Another mistaken interpretation is the one which is somehow the opposite
of the one which reduces desire to demand. Although at one point in “The Sig-
nification of the Phallus” Lacan ambiguously asserts that “what is alienated in
needs”—and constitutes primal repression “as it cannot... be articulated in de-
mand”—nevertheless “appears... as desire,”^53 on the same page, he also un-
equivocally maintains that desire is definitely not just a repressed need. Lacan is
extremely careful in distinguishing desire from repressed need as well as from the
demand for love, even though he closely relates it to bothof them. If, on the one
hand, desire is not a mere prediscursive biological given that was repressed by the
signifier—desire cannot be reduced to need alone—on the other, it is doubtless
the case that desire isrelated to the repressed need in a way that the demand for love
is not: “Desire is something that gives backthe margin of deviation marked by the
incidence of the signifier on needs.”^54 By definition, desire remains beyond the
“necessity of need,” the “appetite for satisfaction”—after all, desire essentially
looks for unsatisfaction—yet, at the same time, it also “recuperates”—in the un-
conscious—the needs that could not be satisfied through demand. As Guyomard
remarks, desire “takes up again, at another level [that of the subject’s activeentrance
into the Symbolic], the biological imperative of the satisfaction of needs.”^55 If de-
mand was defined in the pre-Oedipal dialectic between the mother and the child
as that which lies beyond need, the desire of the post-Oedipal subject who has un-
dergone symbolic castration is in turn defined by Lacan as that which “is located
beyond demand”; “We need a beyond of demand insofar as... demand deviates,
changes and transposes need”:^56 such a beyond will be characterized by the fact
that, in it, “the Other loses his predominance,”^57 his omnipotence.
Let us go through these difficult differentiations by means of a closer examina-
tion of the formula of desire. There is no doubt that, according to Lacan, desire is
always to be understood as sexualdesire.^58 We should keep this in mind when we
are interpreting a specific sentence from Seminar V where Lacan states that “with
respect to the demand for love, sexual need is going to become nothing but de-
sire.”^59 In other words, (sexual) desire is nothing but the post-Oedipal recupera-
tion of sexual need at the level of the demand for love (which had “deviated” from
sexual need). I believe that this quotation is far from contradicting the classic def-
inition of desire as the result of the subtractionof need from the demand for love; on
the contrary, I firmly regard such a definition as meaningful only if it takes into
account what seems to undermine it. My suggestion is that the classic formula of
desire means the following: “The state of puredesire”^60 —the abstract notion that ex-
presses the function “desire” as fundamentally different from the functions “need”
and “demand for love”—is equal to the subtractionof the necessity of need/appetite
for satisfaction from the post-Oedipaldemand for love only inasmuch as really existingthe subject of the fantasy... and beyond