the Freudian sense, namely something that is registered in the signifying chain and dependent on its existence”. (1959-1960, 212). Thus the symbolic, machinic process engenders the dangerous surplus that could turn around and destroy it. The death drive is not just found in the signifier but also in what might destroy it. This underlines Freud’s claim that the death drive is omipresent, in for instance the superego and the id, as the former borrows its energy from the latter.
For true adherents, the death drive acquires a mythical status, especially with the notion of the lamella and its asexual undeadness inspired by the endlessly replicating protista whose substance never dies.
Or as Žižek says, “flayed, skinned body, the palpitation of raw, skinless red flesh” (Žižek 1995, 208). Lacan contrasts this eternal life of the lamella with the finite life of sexual beings, who, from the moment of conception have death on the horizon. Lacan refers to ‘immortal…irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, indestructible life’ (Lacan 1964, 198). Thus the death drive is the drive – the pure drive of life, for the pre-Symbolic state prior to our own history. The first loss is the loss that occurs at conception (Lacan says birth) – man that is born of woman has but a short time to live (Job 14:1). In his myth the lamella that flies off at the moment of conception, the originary lack of the finite creature in the Real is displaced onto the Symbolic-Imaginary register as the lack in the signifying system, where the game of lack is played out incidentally and by displacement around the phallus – who has it and who hasn’t it. But the real longing remains beyond the phallic economy, the longing for pure life.
Jagodzinski understands techno rhythmic pulsation as precisely the function of the body-as-machine akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs” (BwO) – ‘immortal irrepressible life of zoe that needs no organ…the attempt to regain that which has been originally lost’ (Jagodzinski 2005, 260). In the pulsation of the techno-rave one becomes lost in the mOther.
Two Versions
As a variation on the theme of the Symbolic resister, Lacan, following Heidegger, linked science and technological rationality specifically with the death drive. Cut off from tradition, cut off from Being, from blood, soil and belonging by modernity, and globalization, the subject of science as subject of the signifier is already dead (already sacrificed) while still living. This is why