How do we understand desire? We find that human desire is triggered and nurtured by several factors. We shall take Jacques Lacan’s method as the way of deciphering human desire. Humans are never outside desire. Not to want something is also desire. There is no desireless condition at least on this side of the grave. But it defies articulation. This is why Lacan teaches that we can only interpret it. It is therefore, difficult to untangle the concept of desire. Lacan takes recourse to mathematics to untangle desire. He uses mathematics only to show that desire is dynamic and regenerating and remains unnamable.
We have to distinguish desire from need. Need is not reduceable to desire. Need can be fulfilled while desire cannot be fulfilled. To arrive at the notion of desire, Lacan juxtaposed demand and need. This is a new triad of Lacan. He teaches that all demand is demand for love. But need requires us to articulate through the medium of signifier that comes from other. Due to repression demand cannot articulate the original object that desire wishes and wants at least a substitute. This means there is always a gap between desire and demand. Desire is therefore, a desire for and of something impossible. Desire is something but requires demand to articulate its self. That part of demand which persists when the biological need is satisfied can be called desire .
Desire is the desire of / for the Other. The Other is located in the symbolic as locus where speech and demand come from. This is where signifiers emerge with the subject’s desire. It is in this context, that Lacan declares that the unconscious is the discourse of the other. The other becomes the model of subject’s desire. The subject locates himself or herself and his/ her desire in the place of the object of Others desire through the mediation of identification by belonging to the symbolic order. This means the subject desires the other. The other is a subject barred and marked by lack. The subject mimics the desire of the other. It is ,therefore, through the mediation of the other that we can desire.
The subject does not know desire but knows the direction of the demand. This is why the subject does not know that his/ her desire is the desire of the other. Lacan , thus, eludes that it is the first disruption from the mother from where desires arises. In this gap an object a ( Lacans formula … Object a , Object absent) is placed which is the objective cause of desire. As a bridge, object a is always attached to the other. This alienation is also made acute when subject begins to speak but hits the wall of language. Desire is in fact produced by the subject’s alienation in the language and finds its recognition in the desire of the other. Thus, the subject and his/her desire is determined by the discourse that begins to emerge in the other.
The subject, thus, needs the object a to reach the other. This is why once the subject feels that desire is somewhat met, he /she loses the object of desire. (May be for this reason after marriage some husband and wife lose love that they had for each other before marriage). But when desired object slips away one keeps seeking it and is trapped in a pursuit of the object of desire Thus , desire is unnamable and reproduces itself in different ways. Once desire is temporarily quenched it slides it another one.
Desire gets its expression with the first cry of the infant through which the infant announces or represents himself/ herself in the signifier. This is why we may say that desire begins in the lalangue. Lalangue is Lacan’s neologism which stands for the wordless world of phonemes and morphemes that evokes desire. Lacan says that lalangue is where jouissance is deposited and held in reserve. From the world of lalangue, the child gets detached as it begins to speak which also splits the infant form the mother and thus will need the signifier to express its desire. Lalangue, therefore, is located anterior to the accession of language and opens up the space of unconscious. Therefore, can be used to trigger and nurture desire.
We still have the challenge to understand the desire. Lacan makes use of subtraction to bring us to a close understanding of desire. He sees desire as a difference that is produced after a need is subtracted from a demand. Demand always has a double function. It articulates a need within itself and also a embeds a cry for love. We have to read this mathematical equation of Lacan metaphorically. D-N= d, where D stands for Demand, N stands for need and d for desire.
But one has to note that this equation will never give a concrete result. Desire or d always remains unnamable and cannot be quantified accurately. Our demand also never fully known as it carries a double within it. This means there is an x associated with it. It is precisely because of this, that it cannot also fully articulate the need of the subject. Hence we have to agree that a y is also associated with N . This would mean the equation of Lacan becomes : Dx-Ny = d(xy) .
This shows that demand, need as well as desire are not substantive but remain in fluidity. We have another of Lacan’ s triad other than the imaginary, symbolic and the real. All the three elements of this new triad fall into the Real and hence, cannot be fully understood. Need belongs to the real and imaginary as an instinctual impulse. Need looks for the original or the first object or its substitute for its satisfaction. Demand belongs to the symbolic and the real as demands gets articulated by the subject joining the signification system or language. Desire, is complex and is therefore difficult to understand. It is ,thus, viewed as a leftover of the separation from the original object of love. This is why we cannot reduce desire to demand nor to need. Desire arises from object a that is located in the real. Hence , desire keeps regenerating and can never be satisfied.
