Desire and Neoliberalism
To discuss desire as the driving force of the social, as well as to identify certain forms of desire present in cultural expressions, it will be useful to bring up Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the realms of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. Using this framework, desire can be understood as a transindividual field that pertains to the realm of the Symbolic, with both conscious and unconscious dimensions. Desire can only be identified by its effects on discourse and culture, and neither discourse nor culture are the possession of an individual. For Lacan, Language, that is the realm of the Symbolic, actually precedes the subject, as signifying chains from which subject effects can be derived. Desire is governed by a fundamental lack, which keeps it moving from one object to the next, and keeps the subject desiring, and talking until death, without ever being able to fulfill “it.” Desire, in this sense, does not refer to an individual longing for something, a defined concrete ob