Settling Quotes - page 4
Oh, rolling round the ocean,
From a far and foreign land,
May suit the common notion
That a sailor's life is grand.
But as for me, I'd sooner be
A roaring here at home
About the rolling, roaring life
Of them that sails the foam.
For the homeward-bounder's chorus,
Which he roars across the foam,
Is all about chucking a sailor's life,
And settling down at home.
Home, home, home,
That's the song of them that roam,
The song of the roaring, rolling sea
Is all about rolling home.
Norman Lindsay
Lacan conceives the difference between the two deaths as the difference being real (biological) death and its symbolization, the settling of accounts the accomplishment of symbolic destiny (deathbed confession in Catholicism, for example). This gap can be filled in various ways; it can contain either sublime beauty or fearsome monsters: in Antigone's case, her symbolic death, her exclusion from the symbolic community of the city, precedes her actual death and imbues her character with sublime beauty, whereas the ghost of Hamlet's father represents the opposite case, - actual death unaccompanied by symbolic death, without a settling of accounts - which is why he returns as a frightful apparition until his debt has been repaid. This place between the two deaths, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic Kernel in the midst of symbolic order.
Slavoj Žižek