theoretically isolating death or narcissism. However, by taking a primordial condition of non-differentiation as the “starting point” Macdonald supplants the fight for recognition as the hinge of the Hegelian dialectic. Focusing instead on an episode through which the whole is restored to itself by the mutual permeations of its particulars, this hermeneutic allows us to think two “impossible” variables – loss of the subject and totality – as functions of their reciprocal dependency. Sacrifice, in other words, is also the means of fusion, and this equivalency fills an otherwise conceptual void by re-imagining it as a situation of superfluidity. What would otherwise appear as abstract negativity is formulated as an energetic flux that is mobile, mutable, and total.
It is my impression that the variegated lines of reasoning of this paper converge here and might be summarized as follows: death operates as the “vanishing mediator” that never quite vanishes, the elusive “third term” of a psychic economy of binding and unbinding forces, driven by the latter but only able to posit itself through recourse to the former. Death, by this reading, would be that which insists and through that insistence (i.e. the impossibility of its re-uptake by the system) maintains the system in motion, the first struggle reproduced again and again, always equal to itself and yet never quite the same. As the aim of a drive then, it would correspond neither to a “return to zero” nor to “the end of history” – both of which reflect terminal conditions – but rather to an affirmation of the grounding non-differentiation out of which forms proliferate and into which they dissolve so that the process might begin again. Repetition and remainder.
To square this in Bataillian terms we would say that the insufficiency of the self signals more than a constitutive lack: it is also that which ensures contact with the other, not only through the intersubjective dynamics of reversal, introjection, and identification, but also as a form of porous communication. That is, the narcissistic wound as a cause of mourning, anxiety, or anguish is also the means for an ecstatic transmission unrestricted by the formalism of subjectivity, what Bersani describes as “an intransitive pleasure intrinsic to… a self-subtracted being” (2010, 48). Indeed, as both Bataille and Bersani suggest, such a