desire, briefly

Desire is neither an innately differentiating marker (as Soul or Drive) of what it means to be a subject, nor a predicament suffered by that subject in accordance with the demands of a pre-existing superordinate law (as History or Structure).

Rather, the relationship between subjectivity and desire is one of simultaneity, both logical and chronological. When individual and experiential—when, in other words, lived—desire is the use (qua both mode and effect) the subject makes of the broad spectrum of physiological, discursive, affective, ideological, as well as psychological objects it finds*; it is in such a finding that the operations of desire lie.

Furthermore, the subject is neither the vessel or voice of a discernible will that may one day come to recognise its unconscious origins and/or ideological determinants, nor a will that, in the best of all possible worlds, may manipulate and consume the objects that animate it, the same objects it previously lacked but has since been fortunate enough to locate and acquire—to find.

Rather, it is the finding that constitutes the subject, for the subject is not only that which finds but also that which is found and is available to be found, repeatedly, by the object, by other subjects, and, most poignantly perhaps, by the subject itself.

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* as per Winnicott’s use of the term.