This extract from Zizek’s Hegel in a Wired Brain captures something crucial about human desire, caught between our satisfactions (what we actually enjoy in a straightforward way) and the overpowering surpluses which we relate to in ambivalent ways (the compulsion to do something which hurts but energises us). From loc 2852:
The paradoxical structure of human desire is a kind of a priori: we cannot step out of it and (re)establish some new balanced universe in which we will not be fixated on a surplus, but just work for our satisfactions.
The core existential Lacanian insight rests, I think, in the recognition that a balanced existence of pure satisfaction is itself a surplus upon which we fixate. To imagine a way out of the ceaseless metonymy of desire is itself another image on which we desirously fixate. The point is not to escape our desire, but rather to learn to wear it more lightly, to move through this terrain with greater poise rather than to imagine other, easier, terrain. There will always be surplus in our experience, there will always be desire, what matters is how we live it out and orientate ourselves to the activity involved.
Mark Carrigan 