The ominous ‘first vibration’ was noted by Freud who observed his grandson’s repetitive game, where the child makes an object appear then disappear repeatedly, accompanied by the fort/da phonemes. “[T]he child thus begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of those around him by reproducing …his Fort!and Da!” (Freud 1920, 14-15) Lacan rejects what he calls the ‘out-dated notion’ of primary masochism being used “to explain repetitive games [in general] in which subjectivity simultaneously masters its dereliction”, seeing in it rather, “the moment at which…the child is born into language…Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (ibid, 262/319), the birth of the symbolic order. Thus vital being is over-written by the signifier or the symbolic chain, which precedes him and lasts long after his death. The Symbolic is more deathly than mere biological death. We are written off while we are alive. It is a blind automatism. Žižek points to the radical nature of this postmodern discourse: “an animal excoriated by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language)’ (Žižek 1989, 4). Thus the death drive operates from beyond, hollowing out being, the being of an animal no less.
Every drive presses beyond satisfaction, need and ordinary pleasure and tilts toward the excess which Lacanians call jouissance. Paradoxically, jouissance in turn threatens the Symbolic whose deathly negation created it and could yet destabilise it and destroy it. Any conceptual contradiction / confusion about the death drive is covered by the unconscious where opposites can co-exist; to the extent of an apparent reversal of the life and death drives. What we ordinarily thought was giving life, normal life, was on this register giving death! What we thought was utterly destructive was in truth the bursting through of life risking everything.
Lacan summarises Freud’s grim Real: “it is explicitly around masochism, conceived only in the dimension of the search for this ruinous jouissance, that Freud’s entire text revolves” (Lacan, 1969-1970, 46). As Lacan has it, “this [jouissance] dimension is introduced as soon as the historical chain is isolated, and the history presents itself as something memorable and memorized in