time, including it. As Laplanche and Pontalis observe, the only way out of this im-
passe for Freud was to implicitly presuppose two kinds of pleasure principle: the
pleasure principle stricto sensu,which would be in charge of maintaining a constant
level of libido understood as “life instinct,” and the so-called Nirvana principle,
which would instead work “towards the reduction of tensions to nil,”^25 thus serv-
ing the death instinct as the “essence of the instinctual.”^26
Despite the fact that he does not openly confront Freud on this point,^27 Lacan
definitely refuses to consider the Nirvana principle in terms of the death drive.
Adamant that they must be distinguished, he claims that there is a fundamental “di-
visionbetween the Nirvana or annihilation principle and the death drive [insofar as]
the former concerns a relationship to a fundamental law which might be identi-
fied with that which energetics theorizes as the tendency to return to a state, if not
of absolute rest, then at least of universal equilibrium”; that is to say, entropy.^28 By
contrast, the death drive “has to be beyondthe instinct to return to the state of equi-
librium of the inanimate sphere,”^29 and this for three strictly interrelated reasons.
First, it entails a historical dimension insofar as “it is articulated at a level that can
only be defined as a function of the signifying chain.” In other words, the death
drive can be applied only to human beings and not to other living beings; the death
drive is not a death instinct.^30 Secondly, such a historical articulation of the death
drive presents itself in the guise of the repetitive “insistence”^31 of the fundamen-
tal fantasy—in Lacan’s own intricate words, “of something memorable because it
was remembered [mémorisé].”^32 Thirdly, this insistence as principle of conservation
should at the same time be linked to a subtractive element that, for the reasons ex-
pounded above, must be differentiated from any sort of transcendent Schopen-
hauerian Wille:Lacan defines it as a “will to destruction,” and later specifies that it
should, rather, be understood as a destructive “will for something Other [une volonté
de quelque chose d’Autre],” “a will to begin all over again,” ex nihilo.^33
To cut a long story short, the death drive could thus be said to be beyond the
pleasure principle only insofar as we take the latter to express the Nirvana principle
understood as the (alleged) tendency to return to an inorganic state. But if one con-
siders the pleasure principle as “nothing other than the dominance of the signi-
fier,”^34 it is clearly the case that the death drive—on which the differentiality of the
symbolic Other of the signifiers ultimately relies—is notbeyond the pleasure prin-
ciple. This despite the fact that it involves a (domesticated) masochistic jouissance,
which itself aims at the “inorganic” undead. As a matter of fact, such a “beyond”
of the Lacanian death drive always remains withinthe symbolic order (“should we
find anything else than the fundamental relationship between the subject and the
signifying chain in what Freud names the beyond of the pleasure principle”?).^35the subject of the real (other)