desire (as fundamentally sexual) is equal to the additionof the necessity of need to the
pre-Oedipaldemand for love. Another way to express this formula would be to say
that puredesire is equivalent to the subtraction of the drivefrom the demand for love:
in fact, the drive represents precisely the appetite for satisfaction on the symbolic
level, and drive is another name for “sexual desire.” Conversely, we can equally
conclude that “impure” (unconscious) desire is equivalent to the addition of the
drive to the (pre-Oedipal) demand for love: the “impurity” of desire thus corre-
sponds to that which, in consciousness, and especially the unconscious, is partially
satisfied through demand, despite its unconditional character and the essentially
unsatisfiable nature of desire.
Strictly speaking, desire applies only to a post-Oedipal scenario: in the end,
commentators often fail to distinguish between desire and the demand for love
precisely because they fail to acknowledge this important specification by relating
(the child’s) desire to the context of the pre-Oedipal dialectic of frustration. Yet at
the same time, once we have assumed that desire is always post-Oedipal desire, and
thus different from the pre-Oedipal demand for love, we can also show that desire
overlaps with the demand for love, which is precisely what Lacan does in the fol-
lowing passage: “Desire presents itself as that which, in the demand for love, rebels
against any sort of reduction to need, since actually the demand for love doesn’t
satisfy anything but itself, which is to say [pure] desire as an absolute condition.”^61
In other words, the post-Oedipal demand for love is equal to the drive insofar as it
partially satisfies need; it is equivalent to pure desire insofar as it does not satisfy
need. At this stage, we can also see from a new standpoint why Lacan can say that
desire satisfies itself precisely as unsatisfied desire: it is only insofar as desire is un-
satisfied (pure desire) that the drive can satisfy itself (and desire) partially. The ab-
stract function of pure desire, its “absoluteness,” necessitates the drive, and vice
versa. As we have already seen, when pure desire completely purifies itself of the
drive, it can only cause the termination of desire itself.
Let us now take a step back and attempt to explain more exhaustively the trans-
formation of the (pre-Oedipal) demand for love into desire: Lacan obtains the for-
mula of desire only after what he himself calls a “second negation”^62 —of demand
by desire—that follows the first negation—of need by demand. As Lacan has it,
given the pre-Oedipal “alienation” of the child in the signifier, “we should ask our-
selves what is the meaning of the fact that the human subject is able to take hold of
the conditions that were imposed on him... as if they were made for him, and
that he can satisfy himself with them.”^63 In a few words, we could well argue that
what is at stake for Lacan is a passage from the “unconditionality” of demand to the
“absoluteness” of desire; such a change basically involves a positivization of lackon the
part of the subject. The child manages to “positivize” the lack that surfaced with
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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