Chapter 28

“Somebody stop me! —Jim Carrey, The Mask

Žižek posits Rammstein’s Dalai Lama as the theme song for breaking out of the deadlock of modern subjectivity, moving through Heidegger’s being-towards-death and into the “space of the living-dead.”

Žižek writes:

“Yes, the life of the living dead. The central theme of Rammstein’s song ‘Dalai Lama’ is one of falling further and further into a state of ruin but, crucially, having to keep on living—this is death drive at its purest. Not death itself, but the fact that we have to LIVE until we die. This endless dragging of life, this endless compulsion to repeat. The song sounds like what in France they call a lapalissade (a tautological wisdom like ‘a minute before he died, Monsieur la Palice was still alive’). But Rammstein turns around the obvious wisdom ‘no matter how long you live, at the end you will die’: till you die, you have to live. What makes the Rammstein version not an empty tautology is the ethical dimension: before we die, we are not just (obviously) alive—we HAVE to live. Life is not just an organic continuation. For us humans, it is a decision, an active obligation—we can lose this will.”

The death drive is the shadow of that obligation, the thing that keeps dragging us forward—even when we no longer want to go on. The drive goes on and on and on. It doesn’t care. It’s the existential equivalent of a self-checkout machine that keeps prompting you to remove an imaginary item from the bagging area.

In his lecture Death Drive as a Philosophical Concept, Žižek brings up a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West where a phone rings, someone picks up, but the phone keeps ringing anyway. Hegel once wrote that the spirit of life can be found in music—the vibrant sound that reminds us we’re alive, even when we can’t see life itself. But in this scene, the sound keeps going. The vibration of life is excessive—it spills out beyond where it should. Žižek flips this: what happens when it’s the other way around? When the will to live bottoms out? When life continues but as a mechanical repetition?

To illustrate, he describes a play where, at the end, the music stops—but the dancers keep dancing. The sound represents the will, the lively energy of life. But even when it’s gone, the movement keeps going. This is death drive. “Something that remains when you suspend the will,” Žižek says.

I think about The Mask, that Jim Carrey movie I was obsessed with as a kid. He plays a miserable banker, barely scraping through life, no real will to live—just punching in, punching out. Then one day, he finds the mask. Suddenly, he’s immortal, animated, hyper-creative, a danger to himself. In other words, undead.

To be precise, the drive isn’t about craving material things or fulfilling basic survival needs like eating. It’s about the inescapable fact that we all have a hole in us—an emptiness that can never be permanently filled. This is where Nothing exists, and Nothing, being very real, demands to be filled, at least temporarily.

Žižek, in Less Than Nothing, calls the way we orbit this hole “the magical domain of suspended animation.” We curve our thoughts around it, flow into it, lose ourselves in repetition. This is how we get stuck in loops—doing the same thing over and over, because the act itself elevates us beyond time, beyond worry, beyond our so-called “selves.” It’s when you do something—not to complete it, but to keep doing it. It’s why we doomscroll, or get lost in a project, or stay in a job we hate just because it gives us something to do. The repetition is satisfying, not because we’re progressing toward a goal, but because the end would mean confronting the void directly.

And this is where Žižek finds something almost hopeful—if you can even call it that. The drive, though relentless, creates something. This endless repetition isn’t just about stagnation. It’s also where will is born. This process of dragging on creates the space for something new to emerge. As Alenka Zupančič puts it in What Is Sex?, it’s “repetition without any ground.” You keep going, not because you want to, but because in the going itself, something new might happen.

Žižek believes this drive is the ultimate creative force, a type of radical blind principle that gave birth to life itself. But, like any good cosmic joke, it also has a built-in self-destruct button. It has no interest in preserving that life. The death drive is relentless—it doesn’t care if it kills you. It just wants to keep going. It’s not life, it’s not death—it’s something else, operating on its own warped logic.

Which brings us back to Rammstein’s Dalai Lama and Žižek’s point in Surplus Enjoyment: the only way to resist the void is to decide to live, and to live with the utmost intensity. He gives the example of frontline healthcare workers during COVID—people who risked their lives every day. “Many of them died, but till they died, they were alive… they were those who are today most alive.”

I think back to my time working in registration at the county hospital during the pandemic. I worked at a Vegas hospital after the facility before moving to Reno to take the call center job. Twelve-hour shifts in the biggest ER in Vegas, registering patients and getting their insurance so that the doctors could get paid. And yet, I was never in confrontation with the void. We had to do it. We chose to do it. And through that repetition—showing up, again and again—will emerged.

And sure, the job wasn’t as exhilarating as Žižek makes it sound. But then again, I’ve got a warped metric for excitement. I was a thunderbolt death-drive meth addict with no match in civil society for the ultimate high. If anyone knows what it’s like to be animated by the drive, to keep going despite it all, it’s me. And when I think about my coworkers—the nurses, the women on my registration team—I see it clearly: we were the living dead.

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