Introduction
In literary studies, desire is understood mainly as sexual desire or as a passion for something, for instance, a noble cause or something done for personal gain or pleasure. Desire in psychoanalytic literary criticism has been influenced by Lacan’s theory. Although Lacan’s theory is basically a re-reading of Freud, he radically re-conceptualizes Freudianism using principles of linguistics and structuralism. His notion of the unconscious as structured like a language has equally had great influence on psychoanalytic literary criticism. For him, also, the human subject is a product of language because it is preceded by language. Language is a fundamental element in the imaginary and the symbolic orders as both involve relations with the Other. It is what enables the subject to articulate her or his desire and to emerge as a desiring subject. A child’s inability to renounce her or his forbidden desire prevents the child from having a normal life.
Thus desire, in Lacan’s theory of the subject, can be said to be a factor in the making and the unmaking of the subject. It has consequences and can also be affected by the unknown. In literature, the unknown functions as fate and destiny, as that which is beyond human comprehension, that which cannot be grasped, something unspeakable and unknowable. Lacan’s concept of the ‘real’ answers to all these. According to Donna Brody in “Levinas and Lacan: Facing the Real,” the real, for Lacan, is ‘unknowable, ungraspable’ (57) and, as Alenka Zupančič points out in Ethics of the Real, it is ‘impossible’ (235). This is what the death drive aims at. Lacan postulates that the drive is both sexual and deadly and, whereas the sexual drive aims at the object a − the cause of desire, the death drive aims at jouissance, which can be destructive and harmful to the subject because it tends towards the real.
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