omnipotency overlaps with impotence, or, even more radically,…the ‘thrust of life’ overlaps with death drive: the phallic signifier stands for potency, live thrust, but potency within the domain of the signifier, which means: of the symbolic death, of the subordination of life to a dead symbolic machine: This articulation by Freud of the death instinct is the articulation of a position essential to an animal being who is caught up and articulated in a signifying system which permits him to dominate his immanence as a living being, and to perceive himself as already dead… …Not, as it may appear, simply the experience of some presymbolic primordial Real Thing but already the obverse, the other side, of symbolic castration – and vice versa, we do not experience ‘signifier in the pure state’ when we encounter a pure symbolic formation like a mathematic formula but precisely when we confront the Real at its most raw.

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