See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/352355893

"THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE". The Weeknd, the Eerie and the Death Drive

Article · January 2020

CITATIONS READS

0 201

2 authors, including:

Monika Bregović
University of Zadar
104 PUBLICATIONS 509 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Monika Bregović on 12 June 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 PULSE: the Journal of Science and Culture — Volume 7 (2020)

Andrea Jović1

“THIS IS A
HAPPY HOUSE”
The Weeknd, the Eerie
and the Death Drive

Abstract
In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher bor- plunging into recreational sex and drugs al-
rows Jacques Derrida’s term hauntology and though they do not satisfy him. As Fisher ex-
repurposes it to describe a sense of a lost fu- plains, the eerie is necessarily bound up with
turity haunting contemporary music. He sin- issues of agency and the paper will argue that
gles out party hauntology as a specific subset the invisible agent behind The Weeknd’s
of hauntology in pop music in which uneas- compulsive repetition is the death drive
iness looms behind a facade of excess and understood as Žižekian undead wandering
pleasure. This paper revamps Fisher’s term around in guilt. Ultimately, as the mecha-
by focusing on the music of the Canadian nisms of capitalism in itself operate by the
artist The Weeknd. Exhibiting what Fisher rules of the death drive, it will be shown that,
terms depressive hedonia and interpassivity, due to his inability to understand his place in
The Weeknd is an e­ xample of the retreat into the system and submission to the necrocratic
privatized suffering which cannot recognize symbolic order, The Weeknd’s music is the
its social character. However, the paper goes perfect soundtrack to the capitalist realist
further by arguing that The Weeknd’s mu- regime.
sic possesses an eerie quality due to a clash
between upbeat, dance rhythms and dark Key words: hauntology, the eerie, death
lyrics which depict The Weeknd’s constant drive, capitalist realism, The Weeknd

1
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

INTRODUCTI ON

As Frederic Jameson astutely argued as early as 1991, the-then-nascent neo-

liberal ideology brought about a cultural tendency towards formal nostalgia
and ahistoricity, which brought many progressive artistic strands to a creative
halt. For example, the vibrant 1990s electronic music genres were replaced
by the benign repetitions of electronic dance music (EDM), while the subver-
siveness of political rap was replaced by its capitalist realist iterations that
postulated being rich as life’s purpose. Yet, the feeling remains that the ghost
of the bygone eras in which sociocultural conditions were different still lurks
and reaps uneasiness behind the facade of joyful boasts. The uneasiness is best
explained using Mark Fisher’s interpretation of the term ‘hauntology’.
The term ‘hauntology’ derives from Jacques Derrida’s work Specters
of Marx (1993). It is a blend of the words ‘haunt’ and ‘ontology,’ and much like
Derrida’s earlier concepts such as différance and trace, focuses on absence. In
other words, hauntology is Derrida’s new ontology which is no longer about
that which is present, but absent, relying on the idea that “everything that ex-
ists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede
and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that
it does.”2 Especially significant about hauntology is the question of time—the
spectre which haunts the present is never fully present as it has no being in
itself, but always represents a no longer or not yet, a past event that continues
to be effective or an event which has not yet happened, but is already effective
in the virtual.3 Since the spectre is nothing supernatural, it is an agency of the
virtual, which means that it acts without physically existing.
Linked to hauntology is the concept of mourning, as “the slow, painful
withdrawal of libido from the lost object.”4 Fisher suggests that hauntology
is a failed mourning, one in which we either refuse to let go of the ghost, or
the ghost refuses to let go of us. He further suggests that the object we mourn
for is actually a general tendency—what he calls popular modernism—a cul-
tural condition in which culture retains the innovative, futuristic impulse
of modernism without being elitist.5 Such condition favoured collectivism
and innovation, yet declined with the rise of neoliberalism and, according to

1 Andrea Jović is a PhD candidate in literature, performing arts, film and culture at
the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. Her research
interests include contemporary literature, political theory, post-work theory,
xenofeminism, and queer theory.
2 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
(Winchester, UK; Washington, US: Zero Books, 2014), 17–18.
3 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 18.
4 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 22.
5 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 22.

2
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

Jameson, its cultural counterpart postmodernism,6 which established pastiche

as its cultural form. The ahistoricity of the pastiche, as a play of empty surfaces
devoid of any content and connection with the historical conditions in which
they arose, goes hand in hand with the neoliberal tendency to naturalize cap-
italism as the best and only form of governance. In a similar fashion, Wendy
Brown defines neoliberalism as an “order of normative reason that, when it
becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific
formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of
human life,”7 locating the specificity of the contemporary form of capitalism
in the transformation of every aspect of human life into the marketplace.
Given that competition, self-investment and productivity are the all-pervasive
standard, it has become impossible to imagine any alternative to the present
state. As Fisher claims, “the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of
finitude and exhaustion,”8 in which the future and ideas about it have been
slowly cancelled, to paraphrase Franco Berardi.
Hauntology, then, is the spectre of precisely this lost futurity, a haunt-
ing sense that once innovation and futures were possible, but have never come
to fruition. Fisher, however, warns that we should not be haunted by the no
longer so much as by the not yet, implying that simply revisiting the past is not
an effective way out of the current capitalist realism, “the widespread sense
that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but
also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”9
Instead, we should be haunted by the not yet, by the glimpses of the future
that popular modernism had promised but which never came into being, by
the projections of the continuation of popular modernist projects of democ-
ratization and pluralism.
Even more importantly for this paper, Fisher identifies a specific
strand of hauntology he dubs ‘party hauntology,’ which describes a feeling
of unidentifiable uneasiness in the midst of material abundance, a sense of
entrapment which is only emerging within a commodified consciousness.
Whilst Fisher notices this phenomenon in the music of Kanye West and
Drake, this paper will attempt to revamp the concept by applying it to a more
contemporary example, that of the Canadian musician The Weeknd. The
paper will argue that in The Weeknd’s music this uneasiness stems from an
eerie sense of control by a foreign agent, which will be identified as the death
drive. Ultimately, it will be shown that the workings of the death drive are in

6 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991), 17.
7 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York:
Zone Books, 2015), 30.
8 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 8.
9 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Hants, UK: Zero Books,
2009), 2.

3
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

harmony with the workings of capitalism, thus blocking viable alternatives

to the capitalist regime.

PARTY HAUNTOLO GY AND HI P HOP

Fisher originally used the concept of hauntology to describe the works of art-
ists such as Burial or Caretaker. British producer Burial has self-consciously
mourned for a certain lost horizon, the collectivist Rave culture of the 1990s,
which he never belonged to but still felt a part of, attempting in his music to rep-
licate the analogue sounds of crackle, reminiscent of the happier days of music
characterized by intense innovation, when future seemed more than possible.
Unlike Burial’s gloomy, skeletal constructions, party hauntology refers more
to the forced exaltation of the 21st century pop culture behind which there is a
sense of stupor and an arrested imagination. As Fisher puts it, party hauntology
can be described as “a secret sadness” lurking behind the lush pop songs, “the
miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism.”10 Fisher finds
examples of party hauntology even in pumped-up dance songs such as David
Guetta’s “Play Hard,“ which, he argues, reflects the contemporary erosion of
boundaries between work and non-work. The chorus “Keep partyin’ like it’s your
job”11 implicitly takes away the enjoyment from this partying, as it does nothing
more than to signal our inability to get away from work and the complete inva-
sion of neoliberalism into the tissue of everyday life. As Fisher explains: “In a (not
at all trivial) sense, partying is now a job. Images of hedonistic excess provide
much of the content on Facebook, uploaded by users who are effectively unpaid
workers, creating value for the site without being remunerated for it. Partying
is a job in another sense—in conditions of objective immiseration and economic
downturn, making up the affective deficit is outsourced to us.12 Similarly, Fisher
suggests that the party anthem “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas “comes
off more as a memory of a past pleasure than an anticipation of a pleasure that
is yet to be felt,13 that is, by revoking the 1990s Rave as if it had never happened,
it refuses to face the past and admit that the futures which the original Ravers
promised have not been fulfilled.14

10 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 175.

11 David Guetta, lyrics to “Play Hard,” Genius (2013), accessed 20 March 2020, https://
genius.com/David-guetta-play-hard-lyrics.
12 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 180.
13 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 181.
14 The application of hauntology to the music of Burial differs from party hauntology.
Burial and the like explore their relationship to the lost futures and the workings
of memory, whilst party hauntology is much more about attempting to grapple
with an unidentifiable discomfort within hedonism and a realization of one’s own
entanglement in capitalism. However, what both of these hauntologies share is a
focus on the no longer aspect, the first one coming very close to nostalgia, the other
to capitalist realism.

4
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

Fisher states, however, that the genre most haunted by lost hope is
hip hop, which has “become increasingly aligned with consumerist pleasure
over the past 20-odd years.”15 Yet, although the artists have acquired person-
al wealth, there is no actual sense of fulfilment, but just an aimless circling
through pleasures. Fisher suggests this is best exemplified by Drake’s mel-
ancholic album Take Care and the autotuned stupor of 808s & Heartbreak by
Kanye West. The lyrics of the final track on 808s and Heartbreak, “Pinocchio
Story,” reveal a gaping void behind all the glitz and glamor:

Do you think I’d sacrifice, a real life

For all the fame, and flashing lights?
There is no Gucci I can buy
There is no Louis Vuitton to put on
There is no YSL that they could sell
To get my heart out of this hell, and my mind out of this jail.16

Fisher describes this as the “moment when a commodity achieves self-con-

sciousness, or when a human realizes he or she has become a commodity,”17
implying that West finally addresses the flipside of wealth.
A similar phenomenon can be traced in a genre directly inspired by
the lazy autotuned vocals and 808 synths—trap. ‘Trap’ is a slang term for a place
where drugs are sold illegally, and the origins of the genre are quite similar
to gangsta rap, with topics such as dealing and street life. Yet, its 21st century
iteration exhibits much less “street cred” and, rather, indulges in gloating
about wealth, cars, guns, women and drugs. However, far from being simply a
boastful genre blissfully praising wealth, trap is characterized by heavy, slow
beats, hazy synthesizers and lazy mumbles, reminiscent of a drug-induced tor-
por. The emotion invoked is nothing like the gleeful hippie fantasies of hook-
ah-smoking caterpillars or magic dragons, but is much more akin to lethargy,
an inability to cope with the present and a subsequent retreat into the private
world of misty Percocet syrups and marijuana. The tracks perfectly embody
what Fisher, following Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek, terms ‘interpassivity’.
Žižek explains the notion of interpassivity using the example of
canned laughter—the spectator is relieved of his duty to laugh, or enjoy, and
relegates this responsibility to the Other.18 Fisher uses the example of going
to the cinema to see a film which questions capitalism—by doing so, we are
relieved of our responsibility to contemplate the regime and may “continue

15 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 175.

16 Kanye West, lyrics to “Pinnochio Story,” Genius (2008), accessed 20 March 2020,
https://genius.com/Kanye-west-pinocchio-story-lyrics.
17 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 175.
18 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London, New York: Verso, 1997), 115.

5
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

to consume with impunity.”19 As Fisher explains: “The introspective turn in

21st century (post)dance music was therefore not a turn towards emotion,
it was a shift from collectively experienced affect to privatized emotions.”20
Trap music is interpassive in that it touches upon the feelings of hopeless-
ness and loss, of a world without any meaning in which one cannot assume
their place, yet fails to interpret this anxiety as markedly social, choosing
to repress it through sensual gratification. Take “Codeine Crazy,” a song by
one of the most popular trap artists Future, in which signs of this underlying
anxiety burst out through the haze of drugs and recreational sex: “Take all
my problems and drink out the bottle and fuck on a model, yeah.”21 Future
even flirts with suicidal thoughts, but never tries to interpret the origins of
his uneasiness: “Fuck the fame, I’m sipping lean when I’m driving/All this
cash and it ain’t nowhere to hide it/I’m an addict and I can’t even hide it/Don’t
you panic, panoramic companion.”22
The underbelly of wealth and consumer culture is especially empha-
sized in the genre of emo trap, which blends the emo rock tradition with trap
beats. XXXTentacion’s lyrics of “Jocelyn Flores” deal very straightforwardly
with depression:

I’m in pain, wanna put ten shots in my brain

I’ve been trippin’ ’bout some things, can’t change
Suicidal, same time I’m tame . . .
And ever since then, man, I hate myself
Wanna fuckin’ end it, pessimistic.23

The music of Lil Peep is even more connected to the emo rock tradition with
abrasive guitar riffs over heavy trap beats. “Cry Alone” is a raw song about
sadness with drugs no longer helping him numb the anxiety: “I don’t wanna
cry alone right now/Kissing on styrofoam right now/I don’t wanna die alone
right now/I just did a line of blow right now.”24 Unfortunately, Lil Peep would
go on to accidentally overdose on Xanax, casting another ominous shadow
on trap’s fixation on drugs. Yet, in none of the songs is depression linked to
the capitalist regime producing it through precarity, endless repetition and
sensory overload. As Fisher claims: “Instead of treating it as incumbent on

19 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 12.

20 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 173.
21 Future, lyrics to “Codeine Crazy,” Genius (2014), accessed 20 March 2020, https://
genius.com/Future-codeine-crazy-lyrics.
22 Future, lyrics to “Codeine Crazy.”
23 XXXTENTACION, lyrics to “Jocelyn Flores,” Genius (2017), accessed 20 March 2020,
https://genius.com/Xxxtentacion-jocelyn-flores-lyrics.
24 Lil Peep, lyrics to “Cry Alone,” Genius (2018), accessed 20 March 2020,https://genius.
com/Lil-peep-cry-alone-lyrics.

6
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of ac-
cepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty
years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and
especially so many young people, are ill?”25 Intriguingly, the rawness of emo
trap and coded anxiety of mainstream trap songs find perfect expression in
the music of one contemporary artist.

TH E WE EKND AND THE EERI E

The Weeknd, or Abel Tesfaye, is a young Canadian hip hop/R&B musician,

who rose to fame in 2015 with his second album Beauty Behind the Madness.
The Weeknd first drew attention to himself with a trilogy of dark mixtapes
full of self-deprecation and misery. Much akin to the emo trap sensibility, The
Weeknd’s earlier works present a directionless, listless existence, overstimu-
lated by digital culture and unable, as Fisher would put it, to make his life into
a coherent whole.26 In the eerie “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls,” Tesfaye
and a female are intoxicated, and the underlying anxiety compels them to
assert they are having so much fun:

If it hurts to breathe, open a window (Woo-ooh)

Oh, your mind wants to leave (Leave), but you can’t go
Oh, this is a happy house (A happy house)
We’re happy here (We’re happy here)
In a happy house
Oh this is fun, fun, fun, fun
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Fun, fun, fun, fun.27

A number of his other songs mix depression and drugs, for example “Wicked
Games,” with lyrics such as: “Bring your love, baby, I could bring my shame/
Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain.”28 In “Coming Down” The Weeknd
records the feelings of loneliness and fright when the drugs start subsid-
ing: “Pick up your phone/The party’s finished and I want you to know/I’m
all alone/I’m feelin’ everything before I got up/I always want you when I’m

25 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 19.

26 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 24.
27 The Weeknd, lyrics to “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls,” Genius (2011), accessed
20 March 2020, https://genius.com/The-weeknd-house-of-balloons-glass-table-girls-
lyrics.
28 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Wicked Games,” Genius (2011), accessed 20 March 2020,
https://genius.com/The-weeknd-wicked-games-lyrics.

7
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

coming down.”29 As with Fisher’s example of his student who could not do
without having their earphones in or at least playing inaudible music while
they were at their desk, so The Weeknd’s music interpassively recedes from
the outside world, finding the drug-induced stupor as the only response to
the challenges of contemporary world: “The use of headphones is significant
here—pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon
public space, but as a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a walling
up against the social.”30
Many critics31 have never found such strength in Tesfaye’s later works
which exhibit less musical boldness and lyrical depth. With growing popu-
larity, Tesfaye’s music took on the order-of-the-day formal nostalgia, heavily
relying on the 1980s sounds by laying the retro R&B soul synth sounds on top
of a contemporary heavy bass. This is especially true of The Weeknd’s After
Hours (2020), which displays, in Baudrillardian terms, a mummification of
the 1980s sound and its ahistorical reuse. However, his music nevertheless
continues to infallibly display what Nick Murray of Village Voice recognizes
to be “depressive hedonia,32 an inability to do anything other than pursue
pleasure33—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can
only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.
Thus, his music presents an ambivalent tug-of-war between the
underlying anxiety and a glossy, sedated sound. Unlike trap’s heavy beats
and hazy synthesizers, The Weeknd’s music possesses a lot of upbeat and
danceable elements which render its hedonically depressed content all the
eerier, to draw on a concept which will prove crucial for the understanding
of The Weeknd’s relationship with the world and his place in it. Take, for
example, “Starboy,” a groovy bass-driven song often perceived as a feel-
good dance hit. In the song we will find exactly this pursuit of pleasure in
consumerism and recreational sex, which is inevitably entangled with the
utter objectification of women:

I’m tryna put you in the worst mood, ah

P1 cleaner than your church shoes, ah
Milli point two just to hurt you, ah
All red Lamb’ just to tease you, ah
None of these toys on lease too, ah

29 TheWeeknd, lyrics to “Coming Down,” Genius (2011), accessed 20 March 2020, https:
//genius.com/The-weeknd-coming-down-lyrics.
30 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 24.
31 See Murray of Village Voice, 2020; Palo of Vulture, 2020.
32 Nick Murray, “Drake and The Weeknd Wallow in their Misery,” Village Voice
(2012), accessed 20 March 2020, https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/01/18/drake-
and-the-weeknd-wallow-in-their-misery/.
33 Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 175.

8
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

Made your whole year in a week too, yah

Main bitch out your league too, ah
Side bitch out of your league too, ah.34

Although one may think that with such self-contented brags about sexual
prowess and purchase power the song will be upbeat, its very texture sum-
mons a certain ambivalence. The heavy beat and distant, melancholic piano
chords foretell that there is something darker lurking behind the bliss. This
is witnessed in the lyrics “Switch up my cup, I kill any pain,”35 showing The
Weeknd still resorts to drinks and drugs to avoid reality. However, despite the
awareness that women, drugs and money cannot be soothing, we witness an
inability to get out of the pattern and a joyous plunging into dissolution. The
Weeknd’s music clearly presents an encounter with an outside that controls
The Weeknd’s life, but cannot be perceived. The feeling of an unfathomable
outside is best captured in Mark Fisher’s term ‘eerie,’ as an inhuman entity
exerting influence on humans.36 As Fisher explains: “The eerie, by contrast,37
is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation
of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should
be nothing, or (sic!) there is nothing when there should be something.”38 An ex-
ample of the first mode of the eerie, the failure of absence, is best exemplified in
an eerie bird cry—we are unsettled by the ominousness of the bird’s cry, trying
to find some intent in it that is usually not ascribed to animals. What is essential
to this mode of the eerie and what distinguishes it from the mysterious is the
sense of alterity, “a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge,
subjectivity and sensation that lie beyond common experience.”39 An example
of the second mode of the eerie would be ruins and abandoned structures like
the Stonehenge. The eeriness these structures provoke relates to the radical
unknowability of the symbolic order which created them: “For the symbolic
structures which made sense of the monuments have rotted away, and in a
sense what we witness here is the unintelligibility and the inscrutability of
the Real itself.”40 In other words, these remains reveal an eeriness behind the
cultural practices. The key issue this realization raises is the issue of agency, of
the existence or inexistence of an agent watching over us and of its character.

34 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Starboy,” Genius (2016), accessed 20 March 2020, https://
genius.com/The-weeknd-starboy-lyrics.
35 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Starboy.”
36 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater Books, 2017.
37 By contrast to the weird, which denotes a presence which does not belong where
it is found. Fisher argues that the popular Freudian term the Unheimlich conflates
the weird and the eerie which should, however, be distinguished as one implies a
strange presence, and the other an unsettling absence.
38 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 61.
39 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 62.
40 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 63.

9
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

The agent behind the eerie sense of The Weeknd’s music will be exposed in
this paper as the familiar concept of “obscene immortality.”41 In the following
section it will be argued that The Weeknd’s music illustrates the workings
of the death drive, understood not as a tendency towards one’s extinction,
but as a repetition, an enjoyment in the failures of one’s own desire, which,
as will be shown, is analogous to the eerie nature of capitalism and its inbuilt
mechanisms of self-destruction.

T HE WE E KND A S T H E EM B ODI M ENT OF THE DEATH DRI VE

The ambiguous death drive appears in the works of Freud as a desire of organic
life to return to the inorganic.42 However, as Žižek notices, Freud is frightened
by the prospect that all life is governed by such a negative force so he drafts
the binary opposition of Eros and Thanatos to neutralize it and harmonize
the cosmos, which Žižek fully rejects as “pagan wisdom.”43 Instead, following
Lacan, Žižek insists that “Eros and Thanatos are not two opposite drives that
compete and combine their forces (as in eroticized masochism); there is only
one drive, libido, striving for enjoyment, and ‘death drive’ is the curved space
of its formal structure.”44 As Hook explains, for Žižek, the death drive is not a
substantial entity, it is a form rather than a structure, a constitutive “gap”45 in
human psychology. Thus, for Lacan and his dogmatic reader Žižek, the death
drive has nothing to do with biological death: “The Freudian death drive has
nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return
to the inorganic absence of any life-tension; it is, on the contrary, the very
opposite of dying—a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible
fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in
guilt and pain.”46
As has been shown, The Weeknd’s music perfectly fits this descrip-
tion of a vampire-like tumbling from one drug to the other without a clear
purpose. The song “The Hills” probably best captures the eeriness of The
Weeknd’s music. As ever, The Weeknd cannot but brag about how “I just
fucked two bitches ’fore I saw you/And you gon’ have to do it at my tempo.”47

41 Slavoj Žižek, “The Obscene Immortality and its Discontents,” International Journal
of Žižek Studies 11, no. 2 (2017): 1.
42 Derek William Hook, “Of symbolic mortification and ‘undead life’: Slavoj Žižek on
the death drive,” Psychoanalysis and History 18, no. 2 (2016): 221–56.
43 Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation for Dialectical Materialism
(London: Verso, 2014), 123.
44 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2014), 305.
45 Žižek, Living in the End Times, 305.
46 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 61.
47 The Weeknd, lyrics to “The Hills,” Genius (2015), accessed 20 March 2020, https://
genius.com/The-weeknd-the-hills-lyrics.

10
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

Yet, the eerie synth, stunted beat and mechanical bass drone pulsate with
emptiness, as The Weeknd confesses his life is not fulfilling: “I only love it
when you touch me, not feel me/When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me.”48
Moreover, he explicitly owns that drugs do not work any longer to numb him:
“Always tryna send me off to rehab/Drugs started feelin’ like it’s decaf,”49 yet
he still fights to maintain this illusion of happiness rather than to face the
emptiness: “I’m just tryna live life for the moment/And all these motherfuck-
ers want a relapse.”50
However, one aspect of the death drive also explains the seemingly
incongruous upbeat pulsations of the music. This is the assertion that death
drive is always accompanied by jouissance, libidinal gratification, the fact that
it derives satisfaction from its failures.51A fantastic example is Tesfaye’s other
smashing hit “Can’t Feel My Face,” a song seemingly about love, as innumer-
able others in pop culture, but turning to be about The Weeknd’s favourite
drug—cocaine. Misled by the song’s dance bass and upbeat tempo, it is easy
to overlook expressions of an inability to extricate himself from the false
safety of the matrix of stupor: “And I know she’ll be the death of me at least
we’ll both be numb.”52 The Weeknd appears to find jouissance in the repeated
failures of gratification and his undead wanderings: “I can’t feel my face when
I’m with you/But I love it.”53 A similar feeling is evoked by “Reminder,” which
shows that even acclaim is not strong enough to bring any satisfaction, as,
ironically, the very system generating the acclaim is the one that strips it of
any meaning, let alone longevity: “Platinum off a mixtape, sipping on that
codeine/Pour it in my trophies, roll until my nose bleed/I’ma keep on singing
while I’m burning up that OG.”54
What is essential is the fact that the death drive is a function of the
symbolic order. By virtue of the fact that the symbolic cuts access to the mate-
riality of objects, the signifier is always connected with death, as “the thing in
its immediate, corporeal, reality is annihilated,” the thing “must ‘die’ in order
for its reality to reach its conceptual unity though its symbol.”55 This symbolic
death is exemplified in the vampire-like aesthetics of The Weeknd’s latest al-
bum After Hours. The album cover and videos for “In Your Eyes” and “Blinding
Lights” display Tesfaye as an undead vampire, blood dripping from his mouth,

48 The Weeknd, lyrics to “The Hills.”

49 The Weeknd, lyrics to “The Hills.”
50 The Weeknd, lyrics to “The Hills.”
51 Žižek, The Parallax View, 182.
52 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Can’t Feel My Face,” Genius (2015), accessed 20 March 2020,
https://genius.com/The-weeknd-cant-feel-my-face-lyrics.
53 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Can’t Feel My Face.”
54 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Reminder,” Genius (2016), accessed 20 March 2020, https://
genius.com/The-weeknd-reminder-lyrics.
55 Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (Cambridge: Polity, 2014),
74.

11
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

in a manner quite reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller aesthetics. The

lyrics solidify this image of obscene immortality, dead inside, but unstoppable
in its conquest of joy: “Cause I’m heartless/And I’m back to my ways ’cause
I’m heartless/All this money and this pain got me heartless/Low life for life
cause I’m heartless.”56 This is vividly rephrased by Johnston: “insofar as the
denaturalization of nature brought about by the sociocultural overwriting
of vital being involves the colonization of the living (i.e., the organic body)
by the dead (i.e., the symbolic order), one could say… that human life is lived
under the dominance of a lifeless set of cadaverizing signifiers.”57 The idea
that the symbolic order is the frame of the death drive resonates well with
the ideas of Reza Negarestani,58 who argues that capitalism is a regime which
functions the same way as the death drive and needs to be combated by a new
speculative thought.

CAPITAL I SM ’ S DEATH DRI VE

Discussing the potential of speculative philosophy to combat capitalism, Reza

Negarestani argues that contemporary speculative realist thought falls short
of providing viable political alternatives, yet continues debating capitalism.
Negarestani discusses Nick Land’s position in which capitalism is perceived as
a “detoured and hence complex singularity toward the inorganic exteriority
which ultimately enforces an all-inclusive liberation from the conservative
nature of the organism and its confines for thought.”59 Land argues that hu-
man faculties are overdetermined by anthropomorphic material experience
which limits their speculative potential, so he greets capitalism’s inclination
towards dissipation, its “partially repressed desire for meltdown,”60 as a lib-
erating move towards the inhuman. However, Negarestani argues that this
stance incorrectly draws a line of correspondence between capitalism and
the fact of dissipation, which in turn posits capitalism as the sole horizon of
human life and claims it is an emancipative force as it frees us from the dis-
enchantment with human cognitive faculties.61 Negarestani argues that Ray
Brassier tries to escape this epistemological trap by imposing the dissipative
tendencies onto the whole cosmos. In other words, he attempts to circumvent

56 The Weeknd, lyrics to “Heartless,” Genius (2019), accessed 20 March 2020, https://
genius.com/The-weeknd-heartless-lyrics.
57 Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press,
2008), 188.
58 Reza Negarestani, “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic
Necrocracy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi
R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: Re.press, 2011), 182–201.
59 Negarestani, 185.
60 Negarestani, 184.
61 Negarestani, 185.

12
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

the notion of inhumanist capitalism as emancipation by proposing a kind of

cosmic eliminativism, in which all of cosmos, not just the human burdened by
the shackles of anthropocentrism, dissolves.62 While conceding that this idea
does move us away from Land’s, Negarestani argues it nonetheless leaves cap-
italism and its modes of dissipation unquestioned. According to Negarestani,
both of these thinkers’ theories neglect the fact that the dissipation they argue
for remains in line with the conservative economic order of the organism. In
other words, their speculative projections stop at the ways the organisms bind
exteriority, never questioning the fact that capitalism conforms to the econ-
omy of dissipation in which organisms dissipate in the most affordable ways,
die along a trajectory similar to the one carved by capitalism. Negarestani
elucidates that the affordable way to die is, essentially, the conservative nature
of the organism, its “ability to temporarily postpone death and convert the
acquired time to capitalizable ‘interests,’”63 in other words, that in its passage
to death, the organism still needs to fulfil its capitalist duties. He, thus, exposes
capitalism as a truly necrocratic regime in which the organism’s tendency
towards dissipation must necessarily conform to the economic order, which
is in line with the Lacanian perception of the symbolic as resembling death
more than natural death alone.64 Negarestani believes that a speculative turn
would require “the possibility of alternative ways of binding exteriority qua
concept-less negativity,”65 a position which neither conforms to the economic
order nor presents itself as its radical exteriority.
With its exuberance and drug-induced excess, The Weeknd’s music
resembles the definition of life under the necrocratic regime challenged by
Negarestani as “a slope-curve between the inevitability of death and conserv-
ative conditions of the organism.”66 His music mirrors the capitalist “partially
repressed desire for meltdown,”67 the undead persistence built into capitalism.
As Žižek explicates, the very existence of the symbolic implies its potential to
disappear: “The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of
its radical effacement, of ‘symbolic death’—not the death of the . . . ‘real object’
in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.”68
This proposition brings us back to an important issue—that of agency.
It is strange to attribute desires, tendencies or lust to such a decentred and
inanimate object as capitalism. As Fisher describes it, “capital is . . . conjured
out of nothing,” but “nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly

62 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007).
63 Negarestani, 193.
64 Hook, “Of symbolic mortification and ‘undead life’.”
65 Negarestani, 199.
66 Negarestani, 198.
67 Negarestani, 184.
68 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 147.

13
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

substantial entity.”69 Similarly, Hook explains the ambiguous treatment of the

death drive in Žižek, in whose work it is often referred to as both an agency
and an absence. For Žižek the death drive is not a thing, but a gap opened up
between life and death. As such it comes to resemble what Fisher describes
as ‘the eerie,’ an inhuman force with its own agency. On the other hand, it per-
fectly fits the virtual agency of capital which “does not exist in any substantial
sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.”70 However,
one should be careful with attributing agency to capitalism, as it indicates an
acceptance of its mechanisms. As Fisher puts it: “What needs to be kept in
mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that
it would be nothing without our co-operation.”71 In other words, capitalism
is not a real entity, but an impersonal structure parasitizing on what Peter
Fleming calls “the commons”72 to perpetuate its obscene immortality. By the
commons, Fleming refers to the emotional and creative capabilities of citizens
and workers which is outside neoliberal capitalism, but still necessary, as cap-
italism cannot reproduce on its own. However, according to Fleming, workers
are starting to perceive the superfluousness of the capitalist regime and have
replaced the old strategy of fighting against it for simply withdrawing their
capacities from it, hoping this short-circuits its expansion.

CONCLU SI ON

Ultimately, in line with Negarestani’s view, The Weeknd’s music proves to be a

perfect soundtrack to the capitalist realist era rather than a questioning of it. It
may be true that certain trap acts, and especially The Weeknd, have epistemo-
logically surpassed a vast majority of pop artists still poptimistically promoting
the ability to purchase as a road to joy (which is especially problematic in terms
of postfeminist commodification of feminism and the female body73). Indeed,
The Weeknd has acquired a sort of consciousness beyond consumerism, yet
this consciousness still has no way to understand itself, to excavate its causes
and own up to them, as Fisher puts it, it “is aware that something is missing,

69 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11.

70 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 64.
71 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 15.
72 Peter Fleming, Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 2.
73 Pop music is saturated with references to “retail therapy” (e.g., Ariana Grande’s “7
rings”) as a way of self-help and the instances of inscription of clear material value
on the female body (e.g., “If you know your pussy worth a Benz truck” in Nicki
Minaj’s “Rich Sex” or “Pussy ain’t free I might have to charge more/Check numbers
gotta be looking like barcodes” in Cupcakke’s “Barcodes”). This postfeminist sen-
timent, which promotes the ability to purchase and commodifies the female body,
whilst purporting to be liberating, is actually fully in line with the neoliberal order.

14
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

but unsure exactly what it is.”74 The music displays a hedonistic inability to
look for anything other than pleasure to annul the anxiety of life, which is
perceived as something unchangeable, something to be avoided as these art-
ists do not have the strength or the tools to overcome it. Rather than challenge
the necrocratic regime which empties signifiers of meaning and promotes a
pleasure in repeated failures to numb the senseless existence, The Weekend
is completely subject to the workings of the death drive and its necrocratic
economy of pleasure. This Žižekian non-entity controlling his life produces
eerie effects in The Weeknd’s music, the eeriness of not being able to break
away from an inhuman force dictating one’s way towards dissolution. As such,
The Weeknd is fully focussed on the no longer aspect of hauntology, as it is
incapable of imagining any viable alternative to the status quo. Ultimately,
The Weeknd’s songs display a millennial lethargy, a capitalist realist belief
in the fixity of the present condition. Despite exposing cracks in capitalism,
far from being subversive, this music induces interpassivity by painting any
political thought, let alone action, as futile, always already destined to fail and
too much work in any case.

74 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 175.

15
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

BI BLI O G RAPHY

— Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke,

Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

— Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.

New York: Zone Books, 2015.

— Cupcakke. Lyrics to “Barcodes.” Genius, 2017. Accessed October 18, 2020.

https://genius.com/Cupcakke-barcodes-lyrics.

— Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International. New York, London: Routledge
Classics, 2006.

— Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK:

Zero Books, 2009.

— Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and

Lost Futures. Winchester, UK; Washington, US: Zero Books, 2014.

— Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2017.

— Fleming, Peter. Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its

Discontents. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.

— Future. Lyrics to “Codeine Crazy.” Genius, 2014. Accessed March 20, 2020.
https://genius.com/Future-codeine-crazy-lyrics.

— Grande, Ariana. Lyrics to “7 rings.”Genius, 2019. Accessed October 18,

2020.https://genius.com/Ariana-grande-7-rings-lyrics.

— Guetta, David. Lyrics to “Play Hard.” Genius, 2013. Accessed March 20,
2020. https://genius.com/David-guetta-play-hard-lyrics.

— Hook, Derek William. “Of symbolic mortification and ‘undead life’:

Slavoj Žižek on the death drive.” Psychoanalysis and History 18, no. 2
(2016):221–56.

— Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

— Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern

University Press, 2008.

16
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

— Lil Peep. Lyrics to “Cry Alone.” Genius, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2020.
https://genius.com/Lil-peep-cry-alone-lyrics.

— Minaj, Nicki. Lyrics to “Rich Sex.”Genius, 2018. Accessed October 18, 2020.
https://genius.com/Nicki-minaj-rich-sex-lyrics.

— Murray, Nick. “Drake and The Weeknd Wallow in their Misery.”

Village Voice (2012). Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.villagevoice.
com/2012/01/18/drake-and-the-weeknd-wallow-in-their-misery/.

— Negarestani, Reza. “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism

and Organic Necrocracy.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism, 182–201. Edited by Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek
and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re.press, 2011.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “Can’t Feel My Face.” Genius,

2015. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://genius.com/
The-weeknd-cant-feel-my-face-lyrics.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “Coming Down.” Genius, 2011. Accessed March 20,
2020. https://genius.com/The-weeknd-coming-down-lyrics.

— TheWeeknd. Lyrics to “Heartless.” Genius, 2019. Accessed May 28, 2020.

https://genius.com/The-weeknd-heartless-lyrics.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls.”

Genius, 2011. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://genius.com/
The-weeknd-house-of-balloons-glass-table-girls-lyrics.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “Reminder.” Genius, 2016. Accessed March 20,

2020. https://genius.com/The-weeknd-reminder-lyrics.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “Starboy.” Genius, 2016. Accessed March 20, 2020.
https://genius.com/The-weeknd-starboy-lyrics.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “The Hills.” Genius, 2015. Accessed March 20, 2020.
https://genius.com/The-weeknd-the-hills-lyrics.

— The Weeknd. Lyrics to “Wicked Games.” Genius, 2011. Accessed March

20, 2020. https://genius.com/The-weeknd-wicked-games-lyrics.

— West, Kanye. Lyrics to “Pinnochio Story.” Genius, 2008. Accessed March

20, 2020. https://genius.com/Kanye-west-pinocchio-story-lyrics.

17
 “THIS IS A HAPPY HOUSE” by Andrea Jović

— XXXTENTACION. Lyrics to “Jocelyn Flores.” Genius, 2017. Accessed March

20, 2020. https://genius.com/Xxxtentacion-jocelyn-flores-lyrics.

— Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation for Dialectical

Materialism. London: Verso, 2014.

— Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2014.

— Žižek, Slavoj. The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Cambridge:
Polity, 2014.

— Žižek, Slavoj. “The Obscene Immortality and its Discontents.”

International Journal of Žižek Studies 11, no. 2 (2017): 1–14.

— Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London, New York: Verso, 1997.

18

View publication stats