The World Of Desire: Lacan Between Evolutionary Biology and Psychoanalytic Theory

Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to analyse biological foundations of Lacan's notion of desire as expounded in his first two Seminars (1953–1955). These works provide us with his most detailed discussion of species-specific preconditions that allow homo sapiens to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals. Despite its irreducibility to domain of animal instincts, desire can only be adequately understood against background of an evolutionary enquiry on emergence of language, one that problematises both implicit teleological assumptions of a certain Darwinianism and logical consistency of an investigation of origins. Drawing on organic and anatomical evidence, Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of imagination, from which language and symbolic arise immanently. Desire is seen in this context as coextensive with what Lacan repeatedly refers to as the world of symbol. The key argument I intend to put forward is that symbolic order is a world in sense that, in always presenting itself to man as a totality, it compensates for failure of a strictly natural relationship between man as animal and his environment. In performing this function, symbolic also amounts to nothing else than human nature tout-court. In other words, symbolic is an exceptional and to a certain extent autonomous pseudo-environmentthat must nevertheless be interpreted by means of biological concepts.