A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a collectivity but not as a whole and not as a unity, makes use of the psychoanalytic distinction between desire and drive . While Freud’s vicissitudes of the drive are generally known (reversal in to its opposite, turn ing ro und upon the subject’s own self, repression, and sublimation), two features of the perhaps less familiar Lacanian notion of drive bear emphasizing. The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained.
In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process process of not reaching it. One doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive. The second feature concerns the different status of objet petit a in desire and drive.
Zizek In Defense of Lost Causes pg 328: Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, , the “object ” is directly the loss itself — in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.
That is to say, the weird movement called “drive”. is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss ” — the gap, cut, distance-itself.
🙂 And here is Dean’s point:
The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, active and in common. Their sovereignty can be reduced neither to their majority nor to their procedures. Rather, it names the cause and reason for government: the collective people in their desire for a common good. The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.