ABSTRACT
Lacan shifted the focus of Freudian psychoanalytic theory by concentrating on the issue of the subject. He stands apart from his contemporaries in draining the latter notion of its normal meanings. From his standpoint, the subject is no longer the philosopher’s perception-cum-consciousness, nor the moralist’s intentionality, nor again the hidden being of depth psychology. It is rather linked to an original lack, an absence of being and substance which lies at the very origin of desire, in so far as this is distinguishable from need or demand. Whereas need is governed by the interplay of satisfaction and the lack thereof, and demand (which essentially is a demand for love) suspends such interplay in order to relocate it in some unattainable though compulsively yearned-for hereafter, desire itself is never brought to a close by any satisfaction or failure to satisfy. Desire, by which Lacan means to desire something other than the object required to satisfy a need, finds its completion in that which is not actively wanted. Where there is a lack, there is also a desire and a subject. In other words, the subject’s failure is to be superfluously present, being more than it is, and looking for guarantees when at bottom there are none to offer.
