The Life Death Drives - Cengiz Erdem
The Life Death Drives constitutes a network of non-reductive interactions between philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, cinema and politics. It is an analysis of the ways in which the exploitation of the life-drive and the death-drive takes place within and through contemporary cultural products, not only reflecting, but also constituting the internal dynamics of contemporary neo-liberalism and/or militarist-capitalism. From within the vicious cycle of dialectical materialism and out of the deadlock of democratic materialism emerges a new subject of truth constitutive of a new political field transcending the dominant regime of opinions. This new political field requires a new mode of being and thinking in such a way as to sustain the conditions for progressive social change. Badiou presents this process driven by a fidelity to an unknown truth as materialist dialectics. The thesis culminates in an expository inversion into the spotlight of the non-reductive correlation at work between Zizek’s dialectical-materialist theory of the subject as death-drive and Badiou’s materialist-dialectical theory of the subject as infinitude in time… That said, The Life Death Drives also attempts to construct a critical subject within and without finitude at the same time and to produce an immortal subject of critique, capable of affirmatively recreating this mortal, all too mortal life. It is only in and through a position of non-mortality within and without mortal life at the same time that the exploitation of mortality can be brought into the spotlight. A critique of the exploitation of mortality inherent in particularly exemplary cultural products will be achieved through putting them in a perspective that analyzes the life death drives in such a way as to expose the exploitation of the fear of death as the driving force inherent in them. The point is that it is indeed necessary to fantasize being what one is not, in our case being non-mortal, to be able to become self-conscious of one’s self-reflexivity in the way of creating an order of signification not caught up in the rotary motion of drives locked in Klein’s projection-introjection mechanism, but rather one which breaks this vicious cycle and at least attempts to subtract death from life in a counter-act to the post-structuralist idea of life as a process of dying and death as an absent presence in the midst of life. It is only through such a subtraction of the absent presence of death within life that the productive interaction between Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, Foucault’s bio-politics, Badiou’s theory of infinity, and Kant’s reflective mode of judgement give birth to the immortal subject as the womb of a new thought, a new life, and a new mode of being, free of the exploitation of mortality and engagingly indifferent to this mortal, all too mortal life...
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November 2017 -
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