Theories of Desire

Babies are desire-machines, who simply want and who don't take no for an answer, so it would make sense to talk about theories of desire with Helena Iara for that reason.  The truth is, though, that last night's conversation, as I tried to keep her occupied a bit so that Rita could have some brief time on her own, was much more solipsistic (one could argue that this entire exercise never goes beyond solipsism, of course, but this seems extreme): I wanted to talk about my own desires about children.

Because here is the truth of the matter: not only did I not ever want to have children, I actively wanted not to have kids.  And yet, having this basic desire negated in the most absolute way (a baby on my lap as we swing on the hammock) has, in fact, made me immensely happy.  So I wanted to think hard about the relationship between desire and satisfaction and happiness, and Helena seemed at least moderately interested in my reflections on Lacan and Buddhism.  At least she kept looking in my eyes, didn't sleep, and didn't cry.

Psychoanalysis has always put desire on the first plane, and with Jacques Lacan, it became the closest the French analyst got to a commandment: "Do not give up on your desire."  Lacan and his followers did not have any illusions that the satisfaction of these desires would make one happy (in fact, philosophers like Slavoj Zizek explicitly reject happiness as a criterion for judgement), nor were they naïve in thinking that any whim that comes into a person's head ("I want a new TV set") rises to this sort of level of ethical imperative.  But desire served as a way to see if a person was being honest with himself, or was selling out on what he truly wanted from life.

Now, on the other hand, Buddhism has the opposite perspective on desire: desire is the origin of suffering, because people suffer when we want something and can't get it.  And since we never really get what we want (and when we get "what we want," we soon find that it isn't what we really wanted, as anyone who ever won the jackpot in the lottery will be quick to show), desiring things makes us miserable.  The only way out, said the Buddha, was to learn to stop desiring, to eradicate wants and wishes from our thoughts.

Babies are much more Lacanian than Buddhist, of course: they want to eat, to be warm, to be changed, and they will not stop crying until they get what they want (fortunately, Helena is great about this: as soon as we figure out her desire and satisfy it, she's a content baby again).  Perhaps my coincidence, Helena was much more attent as I told her about Lacan than as I told her about Buddhism (most likely, she just picked up on my own interested and biases).  But Lacan doesn't really work for the aporia I was trying to work through with Helena Iara: how the absolute negation of my desire could bring me such happiness.

In her brilliant analysis of comedy The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic notes that both tragedy and comedy depend on the mis-encounter between demand and satisfaction.  Both tragedy and comedy happen when we don't get what we want.  For tragedy, we can think that Hamlet doesn't get revenge, Oedipus gets more than he wanted when the kingdom he desired requires that he kill is father and marry his mother, Antigone can't bury her brother...  In comedy, Cyrano doesn't get Roxanne, and then gets more than he expects; Olivia falls for Cesario, only to find out that "he" is really Viola; Jack Lemmon can only seduce Marilyn Monroe dressed as a girl...  Zupancic proposes to understand the difference between comedy and tragedy as one of point of view: tragedy is this mis-encounter seen from the point of view of desire/before, while comedy is the same mis-encounter, seen from the point of view of satisfaction/after:

"The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really meet demand, but that demand can never meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction."

We might be able to describe this better if we think about love: all of us know someone who knows everything he or she wants in a romantic object, so any real person always turns out to be a let-down.  The magic of love is that it satisfies a desire we never had even thought about, never knew we had.

So how to think about this happiness with Helena Iara?  It could easily be a tragedy, the end of so many dreams of travel and instigating revolutions and who knows what other things I thought I needed to be childless for.  That would be seeing from the perspective of desire.  But I think it's much better to look from the point of view of satisfaction, from the feeling of contentment I have with a wonderful little girl on my lap as I rock back and forth on a hammock.  That makes the story a comedy, one that ends in happiness.  Or at least runs with happiness as the moral for a while...