Alt fails – there’s no ultimate solution to the lack, and the best we can do is develop a more active relationship to it – try or die for perm do both: pass the plan, and remain open to the anxiety that what comes next is unpredictable.

This dispute will gain prominence in the next chapter. But first I want to illustrate that though the reading of death-dealing negativity that Edelman extracts from Lacan is available in Lacan’s work, so is a very different reading of negativity. More specifically, though it is true that Lacan connects the death drive to the suicidal act, presenting Antigone as a heroine who is unwilling to cede on her desire even when she knows that this desire will lead to her demise, he also explicitly links the death drive to a “will to make a fresh start,” “a will to create from zero, a will to begin again” (1959–1960, 212). He in fact suggests that insofar as the death drive “challenges every- thing that exists” (212), it can make visible what is invisible from the point of view of the social order, thereby inviting a fundamental reconfiguration (rather than simply a destruction) of that order. The same logic can arguably be applied to the subject, so that the death drive’s “will to make a fresh start” might productively be taken to gesture toward the kind of psychic rebirth that clinical practice, in Kristeva’s opinion, can bring about (see chapter 2). In other words, although Lacan certainly does not imply that acts of subjective destitution invariably result in collective or personal revitalization, the possibility of such revitalization—a possibility that Edelman studiously ignores—is nevertheless present in his account. This possibility of revitalization is what Badiou has explored through his notion of the truth event as a sudden revelation that erases the individual’s status quo—her “business as usual”—and brings into being the so-called subject of truth, a subject who, through its fidelity to the unanticipated insight offered by the event, engenders a new (collective or personal) order of things. Žižek, whose reading of Lacan is closer to that of Edelman, routinely takes issue with Badiou’s interpretation, accusing Badiou of not fully grasping the destructive power of the death drive. Yet Žižek himself at times also views subjective destitution as a spur for a new order of things, as when, for instance, he observes that “the act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). . . . in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not)” (2001, 44). Unlike Edelman, Žižek here seems to recognize that even though the act may not consciously aim at rebirth, and even though it may not inevitably lead to such rebirth, it can under certain circumstances have this effect. I suspect that the ambivalence regarding the matter arises precisely from the fact that both readings are available in Lacan, so that where one ends up—at destruction or rebirth—depends on what one chooses to highlight. Even Lacan’s statement about the death drive functioning as “a will to begin again” is wrought with ambiguity. One can argue—as Philip Sayers (2014) skillfully does—that the “will to begin again,” the “will to make a fresh start,” refers to the will to return to the beginning of the repetition compulsion, to start “afresh” the process of pursuing the thread of this compulsion, the thread of one’s fundamental psychic destiny. Read in this way, the will to begin again suggests that the subject defends against rebirth—understood as a reconfiguration of life—by opting for the familiar trajectory of the repetition compulsion. Sayers’s reading is also compatible with McGowan’s analysis of the drive as what enjoys by enjoying “nothing,” by never attaining its goal. Translated into my vocabulary, it implies that the death drive causes the subject to repeatedly recommence its circling around the traumatic kernel of the lost Thing. Yet even within this interpretation, there is room for a degree of “rebirth” in the sense that each new cycle of the repetition compulsion repeats slightly differently—draws new elements, new debris of life, into the groove of the compulsion—so that even when the repetition is largely predictable, it is always also somewhat unpredictable; to the extent that something new is added to the repetition compulsion with every new enactment, one can still speak of a “fresh start” of sorts. This interpretation agrees with the conclusion regarding the repetition compulsion that I arrived at in the last chapter, namely, that the compulsion is usually impossible to break in any definitive sense, that the best the subject can do is to develop a more active—and ideally more satisfying— relationship to it. This is one reason that one cannot, in the Lacanian con- text, speak about an analytic “cure,” about an ultimate solution (what Lacan mockingly calls “the Sovereign Good”) that would, once and for all, release the subject from its suffering; the best clinical practice can accomplish is to facilitate the subject’s capacity to enter into the cycle of the repetition compulsion in less injurious ways. This may, for instance, entail developing a greater degree of critical distance from the compulsion so that moments of intervention—moments when the subject decides against its “usual” manner of going about the process of living—become possible. Starting “afresh” in this sense is merely a matter of starting from a slightly different perspective. Although I find this interpretation persuasive, I am also inclined to read Lacan’s statement about the “will to create from zero, a will to begin again” alongside his famous musings about a potter who creates a vase around a void, “creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole” (1959–1960, 120). In both cases, Lacan suggests that absence (zero, a hole) is a source of creativity. The zero of the death drive and the hole of the vase are far from being inert spaces of lack. Rather, they give rise to the desire to play with lack; they—to return to my wording in chapter 1— generate the impulse to work with negativity. Essentially, Lacan stresses that emptiness and creativity—the zero of the death drive and the will to begin again; the void of the vase and the fashioning of the vase that comes to enclose it—arise simultaneously. This is Lacan’s figurative means of conveying one of his most fundamental insights about human subjectivity, namely, that our sense of lack and our capacity to signify come into being in tandem: the signifier causes our lack but our lack, in turn, causes the urge to signify. Or to state the matter con- versely, it is because we lack that we are prompted to signify (create) yet it is our significatory (creative) activity that allows us to (sort of) handle our lack. This is arguably what we do when we write books (yes?). In this sense, there is a direct connection between our alienation on the one hand and our capacity to envision imaginative ways of coping with this alien- ation on the other. In addition, because our alienation can never be definitively redeemed, because we have no way of turning our negativity into a definitive form of positivity, our significatory endeavors are transient at best, giving us access to no permanent meaning, no solid identity, no unitary narrative of self- actualization. Any fleeting state of positivity that we may be able to attain must always in the end dissolve back into negativity; any attempt to erase lack produces new instances of lack. This means that the process of working with negativity must be continually renewed, which is why we start writing a new book the minute the old one is finished. Or at least I do. The hope is that if I work through the same ideas one more time, maybe I will finally be able to put them to rest. But they do not rest. Some of them insist on remaining wide awake, asking for yet another articulation: thus the endless recycling of thoughts, the endless “will to begin again.” In the same way that no object of desire can ever fully gratify, our every attempt to fill our lack unavoidably falls short of its goal: there will, quite simply, never be a perfect book, the book of books that extinguishes the desire for a better book. However, as I have observed, the lack of complete satisfaction does not mean that there is no satisfaction to be had. If any- thing, the intrinsic impossibility of complete satisfaction is what sustains us as creatures of becoming and what allows us, over and again, to take up the inexhaustible process of producing meaning, including the process of signifying beauty. As Kaja Silverman states, “Our capacity to signify beauty has no limits. It is born of a loss which can never be adequately named, and whose consequence is, quite simply, the human imperative to engage in a ceaseless signification. It is finally this never-ending symbolization that the world wants from us” (2000, 146).