As we shall see in Section 5. 5 , the Real of jouissance—that of the object a—is indeed
always a Real-of-the-Symbolic.
Beginning from these presuppositions, Lacan also deduces that the death drive
is precisely that which makes it impossiblefor the subject to return to the inorganic:
Freud’s Nirvana principle should indeed make us “smile” insofar as “nothing is
less sure than returning to [the alleged] nothingness [of the pre-Symbolic].”^36 The
case of suicides is paradigmatic here: the suicide’s desire—which we could call the
“death wish,” in opposition to the death drive—that apparently is a desire to have
done with the Symbolic—to exit from it in order to join the inanimateness to
which, according to Freud, the evolution of life ultimately aspires—actually con-
ceals a desire to be recognized bythe symbolic Other as a suicide, as the one who
rejects the Symbolic.... It therefore follows that “the more a subject affirms
through the signifier that he wants to exit the signifying chain, the more he enters
into it and becomes its part.”^37 Beside the borderline case of suicides, it is more
generally the dead as such who become for others “an eternal sign,” says Lacan—
“signs” which, I would add, the living can endlessly enjoy in their fantasies:^38 the
dead continue to circulate between S and ain the Other’s fantasy, and thus never re-
join the primordial undead. I would also go so far as to propose that, for Lacan, the
dead suffer language as, in different fashions, both psychotics and “pre-Oedipal”
babies do. It goes without saying that in order to put forward these theses Lacan is
here, unlike Freud, tacitly presupposing that the distinction between the organic
and the inorganic is retroactively operative only from the standpoint of the Sym-
bolic: outside of it there is only the undead; hence it is meaningless to talk about a
returnto the inorganic after the symbolic order as such has disappeared—after the
death of the Symbolic—just as it does not make sense to refer to the animal’s re-
turn to the inorganic.
To conclude my explanation of the role of the death drive in the functioning of
the fundamental fantasy, I shall now briefly describe three different notions of
death which are all present in Lacan’s late theory of the subject:
( 1 ) “Normal” death, death “in reality.”This is merely a symbolic construction inso-
far as if, on the one hand, man as animal is always-already undead in the barred
Real—human “life” is per seundead and “inorganic,” as is that of all other “or-
ganic” entities—on the other hand, man as being of language continues to be pres-
ent in the Other’s fantasy as the symbolically realobject of the Other’s jouissance:this
condition will persist as long as there is a symbolic order. Therefore, death “in re-
ality” is ultimately nothing but the consequence of the symbolic order’s inability
to individuate the subject imaginarily—and thus of the subject’s inability to indi-
viduate himself—beyond the visual unity granted by specularity. One could go as