What's Mine Isn't (and Neither is What's Yours): Desire as Debt, the Lacanian Lack, and the Boonian Gift

Abstract

This very brief essay is structured by the claim that James Boon's work suggests the radical idea that Lacanian desire is Mauss's debt. Boon makes any ethics, discourse, or materiality always between, only existing in the paradoxical turning of a distinction toward its absence elsewhere (and vice versa). I juxtapose texts by Boon, Lacan, and Freud to hear how each emphasizes a paradox that is latent or absent in the other—I listen for each other's alternating sounds. And I explore what this means for epistemological uses of sexuality, the good, and jouissance. Reading through Žižek and Boon on antinomies of the feminine, the masculine, and their others, I argue that Boon allows a relational androgyny missing in Žižek's ouvre. Boon's sense of the carnivalesque makes for an analytic that ties misery to ecstasy, the abject to laughter. I speculate that this tradition suggests that our anthropological empathies might bespeak repressed desire. And I end with Boon's sense of irony, an ethics of debt toward even what is being renounced. My interest then is to explore the ways Boon's notion of exchange offers an ethics that is deeply—and richly—unsettling of some of what we hold dear.