Changes

Jump to: navigation, search

Introducing Lacan

1,206 bytes added, 14:45, 18 November 2006
Desire
=====Desire=====
[[Demand]] is ultimately a [[demand]] for [[love]], and, for this reason, [[unsatiable]]. If someone asks you if you lvoe love them and you say yes, that will not step them from asking you again and again and again. The impossibility of really proving one's love once and for all is well known. Hence [[demand]] is a continuing spiral. But Lacan adds something more. To [[need]] and [[demand]], he adds the [[register]] of [[desire]]. ''[[Desire]] take sup what has been eclipsed at the level of [[need]]'' (the dimension represented by the mythical water) and introduces an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditional nature of demand. (We can see this in cases where human desire literally has an absolute condition, in fetishism. I cna can only reach sexual enjoyment when a particular object or trait is present in my partner, like a ribbon or a certain pair of boots.) ''[[Enjoyment]] is determined strictly by the [[present]] of this element''. 
=====And Lack...=====
Although the example of [[fetishism]] is an extreme one, Lacan shows that it is at the horizon of all [[desire]] for the [[man]]. A [[man]]'s choice of partner will always contain some reference to inhumane details: the color of the partner's hair, her eyes, etc. There is nothing "human" about such abstract features. ''Desire is thus linked to condition'' in contrast to the register of [[demand]]. (Part of the work of analysis is to try to tease out the subject's desire from his incessant demands. The neurotic is someone who privileges demand, who hides his desire beneath the imposing presence of demand.)
If demand is demand for an object, desire has ''nothing'' as its object: nothing in the sense of "''lack taken as an object''". Some clinical structures show the different clearly. The anorexic, for example, in refusing to eat gives a place to desire beyond demand. To the mother's demand for the child to eat, the latter offers a symbolic refusal, maintaining a desire centering on the "nothing" which is eaten. Into the relation with the mother, a lack is thereby introduced, ''something which marks out clearly the tension between [[demand]] and [[desire]]''.
Root Admin, Bots, Bureaucrats, flow-bot, oversight, Administrators, Widget editors
24,656
edits

Navigation menu