The death drive is what lives inside us

LRB Vol. 28 No. 17 dated 7 September 2006 Fredric Jameson First Impressions
The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek · MIT, 434 pp, £16.95

As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Zizek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of ‘numbers’ succeed each other and hold the audience in rapt fascination.

It is a wonderful show; the only drawback is that at the end the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at least as to the major ones to be retained. One would think that reading all Zizek’s books in succession would only compound this problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. Still, one would not have it any other way, which is why the current volume – which, with its companion The Ticklish Subject (1999), purports to outline the ‘system’ as a whole (if it is one), or at least to make a single monumental statement – inspires some apprehension...

Zizek seems to identify postmodernism with ‘postmodern philosophy’ and relativism (an identification he shares with other enemies of these developments, some of them antediluvian, some resistant to the reification of the label), while on the other hand he endorses the proposition of an epochal change, provided we don’t call it that and provided we insist that it is still, on whatever scale, capitalism – something with which I imagine everyone will nowadays be prepared to agree. Indeed, some of his basic propositions are unthinkable except within the framework of the epochal, and of some new moment of capitalism itself; Lacan is occasionally enlisted in the theorisation of these changes, which have taken place since Freud made his major discoveries.

Take the new definition of the superego. No longer the instance of repression and judgment, of taboo and guilt, the superego has today become something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: ‘Enjoy!’ Of course, the inner-directed Victorian must equally have been directed to enjoy his own specific historical repressions and sublimations; but that jouissance was probably not the same kind of enjoyment as that taken by the subject of consumer society and of obligatory permissiveness (Marcuse called it ‘repressive desublimation’), the subject of a desperate obligation to ‘liberate’ one’s desires and to ‘fulfil oneself’ by satisfying them. Yet psychoanalysis always involves a tricky and unstable balance between the theorisation of an eternal human psyche and the historical singularity of culture and mores: the latter tilts you back into periodisation, while the ‘eternal’ model is secured by the simple reminder that desire is never satisfied, whether you are a Victorian in thrall to duty or a postmodern intent on pleasure.

This is the point at which we reach the most persistent of all Zizek’s fundamental themes: namely, the death wish, the Thanatos, or what he prefers to call the ‘death drive’. Modern theory is indeed haunted by Freud’s death wish, that better mousetrap which any self-respecting intellectual owes it to himself or herself to invent a theory of (Freud’s own version having satisfied nobody). But we also owe it to ourselves to retain everything that is paradoxical (or perverse) in Zizek’s (or in Lacan’s) version of the matter; for here the Thanatos has nothing to do with death at all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself, sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death mercifully relieves us (all the operatic overtones of The Flying Dutchman are relevant here, all the mythic connotations of the Wandering Jew, or indeed the vampire, the undead, those condemned to live for ever).

The death drive is what lives inside us by virtue of our existence as living organisms, a fate that has little enough to do with our biographical destinies or even our existential experience: the Thanatos lives through us (‘in us what is more than us’); it is our species-being; and this is why it is preferable (following the later Lacan) to call it a drive rather than a desire, and to distinguish the impossible jouissance it dangles before us from the humdrum desires and velleities we constantly invent and then either satisfy or substitute.

Fredric Jameson teaches at Duke University. His many books include A Singular Modernity. From the archive One-to-OneThomas Nagel on What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon Dear PrudenceSteven Shapin on Stephen Toulmin 'You May!'Slavoj Zizek on the post-modern superego To the Sunlit UplandsRichard Rorty replies to Bernard Williams Speaking AzzaMartin Jay : Where are you coming from? Hate is the new loveMalcolm Bull on Slavoj Zizek HOME