Shepherdson, Charles. Vital Signs. New York and London: Routledge, 2000.

“And we might also add that there is a paradoxical ‘pleasure’ in this suffering—there is ‘oral jouissanc’ in anorexia, Lacan says, a kind of deadly ‘satisfaction’ that is uniquely human” (Vital Signs 192).

“its inscription and translation and distortion within the dimension of desire—a dimension that is not at all confined to the personal domain of psychology, but is thoroughly political, historically situated, and contingent” (Vital Signs 37).

“Similarly, the term body, properly understood, is not reducible to a biological phenomenon, because it belongs within the field of sexuality” (Vital Signs 38).

“The body, therefore, this physical and sexualized field, is an imaginary body. Only the imaginary body can be subjected to the kinds of symptoms we find in Anne-Marie, symptoms that are physical and real but that cannot be reduced to the ‘organic disorders’ treated by the medical community” (38).

“This is the question of the relation between the signifier and the flesh” (39).

“Well, let’s take these terms in relation to anorexia and the oral drive. ‘Need’ is a biological category; it designates the organic necessity for food. ‘Demand’ involves the relation to the other. When the child asks for food, the need of the organism may be fulfilled, but the child is also asking for love. So the term ‘demand’ isolates this aspect and distinguishes it from love. To put it very simply, demand is a demand for love, for recognition from the other, which is sought when the child asks for food. So what is the child really eating, when it eats—or when it refuses to eat?” (Vital Signs 193)

“Yes, and usually the two objects go together [like milk and breast]. But anorexia is an oral demand in which the need of the organism is compromised. But demand has more than one side to it, because in one sense the demand for food is a form of speech, a verbal demand addressed to the other [staging an act is similarly a demand to the other], but in a sense it has a corporeal dimension, since demand is not only addressed to the other, but is also an oral demand for an object. So when we talk about the relation to the breast we are talking about this strange, ambiguous relation between the body and speech, the oral satisfaction of the body and the symbolic relation to the other. In anorexia, something in the symbolic relation to the other has gone wrong, and has consequences on the level of the body. The ‘oral demand’ has been somatized, rather than verbalized, and it compromises the needs of the organism” (Vital Signs 193).

“The desire of the mother, which is where lack appears, hasn’t registered for the child, who is therefore stuck in demand. And this has corporeal consequences. The anorxic wants a lack to be introduced, and as long as it isn’t there, she is stuck trying to make a lack appear, and her desire is lost” (Vital Signs 195).

“As long as she is stuck with this oral demand for ‘the nothing,’ desire remains impossible for her, and, there are all sorts of bodily consequences, in perceptual distortion, body image, and so on” (Vital Signs 195)

“That’s the difference between the human and the animal—the human body depends on this ‘object of lack,’ and if it doesn’t get registered, the body can’t emerge, and desire is compromised” (195).