Life's desire
‘Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for’ (Epicurus)
Easier said than done though perhaps not psychoanalytically. For Lacan, as split subjects, we are always ambivalent. Eternally agitated yet attached to our suffering. Seen through the lens of ‘abjection’ this is a state of rebellion and complaint (Kristeva, 1982). An attempt to cleanse the body of the spirit that constitutes the soul. A quest to challenge, defy and subvert while pledging ever more faithful allegiance. As Kristeva would say: ‘I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself’ (1982: 3, original emphasis). Or more directly, ‘I endure it, for I imagine such is the desire of the Other’ (Lacan, 1977: 2).
In questioning life’s purpose, I am often reminded of the lack inherent in endless longing. For ‘Man’s [sic] desire is the desire of the Other’ (Lacan, 1977: 235), which essentially means two things. A desire for recognition and a desire for the thing we believe the Other desires. Strangely this is the very thing the Other lacks. It is less an object of possession than the enigmatic quality of Otherness driving our insatiable quest for recognition. And because we can never fully grasp the nature of what the Other desires, and hence what the Other lacks, we are constantly driven, long-suffering and exasperated, in our desires which are not entirely our own but always frustratingly linked to others. So, I ask: am I not perpetually driven by a sense of failure and disappointment, as my desire moves frenziedly from one object to another, signifier to signifier, in a chain of continuous deferral and displacement? For Lacan, ‘desire is the metonymy of the want-to-be … there is no signification that does not refer to another signification’ (2006: 520). For desire is an unquenchable zest resisting any ultimate satisfaction. As Lacan states, ‘the enigmas that desire … [are] caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally extending toward the desire for something else’ (2006: 431, emphasis added).
My dissatisfaction continues unabated. Yet despite such hysteria I ponder the prospect of challenging myself to think and be differently? For thinkers like Foucault, there is an imaginative and perhaps more redemptive orientation in which personal ethics gives rise to the possibility of change. This is an act of self-formation: a care for the self as a practice of freedom. More than a mere discursive effect it suggests ‘the self is not given to us … we have to create ourselves as a work of art’ (Foucault, 1983: 237), ‘courageously authoring one’s ethical self’ (Foucault, 1977: 154). Precisely into what becomes a recurring theme. Certainly, refusing to know myself in order to reveal myself better in alterity is an alluring prospect. Such self-reflexivity, however, requires an emergent curiosity to liberate the self from a fixed or unchanging identity. To be vulnerable, courageous and empowered is to entertain the ‘unthinkable’ as part of creating a new ‘work of art’. To this, and the process of self-formation, I devote my attention next.
References
Foucault, M. (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Foucault, M. (1983) “On the Genealogy of Ethics: A Work in Progress”. In H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 229-252.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror – An Essay on Abjection, (trans. L.S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London/New York: Karnac.
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits, (trans. B. Fink). London/New York: Norton.
