How is your recapitulation of Lacan’s point that desire’s principal aim is to reproduce itself different from Schopenhauer’s Will, a philosopher largely absent from your oeuvre?
And given this formulation, how can we not agree with Adorno that there is no room on Earth for all our desires, that we seem to be tragically programmed to exhaust the natural world and witness the terrifying clash of the infinite restlessness of self-conscious beings with the finite resources available to us?
Thank you for your work
Zizek:
I don't see any continuity between Schopenhaeur and Lacan. I think Schopenhauer is at the origins of the rationalist philosophy of life which has nothing to do with the Freudian unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is rational, articulated, structured like language. Schopenhaeurian drive is life drive, while the Freudian drive is death drive. And in the opposition between life and death, I'm for death. That's why I love Von Trier's Melancholia - all life on Earth disappears, so I think it's a film with a happy ending.
Slavoj Žižek webchat – as it happened
