Graph of desire

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French: graphe du désir


The "graph of desire" is a topographical representation - schema or model - of the structure of desire.

The graph of desire is a conceptual tool from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

The graph of desire is a topological representation of the structure of desire.

The graph of desire is a topological schema of the structure of the constitution of the human subject and its desire.

History

The graph of desire was first porposed in a 1960 colloquium, and was later published in the Ecrits.

The graph of desire is a schema, or model, that Jacques Lacan began developing in his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious.[1]

The graph of desire was gradually developed by Lacan in the course of two successive seminars: The Formations of the Unconscious and Desire and its Interpretation.

Lacan first develops the graph of desire in the seminar of 1957-8 in order to illustrate the psychoanalytic theory of jokes.[2]

The graph reappears in some of the following seminars, but then all but disappears from Lacan's work.

He refers to the basic schema once again in "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious."

It achieved its definitive form in his essay "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious."[3]

The graph appears in various forms, although the most well known form of it appears in "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious."[4]

Graph

It depends on ideas developed originally in Lacan's Schema R, a graph in which fundamental organizing sturctures of the human mind are shown in a schematic relationship to the registers which in turn structure human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.

The graph of desire is a 'flattened' representation of a signifying chain as it crosses a pathway Lacan called a vector of [[desire].

It appears as two curved lines which cross one another at two separate points.

Each line has a symbolic meaning.

Development

Lacan builds up the graph of desire in four stages.

Its four successive stages represent the constitution of the human subject and his desire.

Nevertheless, Lacan never intended it to describe the genetic stages of a biological development.

Rather, it represents the "logical moments" of the birth of a speaking subject.


See Also

References