The Origin of Desire Between the Two Lacks: The Absent Law and the Infinite Gaze

 

Every human act begins in darkness.

We don’t know what will happen when we act, and yet we do it. We gamble with our actions, from the simplest to the most complex plan. That unawareness of consequence may seem, at first, a flaw, but it is in fact the very pulse of desire.

Desire is not certainty; it is its opposite: uncertainty. It is the realization of something one does not have, and therefore demands change, movement. Water, sex, food, a new phone, a new lover. Desire begins when certainty stops and something stirs within us.

Today, in a world saturated with information and control, where everything can be predicted, desire fades. The subject is no longer the one who desires: the great corporations desire on his behalf. Young people feel it as a nameless fatigue, an absence of impulse. It’s not that they want nothing, but that they no longer believe wanting something on their own is possible.

The Two Lacks of the Human Being

Lacan teaches that human desire is articulated between two fundamental lacks: one that constitutes us as subjects of language (linked to the symbolic Mother), and another, more devastating, that appears when the function meant to limit and give meaning to that desire is missing (proper to the symbolic Father).

The first is the structural lack, which arises when we enter language. In speaking, guided by those who care for us, representatives of maternal desire, we lose the immediacy of life: something always remains outside language, in a limbo of ignorance that, if stared at too closely, can turn to madness. It is the primordial anxiety before the unnamable, like when someone says, “a dangerous animal is near,” but we don’t know which animal, how near, or how dangerous. One doubt links to another, and thus the mind builds itself.

That absence is what gives rise to movement in desire. We always seek an object, a gaze, an idea that promises to fill the impossible. It is the lack that keeps us alive, that drives us to create, to love, to think.

And as Lacan stated (almost as a universal law) desire (of one) is the desire of the Other (with capital O). This is most evident in sexuality: true pleasure appears when one somehow knows that there is desire in the other (“Money can’t buy me love,” as the Beatles sang). In everyday life, the signals are more ambiguous, but desire also springs from a lack in the Other projected onto us or, more precisely, from what one believes the Other lacks and that one could provide, thereby releasing one’s own portion of joy by serving as the vessel for that foreign want.

However, there is a second lack, more dangerous and pathogenic: the one produced by a failure in the symbolic order, when the Name-of-the-Father fails to uphold the world. It is not the real man some call “dad,” but the function that introduces law and meaning, the one that separates probable desires, inherited from the maternal field, from those that are truly possible. When this function is absent or weakened, the subject is left exposed, unprotected.

The Two Gazes: Between Desire and Law

When the Name-of-the-Father is missing (that function that defines the logic of the world by introducing Law) the mother’s gaze no longer finds a limit; it becomes infinite, demanding, all-encompassing. At that point, the child risks becoming the phallic object of the mother, the being destined to fill her imaginary lack. And that place, to be the phallus for the Other, is the most suffocating of all, because within it, one cannot desire.

When the maternal gaze is missing, the paternal one turns rigid: a suffocating, deadly path that dictates there is only one correct way to live, and that if not followed, the world collapses.
When law is imposed without desire, the world becomes barren —devoid of tenderness and play.

That is why the function of the symbolic Father (which can be embodied by a man, a woman, a just word, or even a work of art) is not to repress, but to open the space where the child’s desire can breathe without guilt.

It is worth remembering that when we speak here of the symbolic Father or the maternal gaze of the Other, we are not referring to concrete people, but to functions.
The paternal function is the word or law that introduces a limit, that separates and organizes the world. It is not always exercised by the biological father: it may be a teacher, an institution, a religion, or even an act of justice.
The maternal function, on the other hand, is that of the primordial Other: the one who welcomes us into language, who names and sustains us. Both registers may inhabit any body, regardless of gender or kinship.

The mother’s desire is transmitted with force, because it is first felt in the baby’s body, while the symbolic law arrives later, in childhood, and is learned through the word; in that gesture that separates without destroying.
The most delicate task in life is to transform that inherited mandate from both parents into a desire one can claim as one’s own, while knowing it never truly is.

When both forces balance, the subject learns the hardest form of love: to desire without possessing, to care without enslaving. And in that delicate equilibrium, lacks cease to be devouring holes and become horizons that call.

The Weight of Inheritance

Desire needs risk. It feeds on uncertainty. That is why the biblical phrase “honor thy father and thy mother” does not mean obey them, but rather recognize the symbolic weight of what they represent. Accepting that we come from that weave, and from those traumas, sometimes clumsy, sometimes wounded, and that only by recognizing their limits can we separate from them: that is the path toward emotional freedom.

And such acceptance is not surrender. It is to stop expecting the Other to change. To understand that the real father, with his guilt and withdrawal, is not the symbolic one, and that other symbolic fathers are always near.
And that the mother has her own desire, while the child’s is another, distinct one.

Love, like language, is never fully reciprocal. One always loves in one direction only, for there is no perfect communication, no perfect relation (there is no sexual relation). The Other, with a capital O, never truly answers, and yet we keep speaking to it, asking it to guide and protect us, trying to make it happy. But it is precisely in that silence where the dignity of desire resides: it keeps moving even when there is no echo.

The Rebirth of Desire

The child’s desire, that which will later be called “his own,” though always woven from the Other’s, is not formed through discourse but through example.
To educate is not, as people often think, to impose values, but to show how one lives one’s own desire, to say to the child: “I desire, and I survive it.” To say: “I do what my heart longs for”, whether as a profession or as an act of reconciliation with life. It is to show how one keeps a passion alive, even among ruins.

Sometimes this appears in simple gestures: a father who keeps writing though no one reads him, a mother who tends a garden that will die in winter, or works on a social project doomed to fail, without expecting recognition.
When a child witnesses that quiet stubbornness and understands it as a manifestation of desire, he too can make that movement of life his own; though, in truth, it always comes from the Other.

For every creation (a poem, a decision, a life) begins with not knowing.
And perhaps the highest destiny of desire is not to find its object, but to keep moving despite its impossibility.
Because there is no sexual relation, but there is word; that remnant which, never joining completely, keeps us alive.