No cedas...

En Rado Riha, otra figura de la interesantísima escuela eslovena (junto a Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Rastko Močnik, etcétera), encuentro una definición del concepto lacaniano de deseo, y de la idea lacaniana de la "ley moral" ("no cedas en tu deseo"). Esta semana he estado nadando en cosas de estas, así que sin tiempo para escribir una entrada original me limito a leer en alta voz:

Desire, in this view, does not belong to the register, if I may say so, of the human, to anthropology in the broadest sense, to which belong all – from reason to interests, needs and wishes – that man as a cultivated natural being needs in order to maintain himself and his species. Yet desire is that operator which renders this ‘anthropological’ dimension human by including it in the process of subjectivation. There is, then, something profoundly anti-humanist about desire.

It is precisely this ‘inhumanity’ of desire which makes it possible for Lacan to assimilate desire and moral law, stating that "the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state, that very desire that culminates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in one’s human tenderness" [Lacan, Seminario 11]. Just as the moral law suspends all the ‘pathological’ mobiles of willing, desire – which is always desire for something else – in its metonymical sliding from one object to another, annihilates all of them, as none of them can satisfy it. But the fact that desire, ultimately, is desire of nothing in particular, signals that all objects of desire are related metonymically to that which animates desire and which desire tries to avoid: the cause of desire. What sets desire in motion is, no doubt, the nothing, but the embodied nothing, the nothing as something, which I propose to call the real of desire. Initially, desire is organized as a defence against that which desire itself produces as its cause. The psychoanalytical experience teaches us that in the end it is only when someone decides to try a different access to his/her desire, i.e. when he/she wants what he/she desires, that the desire’s flight from what it itself produces, its cause, comes to a halt. The access of desire to its real can best be described, although in a simplified way, as follows: as speaking beings we are always already the subjects of desire. But to be in accordance with one’s desire, or, to propose another formula, to subjectify oneself, is only possible by wanting what one desires. The act of subjectivation, which is nothing other than the act of wanting one’s desire, thus already implies a sort of rendering present of the real of desire, i.e. of showing that which was not and could never be present, of making visible that which is not and could never be seen. (Rado Riha, "Seeing the Revolution, Seeing the Subject", en Parallax, 9:2, 2003, pp. 30-31.)

No cedas... camarada. Y sigue pedaleando.