Senselogi©

“Sigmund Freud introduces his notorious concept of the “Todestrieb”, the “death drive” in his famous essay “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle”) of 1920. This text has intrigued and puzzled many readers as it relates the death drive to both the so-called “Nirvana principle” aiming at a state without tension and the repetition compulsion, the almost mechanical kernel of the drive itself. If Freud’s death drive stands here philosophically between negation (Schopenhauer) and affirmation (Nietzsche) of the will, Slavoj Žižek insists that we should not confuse the death drive with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension. As his Parallax View states, the death drive is, on the contrary, “the very opposite of dying – a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.” In Žižek’s Lacanian reading, the (death) drive represents a ‘diabolic’ dimension of human beings in opposition to a desire for the lost object that would overcome all differences and tensions. Its articulation as a philosophical concept is certain to lead us also to a deeper understanding of the concept of tension.” ~ ICI Berlin

Slavoj Žižek - Selection | 03:16

Slavoj Žižek @ ICI Colloquium Part I | 26:51

Slavoj Žižek @ ICI Colloquium Part II | 31:35

Slavoj Žižek @ ICI Colloquium Part III | 34:56

Being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Everyone knows Lacan’s definition of love (“Love is giving something one doesn’t have…”); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: “… to someone who doesn’t want it.” And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us - is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us? ~ Slavoj Zizek

Senselogi©

May 21

Slavoj Žižek ~ Death Drive and Nirvana Principle: Tension/Release

May 18

May 16