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As with the movement of the signifying chain, which both seeks coincidence with the void which organises it and perpetually misses that rendez-vous, desire is simultaneously a drive towards and an evasion of the void at the heart of subjectivity. In this way, both desire and the signifying chain harbour death at their very core; the death drive is
immanent to the signifying chain. The subject comes into being ‘barred’ by the signifier and thereby injected with a sense of death. […] The taste for death is not something that the subject acquires through experience, as one might say, or reaches towards as a last despairing manner of delectation, for it has been there from the start as a perilous gift from the signifier, and one that cannot be refused. The drive, as it circles round the excavated centre of being, is pulled outwards towards the objects that promise gratification, but inwards too towards the completest form of a loss that it already knows. (Bowie 162-163)
Desire, subjectivity, and signification are thus inextricably intertwined with the death drive; evacuation of subjectivity on the scale which coincidence with the loss that motivates desire would necessitate means death not only for the psychic structure of the individual, but also for the biologically existent being from which it is inseparable. The absence which structures the symbolic and which gives coherence to the subject through the very instability it imparts is thus finally given a name in the appearance of death on the scene: "the death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order" (Lacan S2 326, qtd. in Evans 202).
At this point the incorrigible temporality of the symbolic order rears its ugly head again, establishing the necessity of conceiving of desire as a drive towards death. In actuality, the nature of the death-drive as motivator of desire is nostalgic; it is an urge to return to the plenitude of the pre-oedipal infant-mother relationship before it was disrupted by the specular image and the paternal interdiction: "when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has" (Ecrits 105; see also Evans 32). And while Lacan insists on the reversible temporality of the symbolic order, he is equally vehement in stating that the symbolic is a universal totality from which there can be only one escape once it has been entered. With the utterance of the paternal interdiction and the infant’s entry into it, the symbolic order assumes the status of an always-already totality from which there can be no regression and only one kind of progression. The movement of desire within the symbolic order, then, is necessarily a tendency towards this final transcendence; the desire to return to the pre-oedipal manifests itself in the symbolic the only way it can, as a drive towards death.
==References==
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==See Also==
[[Category:Terms]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Freudian psychology]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
[[Category:Sexuality]]
[[Category:Symbolic]]
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek]]
=More=
==Death Drive and Freud ==
