CONCRETE UNIVERSALITY

Desire and drive are the two interconnected concepts that run throughout Zizek's oeuvre, relating to his major concerns: psychoanalysis, philosophy and politics. But it is precisely by relating desire and drives in the psychoanalytic tradition to fundamental problems in both philosophy and politics that much of Zizek's theoretical power and originality emerge. The capitalist economy, of course, thrives immensely on this metonymic logic of desire, where no meaning is ultimately fixed and every satisfaction is provisional. Drive is not only the will to destroy, the violent disregard of life and death, but also, as Lacan put it, the "will to create from zero, to begin again". It is in this excess of culture that Zizek finds the resources for a political opening in the midst of the seemingly closed economy of commodified desire and the inertia of post-political administration. If desire is preliminary and provisional, drive is the insistence on one particular point, even beyond the limits of rational justification.