to death (as well as to life); because it is not preoccupied with death, because death does not interest it. … it is indifferent to death. 250
How, then, does the infinite parasitize the finite, our existence as ‘finite beings’ ?
there are two modes of this parasitism, each of them resulting in a different figure of the infinite: first, there is the infinite of desire, which might be described as a ‘bad infinity’
there is the infinite of jouissance (linked to the logic of the Real, and of the realization). Ethics itself can be situated in the passage from the one to the other.
This passage, however, can itself take two different paths.
The paradigm of the first is indicated by the figure of Antigone, and brings out the co-ordinates of ‘classical ethics’ .
The paradigm of the second is evident in the figure of Sygne de Coûfontaine, and constitutes what we might call ‘modern ethics’. 250