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Judith Butler-6 pages "O Faust, thou art ne'er satisfied."-Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust In her essay, "Desire," Judith Butler begins to unravel the status of desire as something which is outside of language and which language facilitates. Language and desire are in this way inextricably linked, the first displacing the second.[1] Butler develops the questions of this displacement from Plato's allegory of desire in the Symposium. If language cannot directly point to that which is desired, an analogy can skim around it, yet as soon as it might touch upon it, the desire shifts and folds. Within the questions posed at the beginning of the essay, the thought of desire's unattainability is suggested. In the silence of the uncertainty of a question, the very hesitation of language's limitations is subsumed: "Does language give rise to desire and does it also set limits on the representability of desire?" Phrasing this concept as a question sets a possibility for its relevance or importance, as it also arouses desire for a certainty or an answer to which the essay could lead. Yet we know that when language follows a potential finality about the truth of desire, the aforementioned limits will stifle its representation, and it will again shift, leading to more problems, more questions, or different subjects. Butler has brilliantly crafted the language of her essay to poignantly arouse a desire for an interest in desire in a remarkable meta-meaningful way. Her next question encapsulates awareness that she is using this form: "How are we to understand these dimensions of language and how is our notion of desire altered in the course of that understanding?"(370) Both the notion and essential knowledge will change with our changing desire that seeks new realms of understanding. Butler brings up the question, of desire's focus, and whether all desire aims "to return to an impossible origin, a Plato insisted and Lacan reasserted?"(370) Such a fundamental issue refers to the concept of desire as lack, as in the Symposium Diotima's story of the unified beings looking for their other halves supports. The lack of Plato's allegory is developed through his concept that "to desire is to be moved," which depends on whether one is moved from within themself or outside of themself. The former origin makes one remain as a "disembodied soul, immortal," while through the latter "one aquires body and a human form."(371) So therefore, within Plato's philosophy, it is this origination of an outside force moving one to desire which puts one into a bodily form. Similarly, Butler points out how "In Lacan, the body will emerge from the transfiguration of desire into an imaginary visual field, one which establishes the body first as a function of a specular imaginary reflection."(372) The world of this imaginary field, is created through the transformation of the desire's idea into a physical, imaginary form. Although the Lacanian form of the imaginary projection strays from that of the Platonic essential realm, its conception strongly relates back to a division between the idea and the body.[2] This split is caused by appetitive desire's creation of the imaginary which in Plato, remains as an embodiment in the realm of appearances. Georges Bataille clarifies desire's transformation using similar language to the Platonic conception which Butler elaborates. For him, the subject is changed into pure movement by the very nature of its object of desire. Specifically, within eroticism, as Fred Botting and Scott Wilson point out in introducing The Bataille Reader, "the object of desire radiates with a nocturnal brilliance that reduces the subject to nothing but the infinite movement of desire itself."(12) Bataille reaffirms the subject's Platonic definition through desire, yet in the erotic encounter, instead of a mere embodiment, the subject becomes the movement of desire. Straying from the Platonic realm of essences, Bataille's conception assumes an actual world which underlies a projected one, and thus tends more towards the Lacanian conception of the imaginary. For him, projection factors in its division between the "real" and "projected" object of desire. In "Love" he notes that "There's a sickness in desire that often makes us perceive some gap between the object imagined and the real object."(94) Here, the object of desire, which in this context is the beloved, differs from one's created conception of them. Their actuality is transformed by desire into an insufficient lack from how one wants to perceive them.[3] Returning to the question of the origin in Lacan, Butler describes how, "as much as desire seeks to recollect or recover one's origins in an effort to achieve a metaphysical oneness, it is thwarted from that recovery by a primary separation or loss. In the place of that return, desire acquires an imaginary trajectory."(Butler, 372)[4] Since is unity impossible, the lack is thus irreparable, and desire continues, as it is defined as "the site in which demand and need are never reconciled," and as "its fulfillment would entail a full return to that primary pleasure, and that return would dissolve the very subject which is the condition of desire itself."(381) Desire in this way recalls its formation or embodiment of the subject, which would be destroyed if desire ever completely returned to the impossible unity. By its very definition, desire within the subject implies eternal separation from the object of desire. Similarly, desire's division of demand and need must exist for language to, for need cannot be expressed in language, while demand is "the symbolic effort to order the subject according to law."(380-1) The demand is how society's organization transforms desire by gauging the satisfaction of needs within norms, and specifically within language. Needs cannot be reconciled with demand for this would imply a unity that the division of language makes impossible. For Lacan, Butler notes, "language itself is structured as desire," and that "if language were to reach the object it desires, it would undo itself as language."(383) Language sculpts our desires, and as we are born into it and its norms, we are controlled and formed by it. The continual shifting of desire from its object and thus from a pure unity is thus explained through language's functions within Lacan's metonymic concept of desire.[5] There is no ideal fulfillment of desire, and thus it functions through a displacement, as "its objects recall the lost origin, but only in part, and through juxtaposition (or association), but not necessarily by semblance."(380) In this way, desire's objects are not fully represented as a unity, and therefore what it seeks is masked or deflected. Lacan's theories thus effect the modern age by involving erotic desire within the fascination of many molds of an ideal, which recall a resemblance to the original, but only as partial, unique objects. As one of desire's objects, the Other plays an important role in Butler's conception of desire. She remarks that in Hegel, "The possibility of having oneself reflected back to oneself is the inaugurating lure of desire; the lure of reflexivity, of mimetic reflection, initiates desire but immediately precipitates desire into a life and death struggle. For the Other, who will reflect back the subject's desire and whom, therefore, the subject desires...will reflect back the subject's own duplicatability, exchangeability," and thus through this reflection will "threaten the singularity of the subject."(379)[6] To gain the desire of the desired Other necessitates that one is put into the gaze as an object, as something is desired just as it desires. Its unique definition is conditioned by the Other's nature as a subject, which puts it in a frame separate from its control. Butler notes how "Lacan's formulation that ‘desire is for the desire of the Other' works in at least two ways: the desire for the Other's desire, to be its object, but also to mime its ways and, in miming to assume an identity other than one's own."(381)[7] This alternate identity is at the heart of the removed frame that one puts themself in when desiring to be desired. In one's definition or thought of themself as distinctively apart from the Other, Lacan's notion is that "for the subject to remain the subject, it must repudiate the Other, and that its desire will nevertheless remain for that Other, the very sign of his potential undoing. This ambivalence suggests that there can be no desire without a prior repudiation, and that desire seeks a recovery of a lost Other that it simultaneously resists."(384)[8]
Deleuze and Guattari: Why should desire be lack at all? --This question is a return to Nietzsche: desire as excessive and productive--Also, their conception of human yearnings satisfied in the social definition of different manifestations of sexual objects...the repression, Oedipal concretion and interruption of Desire See Sartre's conception of the self in continual nihiliation (eros/thanatos), which is both divided and founded through lack
"Aristotle situates desire as a culturally produced activity...Spinoza will later claim" that it's "the passion in human beings from which all emotions are derived," and that there "is a critical distance between a self-acquisitive desire (as a sign of selfishness) and a self-preservative desire(as a sign of life-affirmation) in Spinoza's view, and later in Nietzsche's." While Hegel introduces desire "as the very movement by which consciousness redoubles itself as self-consciousness.."(378-9) Lacan contrib.: "sexual difference is the foundation of language itself"(384) Back to top |
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