Monism of Antagonism

Zupančič's "monism of antagonism" names the final theoretical position she attributes to the late Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: not a simple dualism of Eros and Thanatos, nor a monism of the death drive alone, but a singular ontological principle in which the antagonism, contradiction, or split is itself the ground. Rather than arriving at two opposing drives that explain psychic life from the outside, Freud is read as recognizing that the split—the gap—is immanent to the sexual drives themselves. The "antagonism" is not between two positive forces; it is the constitutive negativity that inhabits the drive from the inside, making it irreducible to any harmonious libidinal economy.

This reading collapses the life/death drive dualism by showing that the death drive is not a separate metaphysical entity but the name for the inherent void or gap around which every partial drive circulates. The monism is therefore not a reduction to one substance but a recognition that there is only one "stuff"—the sexual drive—and that this stuff is already shot through with a fundamental antagonism. Objet petit a functions as the "crust" that sticks to this void, enabling the drive's repetitive circuit without ever filling the gap. The concept thus re-describes what looked like a dualism as the internal self-division of a single libidinal field.

In what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic, the monism of antagonism appears at the pivot of Zupančič's reconstruction of Freud's metapsychological trajectory. It names the terminus of a movement: from an initial monism (death drive alone), through a dualism (Eros vs. Thanatos), to this final position where singularity is recovered — but now as the singularity of the split itself. The concept is therefore a specification and radicalization of the canonical "Death Drive": it denies the death drive the status of a separate drive and relocates it as the structural negativity (the Gap, in Lacanian terms) internal to the sexual drive as such. This aligns precisely with the canonical claim that "every drive is virtually a death drive" and that the death drive is not an obscure will toward the inanimate but the trace of a constitutive trauma — here recast as the antagonism inhabiting sexuality from within.

The concept also extends the canonical "Gap" into an explicitly ontological register: the gap is not merely a structural feature of the signifier or of the subject's relation to the Other, but the ground of the drives themselves. Objet petit a — the "crust" that adheres to the void — mediates between the Gap and the Drive, making repetition (the "Beyond" the pleasure principle) possible without ever resolving the antagonism. The monism of antagonism thus operates as a bridge concept, integrating the partial drive's circular structure, the beyond of the pleasure principle, and the Lacanian death drive into a single non-dualist account of libidinal life grounded in irreducible internal contradiction.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.109)

he inclines toward what I would call the monism (singularity) of antagonism, contradiction, or split. He recognizes this antagonism and split on the ground of sexual drives themselves.

The phrase "monism (singularity) of antagonism" is theoretically loaded because it yokes two terms normally in tension — monism implies unity, antagonism implies division — to assert that the split is the one foundational principle, displacing any dualist ontology. The specification "on the ground of sexual drives themselves" is equally crucial: it locates the antagonism not between drives (Eros vs. Thanatos) but inside the very substrate of sexuality, making the division immanent rather than relational.