the death drive clinically is the degree to which the subject seems automated in his speech and behaviours. Clearly this Lacanian approach represents a move against Freud’s ‘paganism’ – the alleged cosmic conflict between the life and the death instincts (Freud 1940 [1938], 148). According to Žižek (2010, 305), “there is only one drive, the libido, striving for enjoyment, and the ‘death drive’ is the curved [repetitive] space of its formal structure”. There is an excess of negativity peculiar to human existence a kind of basic fault of self-sabotaging. The death drive is the name of a basic malfunction, the stickiness of the drive. But also, “humans are not simply alive, but possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life to excess of the ordinary run of things – and ‘death’ stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ‘ordinary’ biological life. Žižek (2001, 104). Lacan says as much, “It is not a perversion of instinct, but rather a desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form we can find of the death instinct” (Lacan 2002, 263/320). This Kantian shaking off the human with all of its compromises to prevent a greater evil is reflected in the chorus at the beginning of Anouilh’s Antigone. “The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction. Death, treason and sorrow are on the march” (Cudden 1977, 985).
Thus the ordinary harmony and homeostasis of the pleasure-reality principle oscillation of everyday life has something of the same repetitive nature of the death drive – the nine-to-five job, the pension after 40years in the rat-race, etc. – against the exuberant real life of living (dangerously) – the ethical act of striking out for freedom not counting the cost; as per the 1968 slogan:” Soyons Réalistes, Demandons L’Impossible (“Let’s be realists, demand the impossible.”).
There is some foundational ontological fault, like the gap in the order of Being which enables the subject to be. Lacanians understand the death drive as a violent striking out for freedom, against the clamour of the real, clearing a space for the act of creation ex nihilo. As we have said, the death drive as ‘freedom’ is the high point of a Lacanian analysis. The death drive is not the blind pointless will to self destruction, but the violent energy required for the (revolutionary) Act-Event to blast a way through an ontological blockage. As Zupančič makes clear, “After the act I am not the same as before. In the act the subject is