Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

love in the new virtuous community which cures us of it) and the implicit lesson of the story itself (the failure of this “sublation,” the deadly return of love) to be read as a prescient critique of Hegel, as an indication of the limit of Aufhebung, as the persistence of the real of the obscene “undead” passion whose singularity eludes the grasp of notional universalization? One is tempted to agree with such a reading: is what characterizes the post-Hegelian break not precisely the rise of a repetition which cannot be “sublated,” of a drive which persists beyond (or, rather, beneath) the movement of idealization? The memorable phrases in Julie’s final letter to her lover before her death (Sixth Part, Letter VIII) certainly seem to point in this direction. It is not so much that satisfaction (well-being, happiness) are out of reach for her—they are actual, and this very fact, “ce dégoût du bien-être,” is what she finds unbearably suffocating: “je suis trop heureuse: le bonheur m’ennuie.”²⁷ When a contemporary Swiss reviewer of Julie wrote that “after reading this book, one has to die of pleasure . . . or, better: one has to live in order to read it again and again”²⁸—is this overlapping of death and the repetitive excess of life not the most succinct description of the Freudian death drive, a dimension which eludes the Hegelian dialectical mediation.