Salecl, R. (1997) The Satisfaction of the Drives. Umbr(a) #1
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Drive first needs to be understood as a leftover of the operation by which the subject becomes the subject of the signifier and is incorporated into the symbolic structure.
When the subject becomes a speaking being, he or she will no longer be able to have sex in an animal’s instinctive way. Instead of a sheer loss, however, we encounter a force that essentially marks the subject by imposing a constant pressure on him or her.
This force is what Lacan named variously: libido, drive or lamella. Through this naming, Lacan offers another angle on Freudian theory. For Freud, libido primarily concerns the subject’s ability to find sexual satisfaction in different ways. Aside from having sex, the subject can find this satisfaction through eating, shitting, looking, speaking, writing, etc. Libido is always linked to a libidinal object, which is not simply a material object, but what Lacan names object a.
It is crucial for the subject that only partial drives exist, and no genital drive as such. The subject is determined on the one hand by these partial drives, and on the other by the field of the Other, the social symbolic structure.
Already for Freud, love, for example, is not to be found on the side of the drives, but on the side of the Other. And it is in this field of the Other that anything which might resemble some kind of genital drive finds its form.
The paradox of drive is, therefore, that it is what is left out in the process of symbolization, but this does not mean that it has no link with the field of the Other.
Let us exemplify this with the scopic drive. In the scopic drive, the subject is not simply
someone who looks or gazes at objects: the subject causes him- or herself to be gazed at.
The voyeur thus secretly observes something, but the whole point is that the subject wants to be gazed at by the Other.
In the scopic drive the subject makes himself the object that complements the Other, who is supposed to enjoy gazing at this subject.
In the case of the scopic drive, therefore, the subject necessarily needs the Other. in order to set in motion the drive and obtain satisfaction.
Lacan gives here examples of the exhibitionist for whom the victim has meaning only as long as the Other is looking at the exposed exhibitionist: the victim’s horror or uncomfortable reaction would thus have a value for the exhibitionist as long as he knows that he has been gazed at in his act.
The same goes for the sadist. The pain he imposes on the victim has to be looked at by the Other.
Lacan says that “the course of the drive is the only form of transgression that is
permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle.”
The pleasure principle is to be understood here as the symbolic law, a safeguard, a homeostasis which tries to prevent the irruption of the jouissance that is linked to the satisfaction of drive.
Already for Freud drive is what lies beyond the pleasure principle, but Lacan adds to this the notion that the transgression linked to drive is in some way permitted by the symbolic
Law itself.
As long as drive involves the Other, the subject receives from the Other a certain permission for the transgression.
Drive and desire each have a different relation to the symbolic structure.
Desire is essentially linked to the law, since it always searches for something that is prohibited or unavailable. The logic of desire would be: “It is prohibited to do this, but I will nonetheless do it.”
Drive, in contrast, does not care about prohibition: it is not concerned about overcoming the law. Drive’s logic is: “I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it.” Thus, we have a contrary logic in drive since the subject does not desire to do something, but nonetheless enjoys doing exactly that.
For Lacan, drive paradoxically always finds satisfaction, while desire has to remain unsatisfied, endlessly going from one object to another, positing new limits and
prohibitions.
Drive is thus a constant pressure, a circulation around the object a, which
produces jouissance-a painful satisfaction.
Jacques-Alain Miller points out that in the later seminars of Lacan, the object a,
the object around which the drive circulates, needs to be understood as a special kind of
satisfaction: “The object that corresponds to the drive is satisfaction as object.”
As Miller points out, drive in this search for a satisfaction resembles perversion. For perverts, it is essential that they search for sexual satisfaction outside simple copulation. But perverts differ from neurotics who are always lacking satisfaction and are thus going from one object to another, not knowing what they want, endlessly questioning the nature of their desire.
Perverts, in contrast, are satisfied: they find the object and thus also sexual satisfaction. That is why perverts rarely demand analysis, or demand it only when they are perplexed as to whether or not the satisfaction that they found is the proper one (see Fink).
In the same way as the perversion does not seek sexual satisfaction with the opposite sex, drive also is not directed towards the opposite sex: there is only drive towards the libidinal object, towards “a partial satisfaction as the object.”
Drive thus circulates around the partial object, the object a and this circulation precisely constitutes the satisfaction.
If desire constantly questions, drive presents an inertia where questioning stops.
Here the dynamic of drive resembles perversion because the pervert also does not ask for
any permission.
For Lacan, drive is in the final instance always the death drive, a destructive
force, which endlessly undermines the points of support that the subject has found in the
symbolic universe.
In regard to drive, desire plays a paradoxical role of protection, since desire, by being subordinated to the law, pacifies the lawless drive and the horrible jouissance that is linked to it. The subject of desire is the subject of identification: this is the subject who constantly searches for points of support in the symbolic universe, the ego ideals with which he or she can identify and thus achieve an identity.
Such a point of identification can be a teacher, lover, analyst, etc. But on the level of drive, there is no longer any identification, there is only jouissance.
What desire does is to open the fantasy, a scenario, which for the subject masks the jouissance of the drive.
Desire is therefore trapped within the pleasure principle, while drive goes beyond this principle.
Paradoxically, for Miller, the subject is always happy at the level of drive: although because of drive, the subject can actually suffer terribly and tries to get rid of its enormous pressure, in this suffering there is at work jouissance, which means precisely this painful satisfaction that is the highest happiness on which the subject can count.
The major issue in Lacan’s late work is how the subject in analysis can be brought
to abandon the endless perturbations of the Other’s desire in order to begin dealing with his or her drive.
The essential question that perturbs the subject and encourages him or her to seek analysis is: What am I for the desire of the Other? And the whole process of analysis is devoted to answering this question.
Lacan’s thesis is that at the end of analysis, the subject finds the answer, which is that the desire of the Other is actually the subject’s own desire. But how does the subject come to this answer?
As Colette Soler has pointed out, neither the Other nor the subject can give this answer. The Other cannot provide the answer because we find with the Other on the one hand a series of signifiers, which can never fully represent the subject, but can only represent him or her for another signifier. On the other hand, there is a lack in the Other, which for Lacan is supposed to be understood as an interval between the signifiers.
Meanwhile, at the site of the subject of speech, there is a split between the series of signifiers that represents the subject and a radical lack; that is why the subject also cannot give the answer to the question.
Therefore, something else is required to arrive at the answer, and this something else is
drive.
As Colette Soler says: The answer to the question ‘what is the subject beyond the signifier?’ is the drive.
Thus the interval, intersection, or void between the subject and the Other is not as empty as all that, but it is an emptiness into which something comes. It is object a, insofar as object a is not only a logical, but also a bodily consistency, and also insofar as object a is a plus de jouir, as Lacan says — surplus jouissance.”
Drives, however, answer the question in silence, they do not speak but satisfy themselves silently, in action.
For Lacan, drive is essentially what splits the subject, what is his or her “true will” (but not a conscious one); as such “drive is something the subject can’t help or stop in him or herself.”
But drive is paradoxically also what attracts us to the other, what makes another person the object of our love.
However, here we have to invoke again the partial character of drive. When we take a whole person as our object we are not at the level of drive but love.
So, in our perception we always love the other as a whole. When deeply in love, we are usually not clear about what attracts us to some person, everything about him or her seems fascinating, even odd habits at first seem to be endearing. This is because in love our fascination makes the other person complete, ideaL Our perception of love, therefore, masks the fact that we actually fall in love with the object a, with what the other does not have.
According to the distinction between drive and desire developed above, this object a has to be understood as a paradoxical object which is at the same time the never attainable object of desire and the attained object of drive.
We can thus agree with Lacan’s thesis from the seminar on transference: we love the other because he or she is a split, desiring subject. But by taking into account Lacan’s later work on drive, one needs to add here that what makes the other the object of love is actually the very jouissance that is linked to the way the other satisfies his or her drive.
There is thus a paradoxical attraction that obtains between the subject and the drive and the desire in the other.
On the one hand, the loving subject is attracted because the other is also a desiring subject, which means both that the loved subject is perturbed by the question: What does the other desire? And also that the loved subject hopes to become the object of the other’s desire.
On the other hand, the loving subject is also perturbed and attracted to the jouissance of the other. It is well known that in. the case of hatred (which is always a counterpart of love), as with racism or nationalism, the subject primarily objects to the other because of the very way he or she enjoys.
This ungraspable jouissance of the other then incites all kinds of fantasies when people object to how the others enjoy their food, music, etc. On another level, in the case of love, we encounter this kind of attraction (which can easily turn into repulsion) to the jouissance of the other.
This jouissance gets inscribed in the gaze of the other, his or her voice, smell, smile, laughter, etc. Lacan in his seminar on anxiety mysteriously says that it is only love that allows jouissance to condescend to desire.
If desire has to be understood as fundamentally dependent on the Other in the sense that “desire is desire of the Other”, one has to add that what is behind the Other’s desire, what in the final instance keeps our desire in motion, is the unbearable jouissance of the Other.
What attracts us in the Other is thus not, simply his or her desire, but drive — which forces the other into some activity, regardless of how painful. this activity might be.