Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, 2006, London: MIT Press, p.61
“The Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, ...
... for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension; it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying – a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. The paradox of the Freudian ‘death drive’ is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things”
Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, 2006, London: MIT Press, p.61
Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View, 2006, London: MIT Press, p.61