Drive/Death-Drive

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 361-2:

Žižek takes this term from Freud and uses it to speak of that 'void' which underlies symbolic reality: drive can be understood as the repeated folding back of a process onto itself in order to expose that void for which it stands in. In this regard, it can even be understood as speaking of what makes desire possible: 'The Real qua drive is...the agens, the "driving force," of desiring... [This] in no way implies that the Real of drive is, as to its ontological status, a kind of full substantiality...a drive is not a primordial, positive force but a purely geometrical, topological phenomenon, the name for the curvature of the space of desire' (pp. 192-3). Coming back to the question of the empty place or void that runs throughout Žižek's work, however, this drive as abstract principle is not to be seen outside of the actual objects that stand in for it: 'This "pure life" beyond death, this longing that reaches beyond the circuit of generation and corruption, is it not the product of symbolization, so that symbolization itself engenders the surplus that escapes it?' (p. 160). In this sense, drive is not strictly speaking opposed to desire--as the feminine is not opposed to the masculine--but rather its extension to infinity, so that it applies even to itself. As Žižek says, it is a 'curvature of the space of desire'. Another name for this drive is in fact the subject ($)--and this takes us to the relationship between enunciated and enunciation in Žižek's work: 'The psychoanalytic name for this gap [between cause and effect], of course, is the death drive, while its philosophical name in German Idealism is "abstract negativity", the point of absolute self-contradiction that constitutes the subject as the void of pure self-relating' (p. 106).