Page 150 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes be satisfied, or as Slavoj •i•ek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full
satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."
It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. The drives are the partial
manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of the "objet petit a" is the object of
desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire.
Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).
Drives
Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ
from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather
circle perpetually around it. The true source of jouissance is the repetition of the movement of this
closed circuit. Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs-to him, "the drive
is not a given, something archaic, primordial." He incorporates the four elements of the drives as
defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's
circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the
erogenous zone. The three grammatical voices structure this circuit:
1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)
The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic-they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes
its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. Despite being the "passive" voice, the
drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen." The circuit of the
drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial
object the breast), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze)
and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two
to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is
realized-desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations.
Other Concepts
Les Non-dupes errent": Lacan on error and knowledge
Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every
unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden
transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance".
In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth-arising from
misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures
alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects,
forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".
Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language",
to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of]
fictions organized in to a discourse". For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an
erring", the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of
getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse...
become the dupe of a discourse... les Non-dupes errent".
Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn
(whom he never mentions)", with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the
entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given
community"- something reinforced perhaps by Kuhn's approval of "Francis Bacon's acute
methodological dictum: 'Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion'".

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