He strolled along the street until he met a chicken. In panic he ran back to the psychiatrist’s office in a state of near collapse, shouting at the psychiatrist – Okay, I know, I know, that I am a man, but does the chicken know?
The joke needs updating. There are allegedly no longer any chickens to fear or avoid on the one hand, and the grain, on the other hand, is not obligated in any way to become a man. Whatever he wants to be must conform only to the desire that is in him, i.e. have nothing to do with any repressive normalisation as a man. His analyst might now add that these days it is safe to live as a grain or a seed in an equal, inclusive, pluralist world with all traditional chickens consigned to history.
To continue the Lacanian deployment: ‘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 [normative] run of things’. (Žižek, 2006, 62) The key word is “drive”. Its strangeness consists in its tendency to fixate and get stuck and circulate around a particular object seemingly forever – the repetition compulsion – ultimately a very conservative pointless repetition, very often observed as being caught in a loop of guilt and pain. No longer a passionate metonymical search for the (lost) object of desire, but often being caught prematurely in loss itself and the seeming endlessness of it due to the libidinisation of the loss and pain that spells a life of suffering which is excessive and immune to relief. Thus instead of translating Freud’s Wiederholungszwang as repetition compulsion, Lacan prefers repetition automatism to avoid any psychological overtones. To make it clear that Lacan’s stance is about the structuring effect of the Symbolic order: ‘it turns out that the symbol’s order can no longer be conceived of there as constituted by man but must rather be conceived of as constituting him’ (Lacan 2002, 34).
Thus the death drive with its automatism comes from some structuralist ‘beyond’; it is thus determining of human nature rather than determined by human motivation however extreme. Thus the subject seems compelled via the authoritarian operations of the signifier. The subject is always already de-natured and automated. Maybe a way of detecting the operation of