Without Words There Is No Desire

From Need to Desire

A newborn feels hunger. The body cries out. That is need. Give milk, and the body quiets. But the moment the cry is taken up by another, given a name: “the baby wants milk”, something new is born. Language enters the world of the infant. And with language, desire.

For the demand always exceeds the need. The milk fills the stomach, but the cry also calls for love, presence, recognition. No object can give all of that. Something slips away, something that cannot be satisfied. That remainder is desire. And this is why we usually confuse desire with a wish.

Wish, Object, and Objet Petit a

A wish is concrete: a car, a promotion, a lover, a vacation. Wishes can be satisfied or abandoned. Desire is different: every wish hides a desire, and desire cannot be satisfied. It is not for the object, but for that remainder the child longs for. The object is only a decoy, what Lacan calls the objet petit a: the cause of desire, the little lure around which it circles. You never really want the car, the job, the lover, or the vacation. You want the gap they stand in for, the lack that drives you.

The Big Other and Everyday Hauntings

A man makes coffee every morning, grinding, measuring, pouring with precision. He isn’t just chasing caffeine. He is staging a conversation with absence: the father who abandoned him. He remembers the morning when his mother served coffee to his father before the farewell, the smell etched into him as a memory that never dies. But it’s not only about his father as an individual. Behind that figure stands the Big Other: the entire order of law, language, and meaning into which his father once introduced him. The steam curling from the cup is not just a ghost of the man, but of the symbolic law he embodied, still shouting why he left, why what should have been a proper family never was.

A woman longs for a child. Later she admits she never liked children. What she was obeying was the deafening cultural whisper: “You are not complete unless you are a mother.” That whisper comes from the Big Other, the network of family, gender, and culture. When she chose to adopt, she wasn’t ending her desire but repositioning it. She sidestepped the script of the Other and began to write her own.

Desire, Demand, and the Subject

This is the point: desire is never simply our own. It is always entangled with the Big Other: parents, culture, law, the symbolic order itself. Yet within that entanglement, each of us is haunted in a singular way. The task is not to escape desire (impossible), nor to follow it blindly through objects, but to remain faithful to it, to not betray it.

The desire of the subject is born in the earliest years, as the result of a fundamental lack. Growing up, that child encounters the Demand of the Other: parents, society, friends. That demand is also a kind of desire, but born in the Other. Although desire is always “the desire of the Other,” Lacan makes a distinction: demand belongs to the Other, while desire resonates closer to the subject.

Antigone and the Ethics of Desire

That is what Lacan saw in Antigone. She claims to obey the “unwritten laws of the gods,” and her insistence on burying her brother stands in stark defiance of the demand of Creon. But what fascinates Lacan is her refusal to compromise, which goes far beyond any law. She knows she will die, yet she does not step back. She does not cede. Her desire shines in its pure, terrifying form: beyond usefulness, beyond happiness, even beyond life itself. This is the point where desire tips into jouissance, a strange “enjoyment” that is not simple pleasure but a satisfaction found in the very excess of going too far, even into destruction.

This story repeats itself in saints, martyrs, scientists, and politicians who followed their desire despite the demands of others to stop. But here we must be precise: fanaticism is not desire, nor is stubbornness. Fanaticism erases the subject in service of an ideology; stubbornness is a symptom of neurosis, psychosis, or perversion. Desire, in Lacan’s sense, is something else entirely, always singular, tied to the subject’s unique relation to lack.

Against the Pyramid

The Lacanian idea of desire contrasts sharply with Maslow’s pyramid. Maslow imagines human life as a ladder of needs: once survival and safety are met, we climb toward love, esteem, and finally self-actualization. Fulfill the hierarchy, and you reach the top. But Lacan shows there is no summit. Every need expressed in words leaves a remainder. Desire does not ascend toward completion; it circulates around lack without end.

The Work of Analysis

This is also where some religions and philosophies that preach the annulment of desire collapse. There is no way to stop desiring; even the wish to stop desiring is itself a desire.

And the reason is simple: desire is born in the unconscious. The unconscious is not a basement where repressed memories are stored, as Freud once imagined. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language. Dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms, they are sentences, fragments of speech. Our unconscious desire speaks through them, and psychoanalysis is the work of reading those messages. It is not about curing desire, but about helping the subject understand their relation to their lack.

A proper psychoanalysis helps the subject find words that come closer to that lack. Anguish—in the neurotic, the psychotic, or the perverse, often appears when the words we use to anchor ourselves get stuck. We become bound to an object or situation that promises to fill the void. When that promise inevitably fails, the sense that “something is wrong” intensifies. Analysis makes it possible to loosen these anchors. You can still pursue the things you believe might bring happiness, but you can also reframe them, or even replace them altogether, without being destroyed when they fail to deliver. The role of the analyst here is crucial: the analyst does not supply the “right” answers, but occupies the position of the Big Other, issuing the Demand of the Other, the demand to speak. In that space, the unconscious can surface, and the subject can begin to work through both the demand and the enigmatic desire of the Other, crystallized in Lacan’s haunting question: Che vuoi?—What do you want from me?

Not Ceding, Living With Style

So why is repression not a solution? Because to cede is to betray the singular way your lack speaks through you, and to live only according to someone else’s script. Repression is the path to neurosis. The young man who studies law only because his family demands it may look stable, but his life corrodes from within, haunted by the music he refused.

Pursuing objects behind objects in the hope of satisfying desire is also empty. Desire cannot be cured. But it can be lived with, and the way to do so is with style.

Style is how you talk back to the Big Other: with irony, invention, refusal, play. It is the lawyer who writes operas at night, the childless woman who reinvents motherhood by caring for animals, the barista who plays the espresso machine like an instrument, claiming his father’s gesture for his own art.

The ethical life is not about reaching a peak of satisfaction. It is about refusing to silence the part of you that will never, can never, be silenced.

Without words there is no desire. But with words, there is always lack. To live is to be haunted. To live well is to stage the haunting with courage and with style.

Also published at https://substack.com/@lacanianonline