La suscripción de letras de cambio

The Freudian concept of desire (a non-Freudian term which owes considerably to the Leopardi-Schopenhauer-[Nietzsche, see 2.4] lineage) revolves around a subject whose identity is fixed in Oedipal repressions.41 Freudian desire is thus once more formulated in terms of loss. From Freud’s earliest works, particularly The Interpretation of Dreams, it is laid down as a rule that the expression of desire must be sought in a dream and thus in the unconscious. Lacan (whose notion of desire, as argued below, builds considerably on Freud’s) amplifies on how the dream has the structure of a rebus− that is, a form of writing (Écrits 221; 424): 42

Does it mean nothing that Freud recognized desire in dreams?. . .we must read The Interpretation of Dreams to know what is meant by what Freud calls ‘desire’ there…What we must keep in mind here is that this desire is articulated in a very cunning discourse. (Écrits 620)

Lacan, however, also points out that it is “in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious that the root of desire in the unconscious is demonstrated [by Freud] in all its subtlety” (Écrits 223; see 4.4).

Freud goes back to Plato’s Symposium (see 1.2), albeit in a complete inversion of the Platonic search for a transcendent ideal, in order to explain the inner human struggle

41 _{Lacan says: “Castration is the altogether new mainspring Freud introduced into desire, giving desire’s}

lack the meaning that remained enigmatic in Socrates’ dialectic” (Écrits 723).

42_{Although Lacan is greatly interested in Freud’s early discoveries–the Unconscious, transference, the}

sexual life of children–that are so fundamental for Lacanian thought, Lacan also draws on Freud’s later texts where Freud sought to write his insights into a stable psychoanalytic system. A Work like The Ego

of desire. Variations of desire as wanting traverse Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle which condenses the Freudian ‘wish’ and ‘drive’ (Trieb), the latter crucially different from instinct.43 The Freudian drive implies that which is impossible to fulfil in its very naming.44 Significantly, however, the drive, a motivation tracing the human need for satisfaction, becomes, in (Lacanian) desire, a motivation tracing a human need for signification. As Zupancic points out, an important and eloquent distinction divides desire and drive:

Desire sustains itself by remaining unsatisfied. As for the drive, the fact that it ‘understands that this is not the way it will be satisfied’ does not stop it from finding satisfaction ‘elsewhere’. Thus, in contrast to desire, the drive sustains itself on the very fact that it is satisfied. (242)

Freud formulates the conflict between the search for the irreducible origin of human desire and the realization of its lack in the struggle between life and death drives, or what Gavriel Reisner terms desire versus anti-desire (see introduction; 1.4.2; 4.3). Freud pits internal forces tending towards self-assertion on the one hand, against forces of self- preservation: “an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 45). Ego-forces are primarily equated with the death drive, and sexual forces tally with life (52). The pleasure principle is thus in the midst of, on the one hand, reactionary, regressive forces whose compulsion to repeat mask the ultimate attempt at self-preservation self-annihilation expressed through the death-drive. On the other hand, the pleasure principle is fought for by the equally forceful life-forces (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 52). Freud describes the process of the death-drive, what could be construed as conceptually close to the Lacanian Imaginary demand (see 1.4.2), or what we have termed ‘the desire not to desire’

43

Lacan explains: “instinct . . . is defined as a kind of [experiential] knowledge we admire because it cannot become knowledge. But in Freud’s work something quite different is at stake, which is a savoir

certainly, but one that doesn’t involve the slightest connaissance, in that it is inscribed in a discourse of which the subject . . . knows neither the meaning nor the text” (Écrits 680).

44 _{Lacan's elusive descriptions foreground the transformations of desire as an elusive power: “it is precisely}

because desire is articulated that it is not articulable” (Écrits 681).Lacan states: “Freudianism hews a desire, the crux of which is essentially found in impossibilities” (Écrits 722).

in precise terms: “the dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the ‘Nirvana principle’ to borrow a term from Barbara Low [1920, 73] ) a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle” (Beyond The Pleasure Principle 67). Once more this description cannot but remind us of Leopardi’s atarassia and Beckett’s “suffering of being” (see 2.1). Amor proprio in Leopardi is thus, as

Antonio Prete insists, not in contradiction with desire as a quest that struggles at the heart of Freudian drives (17). This discussion also unwittingly steers our course back into Schopenhauer’s harbour and Freud himself will quote Schopenhauer’s phrase that death is the “true result and to that extent the purpose of life,” while the sexual drive is the embodiment of the will to live” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 59-60). The struggle between life and death drives is exposed most compellingly in the fragments of the narratives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

There are five narrative fragments: four narratives of return are aligned against a single narrative of advance. The narratives of return include the embracing-again of original pain. These regressive stories activate what Lacan will term the Imaginary in narrative enactments of the death drive (again echoing Leopardi’s atarassia) and they are all about the desire to return to an absence. The motivating force of the return is

unconscious fear of desire as an infinite, self-regenerative force (desire).

This anti-desire/desire conflict, an absence in presence, is palpable in the discovery of the fort/da game described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the symbolic presence of words is inextricably bound with an absence. As in Leopardi, whereby the emphasis in desire is not on the object desired but the sense of loss of what is no more, the same oscillation experienced in desiring what is no longer can be grafted onto desire of the sheer sense of nothingness as opposed to desire of the infinite:

“L’orrore e il timore che l’uomo ha, per una parte, del nulla, per l’altra, dell’eterno” (“the horror and fear that the human being experiences, on the one hand, of nothingness, on the other, of the eternal”; Zibaldone 644,1; my translation).

Leopardi’s combative poetic voices struggling to voice suffering through a cleaved subjectivity, as well as Beckett's attitude toward contemporary art where there is “nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" (Three Dialogues 103), can be placed in the context of Lacan's understanding of Freudian discoveries on desire and language as interlaced with the unconscious. As the French psychoanalyst states: “By taking one’s bearings from the joint between the consequences of language and the desire for knowledge–a joint that the subject is–perhaps the paths will become more passable regarding what has always been known about the distance that separates the subject from his existence as a sexed being, not to mention as a living being” (Écrits 195).