no one was suggesting otherwise, Professor Godshalk; it seems to me the
categories you are referring to here are need and desire, not lack and
desire, but the conceptual distinction between the two psychic states
does not mean they cannot occur in the psyche simultaneously. So
the phrase "fulfilling desire," in its early modern sense of sonnets
#134 and #135 and its Lacanian sense is at once oxymoronic and
tautological.
My contention is that one desires even as one is fulfilling the desire.
> >(In fact, one might argue that desire sometimes comes before perceived
> >lack.) I think the early modern use of "want" -- as both lack and desire --
> >suggests that these two feelings -- lack and desire -- also may be
> >experienced at the same time rather than seriatim.
> >
> >>From my reading of Marshall Grossman's excellent post, I gather that Lacan
> >is using verbtenses as a metaphor for something else
I am concerned about the imprecise use of the term "metaphor," in
contemporary criticism, and in Lacan, who uses the term (and here I again
agree with Professor Willet) without having unfolded its psychological and
philosophic lineage. It carries a loaded conceptual baggage, was a
category early modern poets and rhetoricians liked to suspense (witness
the emergence of compendia of similes, not metaphors, in the late
sixteenth century, along with pastorals, some of them, such as *As You
Like It*, similaically entitled, and the many references to simile within
pastoral -- for instance, why does the youth in "A Lover's
Complaint" speak of desire in terms of "similes hollow'd with
sighs"... ? When speaking of early mdoern pastoral literature, we had
better use the term advisedly and historically.
> >Certainly Marshall's concept of metalepsis calls the idea that, for Lacan,
> >"desire is proleptic" into question.
I think, Professor Godshalk, there had been general agreement that Lacan's
category of desire includes the analeptic within the proleptic, but I
still do not see why that inclusion ought to be described as structured
metaleptically.
best,
Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser
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