"... language as a dead entity which “behaves as if it has a life of its own”

“These two notions in Freud and Lacan are not what they are in our everyday or standard scientific discourse: in psychoanalysis, they both designate a properly monstrous dimension. Life is the horrible palpitation of the “lamella”, of the non-subjective (“acephalous”) undead drive which persists beyond ordinary death; death is the symbolic order itself, the structure which, as a parasite, colonises the living entity…The basic opposition between life and death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which “behaves as if it has a life of its own”) and its counterpoint, the “living dead” (the monstrous life-substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic.”The Plague of Fantasies (1997) - S.Zizek