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→And Lack...
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]]''.
=====Distortion and Desire=====
Desire is thus a very peculiar thing. Lacan elaborates a theory of desire as something very strange ,very odd: it has nothing to do with wishes, but consists of linguistic mechanisms which twist and distort certain elements into others. A slip of the tongue would provide another example. You say one thing instead of something else and you do not know why. ''Desire is present because one element has been distorted and modified by another one''. We can deduce the presence of desire in clinical work by paying attention to these processes as they repeat themselves and to the points of rupture, distortion and opacity in a patient's associations.
If language has a capacity to transmit a message, it also has a redundant side. It's the different between a letter and a telegram. The telegram conveys the minimum information content quickly, whereas the letter may dwell on details, use rhetorical devices and bow to the requirements of etiquette. Now, if we are to track down desire, Lacan says, we will do best by ''focusing not on the message, but rather on the points of redundancy'', the little details which do not really need to be there.
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