In Mark Bracher’s Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change he identifies the four categories of desire within Lacan’s thought, each operative in the imaginary, symbolic and real domains. This summarised on pg 20:
Passive narcissistic desire: “One can desire to be the object of the Other’s love (or the Other’s admiration, idealization, or recognition)”
Active narcissistic desire: “One can desire to become the Other – a desire of which identification is one form and love or devotion is another”
Active anaclitic desire: “One can desire to possess the Other as a means of jouissance”
Passive anaclitic desire: “One can desire to be desired or possessed by the Other as the object of the Other’s jouissance”
The underlying Freudian categories of narcissistic and anaclitic can be understood, in a way reminiscent of Fromm, as being or having. I want to become the object or I want to possess the object. I want to become someone else’s object or I want to be possessed as someone else’s object. These modes of desiring then play out, sometimes simultaneously, across the three registers: signifiers (symbolic), images (imaginary) and fantasies (real). For Lacan signifiers are primary in this process because they determine the initial coordinates through which desire flows:
- Passive narcissistic desire involves being loved, valued and recognised for the for the master-signifiers which one embodies. These “identity-bearing words”, as Bracher puts it on pg 23, encompass sociological conceptions of role but extend far beyond them. They are categories which we have positively or negatively invested ourselves in, linked together in chains of association. In the imaginary this means “the desire to be admired or idealised for one’s physical appearance, to the point of being loved or identified with” (pg 37). In the real this means “the fantasy of being the object of the Other’s love, the object that will fill the Other’s lack” (pg 44).
- Active narcissistic desire is the desire to actively embody these characteristics, deliberately seeking to realise them rather than simply hoping to be recognised as them, seeking “activities, situations, and objects that allow her to embody” these signifiers (pg 27). In the imaginary this means “loving and admiring the image of the other person – to the point of desiring to become corporeally like that person” (pg 32). In the real this means “loving or admiring the object a in another and attempting to unite with it or identify with it” (pg 45).
- Active anaclitic desire “involves the desire to possess, as a means for one’s jouissance, an object that embodies a specific signifier” (pg 29). I want what it represents and in possessing the object I satisfy my desire, through proximity to the object and its reflection onto me. In the imaginary this means “the role played by the image of the body in arousing active sexual desire” (pg 39). In the real this means “possessing, as a means for one’s own jouissance, the object a embodied in another person, thing, or activity” (pg 44)
- Passive anaclitic desire “involves a subject’s desire to be desired by the Symbolic Order as a bearer of one of the master signifiers (such as a man’s desire to be desired as “man,” by “woman”)” (pg 31). I initially found this difficult to distinguish from passive narcissistic desire but I think the point is that one is recognised and valued as an object rather than a trait. I want to be desire for these characteristics rather than what I am in a more fundamental moral sense. In the imaginary this means “the wish to be the body that the other person desires as a means of jouissance” pg 39). In the real this means “embodying the object a that the Other desires to possess as a means for jouissance” (pg 44).
This is a powerful way to analyse our emotional relationship with cultural forms. As Bracher puts it, “artefacts, then, in addition to eliciting desire, also guide it towards some objects and aims and away from others, by means of such networks of signifiers in the unconscious and in the ego” (pg 49). In a strange echo of Archer’s cultural system, he talks about the “alliances and oppositions established among signifiers in the code constituting the ultimate Symbolic Other, the system of language”. What does this mean in practice? I think it means that when we’re moved by a cultural form, it’s a matter of the positions established within it, the relationships between them and the forms of desire they mobilise. I’ve spent much of this month haunted by Elena Tonra’s Romance which tells the story of a traumatic one night stand after a breakup:
And in the night
It was a drunken stutter
Started as a next to nothing conversation
And then he's tearing me out
Taking me apart at my friend's house
I was uncomfortable
I was hurt
Still with blue innocence in his eyes
I felt my reasoning was harsh
With every stab wound and exhale
I promised myself
That I would never lose my youthful fears of grown up men
I'm scarred with cruel intentions
I thought of another the whole time
Who would have never stared me like that
See he saw me as a human
This one thinks I'm a slaughterhouse
It recounts a traumatic encounter with the real of this man’s active anaclitic desire, in spite of the imaginary safety which characterised their initial meeting (“with blue innocence in his eyes”) there is the realisation in the act that for him she’s simply an interchangeable physical object (“this one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse”), haunted by the symbolic passive narcissistic desire towards the ex (“who would have never started at me like that, see he saw me as a human”). She recognises this man is in the symbolic order likely the object of other’s passive narcissistic desire:
He pretends that he's understanding
And you know in the grand scheme of everything
He's probably called a nice man
Or an ordinary kind of man
Or a stereotype with strong hands
This prompts the real but retrospective active narcissistic desire towards the ex-partner, in contrast to the imaginary grotesque of “these statues” she’s now surrounded with:
At how little joy I realised within my time with my ex guy
Before these statues arrived
Through this experience there is a confrontation with the real of her own desire:
I could begin to open up and risk desire
For I move slower and
Quieter than most
I grew up too quick and I still forgive too slow
Oh I wish there was another way
What it means to be haunted by a song I think involves these levels operating simultaneously. What makes this song so powerful is how the different levels intersect in one clear narrative, as well as the triangle it sets up between Elena, the ex-guy and the stereotype with strong hands. The tightly interconnected characterisation of these figures (the symbolic narrator, the imaginary ex and the real stereotype) permit a range of identifications while also destabilising them. My experience of being haunted by this song, until I sadly killed it for myself by listening to it too frequently, involved swirling through these positions with biographical chains of association sparked by whichever position I was imaginatively occupying. To break it down like this diminishes the song as a cultural artefact but it felt like the perfect example to try and cement my own understanding of Lacan’s notions of desire.
Mark Carrigan 