dox of “pure” desire from different—albeit convergent—angles should always re-
main visible in the background.
5 2 The Subject of the Fantasy and Desire
In Chapter 3 , I analyzed in detail the way in which, during the so-called dialectic
of frustration, the child’s demand—to be distinguished from a mere appeal/cry
relating to the satisfaction of biological needs—is constituted as an unconditional
and unsatisfiable demand for love. What the child actually demands is not the real
object that satisfies his needs, but the love of the one that can give him any object
as a gift, a symbolic object; in this context, “the [occasional] satisfaction of need
corresponds to nothing more than a compensation for the frustration of love.”^51 In
the same chapter I also explained how, as a result of the dialectic of frustration, the
child both symbolizes his relation to the (m)Other for the first time and, for the
same reason, soon becomes utterly dependent on her alleged omnipotence. The
emergence of a subject who is no longer a “non-subject” (a-sujet)completely sub-
jected (assujetti)to the (m)Other and her desire is possible only after the interven-
tion of the law of the father that first deprives the mother—in the second stage of
the Oedipus complex—and successively castrates the child himself—in the third
and final stage of the Oedipus complex.
From what I have said so far, it is clear that desire stricto sensu,unconscious de-
sire, consolidates itself only after the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which
simultaneously involves the formation of the fundamental fantasy and the sexu-
ated subjectivation of the child. The question I shall now attempt to answer is: what
is the specific difference between the register of (pre-Oedipal and Oedipal) de-
mand—most noticeably, the demand for love—and that of (post-Oedipal) desire?
My analysis mainly focuses on Lacan’s seminal lesson XXI of Seminar V, which was
later reelaborated in the well-known article entitled “The Signification of the Phal-
lus.” More specifically, it is my intention to carry out a critical evaluation of the
formula according to which desire is “the margin, the result of the subtraction...
of the necessity [exigence] of need from [par rapport à] the demand for love.”^52
Most of the interpretations of this formula oversimplify it, and continuously
risk contradicting themselves, inasmuch as they render it tautologous with the for-
mula of the demand for love. Indeed, desire is often simply described as the sur-
plus produced by the articulation of need in demand—a perfect definition of the
demand for love. Obviously this cannot be regarded as an acceptable explanation
of desire, since the demand for love(and not simply “demand”) is, in Lacan’s for-
mula, just oneof the elements of the operation from which desire results.