Arts & Culture
FATTAL | Let’s Unpack My Library: An Ode to the Books Unread
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I’m back at home, surrounded by artifacts of a person I struggle to recognize, and I’m digging through ground zero, my “library.”
The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/lacan/)
I’m back at home, surrounded by artifacts of a person I struggle to recognize, and I’m digging through ground zero, my “library.”
In perhaps a libidinal display of masculinity (or maybe a preemptive pre-law hubris), I was attempting to tell a story (that is, accurately convey my internal monologue) with my conclusion already decided.
Slavoj Zizek, a proponent of Jacques Lacan, describes the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive as “the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people do everything possible not to be happy.” Plainly, the death drive is that tendency for rational beings to engage in self-destructive behaviors as a refusal of mortality. A medieval footsoldier will charge into certain death with the reassurance that God waits in the afterlife. The people of Gaza now stand their ground in the face of bombardment with that same reassurance. This is an archaic instantiation of death drive ideology to those that live in the contemporary West, in the heart of empire. But mortality transcends time and place.