annihilated and subsequently reborn” (Zupančič 2000, 83). Something or some act breaks the One of the smooth peaceful sea of Nirvana. Something emerges from the One nothing – the drive – contrasted with tedious ‘the wheel of life’. Authentic human autonomy is a life that exceeds life beyond measure, an anti-adaptational seizing the day. As Alejandra Pizarnik (1962-1972) says of the singularity of her poetry, “Like every profoundly subversive act, poetry avoids everything but its own freedom and its own truth”.
Likewise, the view of the most ardent Brexiteer staking everything on the sovereignty of Britain? Desire, authentic national autonomy, emerging out of the immovability and confident elitism of the EU, surely the Brexit vote is a good example of the near suicidal ethical Act. There will be no more business as usual.
Business as usual is the repetition compulsion of let us say for example the Remainers, stuck in the inexorability of Symbolic order. The compulsion to continue in the same old way, Lacan would call, “the mask of the symbolic order” (Lacan, 1954-1955, 326). After all, the signifier as such, ‘whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death… This is why every drive is virtually a death drive” (Lacan 2002, 719/848). And that is why there is a certain fatality in the “declinist” view of Britain’s position. There is no way out but to stay in.
Primarily, Lacan links suicide with narcissism – “the terms death instinct and primary masochism – depend in my view, on the fact that man’s death, long before it is reflected in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through”, birth, prematurity and weaning. Lacan continues, “Thanks to Freud we can think of them as expressing the first vibration of the stationary wave of renunciations that scand the history of psychical development” (ibid, 152/187). He continues, “we see the primordial ego, as essentially alienated, linked to the first sacrifice as essentially suicidal. In other words here we see the fundamental structure of madness” (ibid). The subject is crushed from the beginning long before he knows it.