{"id":9994,"date":"2012-11-30T08:55:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T13:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9994"},"modified":"2021-04-27T19:00:29","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T23:00:29","slug":"objet-a-death-drive-negativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/30\/objet-a-death-drive-negativity\/","title":{"rendered":"objet a death drive negativity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is not absolute negativity<\/span>, this central notion of Hegelian thought, precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called the \u201cdeath drive\u201d<\/span>? Insofar as \u2015 following Lacan \u2015 the core of Kant\u2019s thought can be defined as the \u201ccritique of pure desire,\u201d is not the passage from Kant to Hegel then precisely the passage from desire to drive?<\/span> The very concluding lines of Hegel\u2019s Encyclopedia (on the Idea which enjoys repeatedly transversing its circle) point in this direction, suggesting that the answer to the standard critical question \u2015 \u201cWhy does the dialectical process always go on? Why does dialectical mediation always continue its work?\u201d \u2015 is precisely the eppur si muove of the pure drive.<\/strong> 495<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This structure of negativity also accounts for the quasi-\u201cautomatic\u201d character of the dialectical process, for the common reproach concerning its \u201cmechanical\u201d character: belying all the assurances that dialectics is open to the true life of reality, the Hegelian dialectic is like a processing machine which indifferently swallows up and processes all possible contents, from nature to history, from politics to art, delivering them packaged in the same triadic form.  492<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What further complicates the scheme are objects and signifiers which somehow overlap with their own lack: for Lacan, the phallus is itself the signifier of castration (this introduces all the paradoxes of the signifier of the lack of signifier, of how the lack of a signifier is itself \u201cremarked\u201d in a signifier of this lack), not to mention l’objet petit a,<\/span>;the object-cause of desire<\/strong> which is nothing but the embodiment of lack, its place-holder. The relationship between object and lack is here turned around: far from lack being reducible to the lack of an object, the object itself is a spectral positivization of a lack<\/strong>. And one has to extrapolate this mechanism into the very (pre-)ontological foundation of all being: the primordial gesture of creation is not that of an excessive giving, of assertion, but a negative gesture of withdrawal, of subtracting, which alone opens up the space for the creation of positive entities. This is how \u201cthere is something rather than nothing\u201d: in order to arrive at something, one has to subtract from nothing its nothing(ness) itself<\/em>, that is, one has to posit the primordial pre-ontological Abyss \u201cas such,\u201d as nothing<\/em>, so that, in contrast to (or against the background of) nothing, something can appear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What precedes Nothing is less than nothing, the pre-ontological multiplicity whose names range from Democritus\u2019s den<\/em> to Lacan\u2019s objet a,<\/span>. The space of this pre-ontological multiplicity is not between Nothing and Something (more than nothing but less than something); den<\/em> is, on the contrary, more than Something but less than Nothing<\/em>. The relationship between these three basic ontological terms\u2015Nothing, Something, den<\/em>\u2015thus takes the form of a paradoxical circle, like Escher\u2019s famous drawing of the interconnected waterfalls forming a circular perpetuum mobile<\/em>: Something is more than Nothing, den<\/em> is more than Something (the objet a<\/em> is in excess with regard to the consistency of Something, the surplus-element which sticks out), and Nothing is more than den<\/em> (which is \u201cless than nothing\u201d). 495<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The underlying problem here is to determine which of the Freudian negations is the primordial one\u2015which one opens up the space for all the others. From the Lacanian perspective, the most obvious candidate may appear to be the notorious \u201csymbolic castration,\u201d<\/span> the loss which opens up and sustains the space of symbolization\u2015recall, in relation to the Name-of-the-Father as the bearer of symbolic castration, how Lacan, as we have seen, plays on the French homophony between le Nom-du-P\u00e8re and le Non-du-P\u00e8re. But it seems more productive to follow a more radical path of thinking beyond the father (p\u00e8re) to what is even worse (pire). Again, the most obvious candidate for this \u201cworse\u201d is the (death) drive,<\/span> a kind of Freudian correlate of what Schelling called the primordial \u201ccontraction,\u201d an obstinate repetitive fixation on a contingent object which subtracts the subject from its direct immersion in reality.<\/span> 495<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But there is a paradox which complicates this critique of Hegel: is not absolute negativity, this central notion of Hegelian thought, precisely a philosophical figure of what Freud called the \u201cdeath drive\u201d? Insofar as \u2015 following Lacan \u2015 the core of Kant\u2019s thought can be defined as the \u201ccritique of pure desire,\u201d is not the … Continue reading “objet a death drive negativity”<\/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":[65,125,142,72,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dia-mat","category-drive","category-nightworld","category-objet-a","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9994","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=9994"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14828,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9994\/revisions\/14828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}