There are many reasons I’m fascinated by Lacan but foremost amongst them is the concept of desire. Once you get past the arcane language, there’s a phenomenological familiarity to the metonymic character of desire which can be unsettling. If you are sensitive to it, it’s easy to see it everywhere in yourself and in others. The continual displacement of what you want, that lingering sense that full satisfaction is tantalisingly within reach, only to escape your grasp as it displaces onto another object or outcome. This fascination is itself metonymic in the elusive character of the esoteric knowledge I discern in this body of theory and practice. The further I go into it, the wider the vista opens up in which shimmering jewels of psychic insight call to me from within these sometimes bewildering texts.

The fact that my own desire is reflexively folded into the metonymy only adds to the allure, the second-order preoccupation with my own capacity to be motivated by an imagined structure of knowledge which I am simultaneously analysing as a fantasy. It’s a thought-castle I’m either going to deliberately pull myself out of in the near future or I will very likely be willingly ensconced within for the rest of my life. I find it a very pleasing place in which to reside, particularly when I’m not the only one obsessively exploring in there.

But the aspect of it which is less phenomenologically accessible, as well as perhaps even more fascinating as a consequence, concerns the ontogenesis of desire. As Alenka Zupančič summarises it in Let Them Rot:

the perspective in which desire is conceived in psychoanalysis: that is to say, as fundamentally related to the modality of the question mark, of questioning, addressed to the Other: What am I to you? What do you want? (You are demanding this and that, but what is it that you actually want, or aim at?). Desire is essentially related to an interrogation of the Other and of one’s place in relationship to the Other—and to what remains unanswered in every answer.

Loc 1,366

I struggled with this idea for a while, in large part because I’ve been trained with a fundamentally phenomenological orientation. My instinct with psychoanalytic theory has been to map this onto my own phenomenology, with a view to grounding structural concepts in an empirical sense of their experiential outgrowths. This works much better for a concept like objet a than it does for the ontogenesis of desire, for which the phenomenological content is largely downstream of the psychic structures which generate it But I’m starting to get to grips with this, I think. In essence there are two propositions around which it revolves in ever escalating complexity, as the basic epistemological predicament of relationality plays itself out in the psychically charged development context of relationships of care and dependence:

• I want to be you what you want me to be. But I don’t know what you want me to be. I only have access to your demands, not your desire.
• I want you to be what I want you to be. But I don’t know what I want you to be. I make demands of you, but those demands miss the target of my desire, sometimes dramatically so.

This dialectic between self and other plays out through the entry into language, with the demands of the other exercising a formative influence over my own demands, leaving me with a sense of what the other wants (and what I myself want) which always fails to coincide with my developing desire. To use a CR vocabulary that Lacanians would hate, we can isolate the synchronic dilemma quite straightforwardly, particularly if we treat the Other as pure otherness, rather than as themselves a subject. I don’t know what you want from me and the terrifying thing is that you don’t know either.

The complexity arises because of the continual tangling up of these dynamics within the whole relational web within which we become who we are, as well as their spiralling complexity over the psychobiographical unfolding of each individual. Trying to take control of desire is a bit like trying to catch the fridge light by opening the door quickly above (which fascinated me as a child). But that basic challenge spirals into infinity over the life course.

It’s not something we can escape from, at least while remaining linguistic beings embedded within the social world living purposive lives. But its excesses can be tamed, its hyperbole can be repudiated and it can be channeled into less destructive forms of the knots with the drives which are our underlying sources of satisfaction. The problem is not desire but rather how tightly we cling to it, not fantasy but rather the rigidity with which we invest ourselves in those fantasies. The existential ethos underpinning Lacanian practice, if not necessarily Lacanian theory, could I think we be summarised as loosening our grip on desire in order that desire might loosen its grip on us.

Because what we desire is often not what we enjoy, which means that our dogged fixation on the deliverance from dissatisfaction which our object of attachment will bring (if only we act in the way necessarily to elicit the Other’s support of getting what we want) stops us from enjoying our enjoyment. Not the enjoyments I imagine will placate the Other or win their love, or which will bring out changes in me which finally make me whole (an aspiration which always ultimately indexes the evaluations of the Other). But the things that are straight forwardly enjoyable in the present circumstances I encounter (which one might add as a statement of sociological reflexivity will not harm my mental and physical capacity for future enjoyments).

The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance, little maketh up the best happiness. Hush!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pg 337

But it is difficult to see how we enjoy anything if our desire wasn’t continually in motion, as this ceaseless metonymy sets up the conditions in which we can move through a world in which objects and people show up to as meaningful, in interactions which have stakes for us. It’s not that desire makes things matter, but the movement of desire creates the conditions in which things can matter.

That at least is the nodal point through which I’m trying to unite neo-Aristotelian sociology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which increasingly feels like a viable long term project, even if it sounded absurd the first time I hear myself say to theory friends that this is what I was planning to do.