Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek

Andrew Long: In recent lectures, both of you have been emphasizing the space between drive and desire. Could you discuss this and talk about its importance for cultural theory?

Renata Salecl: The reception of Lacan in American cultural theory is based primarily on his earlier writing, where the notion of desire is the most important concept. Of course, the later Lacan moves more from this notion of desire into the domain of drives. A very simple distinction between desire and drive would be that desire is primarily intersubjective. With desire, the notion of the Other is always implied. However, with drive this intersubjectivity somehow gets lost. Drive is what remains when the subject is submitted to the symbolic; it remains as a kind of pressure or force that constantly undermines any point of stability that the subject tries to make in relation to the social symbolic order. So drive is the very link to the notion of jouissance: the boundless enjoyment, the painful enjoyment that very much differs from desire. Desire is never satisfied. Desire means that the subject goes from one object to another and never finds the one that would satisfy him or her. Drive, however, is satisfied. Drive is primarily a circulation around the object, a circulation which with Lacan mostly means that there is a deadly pressure to which the subject is constantly submitted without wanting to be. The whole logic of desire is a kind of liberation from this pressure. When the subject falls into desire, somehow the pressure of drive is less present. So desire for Lacan is in some ways a better thing than drive. Drive involves the satisfaction that the subject gets, but does not want to get. Desire is the endless logic of dissatisfaction which produces as a side effect a satisfaction, but a satisfaction, that is less deadly than the satisfaction of the drive. For Lacan every drive is a death drive and has this kind of deadly element.

For Lacan, the crucial problem of drive also has to do with