Desire and Its Interpretation—Seminar VI
Jacques Lacan, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Translated by Bruce FinkAlthough desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals.
Until recently, all of our compasses, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age.
Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits.
What people have latched onto in Lacan―his formalization of the Oedipus complex, his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father―was but his point of departure. Seminar VI revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire’s course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines.
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