Desire
In Lacanian thought, a demand results when a lack in the Real is transformed into the Symbolic medium of language. Whether or not demands achieve their apparent aims, they are always successful in the sense that all parapraxes or slips of the tongue are successful - they faithfully express unconscious signifying formations. But because the Real is never totally symbolizable, a residue or kernel of desire is left behind by every demand, representing a lost surplus of jouissance for the subject. For Lacan, 'desire is situated in dependence on demand - which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder which runs under it'. Inherently 'frustrated demand is what gives birth to desire': "Don't give me what I ask for, that's not it."
Read more about this topic: Demand (psychoanalysis)
Famous quotes containing the word desire:
“There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“If you want to touch the other shore badly enough, barring an impossible situation, you will. If your desire is diluted for any reason, you’ll never make it.”
—Diana Nyad (b. 1949)
“Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind
And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
Belief, that what it believes in is not true.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)