ABSTRACT
“It’s not like this with other people” (Rooney, 2018, p. 93) serves as an apt tagline for the powerful relationship featured in the TV adaptation of the groundbreaking novel Normal People (2018) by Irish author Sally Rooney. Normal People, as a novel and as a small screen representation, removes sex from the pastoral idealisation of symbiotic unity and places it in a more complicated and shifting nexus of desire, power, pleasure, and pain. This chapter argues that Marianne and Connell experience the epitome of psychoanalytic desire, a desire shown to be at risk in pre-pandemic times due to the ubiquity of internet pornography, the endless swiping of dating apps, and the superegoic command to gorge on the physical act of sex. Drawing support from Lacan’s Seminars XX and XVII as well as other psychoanalytic thinkers, this chapter illustrates how within their impossible relation – not despite it – Marianne and Connell construct a fantasy where boundaries, shared power, and awareness of lack eroticise them and arouse us to consider the ways in which we might engage, rather than avoid, psychoanalytic desire in our forthcoming post-pandemic world.
