My previous posts were kind of bleak and depressing, so I thought I’d be a little bit more upbeat this week and write about desire, with Lacan in mind.

I couldn’t have been older than 12 when I first became confused on what having a girlfriend meant. I remember crossing into the neighbors yard, where an old, yellow, rusty, broken down SUV sat, and having this question. Some of my conclusions was that a girlfriend was someone you kissed, and that nobody else was allowed to kiss them. With this in mind, when everyone in the house would be asleep, I would practice kissing on a stuffed Tigger doll. My first kiss was actually pretty nice, it was snowing and our boots were making slushy sounds in the road. I asked if we could kiss, nervous and shaking, not from the cold, and knowing she had had a few boyfriends before, I was confident she wouldn’t be shy. It was quick and I felt like a hummingbird, airless and rosy cheeked. I confessed to her months later that I thought I was bisexual after we stopped dating. Thinking back on that, I think I was just confused that it’s possible to judge everyone on their looks, in fact I think it’s impossible not to. It’s hard to choose attraction, and sometimes you have to make it, but it comes from meticulous social standards and your own idealized fantasies. True attraction is what makes it hard to speak and your hands get all sweaty as your stomach rumbles with butterflies.

It goes without saying that puberty arises sexual attractions, but the thought of who we desire and what we pine for is an interesting thought experiment. I believe desire is not exclusive to any particular gender, but someone more conservative than me would argue otherwise. Desire to some extent comes from the social environment, and our inherent will to mimic behavior. We imitate at an early age in order to learn, and it’s hard to deny we are influenced by fads in our early years. If we’re not influenced, we’re strongly moved to oppose the fad rather than ignore it. Does this commercial behavior apply to our desires for humans as well?

In thinking about how curious it is labeling someone as a partner, which only hits a few different bullet points in labeling them as a friend, and the role commercialism has in manipulating desire, Lacan has an interesting idea which is interpreted by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “Not being real, the ‘object’ of desire is not natural, either… The ‘object’ of human desire is neither the object that saturates a need… nor the fixed and preestablished object of instinct; it is, properly speaking, their negation.”(1)  In other words, in a condensed, simplified explanation, there’s a void in us that gets continually filled by our creation of desire. There’s no actual object that can fill this desire, otherwise there would be nothing left to want, so desire itself is a manifestation of our own fantasy or creation. Rather, it’s negating the object we choose to fill that void.  My question as a young boy can be tied into this ‘object’ of desire. What I was questioning was how odd it seemed to basically own someone, because if they weren’t faithful to me, then they’d be breaking some sort of partner contract. Thinking of having a lover in this context makes me less judgmental toward Swann and the narrator of Proust’s “Search,” because having a lover is in fact a mutual ownership, where sides take different stakes of levels of ownership. Thinking about polyamorous individuals is interesting because their affection and garnishment isn’t exclusive to one individual, but isn’t as common as the traditional social practice. So, we place humans into this void, hoping to negate our need for desire to be filled, only to then realize it’s not what we thought it would be. We may be satiated, but true 100% bliss seems almost impossible to attain, for even if it’s reached, reality is waiting to swallow you back up and make you thirst for more. 

I guess I don’t really see it that bad that the people we’re reading about obsess over possession of people. It’s in these fantasies that they’re playing with desire, and could inevitably lead to healthy, beautiful relationships. Of course there’s the possibility of all the negative events that may come with possession and unmet desire, and we have to be wary of those consequences.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 201. Print.