...the previous is why I can't yet accept Martin Hägglund's argument that it is logically impossible to desire extinction. Far deeper than “desire,” a striving to solve an intrinsic disequilibrium is what at the very least underwrites the existence of self-replicators.
Replicants just are self-contradictory. Hägglund relies too much on the non-proved law of noncontradiction to do justice to that fact. (Hägglund's conception of time devolves from this reliance.) It is in the nature of code to contain true contradictions: this was Derrida's main message.
All this makes me want to wax lyrical on Lacan's thinking of death and the signifier but for now I will simply leave you with this image from The Exorcist. Here we see living tissue “expressing” itself as code. The rift between living tissue and the dead letter that arises from it couldn't be more stark. It's very evocative of why I think DNA and RNA are codes at all:
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