{"id":10117,"date":"2012-12-11T16:35:35","date_gmt":"2012-12-11T21:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10117"},"modified":"2013-11-01T10:42:20","modified_gmt":"2013-11-01T15:42:20","slug":"freedom-death-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/12\/11\/freedom-death-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"freedom death drive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. <\/em> K\u00f8benhavns Universitet 2010<\/p>\n

As \u017di\u017eek (PV 61) emphasizes elsewhere, the difference between desire<\/span> and drive<\/span> is precisely that \u201c[\u2026] desire<\/span> is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive<\/span> circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.\u201d note 275 page 204<\/p>\n

It is however, as \u017di\u017eek (OB 92-98; PV 60-63) emphasizes, paramount to distinguish between the gap of the drive<\/span> and the gap of desire<\/span>, if we want to avoid a highly misleading confusion between drive<\/span> and desire<\/span>. The gap that characterizes desire<\/span> is, as I have already hinted, the external gap between the substitutable object (that I want) and the forbidden\/lost Thing (that I desire<\/span>). In contrast, the gap that characterises the drive<\/span> is, according to \u017di\u017eek (OB 92; PV 61), the inherent gap between its \u2018goal\u2019 and its \u2018aim\u2019. That is, the gap between the object around which the drive<\/span> circulates endlessly (goal) and this very endless circulation around the object itself (aim).<\/p>\n

This finally brings us back to the issue of theology. In On Belief<\/em>, \u017di\u017eek explicitly relates this discussion of the difference between desire<\/span> and drive<\/span> to Christianity. In the section entitled \u2018God Resides in Detail\u2019, \u017di\u017eek applies the contrast between Judaism and Christianity to illustrate this difference (and vice-versa).<\/p>\n

Following Hegel, \u017di\u017eek (OB 89; cf. SOI 201-207; FTKN xxx-xxxi) suggests that Judaism is the religion of the\u00a0Sublime, 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Christianity renounces this transcendent God-Thing of the Beyond<\/strong> with its fundamental
\nmessage that Christ (this miserable human-being) is God (the Sublime).<\/p>\n

By claiming the absolute identity between God and man, Christianity acknowledges that there is really nothing (no Thing) beyond appearance, or more correctly, as \u017di\u017eek (OB 89) puts it \u201c[\u2026] Nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is to say, although Christianity \u2018inverses the Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation\u2019, this inversion is not merely a (Feuerbachian) reduction of God to man, but rather the manifestation of the divine dimension in man<\/span> (OB 90).<\/p>\n

So, in what does this X, this divine dimension in man, consist?<\/strong> \u017di\u017eek\u2019s (OB 90) answer is that:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] far from being the Highest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the \u2018divinity\u2019 is rather a kind of obstacle, of a \u2018bone in the throat\u2019 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

As we know by now this \u2018imperceptible X\u2019 (the inherent \u2018minimal difference\u2019) that Christ manifests, which according to \u017di\u017eek is what prevents man from becoming fully man, is of course that which also goes under the name of the subject, the Cartesian Cogito<\/span>, the self-relating negativity of German idealism, the Lacanian $ or the Freudian death drive<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In \u017di\u017eek\u2018s words, Christ \u201c[\u2026] stands for the excess of life, for the \u2018undead\u2019 surplus which persists over the cycle of generation and corruption [\u2026].\u201d In terms of the issue of the difference between desire<\/span> and drive <\/span>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<\/span>) into an inherent gap in the object itself around which the drive <\/span>circulates.<\/p>\n

Thus, the Christian \u2018inversion of Jewish sublimation into a radical desublimation\u2019 is not merely the demythologization of desire<\/span>; it is the manifestation of the dimension of drive<\/span> 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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<\/span> and (re)closes the loop of drive.
\nAt the end the same section in On Belief, \u017di\u017eek (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:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story of the (Adam\u2019s) Fall is evidently the story of how the human animal contracted the excess of Life which makes him\/her human \u2013 \u2018Paradise\u2019 is the name for the life delivered of the burden of this disturbing excess.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, perhaps we should reverse \u2013 in an admittedly completely anachronistic manner \u2013 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?<\/span> Is this not what \u017di\u017eek hints at? 205<\/p>\n

Christianity also releases or \u2018redeems\u2019 man from the excessiveness of the<\/strong> death drive<\/span>: \u201cOut of love for humanity, Christ then freely assumes, contracts onto himself, the excess (\u2018Sin\u2019) which burdened the human race.\u201d Yet, this redemption (rescue, deliverance from sin, salvation) does certainly not consist in the obliteration of this excess.<\/p>\n

The \u2018redemption\u2019 from the excess of<\/strong> death drive <\/span>offered by Christianity is not a \u2018healing of the wound\u2019, but rather the possibility of accepting it. In short, in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Hegelian reading, the redemption is the wound, the Fall, itself<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod 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 \u201cin itself\u201d already Redemption.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So, what exactly is this redemption, this possibility that Christ opens up with his death, which is already the Fall itself? \u017di\u017eek\u2019s (MC 273) answer is:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe explosion of freedom, the breaking out of the natural enchainment \u2014 and this, precisely, is what happens in the Fall.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Or, as he (PD 86) puts it elsewhere:<\/p>\n

\u201c[\u2026] for Christianity, the Fall is really not a Fall at all, but \u2018in itself\u2019 its very opposite, the emergence of freedom. There is no place from which we have fallen; what came before was just stupid natural existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does the freedom that the death drive<\/span> enables look like?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. K\u00f8benhavns Universitet 2010 As \u017di\u017eek (PV 61) emphasizes elsewhere, the difference between desire and drive is precisely that \u201c[\u2026] desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.\u201d note 275 page … Continue reading “freedom death drive”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,125,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10117"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12197,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10117\/revisions\/12197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}