Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.
“desire is a defense, a prohibition against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance”
One of the easiest ways to gain a preliminary understanding of Lacanian desire is by returning to the Freudian concepts of Trieb and sublimation.
For Freud, sublimation is the typical means by which Trieb adapts itself to the constraints and obstacles it comes to encounter at the level of the reality principle. Reality forbids certain drive-aims qua the attainment of satisfaction linked to determinate drive-objects. Thus, reality is said to be responsible for what Freud designates as ‘aim-inhibition’ (a catalyst for sublimation). 413
The aim-inhibited drive then seeks other forms of satisfaction via different objects; and, if these alternate modes of securing gratifcation are not at odds with the various prohibitions of the reality principle (usually, socio-cultural laws and norms), then the new libidinal arrangement is dubbed a successful sublimation of the drive.
However, especially in the later texts of the second topography, Freud repeatedly emphasizes that Trieb is ‘fundamentally conservative’, that drives unceasingly seek to recover their earliest forms of satisfaction. Furthermore, in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that ‘instinctual renunciation’ (i.e., the aim-inhibition of the drives demanded by human reality) is, despite appearances to the contrary, an unavoidable libidinal fate for all subjects
As such, the Freudian subject lives in a state of unsatisfactory compromise: sublimation provides pleasurable outlets for Trieb, but Trieb itself is incapable of ever being fully satisfied with these compromises, since they are, by the very definition of the mechanism of sublimation, deviations from the original cathetic trajectory (i.e., the ‘earliest state of affairs’ which all drives struggle in vain to recover; in the seventh seminar, Lacan designates this posited ‘ground zero’ of the libidinal economy das Ding).
The libidinal life of the human being is therefore marked by certain constitutive ‘lacks’ or ‘absences’—as Lacan puts it, the ‘sovereign Good’ of das Ding is always missing from the reality of subjective ‘ex-sistence’ — and this condition of (non-)existence is precisely what Lacan intends for his notion of ‘desire’ to designate.
Desire is the residual remainder/by-product of the subjection of jouissance (i.e., Trieb an sich, the unconditional attachment to das Ding) to the ego-mediated negotiations between the pleasure and reality principles.
Das Ding
But where does this take us? Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.
In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shalt not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, Book VII, p. 83).