Lack is a term used by Jacques Lacan to denote Lack, animated Lack, or neglect.
This use echoes Hegel (1770-1831), a philosopher who sheds light on the “potential power of negation.” This power is manifested in desire: a lack of feeling, a compelling feeling of being deprived of something or of being someone other than who you really are, exercising an inevitable and often tyrannical force on human beings. This lack underlies all aspirations. Desire betrays a lack of satisfaction and in turn, radiates a desire for the desire to come true. But is it possible for the desire to be fulfilled, can it be satisfied in such a way that the feeling of deprivation never returns?
Full satisfaction of desire can be found only in death. In contrast, life is a constant renewal of desire, a constant return of the feeling of Lack, albeit in different forms and at different levels, from previous desires and satisfactions.
Our perceived shortcomings are not just physiological, but hereditarily symbolic. The food, drink, clothing, and people we desire are not objects of purely organic needs, but of an overdetermined, culturally conditioned subjectivity.
The latter sentence is above all an opinion. A wrong one mind you. Food, clothing, nor people that we desire are more or less organic needs. They are biologically conditioned as a human, nor any other living specie is would be able to survive without food and vesture (be it natural like fur or artificial like clothing). What is more the people that we desire the most in our lives are the ones that are capable of helping the most to pass on our genes. Friends of the same sex as ours are before all else protection (as we are to them, hopefully), and the better genes a potential sexual partner has, the better chance the offspring has to survive. Therefore, food, clothing and people are not something “culturally conditioned“.
One of the most common objections to that stance is among the lines of “yes, but we do not need expensive food, or clothes, nor a top-gene partner to survive”, which is true to a certain extent. No one needs the best of the best to merely survive. But in order to be comfortable and give your offspring the best chances (not a guarantee, never a guarantee) to survive, the better the genes of the partner, the higher the chances. That goes, as well for the food. The more expensive (presumably better quallity) food, the better the condition of the body, therefore, the higher the chances of surviving.
Lacan‘s psychoanalytic theory focuses on lack in this sense, illuminating its “potential power” and its inevitable destructiveness.
While desire inexorably pushes us forward, satisfaction is constantly eluding us. In fact, there are two ways to say the same thing.
