I don't think "desire is proleptic" adequately represents 
what Lacan said. There are two related issues that may be 
relevant. In the passage a fragment of which I think I saw  
quoted on this list, he is talking about "the subject," 
which, he says, comes to know itself in the future anterior 
tense: "I identify myself in language, but only by losing 
myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history 
is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, 
or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, 
but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what 
I am in the process of becoming" (_Ecrits:A Selection_ p. 
86. or, if you want the French, _Ecrits_ p.299-300) This is 
really a narrative friendly formulation--that could be 
something of a plot summary for FQ I in which RC goes on a 
long journey to learn that he always was Georgos. The tense 
of desire is harder to explain.  Lacan distinguishes 
between "need" and "demand" and sees desire as something 
like the remainder left when demand is met. Lacan says that 
desire passes through the symbolic and always comes out 
before it went in (this is the fish-hook diagram elaborated 
throughout "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic 
of Desire," and it is, at least in part, Lacan's take on 
Freud's notion of "deferred action" 
(Nachtraglichkeit)--The subject is belated in relation to 
desire because, for Lacan, we are the subjects of desire, 
we recognize ourselves as I who will have wanted. 

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that since, for 
Lacan, the speaking subject, who says "I" loses 
himself/herself in language by identifying himself with the 
bespoken "I" he/she utters, which never quite coincides 
in time with the speaker's speaking, it would be better to 
think of the subject of desire as situated at t a point 
where prospection and retrospection cross: the trope for 
this is, I think, not prolepsis, but metalepsis, structured 
according to chiasmus.

I know I'm not being very clear here, but for those who 
haven't read much of Lacan in context and want to, the 
implications of tense and the tension between the "I" that 
utters and the "I" represented in the utterance are very 
clearly explained in Emile Benveniste's _Problems in General
Linguistics_" (You may very well know all this already. If 
so, I apologize and hope some on the list find it useful.)

As far as how Lacan might inform Spenser (and vice versa): 
fine books by David Miller, Linda Gregerson, and Graham 
Hamill come to mind--and there are others. 

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000 10:36:57 -0400 "w. l. godshalk" 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 
> >psychoanalytic critics addressed this question of verb tense and desire a 
> >while back.  lacan, for instance, points out that desire is proleptic---it 
> >is a present moment of anticipation, and is, thus, most effectively 
> >expressed/embodied in the future perfect, a gratification that will have 
> >occurred, a satisfaction that will occur in the present but that will be 
> >recognized only retrospectively.  
> 
> writes stephen.
> 
> I'd like to make a point or two. Lacan defines desire as proleptic, that
> which comes before, a moment of anticipation. As I've already pointed out
> on this list,  this is a very limited definition of desire.  At the very
> moment of love making, I am desirous.  I am enjoying my very present
> desire. I am not at all concerned about futurity. 
> 
> Lacan was writing with the French language and culture in mind.  It is
> distinctly possible that there is a difference between American English and
> American feelings of desire, and the French. 
> 
> And, of course, I believe that Lacan has not cornered the market on truth.
> Bethink ye by the bowels of Christ that he may be wrong?
> 
> Yours, Bill Godshalk

----------------------
Marshall Grossman
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