What, then, is that which does not die, the material support of the Holy Spirit? When Robeson sang “Joe Hill” at the legendary Peace Arch concert in 1952, he changed the key line from “What they forgot to kill” into: “What they can never kill went on to organize.” The immortal dimension in man, that in man which it “takes more than guns to kill;’ the Spirit, is what went on to organize itself.<\/p>\n
This should not be dismissed as an obscurantist-spiritualist metaphor \u2014 there is a subjective truth in it: when emancipatory subjects organize themselves, it is the “spirit” itself which organizes itself through them. One should add to the series of what the impersonal “it” (das Es, \u00e7a) does (in the unconscious, “it talks,” “it enjoys”): it organizes itself<\/em> (\u00e7a s’organise \u2014 therein resides the core of the “eternal Idea” of a revolutionary party). One should also shamelessly evoke the standard scene from science-fiction horror movies in which the alien who has taken on human appearance (or invaded and colonized a human being) is exposed, its human form destroyed, so that all that remains is a formless slime, like a pool of melted metal . . . the hero leaves the scene, satisfied that the threat has been dealt with \u2014 and then the formless slime that the hero forgot to kill (or could not kill) starts to move, slowly organizing itself, and the old menacing figure is reconstituted.<\/p>\n Is not what we believers consnme in the Eucharist, Christ’s flesh (bread) and blood (wine), precisely the same formless remainder, “what they [the Roman soldiers who crucified him] can never kill,” which then goes on to organize itself as a community of believers? From this standpoint we should reread Oedipus himself as a precursor of Christ: against those-including Lacan himself \u2014 who perceive Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone<\/strong> as figures driven by the uncompromisingly suicidal death drive<\/strong>, “unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled.”<\/p>\n Does this not recall a later beggar king, Christ himself, who, by his death as a nobody, an outcast abandoned even by his disciples, grounds a new community of believers? They both re-emerge by way of passing through the zero-level<\/strong> of being reduced to an excremental remainder. The notion of the Christian collective of believers<\/strong> (and its later versions, from emancipatory political movements to psychoanalytic societies) is an answer to a precise materialist question: how to assert materialism not as a teaching, but as a form of collective life? Therein resides the failure of Stalinism: no matter how “materialist” its teaching was, its form of organization-the Party, which is an instrument of the historical big Other-remained idealist. Only a collective of the Holy Spirit founded on the “death of God;’ on accepting the inexistence of the big Other<\/strong>, is materialist in its very form of social organization.<\/p>\n Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up, and it didn’t help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and as soon as she had done that, it withdrew, and the child finally came to rest beneath the earth.<\/p>\n Is not this obstinacy that persists even beyond death freedom \u2014 the death drive at its most elementary<\/strong>? Instead of condemning it, should we not rather celebrate it as the last resort of our resistance? The death of Christ is also the death\/end of human mortality, the “death of death,” the negation of negation: the death of God is the rise of the undead drive (the undead partial object). 101<\/p>\n Here, however, Hegel is not radical enough: since he is not able to think objet a<\/span>, he also ignores bodily immortality (“undeadness”) \u2014 both Spinoza and Hegel share this blindness for the proper dimension of the objet a<\/span>. How can a Christian believer come to terms with this obscene excess of immortality? Is the answer, once again, love? Can one love this excess? 101<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What, then, is that which does not die, the material support of the Holy Spirit? When Robeson sang “Joe Hill” at the legendary Peace Arch concert in 1952, he changed the key line from “What they forgot to kill” into: “What they can never kill went on to organize.” The immortal dimension in man, that … Continue reading “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":[78,125,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-drive","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9197","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=9197"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9199,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9197\/revisions\/9199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}