Between-Two-Deaths
ELI5
Imagine someone who is still physically alive but whose life in society is completely over — they've been cast out, condemned, or spiritually destroyed — yet they haven't died yet. Or the reverse: someone who has died but whose "account" with the world is still unresolved, leaving them somehow still haunting the living. That liminal no-man's-land, where you're caught between two different kinds of death, is what Lacan calls "between two deaths."
Definition
Between-Two-Deaths designates a topological zone first elaborated by Lacan in Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) that names the liminal space inhabited by a subject who has undergone symbolic death — the cancellation or exhaustion of their place within the social-symbolic order — while biological life persists, or conversely, one whose biological existence has ended while the symbolic debt remains unsettled. The concept rests on a structural distinction between two heterogeneous registers of death: the real (biological) and the symbolic (the annihilation of one's inscription in the signifying chain, the "second death" that extinguishes even the cycles of natural transformation). The zone between these two deaths is neither simply alive nor simply dead; it is a condition of radical exposure, of existing outside the protective cover of the symbolic order, yet persisting.
Lacan derives the concept primarily from his reading of Antigone, whose condemnation by Creon places her in this uncanny middle: buried alive, she inhabits "a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death" (Seminar VII, p. 257). But the concept has wider application: it structures the tragic hero's position across all extant Sophoclean plays, the ethical stance of Socrates (already effectively resigned to death, yet still speaking), and figures like Hamlet's father, whose unresolved symbolic debt keeps him circulating as the undead. Crucially, it is in this zone that the aesthetic-ethical effect of beauty is generated — beauty functions as a veil over, and a barrier at the limit of, this abyss — and desire is both reflected and refracted in its most intense and most objectless form.
Evolution
The concept is introduced and most fully elaborated in Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), where Lacan uses Antigone as its paradigm case. There, the zone between two deaths is defined through the figure of the "second death" — not biological extinction but the annihilation of one's very being as a symbolic entity, the erasure of the cycles of nature and transformation. In Seminar VII Lacan also invokes Sade's heroes who fantasize this second death as the ultimate transgression. The zone is explicitly tied to beauty: it is the structural locus from which the aesthetic effect of tragedy irradiates, splitting desire between extinction and intensification (Seminar VII, p. 257).
In Seminar VIII (Transference), Lacan recalls the concept as foundational ground, noting that "those attending the Seminar coined the phrase 'between two deaths'" (Seminar VIII, p. 290), which signals its status as a collectively recognized theoretical achievement. In Seminar VIII the concept is extended beyond tragedy: it names Socrates' own structural position — already resigned to death, inhabiting "a sort of gratuitous no man's land" (Seminar VIII, p. 95) — and the topological zone where "the space of the between-two-deaths is found in a pure state, emptying out the place of desire as such" (Seminar VIII, p. 117). Beauty's function as a barrier at the limit of this zone, veling the desire for death, is made explicit in the reading of Diotima's speech (Seminar VIII, p. 140). Seminar VIII also marks an important development: Lacan argues that Sygne de Coûfontaine's drama "outstrips" the between-two-deaths locus, going "beyond beauty, strictly speaking" (Seminar VIII, p. 290), indicating that the concept, while foundational, does not constitute an absolute limit in ethical analysis.
In the secondary literature, Alenka Zupančič applies the concept with precision to literary cases, showing how Valmont's project with Madame de Tourvel is a deliberate attempt to engineer the between-two-deaths experience — to destroy her symbolically before her actual destruction — and linking it to the structural temporality of Hamlet's father's unresolved guilt. Slavoj Žižek extends the concept into political philosophy, using it to theorize both the Stalinist Communist as a "sublime object" placed in the interspace between the two deaths (indestructible, backed by the big Other of History) and Antigone's position as one of radical exclusion from the polis — bare life — which he connects to the Holocaust and to the failure of Heideggerian politics.
Key formulations
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (p.257)
a life that is about to turn into certain death, a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death
This is Lacan's own primary definition of the zone, generated through close reading of Antigone's situation after her condemnation — the clearest articulation of the concept's phenomenological texture in the corpus.
Seminar VIII · Transference (p.111)
The 'between-two-deaths' - which is not so difficult to grasp, because it simply means that, for humankind, the two borders related to death do not overlap - grew out of this topology over the course of the last year.
Lacan's own retrospective, topological summary of the concept as he opens Seminar VIII: the non-overlap of the two registers of death is what constitutes the zone, and it is explicitly tied to the signifying chain and the death drive.
Seminar VIII · Transference (p.140)
beauty intervenes as a barrier at the limit of the zone I defined as lying between-two-deaths. If there are two desires that captivate man, on the one hand in relation to eternity, and on the other in relation to reproduction... beauty is designed to veil his desire for death insofar as it is unapproachable.
This formulation makes explicit the structural relationship between beauty and the between-two-deaths, showing beauty not as an aesthetic ornament but as a topological barrier that both marks and conceals the zone.
Seminar VIII · Transference (p.290)
those attending the Seminar coined the phrase 'between two deaths'; showed that this locus is outstripped by going... beyond beauty, strictly speaking
Lacan attributes the phrase to his seminar audience while simultaneously marking its limit — Sygne de Coûfontaine's drama exceeds even this zone — demonstrating that the concept, while foundational, is subject to further ethical elaboration.
The Sublime Object of Ideology (page unknown)
the place of the Stalinist Communist is exactly between the two deaths... the sublime object placed in the interspace between the two deaths
Žižek's decisive political extension of the concept: the Stalinist revolutionary is constituted as a sublime, indestructible body by the big Other of History, occupying the between-two-deaths as a structure of ideological immortality.
Cited examples
Antigone (Sophocles) (literature)
Cited by Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (p.257). Antigone's condemnation by Creon — being buried alive — is Lacan's paradigm case for the between-two-deaths: she inhabits the zone between biological and symbolic death, which is also the site from which the aesthetic effect of beauty and the ethical force of tragedy are generated. The middle third of the play, Lacan argues, is entirely structured around this liminal position.
All seven extant plays of Sophocles (Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Rex, The Trachiniae, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus) (literature)
Cited by Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (p.281). Lacan generalizes the between-two-deaths structure across all extant Sophoclean tragedy, arguing that Sophoclean heroes universally occupy a 'limit zone, between life and death' — the race-is-run stance — making this the formal condition of the tragic hero as such, not merely an attribute of Antigone.
Socrates (as depicted in Plato's Phaedo and Symposium) (history)
Cited by Seminar VIII · Transference (p.95). Lacan uses Socrates' absolute calm before death and his promotion of the signifier to absolute dignity as an instance of inhabiting the between-two-deaths: already effectively dead (resigned, freed of 'fear and trembling' before the second death), Socrates exemplifies the ethical position of desire unattached to self-preservation.
Alcestis, Orpheus, and Achilles (in Phaedrus' speech in Plato's Symposium) (literature)
Cited by Seminar VIII · Transference (p.59). Lacan notes that Euripides' version of Alcestis — dying for her husband, then retrieved from the dead — illustrates the zone of tragedy delimited by the between-two-deaths, grouping her with Orpheus and Achilles as mythic figures who traverse the boundary between symbolic and biological death.
Madame de Tourvel in Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (literature)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.126). Zupančič argues that Valmont's entire project with Madame de Tourvel is a deliberate attempt to push her into the between-two-deaths: he systematically makes her aware of her symbolic ruin ('destroy her before her actual destruction'), keeping 'that sombre spectacle ceaselessly before her eyes' so she lives her symbolic death while still biologically alive.
Peeping Tom (film, dir. Michael Powell, 1960) (film)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.127). Zupančič invokes this film to illustrate the structure of forcing the victim to witness their own death: the murderer's weapon includes a mirror so victims see themselves dying, compelling them to inhabit the between-two-deaths — the moment of absolute horror on their faces is the expression of this liminal experience.
Hamlet's father's ghost (Shakespeare's Hamlet) (literature)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.197). Zupančič uses Hamlet's father to illustrate the between-two-deaths as unresolved symbolic debt: surprised by death before his sins were accounted for, the former king remains in the liminal zone as the undead, his symbolic ledger still open — the apparition inaugurates guilt precisely because death did not bring symbolic closure.
Sygne de Coûfontaine in Paul Claudel's L'Otage (literature)
Cited by Seminar VIII · Transference (p.290). Lacan uses Sygne to mark the limit and transgression of the between-two-deaths zone: her absolute sacrifice — going against her own being, beyond beauty and meaning, ending in a pure 'no' — outstrips the Antigonean structure and points toward a new form of tragic ethics that exceeds the ancient limit.
The Stalinist Communist as political figure (politics)
Cited by The Sublime Object of Ideology (page unknown). Žižek deploys the between-two-deaths to theorize the Stalinist revolutionary's sublime indestructibility: backed by the big Other of History as teleological accountant, the Communist occupies the interspace between two deaths — guaranteed symbolic immortality regardless of biological fate — making them a 'sublime object' whose guilt or innocence is measured by historical necessity.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether the between-two-deaths designates the absolute ethical-aesthetic limit, or whether it can be surpassed by a more radical form of sacrifice
Lacan (Seminar VII): the zone between-two-deaths is the defining topological site of tragedy and ethics — Antigone's position there is the paradigm of desire maintained to its limit, and beauty marks this as the ultimate ethical-aesthetic horizon. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-7 p.257
Lacan (Seminar VIII): the between-two-deaths locus is explicitly 'outstripped' by Sygne de Coûfontaine's drama, which goes 'beyond beauty, strictly speaking,' suggesting that the concept, while foundational, does not exhaust the possibilities of tragic ethics and can be exceeded by a new form of subjective sacrifice. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-8 p.290
This tension maps a genuine development in Lacan's own thinking between the two seminars: what is the ceiling of the between-two-deaths, and what lies beyond it?
Whether the between-two-deaths is primarily an aesthetic-ethical category tied to beauty and desire, or a political-ontological category tied to the subject's exclusion from the symbolic order
Lacan (Seminar VII/VIII): the zone is fundamentally defined by the aesthetic function of beauty as a veil over the death drive, and by the refraction of desire — it is the locus of tragic beauty and the ethics of desire maintained beyond all compromise. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-8 p.140
Žižek (The Sublime Object of Ideology): the between-two-deaths is redeployed as a political-ontological category — both for Antigone's excommunication from the polis (bare life) and for the Stalinist Communist's sublime indestructibility — relocating the concept's primary valence from aesthetics and desire to ideology and political power. — cite: slavoj-zizek-the-sublime-object-of-ideology-the-essential-zizek-verso-2009
This tension reflects a broader methodological difference: Lacan anchors the concept in the ethics of psychoanalysis, while Žižek extends it into social and political theory with importantly different implications.
Across frameworks
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: For Lacan, the between-two-deaths designates a structural zone that is not a historical aberration but a permanent feature of the subject's relation to the symbolic order and the death drive. The tragic hero who occupies this zone — Antigone, Socrates — does not suffer false consciousness or a failure of recognition; rather, they embody the ethical limit of desire, the point where the subject refuses to cede ground on their desire even at the cost of symbolic and biological annihilation. The zone is constitutive, not pathological.
Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School critical theory (especially Adorno and Horkheimer) would tend to historicize such liminal states of bare exclusion as products of specific social formations — the administered society, totalitarian domination, the reification of the subject by instrumental reason. The 'living dead' would be analyzed as an effect of historical domination and alienation, potentially resolvable through emancipatory social transformation, rather than as a structural constant of the subject's relation to language.
Fault line: Lacan treats the between-two-deaths as a structural-topological necessity rooted in the non-overlap of the symbolic and the real; the Frankfurt School treats analogous conditions of radical exclusion as historically contingent products of social domination that demand and permit critique and transformation.
vs Object Oriented Ontology
Lacanian: For Lacan, the between-two-deaths is irreducibly tied to the subject's constitution through the signifier: the two deaths are heterogeneous precisely because one (the second, symbolic death) belongs to the order of language and the Other, while the other is biological. The zone is traversed and produced by the signifying chain; it is not a feature of objects as such but of subjects-in-language.
Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, Morton) would resist grounding this liminal zone in the subject's relation to language. For OOO, every object — including organisms — withdraws from full actualization; the 'undead' persistence of objects beyond their functional context would be understood as a feature of object-being in general, not as an effect of symbolic inscription. The gap is ontological and flat, not structured by the asymmetry between signifier and real.
Fault line: Lacan grounds the between-two-deaths in the subject's non-coincidence with the signifying order (a specifically linguistic-ontological gap); OOO would flatten this into a general ontological withdrawal common to all objects, dissolving the specifically human-subjective character of the concept.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (18)
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#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.126
The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > In letter 70, he puts it like this:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Valmont's conduct toward Madame de Tourvel exemplifies the perverse structure as Lacan conceives it—making the Other enjoy/become a subject—while his eventual betrayal of Merteuil illustrates Lacan's formula of 'giving ground on one's desire' (céder sur son désir), wherein the rhetoric of 'it is not my fault' is itself the purest confession of guilt and the mark of the subject who has abandoned desire for the logic of the superego.
Valmont systematically pushes Madame de Tourvel towards the realm 'between two deaths'.
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#02
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.197
Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis > Oedipus, or the Outcast of the Signifier > The theft of desire - and the mother in exchange
Theoretical move: The passage argues that guilt is constituted by the moment when the desire of the Other becomes the subject's own desire (finding surplus-enjoyment in objective necessity), and that Oedipus escapes guilt precisely because his desire is stolen from him from the outset — he is 'robbed of his desire' and given over to the social order in exchange, a structural theft that distinguishes his tragedy from those of Hamlet, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra.
the horrific place 'between two deaths': Hamlet's father was not condemned to all this simply because he was the victim of a cowardly and deceitful attack, but because death surprised him when he was not prepared.
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#03
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_44"></span>**death**
Theoretical move: Death is a multi-dimensional concept in Lacan, functioning simultaneously as constitutive of the Symbolic order (the symbol murders the thing), as a topological limit (between-two-deaths), as a philosophical inheritance from Hegel and Heidegger, as an analytic stance (the analyst as 'dummy'/dead), and as the structuring question of obsessional neurosis.
The phrase 'zone between-two-deaths' (l'espace de l'entre-deux-morts)…is taken up by Lacan to designate 'the zone in which tragedy is played out'
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#04
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257
**XIV** > **XIX**
Theoretical move: Lacan locates the ethical and aesthetic force of Antigone in the liminal zone between life and death (the 'second death'), arguing that it is precisely there that desire is both reflected and refracted to produce the effect of beauty — a zone Hegel's dialectical reading of reconciliation entirely misses, and which requires a rigorous analysis of signifiers rather than a moralising or aesthetic reduction.
a life that is about to turn into certain death, a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death
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#05
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281
**XIV** > **XXI** > **Antigone between two deaths**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the defining characteristic of Sophoclean heroes is not simply solitude but a structural position "between life and death" — the race-is-run stance — and uses this to show how Antigone's image rises up through a tragic anamorphosis that exposes the gap between nature and culture, the imaginary and the symbolic, against which humanist thought dissolves.
they are characters who find themselves right away in a limit zone, find themselves between life and death. The theme of between-life-and-death is moreover formulated as such in the text
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#06
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.140
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Diotima's speech in the Symposium as staging a fundamental slippage between two functions of beauty—beauty as a veil over the desire for death (between-two-deaths) and beauty as the metonymic object of desire—arguing that this movement illustrates the metonymic structure of desire itself, while also pointing toward what is missed when Plato is read as reducing Eros to narcissistic self-perfection (identification with the ideal ego).
beauty intervenes as a barrier at the limit of the zone I defined as lying between-two-deaths. If there are two desires that captivate man, on the one hand in relation to eternity, and on the other in relation to reproduction... beauty is designed to veil his desire for death insofar as it is unapproachable.
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#07
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.111
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the topology of desire in the death drive and the "between-two-deaths," arguing that Freud's discovery of the unconscious is not reducible to the content of the Oedipus myth but to its structural form—"he did not know"—which inscribes the subject's desire in a signifying chain beyond consciousness, beyond adaptation, and in permanent tension with individual life.
The 'between-two-deaths' - which is not so difficult to grasp, because it simply means that, for humankind, the two borders related to death do not overlap - grew out of this topology over the course of the last year.
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#08
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.95
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of Socrates — his *atopia*, his daemon, his relation to truth and death — to theorize a pre-subjective, discourse-grounded dimension of truth and the Real, drawing a genealogy from pre-Socratic philosophy through Plato's *Symposium* in order to illuminate what is demanded of the analyst: a situatedness-nowhere analogous to Socrates' own unsituable position.
it is difficult not to formulate the tragic minimum related to the deportment of this man in a sort of gratuitous no man's land* or between-two-deaths.
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#09
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.290
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **SY G N E'S NO**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine to push beyond the ethical limit marked by Antigone's beauty — the "between two deaths" — arguing that Sygne's sacrifice, which ends in an absolute refusal of meaning (the "no"), goes beyond ancient tragedy's evil-God function and beyond beauty itself, indexing a new form of human tragedy organized around a desire adjacent only to the reference of Sade.
those attending the Seminar coined the phrase 'between two deaths'; showed that this locus is outstripped by going... beyond beauty, strictly speaking
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#10
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.117
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' desire as an atopia — an unclassifiable, unsituable place of pure desire for discourse — which he locates topologically in the space between-two-deaths, and uses this to frame the question of the analyst's desire as something that must be articulated beyond the vague notion of training catharsis.
the space of the between-two-deaths is found in a pure state, emptying out the place of desire as such.
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#11
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.59
**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of Phaedrus' speech in the Symposium to argue that the succession of eulogies traces a fundamental topology of love's impossibility, and introduces a theological framework (the gods belong to the Real) to situate Eros within the tripartite RSI schema, while the myth of Orpheus anchors the distinction between the fantasmatic object and the Other's being.
I find it noteworthy that Euripides' version of Alcestis surfaces here, illustrating once again what I formulated for you last year as what delimits the zone of tragedy - namely, the between-two-deaths.
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#12
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.20
**Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**
Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.
It is at the heart of what some of you dubbed the 'between-two-deaths' - a perfect expression for designating the field in which everything that happens in the universe traced out by Sophocles is articulated
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#13
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Žižek opposes Stalinist "evolutionary idealism" (grounded in the big Other of history as teleological accountant) to a "creationist materialism" derived from Benjamin and Lacan, showing that the death drive, retroactive signification, and the logic of objet petit a underpin both Benjamin's revolutionary rupture and the Stalinist Communist's "sublime body between the two deaths"; he further distinguishes the classical Master's performative legitimation from the totalitarian Leader's circular self-legitimation through the non-existent "People," arriving at a Lacanian definition of democracy as the structural emptiness of the place of power.
the place of the Stalinist Communist is exactly between the two deaths... the sublime object placed in the interspace between the two deaths
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#14
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.410
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 4The Loop of Freedom
Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus performs multiple theoretical moves simultaneously: it glosses the Lacanian big Other's radical ambiguity (symbolic substance vs. pure appearance), identifies the Master-Signifier as the answer to infinite regress in argumentation, reads anxiety (and, contra Lacan, Badiouian enthusiasm) as the affect that grants access to the Real, and deploys the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' to illuminate the mutual entanglement of sexual and socio-symbolic failure in marriage.
Bill is aware of his predicament of a living dead, of one who is in a way already dead, although he continues to walk around normally, finishing his last drink
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#15
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.76
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > A Boy Meets the Lady
Theoretical move: By reading Mrs. Robinson (and analogous figures like Julia in Brideshead Revisited) as ethical subjects rather than corrupt seducers, Žižek argues that an apparent prohibition sustaining promiscuity—keeping one person "pure" through one's own corruption—constitutes a genuine ethical act, thereby instantiating the dialectical structure of concrete universality where the particular sacrifice secretly upholds the universal.
is this not one of the figures of the Absolute?
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#16
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.233
Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong
Theoretical move: The passage argues that music (via Wagner's *Tristan*) lies about its own affective status—its true "truth" resides not in the grand metaphysical affect but in the ridiculous narrative interruptions that enable it—and then uses this insight to critique Damasio's homeostatic/adaptationist account of emotion by invoking the psychoanalytic "death drive" as the minimal structure of freedom: a dis-adaptation from utilitarian-survivalist immersion that ruptures biological determinism.
Tristan's agony of the impossibility of dying would drag on indefinitely
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#17
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.135
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1
Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.
Its three main characters find themselves 'between the two deaths': Paul is living on borrowed time, he is dying because his transplanted heart is failing; Cristina is a living dead
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#18
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.342
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the depoliticization of Human Rights traps both liberal humanitarianism and radical biopolitical critique in the same ontological deadlock, and proposes "Bartleby politics"—a withdrawal into passivity as the genuinely aggressive first act that clears space for real political change—as the way out.
finding oneself in the uncanny place 'between the two deaths': one is either biologically dead while symbolically alive... or symbolically dead while biologically alive