The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its Kernel, at its very centre, some strange traumatic order - the Thing. L… - Slavoj Žižek

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The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its Kernel, at its very centre, some strange traumatic order - the Thing. Lacan coined a neologism for it: l'extimité - external intimacy, which served as a title for one of Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminars. And what, at this level, is the death drive? Exactly the opposite of the symbolic orderL the possibility of the second death,<nowiki/>' the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constructed. They very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of symbolic death - not the death of the so-called real object in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.