McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire, and psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the drive where the neurotic mistakenly sees desire.
We misrecognize satisfaction as dissatisfaction because we imagine, in our present state of lack, that we once had a completeness that we have now lost.
That is to say, we believe that our privileged object once had a substantial existence and fail to see that it became a privileged object through the very act of being lost.
This misrecognition allows us to continue to believe in a previous and possible future completeness. Though it is neurotic, this misrecognition is inherent in the very nature of desire, and it is through this fundamental misrecognition that desire first begins and later sustains itself. 59
Desire constantly seeks out the object that would satisfy it, but this object always eludes it — or, to be more precise, desire eludes the object, keeping desire perpetual (and perpetually dissatisfied). 59-60
Desire, in other words, doesn’t attempt to achieve satisfaction but to sustain itself as desire, to keep desire going. This is why desire constantly seeks out a satisfying object and yet never quite gets it. It leads us to see ourselves as dissatisfied and to fail to see the satisfaction we obtain from the circulation of the drive.
Desire is nothing but a misrecognition of the death drive. 60
note 14. The intrinsic link between desire and the death drive makes it possible to transition from desire to drive through fully insisting on one’s desire. This is why Alenka Župančič claims: “In order to arrive at the drive, one must pass through desire and insist on it until the very end” (Alenka Župančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan [New York: Verso, 2000], 239).