{"id":13739,"date":"2019-05-19T13:36:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-19T17:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13739"},"modified":"2021-08-14T12:17:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-14T16:17:54","slug":"alenka-zupancic-death-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2019\/05\/19\/alenka-zupancic-death-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d Death Drive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d. Death Drive and Repetition. 2011<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d. Death Drive and Repetition. 2011\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Jc3OSHX3yaE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Freud-museum-resize.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"600\" height=\"323\" src=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Freud-museum-resize.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-15149\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Freud-museum-resize.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Freud-museum-resize-300x162.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Lecture presentation: April 20, 2019 at the<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/archiv.freud-museum.at\/en\/podcasts_en.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sigmund Freud Museum<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Quote from Freud&#8217;s &#8220;Beyond the Pleasure Principle&#8221;  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say &#8216;The goal of all life is death&#8217;, and, casting back, &#8216;The inanimate was there before the  animate&#8217;.  At one time or another, by some operation of force which still completely baffles conjecture, the properties of life were  awakened in lifeless matter. Perhaps the process was a prototype resembling that other one which later in a certain  stratum of living matter gave rise to consciousness. The tension then aroused in the previously inanimate matter strove to attain an equilibrium; the first instinct was present, that to return to lifelessness. The living substance at that time had death within easy reach; there was probably only a short course of life to run, the direction of which was determined by the chemical structure of the young organism. So through a long period of time the living substance may have been constantly created anew, and easily extinguished, until decisive external influences altered in such a way as to compel the still surviving substance to ever greater deviations from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of life as we now know it. If the exclusively conservative nature of the instincts is accepted as true, it is impossible to arrive at any other suppositions with regard to the origin and goal of life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>hypothesis: life is accidental there is no mysterious will of want to live.  There is no struggle, life is a circuitous route to death, will to live just do their job of making the circuitous job operative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The postulate of the selfpreservative instincts we ascribe to every living being stands in remarkable contrast to the supposition that the whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death. The theoretic significance of the instincts of self-preservation, power and self-assertion, shrinks to nothing, seen in this light; they are part-instincts designed to secure the path to death peculiar to the organism and to ward off possibilities of return to the inorganic other than the immanent ones, but the enigmatic struggle of the organism to maintain itself in spite of all the world, a struggle that cannot be brought into connection with anything else, disappears. It remains to be added that the organism is resolved to die only in its own way; even these watchmen of life were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence the paradox comes about that the living organism resists with all its energy influences (dangers) which could help it to reach its life-goal by a short way (a short circuit, so to speak); but this is just the behaviour that characterises a pure instinct as contrasted with an intelligent striving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Conservative instincts repeat a required pathways. What is life if we spell out these implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At 20 minutes: Life has no ground or source of its own. It&#8217;s something that happens to inanimate, it is an interruption and disturbance of the inanimate. Instead of saying the inanimate universe doesn&#8217;t give a damn if we live or die, we are invited to consider a possibility that we are mere perversions or strange pleasures of the inanimate itself. Precisely constituting its tics and grimaces. Life is but a dream of the inanimate, more precisely it is a nightmare disturbance, since the inanimate wants nothing but to be left alone.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Big Problem:  return to inanimate and cancel out tension &#8230; Pleasure Principle: Lowering of tension to reach state of Nirvana (homeostatic state). The death drive is simply another name for Pleasure Principle. Reality Principle, sometimes have to postpone to survive, uses same image of &#8216;detour&#8217; between life and death drive. Reality Principle, postponement of satisfaction. Life (reality principle) is disturbance of the inanimate, Reality Principle is detour of death drive, or Pleasure Principle, so there is a direct point by point mapping between Pleasure Principle and Death Drive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a problem: Pleasure Principle being a primary principle but what about the compulsion to repeat, something more drive related than the P.P which it overrides.  Compulsion to Repeat (CtR), insistance of an organism to endless repeat the state of tension, this corresponds more to Freud&#8217;s first idea. Interesting dilemma, abandon notion of D.D. as useless detour, or try to conceptualize in different way and this is what Lacan did. There is something essential to drives, when Freud introduced the D.D.  Not D.D. as one drive amongst others (scopic,anal), there is something in the midst of every drive that has this dimension. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sexual Drive (SD), the SD are something more and less than life. This is the part of Freud&#8217;s text, he sets up a dualist view, Eros and Thanatos.  This dualist view turns out to be unsustainable for Freud, what undermines it is that sexuality cannot be subsumed under life instinct. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is not inbuilt principle that orients sexuality.  Jung&#8217;s Libidinal as neutral substance.  Freud&#8217;s move was to DE-substantialize sexuality, it is the very impossibility of its own circumscription or delimitation. The sexual is not a separate principal or domain of human life, this is why it can inhabit every domain of human life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are only sexual drives, all drives are sexual. Freud inclines to monism, but not of the Jungian kind.  Sexual Drives (SD). I love in you something more than you (object a) I mutilate you.  Imperceptibly the perspective has changed. to the Monism of Sexual Drives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>45 minutes: Split\/Antagonism prevents any substance from being One.  We don&#8217;t start with one, or two, we start with a problem that prevents being from being One <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SPLIT\/Contradiction: This negativity, the minus to life becomes the very site of the unconscious.  Something gets lost here, death becomes inherent to life, its presupposition. We start talking when one signifier goes missing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Freudian concept of Unconscious and sexuality.  Death is what lurks in the very midst of sexual drives, not as aim, but as negative magnitude or gap, or minus repeated by them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lacanian notion of the DD. Repetition in conservative, instinct of self-preservation, repetition, instincts repeat circuitous paths, DD originating in another kind of repetition within this conservative repetition, a repetition within a repetition. Freud in 3 Essays in series of Sexuality.  Surplus satisfaction, we eat but there is also pleasure of oral beyond the need for food. This surplus satisfaction is internal cause of tension, it has constant pressure, The drive originating in this surplus, doesn&#8217;t seek to minimize tension but to repeat it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>satisfaction comes before the demand, satisfaction and its repetitions goes against PP<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\">2017 article on Death Drive<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p>Zupan\u010di\u010d, Alenka. &#8220;Death Drive.&#8221; <em>Lacan and Deleuze<\/em>, edited by Bo\u0161tjan Nedoh and Adreja Zevnik, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 163-179.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Compulsion to repeat and hypothesis of the death drive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Human relationships that end is same outcome: teacher-mentor abandoned each time by his\/her prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, however much prot\u00e9g\u00e9s differ from one another. Person whose friendships all end by the friend, person who raises people to positions of great public or private authority and after a while upsets the authority and replaces them with a new one, or lover each of whose love affairs, &#8220;passes through same phases and reaches the same outcome.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even &#8216;passive cases&#8217; i.e., women married 3 times and each time husbands fell ill and she had to cater to and nursed them on their deathbeds. At the level of dreams that are governed by pleasure principle and wish fulfilment, compulsion to repeat particular traumas<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pleasure principle EQUALS maximize pleasure (lowering of tension), minimize displeasure, BUT the compulsion to REPEAT contradicts the Pleasure Principle<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Why would somebody be compelled to repeat a distinctly unpleasant experience?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Two divergent accounts in Freud: a) Repetition appears something one can&#8217;t remember, &#8220;Repetitions is thus fundamentally the repetition (in different &#8216;disguises&#8217;) of a concrete, originally traumatic event or experience.&#8221; Ray Brassier has opined that what this repetition repeats is not a traumatic and hence repressed experience, &#8220;but something which COULD NEVER REGISTER AS EXPERIENCE TO BEGIN WITH.&#8221; In other words the trauma being repeated is according to Z, outside of the horizon of experience (and is constitutive of it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d. Death Drive and Repetition. 2011 Lecture presentation: April 20, 2019 at the Sigmund Freud Museum Quote from Freud&#8217;s &#8220;Beyond the Pleasure Principle&#8221; If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say &#8216;The goal of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2019\/05\/19\/alenka-zupancic-death-drive\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d Death Drive&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,125,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13739","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=13739"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15153,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13739\/revisions\/15153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}