Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

130 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
equilibrium, nothingness, balance. He argues that it is not “a tendency to return to
the inanimate…[but]…a will to direct destruction” (1986, p. 251). It is “equally a
will to creation from nothing” (1986, p. 251). What is this creativity Destruction
and recreation: Sadeian leisure. Freud’s death instinct is of the “same principle” as
Sade’s system, it is “creative sublimation” Lacan argues (1986, p. 251), a creativity
tied to a structural element, the relationship to nature, such that all within this world
touched by the chain of signifiers is linked to the ex nihilo which orders and
pronounces it as such. Lacan introduces this section on the registry of human
experience by way of a reference to Marxism. He argues that desire and the function
of desire in the human libidinal economy can in no way be related to the Marxist
dimension of need. Freud has shown us that need and reason do not illuminate the
field of human experience. The function of desire is the problem of this structure.
Lacan refers to the “primitive and fundamental” hold on man by the unconscious
(1986, p. 247). Language and reason are hidden within the unconscious, unknown
and unmastered by the being which is their base. “It is in relation to this already
structured field that man must…situate his needs” (1986, p. 247). It is also from this
logical field of the unconscious that desire must be articulated. Jouissance is the
satisfaction of a drive, not a need. Drive is a complex concept, not simply reducible
to instinctual energy. It is historical and has a memory. This aspect of the psychic
function of drive is also the place where destruction is registered in the mind.
Nature’s essential subjectivity 21 is the reduction of everything to nothing, such that
recreation can be continually recommenced (1986, p. 251).
But do not suppose that Lacan will accord to even a destructive nature a direct or
original relationship to meaning or form. The order of nature is destruction, but that
is not the origin of the chain of signifiers. “The death instinct is to be situated within
the domain of the historical, in as much as it is articulated to a level that is not
definable except as a function of the chain of signifiers” (1986, p. 250). Lacan
argues that if the death instinct is the scribe which writes the chain of signifiers, it is
not because of nature, it is because of its historical dimension in the Freudian sense.
The notion of the death instinct and creative sublimation in Freud and Lacan and all
that is presented by the chain of signifiers originates in something which is definitely
outside the world of nature and beyond that chain. It originates in the ex nihilo on
which the chain of signifiers and the logos of nature is founded (1986, p. 252).
Freud’s theory and Sade’s idea were necessary, Lacan continues, because they
brought Freud to “the edge of a deeply problematic abyss” (1986, p. 252) and
revealed the structure of the field which Lacan has called das Ding.
I am showing you the necessity of a point of creation ex nihilo where what is
historical in drive is born. In the beginning was the Word, which is to say, the
signifier. Without the signifier at the beginning, it is impossible to speak of
drive as historical. And that is enough to introduce the dimension of the ex
nihilo into the structure of the field of analysis (1986, p. 252).
21. After this play with words on page 248, Lacan ridicules any attribution of a relationship between
consciousness and nature on page 252 of L’éthique de la psychanalyse.