Lack and Desire

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 s... 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 diff... 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 negativity... See more

Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

This project of seeking out a truth found elsewhere is, at its best, intersubjective in the Lacanian sense—a tending toward an other that placesthe self at risk