" In German idealism it is absolute self-relating negativity; in psychoanalysis it is the death drive. This is at the very centre of what I am doing generally. My basic thesis is that the central feature of subjectivity in German idealism - this desubstantialized notion of subjectivity as a gap in the order of being - is consonant with the notion of the 'object small a' which, as we all know, for Lacan is a failure. It's not that we fail to encounter the object, but that the object itself is just a trace of a certain failure. What I am asserting here is that this notion of self-relating negativity, as it has been articulated from Kant to Hegel, means philosophically the same as Freud's notion of death drive - this is my fundamental perspective. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek