There is a distinction in Lacanian thought between the object of the drive and satisfaction as object which I’ve been preoccupied by while reading Alenka Zupančič. I still haven’t quite got to grips with it, but this is an attempt to map out why I’m so drawn (ironically) to this distinction. From What is Sex? by Alenka Zupančič pg 103:
The repetition involved in the functioning and satisfying of organic functions produces a surplus, unexpected satisfaction, which then becomes the drive of another repetition, repetition within repetition, repeating this surplus satisfaction. And this drive can become stronger than the organic need, in the sense that it now dominates both. This is what seems to be at stake, for example, in gluttony, the surplus satisfaction – surplus in relation to the organic need – produced in the course of consuming food (the pleasure of the mouth, etc…) not only deregulates the organic function, but reverses the causality of this configuration. If the surplus is first a by-product of satisfying the organic need for food, satisfying the organic need for food now becomes a by-product of repeating the surplus satisfaction.
This is a straightforward example of how the pursuit of satisfaction comes to dominate a prior satisfaction with an organic basis. The underlying need for food is crowded out by the pursuit of the satisfaction accompanying the ‘pleasure of the mouth’: eating becomes an end in itself rather than an activity fundamentally dictated by biological rhythm. The satisfaction itself becomes the object of the drive but, as Zupančič points out, this is a repetitive circulation around loss rather than the pursuit of pleasure as a deliberate end.
It reflects the gnawing sense of absence underpinning our experience, the gap we are confronted with when our demands are met yet something inarticulate within us goes unmet. The drive is circling around this negativity in what can become increasingly compulsive ways, with the object of satisfaction giving form to it. Each time it tries to hit the target, meeting the want which forever eludes our attempts to articulate it, only to once more miss and leave us mired in dissatisfaction. There is an enjoyment which can be found in the process but this, notes Zupančič, should be understood as the exercise of the superego. It “reduces the drive to the issue of satisfaction (enjoyment), making us hostages to its vicissitudes, and actively blocking access to the negativity of the drive” (pg 104).
The satisfaction is the means of the drive rather than its goal, the mechanism through which it sets us into motion in a process we are caught up within rather than deliberately choosing. The irony being that the more we identify with the object of satisfaction as if it were an intentional pursuit, the more precarious our enjoyment becomes. The enjoyment is, at most, a byproduct of a process we are being carried along by rather than something we are deliberately setting out to enact. The satisfaction comes, I think, when we can tread lightly over this uncertain terrain in a way mindful of the journey rather than fixated on the satisfaction we impute at its end. If I understand correctly, this is where drive and desire are knotted together in more or less destructive ways: to imagine some fullness awaiting us through the deliberate embrace of the drive ironically cuts us off from the motor of drive satisfaction in a way that risks intensifying over time.
To the extent this becomes a matter of desire (what we think we want) it locks us into a logic of displacement which dulls us to the satisfactions continually emerges from the churning motor of the drives. As Zupančič writes in The Shortest Shadow pg 176:
The subject is separated from the object by an interval or a gap, which keeps moving with the subject, and makes it impossible for her ever to catch up with the object. The object that the subject is pursuing accompanies her, moves with her, yet always remains separated from her, since it exists, so to speak, in a different ‘time zone’.
This creates the temptation to distinguish between what we think we want and what we (really) want. If only we could identify the real object of satisfaction and then steadfastly pursuit this, the partial satisfaction might be transformed into the fullness we inarticulately long for. The problem is that the drive circulates between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction as object. To forego the latter in order to pursue satisfaction as an end itself leaves us tangled up in the aforementioned drive/desire knot which split us off from the partial satisfaction which sustains us.
Instead we might cultivate “a dislocation or a decentering of the sublime object in relation to the source of enjoyment” (pg 180). Not a displacement but a commitment to strive to exist in the tension between the two in as graceful a way as we can manage, not disavowing the partiality of what we inflate with our longing but resisting the temptation to make it the centre of our reality to which all other value is subordinated. This runs contrary to Nietzsche’s concern about the ascetic ideal which Zupančič interprets in a Lacanian mode as our being “compelled constantly to look and strive for the immediate Real of satisfaction as such, beyond all ‘apparent’ and always partial satisfaction. It means to take your pleasures where you find them, to use a phrase I remember from Alan Bennett but undoubtedly has a more complex genealogy. As Zupančič puts it, “nihilism appears when the only possible object left to desire is its transcendental condition itself” (pg 127)
Mark Carrigan 