Changes

Drive is the subject’s answer to this fundamental impasse. It is not a repressed “natural urge” that must be domesticized, but on the contrary the most radical result of domestication itself. Much of the contemporary philosophy of formation and linguistic normativity (virtue ethics, Hegelian pragmatism, etc.) therefore entirely fails to recognize the crucial element in Žižek’s grasp of human subjectivity: the “[[The Night of the World|night of the world]]”, the madness of the transition from biology to culture. Human beings are not well-behaved animals that have gradually learned how to suppress their animal instincts, but much rather sexualized animals that have become sexualized by virtue of entering the domain of second nature. Therefore, “the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (''LN'': 499).