delicious

A recent article by Žižek, in which he argues against the idea of 'nature' as a balanced, self-regulating whole. He claims that there is not only no 'human nature', but also no such thing as 'nature' itself (as understood in the aforementioned sense). Ecology is becoming the new 'opiate of the masses'. He says we must accept "the fact of the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count... ‘nature’ qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion is man’s fantasy... [...] Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on..."

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.”