the space of desire(about the real)
how can i visualize tha t space?
Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function: on the one hand, it articulates need, and on the other, acts as a demand for love. Even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied This remainder is desire.[54] For Lacan, “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.” Lacan adds that “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need.” Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.”[55
visualize that space
the space of desire
substraction space
double fuction of the biological instict\=
space beetween digits 0.1.2.3.4.5.6.
from wiki
DesireLacan’s conception of desire is central to his theories and follows Freud’s concept of Wunsch. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand and to uncover the truth about his or her desire, but this is possible only if that desire is articulated.[52] Lacan wrote that “it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.”[53] This naming of desire “is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.”[37] Psychoanalysis teaches the patient “to bring desire into existence.” The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire—whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.[52]In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function: on the one hand, it articulates need, and on the other, acts as a demand for love. Even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied. This remainder is desire.[54] For Lacan, “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.” Lacan adds that “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need.” Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.”[55]It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire.[56] Lacan’s concept of the “objet petit a” is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).
The three orders
[edit]The Imaginary
Main article: The Imaginary (psychoanalysis)
The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and similarity. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: “alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order.”[40] This relationship is also narcissistic.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the “wall of language” that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject’s relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order.[48] Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the Symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. “The use of the Symbolic,” he argued, “is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification.”[49]
[edit]The Symbolic
Main article: The Symbolic
In his Seminar IV, “La relation d’objet,” Lacan argues that the concepts of “Law” and “Structure” are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque)connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (“das Ding an sich“) and the death drive that goes “beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition”—”the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order.”[37]
By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.[9]
[edit]The Real
Main article: The Real
Lacan’s concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as “an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself“.[50] Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), “there is no absence in the Real.”[37] Whereas the Symbolic opposition “presence/absence” implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, “the Real is always in its place.”[49] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated—it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces “a cut in the real” in the process of signification: “it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the “here and now” of the all in the process of coming into being.”[51] The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as “the impossible” because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is “the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.”[37]
“presence/absence” in the space (yale conference)
[edit]Desire
Lacan’s conception of desire is central to his theories and follows Freud’s concept of Wunsch. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand and to uncover the truth about his or her desire, but this is possible only if that desire is articulated.[52] Lacan wrote that “it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.”[53] This naming of desire “is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.”[37] Psychoanalysis teaches the patient “to bring desire into existence.” The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire—whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.[52]
In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function: on the one hand, it articulates need, and on the other, acts as a demand for love. Even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied. This remainder is desire.[54] For Lacan, “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.” Lacan adds that “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need.” Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.”[55]
It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire.[56] Lacan’s concept of the “objet petit a” is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).
