The Death Drive

This chapter examines Žižek’s account of the relation between desire and the death drive and gives an account of the ways in which this central Žižekian notion is ontologized and how this model inherits and transforms certain key theological terms, offering resources not for escaping but for confronting the antagonisms of Christian theology. It traces the key notion of the death drive through Freud, Lacan, and Žižek, examining how Žižek takes up this psychoanalytic notion to give an account of the social order. In contrast to Dionysius’s Neoplatonic account of eros and ontology, Žižek’s materialist ontology of failure is one in which both desire and being are irreducibly particular and contingent. It is precisely out of the cracks in being that unity is impossible, out of the failure of every identity that newness is generated. Division is a good in itself, not merely something to be undone in order to return to union with God; and the desire for union is itself a false and unrealizable dream.