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Against Embodiment: The Material Ground of the More-than-Material Subject According to Freud, one feature of neurosis is a problematization of sexual life triggered by its associations with mortal finitude. He also mentions, during the course of the Rat Man’s case history, that obsessional neurotics in particular have a tendency to latch onto topics enabling them to indulge themselves in their favorite mental-affective state, namely, the uncertainty of doubt (an uncertainty sustaining a ceaseless activity of thinking—if “I think, therefore I am,” then “if I do not think, then I am not”). Two of these topics listed by Freud are “length of life” and “life and death.”1 Likewise, indications of a profound relation between obsessional neurosis and mortality are scattered throughout Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic literature. The standard interpretation here is that the obsessional, through the rigidity of repetitive ritual, attempts indefinitely to stave off death through the strange strategy of turning him/herself into a living corpse.2 Serge Leclaire evocatively speaks of a “spatialization of time” that terminates in the “freezing of becoming.”3 André Green widens the scope of this, characterizing symptomatic repetition in general (in melancholia and compulsiveness as well as obsessional neurosis) as bound up with the matter of death.4 Picking up on this line of thought, Žižek discerns a paradox within the obsessional strategy of rigidifying self-cadaverization: the very effort to avoid death leads to a de-vitalizing mortification.5 In fact, regarding this specific dimension of neurosis (the pathology whose structure Žižek claims to discern in Kant), Žižek asserts that a Hegelian dialectical oscillation, an unstable reversal of opposites into each other, takes place between the terms life and death.6 Expanding on his notion of the space between two deaths, a notion first proposed toward the end of the seventh seminar in connection with a reading of Sophocles’s Antigone,7 Lacan, in the eighth seminar on transference , further specifies the difference between these two sorts of death. The “first death” is, simply enough, mere physical demise, the cessation of vital functions in the organism. The “second death,” by contrast, is essentially linked to the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, hav5 45 ing more to do with the annihilating yet eternalizing effects of subjective alienation in the spheres of both the image as well as the signifier: This boundary . . . of the second death . . . one can define it under its most general formulation in saying that man aspires to annihilate himself there in order to inscribe himself there in the terms of being. The hidden contradiction . . . is that man aspires to destroy himself in eternalizing himself. (SVIII 122) The “hidden contradiction” of this second dimension of death is that the barred subject, as a finite power of unrepresentable negativity, achieves its illusory eternalization exclusively through, so to speak, destroying itself by exporting its very (non-)being to the domain of external representational mediators. Lacan refers to the Symbolic axis of this dynamic as “corpsification,” as the “cadaverizing” effects of the signifiers of the big Other on the living being that thereby becomes a parlêtre.8 In Lacanese , the subject of enunciation (i.e., the unsuturable void of $) secures its fantasmatic transcendence of finitude only via the mortification of alienating meditation vis-à-vis the subject of the utterance. At stake in this second death is, rather than the biological body of the individual, the subject as signification, as routed through the circuitous networks of images and signifiers. Here, as both Lacan and Žižek observe, mortality and immortality cross over into each other. The paradoxes of this dialectical convergence of opposites are vital to the framing of a transcendental materialist theory of the subject, a theory arising, in part, from this heterodox endeavor to couple, with the help of Žižek, Kant avec Lacan. This oscillation between mortality and immortality exhibits itself in both the Imaginary, with the ego, and the Symbolic, with the subject. Regarding the former aspect of this dialectic as exhibited in the mirror stage, Žižek states: At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan—as is well known—locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child’s actual helplessness and lack of coordination. The feature to be emphasized here is that we are dealing with a kind of “freeze of time”: the...

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