Shepherdson, Charles. “The Gift of Love and the Debt of Desire.” Differences. 10.1 (1998). 30-74.

“The crucial point, and the one that will occupy our attention here, can be expressed in terms of the object relation, for if we construe the object of demand as ‘recognition,’ the corporeal dimension of psychoanalysis tends to disappear” (31).

“for Lacan, demand has a bearing on the problem of the body” (32).

“the distinction between ‘anthropogentic desire’ and ‘animal desire’ provides us with two terms, whereas Lacan speaks of three terms, need, demand, and desire” (32).

“This ignores that the unconscious (the discourse of the Other) “can also appear as a symbolic demand inscribed at the level of the flesh” (32).

Falsely, “maintains the dichotomy between matter and spirit, with the result that the body remains at the level of animality, as a natural or biological relation to the object, while the intersubjective relation is understood a disembodied affair of spiritual or psychic rivalry” (33).

“The drive [the oral drive] is a symbolic demand, a demand of the Other that is registered in the flesh” (32).

“In the drive [here, the oral drive] some part of the subject is ‘bound’ to symbolic demand in a way that gives rise to corporeal effects” (33).

“For psychoanalyses, the question therefore arises as to why the symbolic demand of the symptom elects one particular bodily site rather than other—a question of libinal organization (oral, anal, scopic, etc.) that requires us to distinguish between the body and the natural organism” (33).

“In short, while Lacan sometimes uses demand in Kojeve’s sense, as a ‘demand for recognition’ (on the part of the ego), demand can also designate a corporeal phenomenon that is irreducible to biology” (33).

Should not privilege “specularity” since, “for Freud identification is first of all incorporation” (34).

“Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we look for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such (105 in Freud)” (Shepherdson 35).

“‘Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses, the judgement is ‘I should like to eat this,’ or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and keep that out (237)’” (Shepherdson quoting Freud 35).

That which we spit out as ‘bad’ is annihilated: “we cannot immediately conclude that what s ‘bad’ is thereby also affirmed as ‘existing.’ The very opposite is the case: such is the force of the ego’s initial negation that it simply annihilates what it excludes (Lacan thus speaks of ‘foreclosure’ instead of ‘negation’ in the ordinary sense)” (36).

“the question of ‘reality’ . . . will be built on the foundation of this initial oral affirmation, since negation thus far amounts to sheer annihilation” (36).

“One tests reality not in order to find what is there outside, nor even simply to refind in reality what was initially taken up within the subject, but above all in order to refind what was taken in, affirmed, and then lost. That loss, Freud says, is a ‘precondition for the setting up of reality testing.’ This is why Lacan says that the reality principle is an extension of the pleasure principle, but one that is organized around lack” (37).

“It is this border, which is not automatically given by nature (by the fact of biological birth), but which has to be brought into being through the corporeal registration of loss, that organizes the limit of the body, and provides an opening into the world where desire will find its place” (39).

“As Michele Montrelay says, human reality is given not by nature, but by the gift of a hallucinated object in which satisfaction can be taken apart from the satisfacton of need—an object that serves, unlike the natural thing, to give a place to lack, a local habitation, thereby providing the tentative beginning of a limit to this lack, a protosymbolic limit, in relation to which the body will be organized” (39).

“As the object and the orifice makes clear, it is rather a matter of grasping the logic of the body’s organization, which takes shape in relation to lack. The concept of the body in psychoanalysis thus cannot be adequately grasped in imaginary or symbolic terms: one should not be content to believe that the body, for Lacan, is simply an imaginary body, given by the action of the Gestalt; nor can one conclude that the body is distinct from its biological counterpart only because it is subject to symbolic effects in a sociological sense—because sexuality is organized by the cultural horizon of representation (though psychoanalysis would hardly refuse this claim). It is here that a clearly grasp of the ‘object’ (and the peculiar ‘object of lack’) is especially important to current debates” (Shepherdson 41).

1. Need = milk
2. Object of Demand = breast
3. Hallucinated Breast = thumb-sucking (“that peculiar satisfaction that the child takes in a displaced representation of the breast” (41 Shepherdson paraphrases Montrelay).

The complications with this model are explicitly clear in the case of anorexia (or the hunger artist) where we cannot “speak of demand as a purely symbolic phenomenon” (44).

“For what can it mean to say that the anorexic’s refusal to eat is in fact a mode of ‘oral satisfaction’—a satisfaction of the drive (oral jouissance) in which the needs of the organism are compromised?” (44).

“separating ‘natural’ need from the ‘symbolic’ domain of demand and desire, is plagued by an excessively linguistic or disembodied perspective” (46).

“If we wish to understand the distinction between demand and desire, we cannot avoid the problem of the object, and the problem of the drive that attends to it” (46).

The part-object “‘opens a place other than the one that concerns the satisfaction of need.’ And the question this raises is that of the relation between the loss of this object and speech—a question that is decisive for the logic of eating disorders, where speech and the oral object remain closely intertwined, and the subject remains bound to a time of compulsive repetition in which desire is profoundly compromised, with a cost that is paid by the body” (47)

“Such is the ‘pound of flesh’ extracted for the refusal of symbolic debt, whereby the anorexic makes her body the witness and spectacle for a lack that has been opened in the subject, but that continues to haunt the structure of the body, demanding an impossible restoration, for want of being given its symbolic place. Representation itself is structured by a void (is lacking); the body is given its place in relation to this void; therefore, the body “acquires symbolic or imaginary consistency only on the basis of a lack” (48).

“The fact that the drive is ‘not all’ in the field of the Other should allow us not only to grasp the problem of the object apart from the familiar debate between nature and culture” (49).

“The object a and the concept of lack it entails thus amount to a dramatic departure from the concept of an ‘object-relation’ which retains a common sense appeal to the ontic thing (however invested with fantasy it may be)” (53).

“Logic of body is based . . . on the ‘not-all’ in relation to the Other.” This leads to a limit or failure that the drive will try to compensate for with jouissance (54).

Drive always demands satisfaction but at the cost of the subject’s desire.

Drive is “an effect of symbolic law and nevertheless irreducible to representation” (55). Hunger artist seems to understand this when he says that his drive as an artist should not be reduced to representation—that it was also physical.


“This is the satisfaction Lacan tries to isolate when he speaks of the oral jouissance of the anorexic, as a form of symptomatic satisfaction that the subject does not choose, and that can even be said to bear witness to a loss of desire” (54).

“an unconscious satisfaction, not ‘chosen’ (in spite of appearances) but registered at the level of the flesh—a satisfaction of oral jouissance in which the subject’s desire is lost” (54).

“If Lacan defines anorexia in terms of oral jouissance in which the drive is satisfied, this satisfaction not only runs counter to organic need . . . but also testifies to the opposition between desire and jouissance” (56).

Lacan in Seminar XI: “‘At the oral level, it is the nothing . . . In anorexia nervosa, what the child eats is the nothing . . . At the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other. It is the same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is closest to the experience of the unconscious” (57).

For the anorexic, the body is only formulated through symptoms: “in this sense, she does not have her body and is still awaiting for its arrival” (58).

For Lacan, “‘the passage from the oral drive to the anal drive can be produced not by a process of maturation, but by the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive—by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other” (59).

From “The Meaning of the Phallus”: “‘This privilege of the Other thus sketches out the radical form of the gift of something it does not have, namely, what is called its love (690-691)’” (65).

“It is thus by the ‘gift of speech’ (passing from the breast to the voice) that the mother substitutes, in place of the object that she does not have (since the object of need cannot serve as an answer to demand), the ‘gift of love,’ which is a gift of nothing, (“there there now, it’s ok, don’t you worry—you’re going to be just fine’). The voice is this promise—the promise of desire—the ‘object’ that holds the future which appears when demand is born in its irreducible divergence from the satisfaction of need” (65).

“The field of the Other thus emerges only on the basis of a lack, not as a superior ‘beyond’ (culture supposedly transcending nature), but rather as a deficiency in relation to the satisfaction of need (the Other, Lacan says, must ‘be situated some way short of any needs which it might gratify’).” (65).

“The child whose every demand is treated with great solicitude, but as if it were the expression of need, whose every cry is put to rest by an object offered, not to the subject but to the organism, can only close its mouth in order to voice its demand, which is not a demand for any ‘need,’ but for the ‘radical form of the gift’ which we have called the gift of the nothing” (66).
“Anorexia can thus be understood, for Lacan, as a failure of the gift: if the anorexic ‘eats the nothing,’ is in order to produce a lack in the Other that has not been sufficiently registered” (66).

“‘In the final analysis,’ he adds, ‘by refusing to satisfy the mother’s demand, is not the child demanding that the mother should have a desire outside him, because the way towards the desire that he lacks is to be found there?’ (628)” (66).

“‘Demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that is to say, the power of depriving them’” (Lacan in Shepherson 67). This complicates the hunger artist’s condescension to the public.

“The lack in the subject (which gives birth to desire) thus depends on the lack in the Other, a ‘power of pure loss’ that transforms the Other from its initial phantasmatic ‘omnipotence’ to an other to whom speech can be directed” (67).