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Desire (dEsire; Wunsch, Begierde, Lust)
THe Standard Edition translates Freud's ''Wunsch'' as 'wish', which corresponds closely to the Germna word.
Frued's French translators, however, have always used 'desire' rather than 'voeu', which corresponds to 'Wunsch' and 'wish', but which is less widely used in current French.
The crucial distincition betwen 'Wunsch' and 'wish', on the one hand, and 'desire', on the other, is that the German and English words are limited to individual isolated acts of wishing, whle the French has the much stronger implication of a continuous force.
It is this implication that Lacan has elaborated and placed at the centre of his psychoanalytic theory, which is why I have rendered 'dEsire' by 'desire'.
Furthermore, Lacan has linked the concept of 'desire' with 'need' (besoin) and 'demand' (deamnde) in the following way.
The human individual sets out with a particular organism, with cetain biological needs, which are satisfied by certain objects.
What effect does the acquisition of language have on these needS?
All speech is demand; it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed, whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation.
By the same token, that which comes from the Other is treated no so much as a particular satisfaction of a need, but rather as a response to an appeal, a gift, a token of love.
There is no adequation between the need and the demand that conveys it; indeed, it is the gap betwen them that costitutes desire, at once particular like the first and absolute like the second.
Desire (fundamentally in the singular) is a perpetual effect of symbolic articulaton.
It is not an appetite: it is essentially excentic and insatiable.
That is why Lacan co-ordinates it not with the object that would seem to satisfy it, but with the object that causes it (one is reminded of fetishism).
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In the Lacanian cosmology desire is fundamental to every aspect of the psychic life of the individual and to the social system in which the individual finds himself or herself embedded. It is endemic to the symbolic order (since it is at base a quest for presence, the possibility of which is precluded by the mechanism of signification), and thus inhabits all signification, providing the subject with its primary motivation and frustration. The chief elements of the Lacanian conception of desire as I will outline it here are its origins in the master/slave dialectic of G.W.F. Hegel (as explicated by Alexandre Kojève), its fundamentally social dimension, its relationship to the death drive, and finally its focus on the chief bugbear of all Lacan’s thought, the objet a.
