Slavoj Žižek on Death drive - Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept
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- čas přidán 12. 08. 2015
- Public lecture by Slavoj Žižek within the framework of the ICI’s core project “Tension/Spannung” 6 Mär '09
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.
Slavoj Žižek is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has gained wide recognition with his characteristic combination of high and low, of Lacanian theory, pop cultural issues and Post-Marxism. He has published a high number of books, edited several collections, and published numerous philosophical and political articles. - Věda a technologie
Greatest intro ever stops at 3:55
Starts talking in the language of imperialism at 4:17
I always have been interested in spiritual practices like Buddhism. Yet somehow nowadays I find Zizeks way of taking apart ideology to be "spiritually" more fulfilling than most so called spiritual philosophies, exactly this point of reality being incomplete, relieving us of the sheer terror of hundreds if not thousands of years of the thinking of the all-circumfering totality (totalitarianism of the psyche if you want)
This concept of incompleteness, of undermining every fixed ontological notion is in my opinion a great gift for every creative and restless mind, exactly in the way of telling us, that the restlessness of being incomplete, being on the level of the ever-tripping, stumbling signifier itself is not a sickness to be cured with the absoluteness of the one word, but is just the way it is playing itself out. And we're in the middle of this "Buchstabensuppe", able to freely choose how the next sentence is going to spell itself out. And this is freedom as I conceive it, since there's always going to be another sentence, so the sentence never sentences itself into a totality
Thanks for the upload, have a good day
I feel the same way as you. I really feel like Zizek helps to free the whole generation of sick individuals of imperatives our culture, economy and politics imposes on us. Afte hundrets of minutes listening to Zizek many years now, somewhere in the middle of this lecture I suddenly had that wierd smile on my face, feeling deep sympathy for what Zizek is doing and the sincerity of his enterprise. Sympathy towards someone who does not only understands your experience of reality but also brings some order into it, showing some path in it.
Hey great comment, could you please tell me what that word wich is in quotations means?
@@no_special_person "Buchstabensuppe" is a soup of letters. I don't know if you have that in your country but it's quite literally a soup where the noodles in it are formed like various letters :D
Wonderful comment.
@@henrix999 Same. After a couple of years of listening to his lectures and being so lazy/busy not to read his books he's had a few key lectures that had brought me clarity to the depth of his thinking and I feel so glad I'm finally understanding this less than nothing.
23:27 *Morals vs ethics* “The two are not the same. Morality is concerned with the symmetry of my relation to other humans-it’s zero level rule is _do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you._ Incidentally, a good rule to follow for a masochist no, where it gets a little bit complicated. Ethics on the contrary deals with my consistency with myself-my fidelity to my own desire.”
best zizek lecture out there
+Daniel Gustafsson I agree
This was once true, but some of his recent lectures really nail down his understanding of universality. I'm thinking of Populism as a Way to Disavow Social Antagonism and especially A Plea for Bureaucratic Socialism.
link or it didn't happen
Yeah. Definitely the best.
Wish he focused on Death Drive more in his work, I think it's a philosophical concept that could use some inflation and which is even more interesting than his other (still very interesting) work.
Yeah, could use inflation but also development.
Do the research yourself
It is indeed one of „his“ most fundamental and difficult concepts
It is indeed one of „his“ most fundamental and difficult concepts
Zizek's most profound lecture
great lecture. It is in other videos but this version sounds great. Thanks!
“I’ll stop here”, only to keep notstopping...driven!
todestrieb
What paper is he reading? Is that available anywhere, or was it merely a series of notes?
best intro ever hes like backing away from the mic and still talking
+youcreatea lol yea he just didn't wanna let go
Does anyone know if he has written any books elaborating this idea of Todestrieb? Would love to get under the skin of this concept.
yes i also want to know which of his books details this thesis the most. maybe parallax view?
chapter 6 of civilization and its discontents by sigmund freud talks explicitly about this
@@minhanhbui3955 yes, thank you.
What I meant was Zizek’s interpretation, since it differs quite markedly from Freud’s
1:18:45 No Illusions but there is Hope as the status of spectrality can change - Logic of Repetition. Revolution here! This is Badiou’s Possibility of a New Real
Great lecture. Looks like Steve Earle though.
The way he touches his nose makes me think he has been cutting glass
Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain
Author(s): Veena Das
Source: Daedalus, Vol. 125, No. 1, Social Suffering (Winter, 1996), pp. 67-91 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: www.jstor.org/stable/20027354 .
Damn been 4 years!
21:01 Desire
What is Zizek's Ideology??
Restlessness
rossyy94 cocaine
@rossyy94 29:12 - 30:48
"This is why Lacan's motto, _'there is no Big Other',_ (the Big Other doesn't exist) brings us to the very core of the _'ethical problematic'._ What Lacan excludes is precisely this perspective of _'the last judgement':_ The idea that somewhere, there must be a standard (universal) that allows us to take measure of our acts and produce their true meaning; their true ethical status _(even if it will be as a truly virtual point of reference, even if we concede that we cannot ever occupy this place)._
Even Jacques Derrida's ethical notion of deconstruction as justice I think relies on a Utopian hope which sustains the _'specter of infinite justice'_ -forever postponed, but nonetheless kept as the ultimate horizon of our activity. This idea that, even if it is _defacto_ inaccessible we must _act_ as if there is a final point where retroactively there will be an objective judgement on the status of our acts.
The harshness of the Lacanian ethics is that it demands us to relinquish this reference and its further thesis is that: *'not only does this abdication not deliver us to an ethical insecurity, or relativism-but that renouncing the guarantee of some Big Other is the very condition of a Truly autonomous ethics.'"*
rossyy94 Good question!
Zizek is psychoanalytical in the Lacanian sense-hence the "quilting" of our various ideologies, a lifting of the veil to show us the _polysemous figure of our desire._ We are hysterical subjects $plit by a nonconsciousness gap (void) which haunts our being irreducibly and eternally. Zizek believes in love because he believes in death (nothing).
1:03:27 - My experience of meditation
1:05:39
53:00 he starts to talk about death drive
20:02 -20:20 Isn't this Epicurean? Practical reasoning.
1:13:00 He is so charismatic that is unbelieveable xd
How can anyone say that nazis following orders is an application of Kant? In Was ist der Aufklarung he explicitly condemns normative reliance upon others.
1:10:05 - 1:10:07
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah
"80 % of academics are taking prosac in the USA", 10:53
52:18 IMP
I don't think Zizek really explained the difference between Froud's concept of "death drive" and Nietzsche's concept of "will"
I can recommend Todd McGowans lecture on Death Drive found here on youtube - he answers this question directly.
@@Stereotype23 Thanks
The budhists go back to the originial question of "I"--Rene Descartes and all that. So if the idea of "me" and "I" (as an individual) are delusions--if what I believe myself to be is largely a societal construct, then what the Budhists have to say is correct. Understanding "me" is not the goal because "I" cannot be defined without taking into consideration my environment, just as a jellyfish cannot be defined without describing the ocean, or a cloud cannot be defined without describing the sky. Simply defining oneself and apart from the rest of the universe is futile at best. I believe Zizek would understand this if he weren't so holistically set against religion. But that's just a theory.
I don't think Zizek is against religion, he often calls himself a Christian Atheist, and criticizes the New Atheists for being naive.
The question he poses to Buddhism (at least, insofar as he understands Buddhism proper) is: why do we first fall into believing our false selves? In other words, If the idea of Buddhism is that underneath the facade of the self is a void, Zizek is asking a basic question: how is it that we come to believe in this facade in the first place? What is the facade? Of course it is not real (in some sense)-- perhaps it's an appearance, but what does that mean? What is appearance?
Even if he gets Buddhism wrong in asking the question (I wouldn't know), I think it displays quite nicely what *his* thought is about.
@@TheRandomBiscuit This is the same question in Buddhism as well. In fact Buddhism deals with the same 'incompleteness' in a similar ish way.
The way buddhists understand it though is more than just rejection of understanding of a material world but rather in the context of karma and rebirth.
Zizek thinks ethics is equivalent to authenticity.
50:17 Lack
Since Zizek is investing a fair amount of time into the Buddhist view of the world, there is something to be said about this from my side.
Namely, the greatness and radical character of Buddha's teaching is the demand to the disciple to walk around without taking pride in some sort of identity or even worse, a believe that the show will somehow go on for him personally, when death has put his dry hand on the human being.
All these ideas of _meaning of life_ and these abhorrent concepts like _love, soul and god_ are brushed from the table.
NO MORE BACKUP's. Much more, these are clearly seen as the main obstacle to become a truly human flower.
Thesis : 'Nirvana is a point in the very structure and fabric of the world (planet and universe) to where one can clutch in and begin to revolve WITH the planetary movement and not against it.'
Nirvana is missed by sticking to ideological, populistic paradigms like identity and personality. A sheer waste of energy invested there, which could be used on a practical level to succesively decrease the circles of misery, hatred and violence. The root cause of suffering is this unconditional investment and unquestioned perpetuation of doggish and sycophantic superstition for "identity", which is passed on from generation to generation. Be that the identity of a nation, tribe or a persona.
Identity is useful for earthly societal and social interactions, albeit an energy eater when it comes to the spiritual and the infamous beyond. Nirvana is available to everyone, be he a trained monk, a holy hooker or plumber man. And factually we are in Nirvana uninterruptedly. It is analytical thinking which disables access.
How could we fall for this ?
For simple practical reasons. The others do so and we do so too, bcs we also want our share. Cheap opportunism which totally ran out of control.
Zizek somewhere pointed to our collective hypocrisy related to this phenomenon.
Why do we celebrate Christmas? None believes the tale told about it. We are obedient followers of the consumerist order handed down to us by, now guess : The Big Other.
Not to speak about the terror of positivity and it's depressing side effects.
Sorry, I talk too much. You can correct me IF I'm wrong ;)
My Christian mom was extremely disappointed when I told her that Christmas was never a pagan holiday, probably because in that moment, she got what she desired. Christmas symbolically represents the second coming of Christ and the rebirth of the Church, which is followed by the Epiphany and a repetition of the cyclical calendar of the church. The Puritans did not celebrate Christmas, because they argued that Scripture provides no evidence that Jesus was born on December 25th. Traditionally, before the Industrial Revolution, Christmas was celebrated as a public revelry where participants would get drunk and party in the streets for 12 days- the Puritans also condemned Christmas as an excuse for disorder. The US did not recognize Christmas as a national holiday until the mid-19th century. By that time, the middle class started to push Christmas celebrations from the public streets into the safe spaces of private homes, while making children the central focus of the holiday and a reason to increase consumer demand. The Christmas that is celebrated by a majority of Americans today is a capitalist, world-affirming redirection of the Christian drive. It’s not the big Other ordering us to excessively consume stuff around Christmas, it’s the Superego demanding that we enjoy. Like Buddhism, Christianity is also world-rejecting, but contextually very different from Buddhism because it emerges from the Western canon where mankind creates, destroys, and worships god(s).
Growing up, my mom used to warn me by saying “I brought you into this world and I can sure as hell take you out too.” My grandma used to say it to my mom, and I never really understood what it meant until I started to learn more about Early Christianity and the philosophy of Plato, more specifically Socrates.
This Jewish woman in my photography studio used to joke that all the Christians in the room were actually pagans, implying that we worship a false god. She did not understand, nor would I ever try to force her to understand, that Christianity killed God and polytheism thereafter.
I would not categorize Buddhism as a religion nor a philosophy in the Western sense, because it has no ties to theism nor Platonism nor orthodoxy. Everyman falls.
@@one-sidedrationalization1091 only if man ever rose, he could fall. When did he rise ? You're also well informed about your universe. Thanks for sharing 1091
47:43 Evil
‘some stupid Guatemala family’
4:01
4:30
1:05:00
1:13:07
Matt K . 19:00 onward
Matt K. 24:00 too
Matt K 128:00
How can you be serious when you defend Stalin?
51:00
Great lecture. I do like his work, but I can't help cringing when he compares Buddhism (far too superficially) with Freud.
seeget his essays are better, and the comparison is more to Lacan
He does differentiate "Western" Buddhism.
He jacks Lacan like Lacan jacked him some good Heidegger who jacks Buddhism. It's a co-jack, but Kojak jacked-off on lollipops. Still, we should remember that Eminem said that Daniel-san wax off
best quality *0*
Slavering zizek
Hey... making a smokescreen to make his point...Some stuff I may agree with..but everything needs balance and this life is kind of like a game, it doesn't make it a bad thing. Also...IT'S PROVEN SCIENTIFICALLY THAT ECO FOOD IS HEALTHIER THEN regular. Also I eat it for the health not for the social thing... what a guy..
The social thing happens all across language regardless of whether YOU are doing it for health reasons or not
and very often his point is the smoke screen
Can we just edit out these stupid introductions, or at least make them tolerably short and less sycophantic.
i Neeraj Lohchab
I love the way he disses Bill Gates! I bet Zizek uses word, Hotmail etc! Bill gates transformed how we communicate and function just like Steve Jobs did. How has Zizek exactly transformed the world? How has his interpretation of Lacan enlightened anyone?
relax
You entirely missed his exact point which is that it's a time to think and not to do
And lol Zizek has done plenty for me, Bill Gates hasn't done aaanything why should I care about some random rich guy who does good things for the world over someone who makes me think? The rich guy who does good things can continue with or without me being there but I wouldn't think this much if Zizek doesn't exist. So yeah Bill Gates is as irrelevant to me personally as the country of Angola is what do you think of that
23:27 *Morals vs ethics* “The two are not the same. Morality is concerned with the symmetry of my relation to other humans-it’s zero level rule is _do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you._ Incidentally, a good rule to follow for a masochist no, where it gets a little bit complicated. Ethics on the contrary deals with my consistency with myself-my fidelity to my own desire.”
44:10