Back to Table of Contents
the beginning, there was death, succeeded by later illusion of integrity and the unity of things, which is only gradually fragmented. Only then the mind can take first feeble steps towards facing the demands of a reality built pari passu with an Ego made of death, of abandoned and lost libidinal investments. When sleeping, the essence of the human desire returns to an initial state of nonexistence, with a dilemma of being or not being born. In this state it might be possible to recover an unthinkable initial state where the word has not yet detached the infants from the illusion of unity, of belonging to the silence of the stars, of the union to the ubiquitous body of the Creator. Magdaleno points out that conceiving of the death drive as corporeal, in contrast with the life drive as essentially psychic, leads to a very complex psychoanalytic problem, because it would involve multiple fields of detachments and simultaneous movements in the direction of a unique field of the desire. However, Magdaleno also sees Lacan running into a problem of his own by potentially conflating desire and death, when he writes that “desire is borne of lack…it is the desire for nothing nameable” (Lacan 1991, p. 223) . In this conceptual framework, Magdaleno contends, behind everything a man undertakes there is the unspeakable lack, the hollow, the unspeakable par excellence, that is, death. The primitive Father, the subject of acts and not of words, becomes a constitutive acquisition of the Being that speaks, a determinant of a tendency that Freud called the Death Drive. It comes to exist as a sensitive experience of mutual belonging of the human being and the world. It exists as fundamentally belonging to language, a mark of a fissure between human beings and nature. VI. G. SERAPIO MARCANO: THINKING ABOUT THE DRIVE. MUTATION – TRANSFORMATION - EVOLUTION Serapio Marcano’s (1994) “Death drive? Or the death of the drive?”, [“¿Instinto de muerte? ¿O muerte de la pulsión?”] spawns deep theoretical thought at the intersection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. In this discourse he exposes some of the complexity implied in life and death instincts or drives as two pillars of the psychoanalytic theory. The resultant multiple vertexes, from which human phenomena can be theorized, have far reaching implications for both psychoanalytic theories, clinical method and practice. In Marcano’s view, the concept of the death drive forces revision of the role played by aggression in human bonds from the beginning of life . Aggression, as an attribute both universal and independent from all the drives, can at a given time become autonomous and gain more power within one of the two factions in dispute to achieve its aim. The aim can be to produce the disappearance/repression of the sexual drive seeking expression in the unconscious. This faction is in struggle with another one, whose component is phylogenetic and is neither the object of repression nor presentation. When the object appears and the formation of the Ego starts, aggression, at the service of the Ego drives, deals death to the sexual drives. The dramatization of the struggle can be represented within the subject himself that assumes the role of the repressing Ego and is at the same time the object of his own repressed sexual drives. The struggle can also be represented as an interactive bond with an
202
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online