Category: drive

zizek on malabou descartes malabranche autism

Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” Filozofski vestnik. 29. 2 (2008): 9-29.
Žižek. S. “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou’s Les Nouveaux Blessés.” Qui Parle. 17.2 (2009): 123–147.
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Catherine Malabou Replies to Žižek

In the new form of subjectivity (autistic, indifferent, without affective engagement), the old personality is not “sublated” or replaced by a compensatory formation, but thoroughly destroyed — destruction itself acquires a form, becomes a (relatively stable) “form of life” – what we get is not simply the absence of form, but the form of (the) absence (of the erasure of the previous personality, which is not replaced by a new one).

More precisely, the new form is not a form of life, but, rather, a form of death – not an expression of the Freudian death drive, but, more directly, the death drive. 15

does she not forget to include herself, her own desire, into the observed phenomenon (of autistic subjects)? in an ironic reversal of her claim that the autistic subject is unable to enact transference, it is her own transference she does not take into account when she portrays the autistic subject’s immense suffering. This subject is primordially an enigmatic impenetrable thing, totally ambiguous, where one cannot but oscillate between attributing to it immense suffering and blessed ignorance.

What characterizes it is the lack of recognition in the double sense of the term: we do not recognize ourselves in it, there is no empathy possible, AND the autistic subject, on account of its withdrawal, does not enact recognition (it doesn’t recognize US, its partner in communication). 17

Ž begin at the beginning pt 1

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capi­talism contain antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? 212

Žižek, Slavoj. “How to Begin from the Beginning.” The Idea of Communism. Eds. Costas Douzinas, and Slavoj Žižek, New York: Verso, 2011. 209-226.  Print.

There are four such antagonisms:

  1. the looming threat of ecological catastrophe,
  2. the inappropriateness of the notion of  private prop­erty for so-called ‘intellectual property’,
  3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments(especially in biogenetics),
  4. new forms of apartheid,new Walls and slums.   212-213

There is a qualitative difference between the last feature — the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included — and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call the ‘commons’, the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should also, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

— the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of ‘cognitive’ capital, primarily language, our means of communication and educa­tion, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. (if Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would liter­ally own the software texture of our basic network of communication);

— the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

— the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of human­ity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

… one should give all weight to the terms ‘global citizenship’ and ‘common concern’ — the need to establish a global politi­cal organization and engagement which, neutralizing and channelling market mechanisms, expresses a properly communist perspective.

Today’s historical situation not only does not compel us to drop the notion of proletariat, of the proletarian position — on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination.

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content.  213

For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of differ­ent agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians having ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being makes us all in a way proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.

The figure of the ‘part of no-part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure — in a way, we are all excluded, from  nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all poten­tially a homo sacer,and the only way to defend against actually becoming so is to act preventively.  214

There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. 214

Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.

The only way for the global capi­talist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution, will be to reinvent some kind of social­ism — in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatever. The future will be communist… or socialist. 214

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the last antagonism, the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included, and the other three: it is only the reference to the Excluded that justi­fies the term communism. There is nothing more ‘private’ than a State community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance.

In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one: without it, all others lose their subversive edge. 214-215

  1. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development,
  2. intellectual property into a complex legal challenge,
  3. biogenetics into an ethical issue.

One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confront­ing the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.

Whats more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only private’ concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. 215

In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire. 215

death drive in the early middle late Lacan barred subject vs. subject positions

Žižek, Slavoj. “Zizek_TheLacanianReal_Television” The Symptom 9 Summer 2008.

That’s why the Stalinist victim is the perfect example of the difference between the sujet d’énoncé (subject of the statement) and the sujet d’énonciation (subject of the enunciating). The demand that the Party addresses to him is: “At this moment, the Party needs the process to consolidate the revolutionary gains, so be a good communist, do a last service to the Party and confess.”

Here we have the division of the subject in its purest form: the only way for the accused to confirm himself as a good communist at the level of the sujet d’énonciation, is to confess, i.e., to determine himself, at the level of the sujet d’énoncé, as a traitor.

Ernesto Laclau was perhaps right when he once remarked that it isn’t only Stalinism which is a language-phenomenon; it is already language itself which is a Stalinist phenomenon. 2

Here, however, we must carefully distinguish between this Lacanian notion of the divided subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In “post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to subjection.

He is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by, the pre-subjective process (of “writing,” of “desire,” etc.), and the accent is put on different modes of how individuals “experience,” “live,” their positions as “subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process.

For example, it is only at a certain point in European history that the author of works of art, a painter or a writer, began to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work, is giving expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to articulate the different modes of how individuals assume their subject-positions.

But with Lacan, we have quite another notion of the subject. To put it in a simple way: if we abstract, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals “live” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled out with this richness; and this original void, this lack of the symbolic structure is the subject, the subject of the signifier.

The subject is therefore to be strictly opposed to the effect of subjectivation: what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject.

Our predominant idea of the subject is, in Lacanian terms, that of the “subject of the signified,” the active agent, the bearer of some signification who is trying to express himself in the language. The starting point of Lacan is, of course, that the symbolic representation represents the subject always in a distorted way, that it is always a displacement, a failure, i.e., that the subject cannot find a signifier which would be “his own,” that he is always saying less or too much, in short: something other than what he wanted, intended to say.

The usual conclusion from this would be that the subject is some kind of interior richness of meaning which always exceeds its symbolic articulation: “language cannot express fully what I’m trying to say…”

The Lacanian thesis is its exact opposite: this surplus of signification masks a fundamental lack. The subject of the signifier is precisely this lack, this impossibility to find a signifier which would be “his own”: the failure of his representation is a positive condition.

The subject tries to articulate himself in a signifying representation, and the representation fails; instead of a richness we have a lack, and this void opened by the failure is the subject of the signifier.

To put it in a paradoxical way: the subject of the signifier is a retroactive effect of the failure of his own representation; that’s why the failure of representation is the only way to represent him adequately. 3-4

It is at the level of this difference between the two deaths, of this empty place in the very heart of the Other, that we must locate the
problematic of the death drive.

The connection between the death drive and the symbolic order is a constant with Lacan, but we can  differentiate the various stages of his teaching precisely by reference to the different modes of articulation of the death drive and the signifier.

In the first period (the first seminar, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language…”), it is the Hegelian phenomenological idea that the word is a death, a murder of a thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.

More precisely, we cannot return to the immediate reality:even if we turn from the word to the thing, from the word “table” to the table in its physical reality, for example, the appearance of the table itself is already marked with a certain lack. To know what a table really is, what it means, we must have recourse to the word, which implies an absence of the thing.

In the second period (the Lacanian reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter), the accent is shifted from the word, from speech, to language as a synchronic structure, a senseless autonomous mechanism which produces meaning as its effect If, in the first period, the Lacanian concept of language is still basically the phenomenological one (Lacan is repeating all the time that the field of psychoanalysis is the field of meaning, la signification), here we have a “structuralist” conception of language as a differential system of elements.

The death drive is now identified with the symbolic order itself: in Lacan’s own words, it is “nothing but a mask of the symbolic order.” The main thing here is the opposition between the imaginary level of the experience of meaning and the meaningless signifier/signifying mechanism which produces it.

The imaginary level is governed by the pleasure principle; it strives for a homeostatic balance. The symbolic order in its blind automatism is always troubling this homeostasis: it is “beyond the pleasure principle.” When the human being is caught in the signifier’s network, this network has a mortifying effect on him;  he becomes part of a strange automatic order disturbing his natural homeostatic balance (through compulsive repetition, for example).

In the third period, where the main accent of Lacan’s teaching is put on the real as impossible, the death drive again radically changes its signification. This change can be most easily detected through the relationship between the pleasure principle and the symbolic order.

Till the end of the fifties, the pleasure principle was identified with the imaginary level: the symbolic order was conceived as the real “beyond the pleasure principle.” But starting from the late fifties (the seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) it is on the contrary the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle: the unconscious “structured like a language,” its “primary process” of metonymic-metaphoric displacements, is governed by the pleasure principle; what lies beyond is not the symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotations it possesses in the domain of horror science-fiction: the “alien” from the movie of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excellence).

The symbolic order strives for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, in its very centre, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order: the Thing.

Lacan coined a neologism for it: l’extimité — external intimacy, which served as a title for one of the seminars of Jacques-Alain Miller. And what is, at this level, the death drive

Exactly the opposite of the symbolic order: the possibility of what was named by de Sade “the second death,” the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constituted. The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of the “symbolic death” … the obliteration of the signifying network itself.

This distinction between the different stages of Lacan’s teaching is not of merely theoretical interest; it has very definite consequences for the determination of the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure.

In the first period, where the accent is laid on the word as a medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire, symptoms are conceived as white spots, non-symbolized imaginary elements of the history of the subject, and the process of analysis is that of their symbolization, i.e., of their integration into the symbolic universe of the subject: the analysis gives meaning, retroactively, to what was in the beginning a meaningless trace.  So the final moment of analysis is here reached when the subject is able to narrate to the other his own history in its continuity, when his desire is integrated, recognized in a “full speech” (parole pleine).

In the second period, where the symbolic order is conceived as having a mortifying effect on a subject, i.e., as imposing on him a traumatic loss – and the name of this loss, of this lack, is of course the symbolic castration – the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is made ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to pay for access to his desire.

In the third period, we have the great Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element in its very heart; and in Lacanian theory, fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level, the final moment of analysis is defined as “going through a fantasy” (la traversée du fantasme): not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, just fills out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing “behind” the fantasy; the fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void, this “nothing,” i.e., the lack in the Other. The crucial element of this third period of Lacan’s teaching is then the shift of the accent from the symbolic to the real.

jodi dean communist desire democratic drive

A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a collectivity but not as a whole and not as a unity, makes use of the psychoanalytic distinction between desire and drive . While Freud’s vicissitudes of the drive are generally known (reversal in to its opposite, turn ing ro und upon the subject’s own self, repression, and sublimation), two features of the perhaps less familiar Lacanian notion of drive bear emphasizing. The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained.

In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process process of not reaching it. One doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive. The second feature concerns the different status of objet petit a in desire and drive.

Zizek In Defense of Lost Causes pg 328: Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, , the “object ” is directly the loss itself — in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive”. is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss ” — the gap, cut, distance-itself.

🙂 And here is Dean’s point:

The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, active and in common. Their sovereignty can be reduced neither to their majority nor to their procedures. Rather, it names the cause and reason for government: the collective people in their desire for a common good. The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.

Ž lectures on Hegel at the egs 2009

Death Drive 1
this is starting point but at the end we have perfect reconciliation.  Hegel was well aware that this excess of negativity could never be culturalized.  In contrast to Kant Hegel never believed in perpetual peace.  Hegel thinks that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again.  This excess is neither Nature nor Culture.  Hegelian progress, once you are in culture, retroactively you de-naturalize nature.  The price we pay to move into culture, what before was a natural instinct becomes an absolute eternal repetitive drive.  That is a REPETITIVE drive.

Aim the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself.
Goal is what you official want

Concrete Universality
outlines Schuman and then exposes his source as Charles Rosen

Maybe the true ideological revolution is not a chang in the explicit rules, but the revolution in this background, I’m saying the same thing but the virtual resonance, the virtual background has changed. The implicit, you can’t pin it down, but somehow everything is different.

Billy Bathgate This is a good discussion

Doctorow’s novel and the movie.  The novel must have been better after seeing the movie.  We have a failed novel, we have a failed repetition (movie) but the repetition, generates retroactively a truly spectral presence of what the novel should have been.  It is a virtual object of another kind, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based, rather they both repeat the virtual X.

Retroactive movement: a movement described it is something which was first conceptualized by Bergson,  in spite of my turmoil, I experienced a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from abstract to concrete.  THe war exploded, what happened, before at the level of abstract knowledge everybody knew about it, expected it, but nonetheless nobody believed it really could happen, a fetishist disavowal, I know very well but nonetheless I don’t believe it could really happen.  FIrst it was probable but impossible, but then when it happend it suddenly become REAL and possible.  When it really happened, it retroactively became totally possible and acceptable.

The logic we have here is not standard linear logic of possibility.  i.e., we have a sitatuation A, with certain possibilities, and one possiblity is realized. NO.  we have something that is considered impossible HAPPENS and then retroactively it becomes possible.  THIS IS THE LACANIAN ACT.

the ACT it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

Get’s back to Hegel here

The Hegelian temporality, eternity it’s always done this way.   You may think Hegel is closure, in development thing becomes what it always already was. … Hegel may appear to be a totally closed structure.  NO. We should read the Hegelian notion of totality in this Bergson way.

Pure Past: T.S. Elliot, every new work of art retroactively changes the past.  After a certain new work of art, classical works of art are perceived in a different way. The priority of synchrony over diachrony.  Yes this is a good 10 minutes

Dostoevsky didn’t only influence Kafka, only through Kafka are we able to note this dimension in Dostoevsky that has become discernible to us.

This retroactive structure in the sense, in every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary, but this totality is retroactively

… Hegel deduces the necessity of contingency. Not only the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity.  Things become necessary in a way that is ultimately contingent.

Hegel’s narrative is about the very rise of necessity.  This is why for Hegel, he insists on Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy.  Hegel was very aware that exactly what people attribute to him, total rational State, where everything is rationally regulated is nonsense, Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have a contingent element on top.  The function of the King is to sign his name, the less he knows all the better.

Hegel’s point is that you have state as rational totality, at the top you need an element of radical contingency

Reality is ontologically incomplete

Reality is not fully constituted.  Great works of art are like shots on a film, but the film wasn’t developed.  If you come later it isn’t an obstacle, there are things you can only understand with a delay.  How I perceive this ontological openness, how to interpret quantum physics.  Ž quotes the shitty book by Nicholas Fearn.  BUt he makes the point of the ontological incompleteness of reality.  He uses the video game analogy.

The difficult reality is incomplete but doesn’t collapse into itself, if you look closely enough it is blurred, there is no zero level, the closer you get is blurred.

The basic operation of Hegel, you have a certain epistemological limitation, you solve the problem, by showing how the problem is its own solution.

Adorno, you have 2 irreducible levels: Its wrong to ask oneself, can we get a unified theory, does this mean that we can’t know society. The result of this individual deadlock between  individual psychic intersubjective experience and autonomous social structures, this gap.  What we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality, is a basic feature of social reality itself.

Fredric Jameson alternate Modernities

back to Concrete Universal

subject of truth death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

In sum, according to Žižek (and Santner) the Freudian notion of death drive, and more generally Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, would provide Badiou with an anti-humanist anthropology that, as a necessary supplement to his purely formal theory of the subject, would allow him to explain more precisely what it is about the human animal that makes it capable, in contrast to all other animals, of breaking with its immediate needs and desires in order to dedicate itself to a Cause beyond its own self-interests, in short, to become a subject of truth.

freedom death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

As Žižek (PV 61) emphasizes elsewhere, the difference between desire and drive is precisely that “[…] desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.” note 275 page 204

It is however, as Žižek (OB 92-98; PV 60-63) emphasizes, paramount to distinguish between the gap of the drive and the gap of desire, if we want to avoid a highly misleading confusion between drive and desire. The gap that characterizes desire is, as I have already hinted, the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire). In contrast, the gap that characterises the drive is, according to Žižek (OB 92; PV 61), the inherent gap between its ‘goal’ and its ‘aim’. That is, the gap between the object around which the drive circulates endlessly (goal) and this very endless circulation around the object itself (aim).

This finally brings us back to the issue of theology. In On Belief, Žižek explicitly relates this discussion of the difference between desire and drive to Christianity. In the section entitled ‘God Resides in Detail’, Žižek applies the contrast between Judaism and Christianity to illustrate this difference (and vice-versa).

Following Hegel, Žižek (OB 89; cf. SOI 201-207; FTKN xxx-xxxi) suggests that Judaism is the religion of the Sublime, insofar that it perceives God as the transcendent irreprehensible wholly Other, or in Lacanian terms, as the impossible God-Thing. In other words, Judaism follows the logic of desire.

In contrast, Christianity renounces this transcendent God-Thing of the Beyond with its fundamental
message that Christ (this miserable human-being) is God (the Sublime).

By claiming the absolute identity between God and man, Christianity acknowledges that there is really nothing (no Thing) beyond appearance, or more correctly, as Žižek (OB 89) puts it “[…] Nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God.”

That is to say, although Christianity ‘inverses the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’, this inversion is not merely a (Feuerbachian) reduction of God to man, but rather the manifestation of the divine dimension in man (OB 90).

So, in what does this X, this divine dimension in man, consist? Žižek’s (OB 90) answer is that:

[…] far from being the Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the ‘divinity’ is rather a kind of obstacle, of a ‘bone in the throat’ – it is something, that unfathomable X, on account of which man cannot ever fully become MAN, self-identical. The point is not that, due to the limitation of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully divine, but that, due to the divine spark in him, man cannot ever fully become MAN.

As we know by now this ‘imperceptible X’ (the inherent ‘minimal difference’) that Christ manifests, which according to Žižek is what prevents man from becoming fully man, is of course that which also goes under the name of the subject, the Cartesian Cogito, the self-relating negativity of German idealism, the Lacanian $ or the Freudian death drive.

In Žižek‘s words, Christ “[…] stands for the excess of life, for the ‘undead’ surplus which persists over the cycle of generation and corruption […].” In terms of the issue of the difference between desire and drive and God into God himself, conforms to the transposition of the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden/lost Thing (that I desire) into an inherent gap in the object itself around which the drive circulates.

Thus, the Christian ‘inversion of Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation’ is not merely the demythologization of desire; it is the manifestation of the dimension of drive in man. Or, to put it in other words: by manifesting the divine dimension in man through its message of Christ on the cross as the death the God, Christianity makes it possible to (re)enter the domain of drives.

By making manifest through his sacrifice on the Cross of the absolute identity between the sublime Thing and miserable human-being (the everyday object) Christ suspends the gap of desire and (re)closes the loop of drive.
At the end the same section in On Belief, Žižek (OB 105) indicates that the fundamental narrative of Christianity, the story of the Fall, could be read as a parallel to the psychoanalytical conception of the emergence of the death drive:

“The story of the (Adam’s) Fall is evidently the story of how the human animal contracted the excess of Life which makes him/her human – ‘Paradise’ is the name for the life delivered of the burden of this disturbing excess.”

So, perhaps we should reverse – in an admittedly completely anachronistic manner – the suggestion made by the German philosopher, Jakob Taubes (1957, 137), that Freud was the last great advocate of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin the first great advocacy of the Freudian notion of death drive? Is this not what Žižek hints at? 205

Christianity also releases or ‘redeems’ man from the excessiveness of the death drive: “Out of love for humanity, Christ then freely assumes, contracts onto himself, the excess (‘Sin’) which burdened the human race.” Yet, this redemption (rescue, deliverance from sin, salvation) does certainly not consist in the obliteration of this excess.

The ‘redemption’ from the excess of death drive offered by Christianity is not a ‘healing of the wound’, but rather the possibility of accepting it. In short, in Žižek’s Hegelian reading, the redemption is the wound, the Fall, itself.

“God does not first push us into sin in order to create the need for Salvation, and then offer himself as the Redeemer from the trouble into which he got us in the first place; it is not that the Fall is followed by redemption: the Fall is identical to Redemption, it is “in itself” already Redemption.”

So, what exactly is this redemption, this possibility that Christ opens up with his death, which is already the Fall itself? Žižek’s (MC 273) answer is:

“The explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchainment — and this, precisely, is what happens in the Fall.”

Or, as he (PD 86) puts it elsewhere:

“[…] for Christianity, the Fall is really not a Fall at all, but ‘in itself’ its very opposite, the emergence of freedom. There is no place from which we have fallen; what came before was just stupid natural existence.”

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

death drive desire

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.”

difference between instincts and death drive

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

moment of madness between nature and culture death drive

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.

neighbour

However, from a strict materialist standpoint, Laplanche’s notion of the “enigmatic signifier” should be critically supplemented: it is not a primordial fact, an “original trauma” which sets the human animal on the path of subjectivization; it is, rather, a secondary phenomenon, a reaction to the primordial fact of the over-proximity of the other, of his or her intrusive presence or bodily­ material too-much-ness. 543

It is this intrusive presence which is then interpreted as an “enigma,” as an obscure “message” from the other who “wants something” from me. In this sense, the “Neighbor” refers NOT primarily to the abyss of the Other’s desire, the enigma of “Che vuoi?” of “What do you really want from me?” but to an intruder who is always and by definition too near. This is why for Hitler the Jew was a neighbor: no matter how far away the Jews were, they were always too close; no matter how many were killed, the remnants were always too strong.” Chesterton made this point with utmost clarity: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” 543

The properly Freudian materialist solution would be to turn this relationship around and to posit the paradox of an original excess, an excess “in itself” rather than in relation to a presupposed norm.The Freudian drive is just such an excess-in-itself: there is no “normal” drive. The formation of the Ego with its borderline between Inside (Ego) and Outside (non-Ego) is already a defense-formation, a reaction against the excess of the drive. In short, it is not the excess of the drive which violates the “norm” of the Ego, it is the “norm” (proper measure) itself which is a defense against the excess of the drive.

It is for this reason  that  intersubjectivity is not a primordial or “natural” state of  human being. 544

To find traces of a dimension “beyond intersubjectivity” in Hegel, one should look for them in the very place which is the central ref­erence for the partisans of recognition: the famous chapter on servitude and domination from the Phenomenology.

Malabou has noted perceptively that, in spite of the precise logical deduction of the plurality of subjects out of the notion of life, there is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, that is, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being in the world which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness).

As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and no amount of phenomenological description of how I am always already “together-with” others can cover up the scandal of another such singularity existing in the world. 544

So when I encounter in front of me another self-consciousness, there is something in me (not simply my egotism, but something in the very notion of self-consciousness) which resists the reduction of both myself and the opposed self-consciousness to simple members of the human species: what makes the encounter shocking is that in it, two universalities meet where there is room only for one. 545

In the original encounter, the Other is thus not simply another subject with whom I share the intersubjective space of recognition, but a traumatic Thing.  This is why this excess cannot be properly counted: subjects are never 1 + 1 + 1. .., there is always an objectal excess which adds itself to the series. … an alien monster which is less than One but more than zero.  (The psychoanalytic treatment recreates this scene; the analyst is not another subject, there is no face to face, s/he is an object which adds itself to the patient.) This excessive spectral object is, of course, a stand-in for the subject, the subject itself as object, the subject’s impossible-real objectal counterpart. 545

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theater, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One of them feels an urgent need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet: “I think I saw one down the corridor outside.”  The man wanders down the cor­ridor, but finds no WC; wandering ever further into the recesses of the theater, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it and returning to his seat, his friend says to him: “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just walked on stage and pissed in that plant pot!” The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on the stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.

What, then, divides the subject? Lacan’s answer is simple and radical: its (symbolic) identity itself — prior to being divided between different psychic spheres, the subject is divided between the void of its cogito (the elusively punc­tual pure subject of enunciation) and the symbolic features which identify it in or for the big Other (the signifier which represents it for other signifiers). 555

In Agnieszka Holland’s Europa, Europa, the hero (a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan and fights in the Wehrmacht in Russia) asks a fellow soldier who had been an actor prior to the war: “Is it hard to play someone else?” The actor answers: “It’s much easier than playing oneself.”

We encounter this otherness at its purest when we experience the other as a neighbor: as the impenetrable abyss beyond any symbolic identity.

When a person I have known for a long time does something totally unexpected, disturbingly evil, so that I have to ask myself, “Did I really ever know him?” does he not effectively become “another person with the same name”?