Archimedean Desire: Commentary on Kirshner

“Give me a place to stand,” Archimedes is reported to have said, “and I will move the earth.” If only there were a fixed point in the universe, the earth itself would give ground to his desire. But how are we to live with the fact that when it comes to the human realm, there are no Archimedean points? This, I think, is the most fundamental question raised by Lewis Kirshner's thought-provoking paper, “Lacan's Ethics of Desire: A Critical Reading.” Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States the authority of the doctor was an unquestioned fixed point. And psychoanalysis partook of that authority. But through a variety of social and economic forces that authority has come in for questioning, and Kirshner wants to take up the challenge via an engagement with Lacan.

As we look at the myriad ways that humans have spent time on earth, we are convinced that some ways of living are better than others. And psychoanalysis, of course, is a peculiar intervention in a human life that is meant to be of help. But as soon as we try to say what we mean by “better” or “help,” we enter contested territory. One route is to stick to a high level of generality: for example, to claim that a person who is able to exercise her capacity for creative engagement is better off than one whose capacity for creativity has been stifled or foreclosed. But even if that claim is true, it is open to the charge that “creative engagement” is an enigmatic signifier (Laplanche 1999), one that can lull us into thinking we are dealing with a concept with determinate content, rather than a placeholder for an open-ended (and inevitably contested) investigation into what human creativity consists in. Even worse: we become vulnerable to the charge that we are deploying phrases like “creative engagement” for ideological purposes of which we are largely unaware. Perhaps