Sublimation at the End of the World: Lacan contra Nancy

Few theorists today agree on what it means to belong to a world. For some, the world of shared meaning has ended. For others, the world sustains itself on the worldlessness of others. One popular argument traversing these positions is that the world must be (re)created. The genuine creative act, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, is worlding. The worlding gambit invites care ethics, multispecies flourishing, and art, said to produce a better, more harmonious world through storytelling, a redistributed sensory commons, and bodies and their pleasures. Nancy turns to the arts to promote world-making. The psychoanalytic term for this creative process is sublimation. Sublimation is now a plaything for the well-intentioned critic who, sensing that the world has ended or is ending, wants to restore it. Sublimation, defined by Jacques Lacan as the repetition of self-destructive drive sexuality, has consequently been neutralized, indeed, desexualized. Mourning the end of the world on the one hand and urging its return on the other, critics overlook the splitting of the drive, which is in the world but not of it. Reading Lacan contra Nancy, this essay seeks to break the world/worldlessness problematic by focusing on the unworldly dimension of the drive.