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Desire


Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
- Lao Tzu

"Lacan states that desire itself, and with it, sexual desire, can only exist by virtue of its alienation. Freud describes how the baby can be observed to hallucinate the milk that has been withdrawn from it and the infant to play throwing-away games to overcome the trauma of its mother's necessary departures. Lacan uses these instances to show that the object that is longed for only comes into existence as an object when its lost to the baby.

Thus, only satisfaction that might subsequently be attained will always contain this loss within it. Lacan refers to this dimension as 'desire'. The baby's need can be met, it's demands responded to, but its desire only exists because of the initial failure of satisfaction. Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that, in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself." pg. 6 Feminist Sexuality Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne

“To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?”
― Roland Barthes


"After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?"
Edna St. Vincent Millay Passer Mortuus Est
"(...) It is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable" (p.335).

"The fact that desire is not articulable may be clear to us because we already worked on the idea of desire being that effect of the demand that demand itself cannot recapture. Necessarily, desire will always imply a field that is beyond any demand. This justifies the fact that in the analytic practice with neurotics it is not possible for desire not to be there. Lacan is particularly subtle when he states that, regarding desire's rejection, a neurotic subject can only go as far as "to desire not to desire". We call desire then, the structural effect of demand over need, which is not recoverable through demand, but which has to be distinguished from any " I desire x object".

p. 71-2 The Graph of Desire Using the Work of Jacques Lacan by Eidelzstein







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