Lack and Desire

This is why Lacan places the signifier at the center of clinical work. As he states: ‘‘In analytic practice, mapping the subject in relation to reality . . . and not in relation to the signifier, amounts to falling already into the degradation of the psychological constitution of the subject’’ (Seminar of Jacques Lacan 1964 142). In other words,

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“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” — René Girard.

“love is never any better than the lover. wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly... the lover alone possesses his gift of love. the loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.” ― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

In point of fact, the intellect cannot justify the power of passion, and yet it naively considers itself obliged to deny that power. But in choosing to hear of other reasons but its own, the intellect errs; for it can go into the reasons of the heart if it so chooses, provided it does not insist on reducing them first to the calculation of reason.... See more

And what returns home to the point of ambivalence is something foreign. By dint of the obsessive relation of repression, the repressed "proliferates in the dark" becoming fantastical, chimerical. This estrangedthing then gets to stand in for the repressed

other. In Lacanian terms,our claimed solidarity with the other masks our desire. This opens a psychoanalytic reading of anthropology to listen for an ambivalence often absent in our ethics—what might we repress in an emphasis on empa

? For Lacan, "I is an other" (2005:96) constituted in the symbolic,yet never fitting fully within it. We achieve our subjecthood only by taking in the Name of the Father which is also the No of the Father: theprice of becoming a subject is being fundamentally barred from a kernelwithin—and the result of this barring is a lack at the center of the... See more

s, truth. If any myth,discourse, and analytic only exists by contrast to another one then thecondition for its possibility must be in the oscillation toward and fromanother. This is no simple relativism, some space encompassing all thepluralities, equally positioned toward each of the alternatives. The pointhere is not a whole comprised of the... See more

In structuralist terms any discourse at some level alludes to the absences it intrinsically sets in abeyance: whether being (versus conceptualizing), speaking (versus writing-reading), sexuality (versustextuality), music (versus letters), and so forth. Every discourse, likeevery culture, inclines toward what it is not: toward an implicit... See more