desire

some thoughts on DESIRE

(culled mainly from personal experience, as well as from my readings of the Dharma, Lacan, Spinoza, and Deleuze)

(1) DESIRE IS ALWAYS FOUNDED ON LACK🕳, or ABSENCE. this is a deceptively simple idea: it seems intuitive, “you always want what you can’t/don’t have”, etc., but the implications of this idea are actually quite DEEP:

while the conventional understanding of desire posits that people want their desires somehow MET or FULFILLED, in fact the opposite is true: desire does not, as it turns out, seek its FULFILLMENT, but rather its CONTINUATION. if desire was fully MET or FULFILLED, there would be no lack, and thus no desire (what we might call depression, melancholia, etc.) all of this leads us to a very radical and kinda horrifying assertion...

,that (2), DESIRE IS ITS OWN OBJECT. which is to say: when one desires something, what one actually desires is THE VERY DESIRE ITSELF. this generates a peculiar and eerily familiar feedback loop (samsara), wherein desire never ceases to collapse in on itself, and is always succumbing to the weight of its own logic.

this is quite a conundrum: the stage is set for a rather extreme degree of ALIENATION. the next assertion is a crucial one— namely that, (3), DIRECT, UNMEDIATED CONTACT WITH THE DESIRED OBJECT IS IMPOSSIBLE❌🚫

we are, at all times, fundamentally incapable of confronting our desires head-on. desire always has to be MEDIATED through the screen of fantasy or fetish. alternatively, desire is projected onto the OTHER (but more on that later). the key point here is that DESIRE IS NEVER EXPERIENCED DIRECTLY.

this means that, (4), DIRECT, UNMEDIATED CONTACT WITH ONE’S OWN DESIRES IS ALWAYS A VIOLENT AND TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE. confronting desire head-on, in an unmediated fashion, means confronting the inherent EMPTINESS of human subjectivity. there is a void-space at the core of every human subject which can never be filled—that is where desire lives.

steps are taken, and elaborate rituals constructed, in order to avoid any kind of confrontation with one’s own subjectivity.

the inevitable blowback from all of these doomed-to-fail attempts to avoid confronting the void-space of desire at the core of our subjectivities manifest as SYMPTOMS, the sum of which is called NEUROSIS.