DESIRE – LACAN

Desire exceeds need and uses demand as its vehicle

“… Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung)” (Ecrits, 690-692).

“Desire is situated in dependence on demand – which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued, (méconnu), an element that is called desire”  (Seminar XI, p.154).

A joke that Freud tells in Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious illustrates well the point that Lacan is making about how desire differs from both demand (what you ask for) and need (what you cannot do without). The joke goes:

“An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many asseverations of his necessitous circumstances. The very same day his benefactor met him again in a restaurant with a plate of salmon mayonnaise in front of him. The benefactor reproached him: “What? You borrow money from me and then order yourself salmon mayonnaise? Is that what you’ve used my money for?” “I don’t understand you”, replied the object of the attack; “if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to eat salmon mayonnaise?” (SE VIII, 49-50).

But for Lacan at least this does not mean that desire can be simply reduced to the idea of yearning or pining for something lost. Desire for him is always a desire for something else, because it is caught in what he calls “the rails of metonymy”:

This brings us to an answer to a simple question: what precisely is desire a desire for if it is not the same as demand? Firstly, we have to remind ourselves that desire is not simply a wish. It is not a wish for a particular object, like we might have a wish for chocolate cake or for sex. Lacan claims to find desire manifested in the same place that Freud finds the wish – namely, in dreams. Freud’s central thesis in the Interpretation of Dreams is that dreams represent a wish fulfilled (SE IV, 122). But for Lacan, to have a wish for something is not the same as desire. For him, the important lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams is to show us our desire cannot be expressed in the form of a sentence – for example, ‘I want sex’ or ‘I want chocolate cake’ – but rather that desire is the very process by which dreams are formed:

“Although Freud there [the Traumdeutung] goes over the thousand empirical forms which this desire can acquire, there isn’t a single analysis which ends up with the formulation of a desire. Desire is, in the end, never unveiled there. Everything [in the dreams] happens on the steps, in the stages, on the different rungs of the revelation of this desire. Freud also somewhere pokes fun at the illusion of those who, having read his Traumdeutung, end up thinking that the reality of the dream is the sequence of the dream’s latent thoughts. Freud himself says that if that were all it was, this reality would be of no interest. It is the stages of the dream-work which are interesting, for that is where we find revealed what we are looking for in the interpretation of the dream, this x, which in the end is desire for nothing. I defy you to bring me a single passage from the Traumdeutung which concludes – this is what the subject desires….

Desire’s little object – the object a

If desire cannot be satisfied with an object in the same way as a wish, need or demand can be, in what sense is the famous object a, that Lacan sees as his most important contribution to psychoanalysis, the object of desire? Crucial in answering this is to understand that object a is not an object that has positive properties or form as such. When in Seminar XI Lacan gives examples of objects a, he does not choose attributes such as hair, eyes, or a smile but parts of the body that are at a kind of margin between inside and outside, that lack specular representation.

The gaze is the best example of this formlessness of the object a. We cannot see the gaze as such, and when we try to we see only the eye. We might feel the gaze upon us from the blacked out window of a passing car or from a CCTV camera, but there is not necessarily anyone behind it. We have the unusual sensation that we are being watched even if there is no one watching. The gaze as an example of object a is an  object that does not require a subject. As we saw when looking at the role of the phallus as signifier of desire, Lacan says that where we look for an object of desire we only find a lack, or at best, a place-holder for lack. This is another way to understand his pronouncement quoted above that desire is “only ever represented as a reflection on a veil” (Seminar II, p.223). It is this anti-objectivisable quality of desire’s object that lend it so well to the many different faces of human sexuality. By the time of Seminar XI in the mid-Sixties, Lacan presents desire as like a hinge or lynch-pin between the unconscious and sexuality: