THE SECOND DEATH

Abstract

As much as humanity has always been driven by the idea of conquering death, it is also haunted by the impossibility of dying completely; that is, by a possible persistence and recurrence of something undead and indestructible that pertains to us; not necessarily as our ally, but rather as our enemy. This paper explores this strange non-coincidence of death (and life) with itself. Following various authors (Lacan, de Sade), it develops the thesis that the difference between the “real” (empirical) and the symbolic is not sufficient to explain this irreducible surplus of life, this undeadness, which is not the same as “symbolic life.” Rather, it corresponds to a surplus of life that occurs as a by-product of the symbolic, but which is not itself symbolic or covered by it. Lacanian theory differs from the so-called “linguistic turn” in that it alerts us to the following paradox: language is not reducible (back) to language. It is because of language that another, additional non-linguistic Real exists in the universe.