All politics or morality must begin with the death drive, it shapes subjectivity through a fantasy of wholeness which can never be filled.

The politics of the death drive begins with the revolutionary idea of subjectivity that Freud uncovers: his understanding that the subject doesn’t seek knowledge but instead desires. Following from this idea, the traditional notion of progress becomes untenable, and the subject becomes self-destructive. On the one hand, earlier thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche anticipate Freud’s revolutionary turn from the subject of knowledge to the subject of desire. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche emphasize how our quest for knowledge serves as a guise for a more fundamental quest for satisfaction, and in this way they overturn the traditional philosophical conception of subjectivity.1 But on the other hand, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche fail to grasp the significance of the human animal’s entrance into the fi eld of knowledge or language. For both, will exists on one side and knowledge (or representation) on the other, and will is nothing but a biological fact. Freud’s conception of desiring subjectivity recognizes that the subject is the result of instinct being deformed through its submission to the realm of knowledge. Th ough we act on behalf of desire rather than knowledge, we do so, paradoxically, because our instincts are mediated by knowledge. Freud’s subject, in contrast to Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s, never experiences pure biological instincts but rather a desire that remains unconscious.2 Authentically prioritizing desire requires an idea of the unconscious not simply as the site of a will or instinct associated with human animality but as a radically diff erent psychic scene fundamentally irreducible to consciousness. For Freud, the subject doesn’t know its unconscious desire not because of its failure to grasp its continued animality but because unconscious desire gives birth to the subject and always remains in front of every project of knowledge. Freud’s revolution is a genuine one — tied to a unique vision of how subjectivity emerges.3 The political implications of psychoanalytic thought begin with its understanding of the genesis of subjectivity, an understanding that sets psychoanalysis apart from other political theorizing of all stripes. The foundational status of loss for the subject entails a politics centered around the repetition of loss rather than the achievement of the good. Psychoanalytic thought sees us as condemned to the repetition of loss, but it aims at freeing us to take up a new relation to this repetition. This new relation is the emancipatory project of psychoanalytic politics. Initially, as Freud conceives it, the human animal is an autoerotic being that has no object world. The distinction between self and other (or subject and object) is not a fact of birth but a psychical achievement. The infant’s autoerotic mode does not yet diff erentiate between itself and objects, and the being fi nds some degree of satisfaction in its undiff erentiated existence. This autoeroticism is not yet even narcissism. Th e narcissistic relationship of the subject with its own ego requires the formation of an ego, which can only form through a break in the autoerotic circuit. As Freud puts it in “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” “A unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. Th e auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very fi rst; so there must be something added to auto-eroticism — a new psychical action — in order to bring about narcissism.”4 Because the ego is just a special sort of object (one that competes with other objects for the subject’s libido), it can form and the subject can become narcissistic only aft er the subject has created the division between subject and object. Th is creative act — what Freud calls “a new psychical action” — produces a division out of the undiff erentiated autoeroticism of the human animal. Th e subject as such emerges through the experience of loss. It is the loss of a part of the subject — an initial act of sacrifi ce — that creates both subject and object, the object emerging through this act as what the subject has lost of itself. Th e subject takes an interest in the object world because it forms this world around its lost object. As Jacques Lacan notes, “Never, in our concrete experience of analytic theory, do we do without the notion of the lack of the object as central. It is not a negative, but the very spring for the relation of the subject to the world.”5 The loss of the object generates a world around this loss to which the subject can relate. Obviously, no one literally creates objects through an initial act of sacrifi ce of an actual body part. This would be too much to ask. But the psychical act of sacrifi ce allows for a distinction to develop where none existed before and simultaneously directs the subject’s desire toward the object world. In his breakthrough essay “Negation,” Freud describes this process as follows: “The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the fi rst. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refi nd such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.”6 Though Freud doesn’t use terms from linguistics, it is clear that he is making reference to the subject’s alienation in language and that he sees this alienation as the key to the emergence of both the subject and the object. When the subject submits to the imperatives of language, it enters into an indirect relation with the object world. The speaking being does not relate to books, pencils, and paper but to “books,” “pencils,” and “paper.” The signifier intervenes between the subject and the object that the subject perceives. Th e subject’s alienation into language deprives it of immediate contact with the object world. And yet, in the above passage from “Negation,” Freud conceives of the subject’s entrance into language — its “capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there” — as the event that produces the very distinction between subject and object. This means that the indirectness or mediation introduced by language deprives the subject of a direct relation to the object world that it never had. Prior to its immersion in the mediation of language, the subject had no object at all — not a privileged relation to objects but a complete absence of relationality as such due to its autoeroticism. In this sense, the subject’s willingness to accede to its alienation in language is the fi rst creative act, a sacrifi ce that produces the objects that the subject cannot directly access. Language is important not for its own sake but because it is the site of our founding sacrifi ce. We know that the subject has performed this act of sacrifi ce when we witness the subject functioning as a being of language, but the sacrifi ce is not an act that the subject takes up on its own. Others always impose the entry into language on the subject. Their exhortations and incentives to speak prompt the emergence of the speaking subject. But the subject’s openness to alienation in language, its willingness to sacrifi ce a part of itself in order to become a speaking subject, suggests a lack in being itself prior to the entry into language. That is, the act through which the subject cedes the privileged object and becomes a subject coincides with language but is irreducible to it. Th e subject engages in the act of sacrifi ce because it does not fi nd its initial autoeroticism perfectly satisfying — the unity of the autoerotic being is not perfect — and this lack of complete satisfaction produces the opening through which language and society grab onto the subject through its alienating process. If the initial autoerotic state of the human animal were perfectly satisfying, no one would begin to speak, and subjectivity would never form. Speaking as such testifi es to an initial wound in our animal being and in being itself. But subjectivity emerges only out of a self-wounding. Even though others encourage the infant to abandon its autoerotic state through a multitude of inducements, the initial loss that constitutes subjectivity is always and necessarily self-infl icted. Subjectivity has a fundamentally masochistic form, and it continually repeats the masochistic act that founds it. Th e act of sacrifi ce opens the door to the promise of a satisfaction that autoerotic isolation forecloses, which is why the incipient subject abandons the autoerotic state and accedes to the call of sociality. But the term “sacrifi ce” is misleading insofar as it suggests that the subject has given up a wholeness (with itself or with its parent) that exists prior to being lost. In the act of sacrifi ce, the incipient subject gives up something that it doesn’t have. Th e initial loss that founds subjectivity is not at all substantial; it is the ceding of nothing. Th rough this defi ning gesture, the subject sacrifi ces its lost object into being. But if the subject cedes nothing, this initial act of sacrifi ce seems profoundly unnecessary. Why can’t the subject emerge without it? Why is the experience of loss necessary for the subject to constitute itself qua subject? Th e answer lies in the diff erence between need and desire. While the needs of the human animal are not dependent on the experience of loss, the subject’s desires are It is the initial act of sacrifi ce that gives birth to desire: the subject sacrifi ces nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire. As Richard Boothby puts it in his unequaled explanation of the psychoanalytic conception of the emergence of desire, “Th e destruction and loss of the object . . . opens up a symbolic dimension in which what was lost might be recovered in a new form.”7 He adds: “Sacrifi ce serves to constitute the very matrix of desire. Th e essential function of sacrifi ce is less do ut des, I give so that you might give, than do ut desidero: I give in order that I might desire.”8 Th e subject’s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost. Th is is why one can never att ain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire.9 Th e coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of desire as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this object, we discover its emptiness. Th e lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost.