Desire always emerges from lack for Lacan, and as such, is decentred from any given subject. This is because desire is always obliquely shaped by another, by the Other: “man’s desire is the desire of the Other”. Such a desire, wrestled with from within, may nonetheless intuit its own ‘object’, but this is only a construction. For Deleuze and Guattari, this construction may well be “a real production”, “a desiring-machine”, but when the Other confronts us, Lacan sees that we are only making castles out of sand. For Lacan, then, the true ‘object’ is always missing – the object = a.
Although many may mistake Lacan’s theory of desire as a monument built to failure, the vector emphasised by Deleuze and Guattari uncovers a true monument to love. Indeed, Lacan’s great unattainable desire, in his own words, nonetheless “produce[s] a feeling, not of revitalisation, but of disorientation”, which “creates a split that will in and of itself … have an enlightening effect.”
It is a understanding of desire – albeit as non-knowledge – that Lacan, in his sixth seminar, compares to John Donne’s sixteenth-century poem, ‘The Ecstasy’, which dramatizes the way in which “desire’s position is profoundly marked by, moored to, and riveted to a certain linguistic function – that is, to the relationship between the subject and the signifier” — which we find again in the brotherly love of Deleuze and Guattari, those writers who are each already a crowd:
This ecstasy doth unperplex,
We said, and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex,
We see we saw not what did move;
But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love these mix’d souls doth mix again
And makes both one, each this and that.
There is an echo here, in Donne’s poem, of Lacan’s later declaration that there is no such thing as the sexual relation. Indeed, “it was not sex”, the signifying act of love, that makes us ecstatic, but a “[m]ixture of things” that “makes both one, each this and that.”
The sexual act, then, framed as that most intimate activity, becomes some sort of vague attempt at accessing what, in the Other and in ourselves, is most hidden. The jouissance experienced is itself a mixture of the carnal pleasure derived from an attempt at knowing that fails us as much as it enthralls us.
When truly in love, even post-coitus, do we ever feel like we have found ourselves close enough to the person we love? That the object of our desire, the desire of the Other, has been in any meaningful way attained? It is an affect common to erotic poetry going back millennia; what Anne Carson refers to, via Sappho, as the “sweetbitter” — the sense we have of a desire that “is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer”, but is rather “[f]oreign to her will,” and “forces itself irresistibly upon her from without.”
It is likewise from the Greek that Lacan is taking his leave here, since “[t]he Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’” And this missingness, this hole, imbues desire with a spatial aspect that lends itself to Lacan’s topology. “Eros is an issue of boundaries”, Carson writes. “He exists because certain boundaries do.” And it is the absent centre within these intersecting boundaries, the a at the heart of Lacan’s famous knot, she continues, that is the true subject of love poetry: “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”
The love poem, then, might be understood as its own (dis)intercourse – that is, disinterring the signs that mark the body, but which do not, in fact, touch upon what the soul contains; disinterring in the manner of a grave, a hole, a lack, which carries with it all the significance of a person, but which not satisfied by a body for us to hold, nor vanquished when the body leaves us. Remember Heathcliff on the moor:
I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down. “If I can only get this off,” I muttered, “I wish they may shovel in the earth over us both!” and I wrenched at it more desperately still. There was another sigh, close at my ear. I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but, as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once: unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me: it remained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home.
To Donne, then:
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change, when we’are to bodies gone.
It is this same body-book that Lacan also titillates, in its absence, through his own form of speech, famous for its complex linguistic play and love of puns – and puns are themselves the production of a kind of jouissance that attempts to make up for a lack.
In attempting to draw out some gap in a lexicon, we combine two words that sit together and apart. “A pun is a figure of language that depends on similarity of sound and disparity of meaning”, Carson explains. “Within a pun you see the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than is available from the separate senses of either word. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing.”
Love and puns alike are ghostly. Love in language, and the language of love, are always insufficient, unfounded in a speaking that attempts to communicate what one feels in ways that cannot do love the poetic justice it deserves, but nonetheless builds a monument, a gilded mausoleum, for all that cannot be attained. A mausoleum beautiful and tragic, like the experience of a petite mort, which is nothing less than to be overcome by a caress from beyond the grave.
The sublime, after all, is subliminal. And love is a pun(n)y thing.