A new desire Some notations on the theme and a question: A new desire? What is the source of desire? The poet Reiner Kunze wrote about it plainly: “The poem resides in the extent of its wonderment, It is there that we go”.

Analysis wends its way from paradox to paradox, but in order to name, and even more “to rename anew the things of the world”, say F. Cheng, in responding to the unnameable, another name for the impossible: such is desire.

The subject is so prey to desire and its paradox that Lacan notes on page 558 of the Seminar Desire and its Interpretation: “Desire is at once subjectivity—it is at the very heart of our subjectivity, what is most essentially the subject—and at the same time it is its contrary, opposed to subjectivity as resistance, as paradox, a rejected kernel, refutable”.

Paradox of desire knotted to love and to the jouissance of the symptom.

The desire of the analyst comes from the act itself which both supports and dictates an ethic that governs the Saying, the One-saying, the Real. Crisscrossed threads, contrived, knotted, plaited like so many figures from which desire is deduced, not without guilt/cut [coupabilité],[1] in the sudden appearance of its cause.

A new desire that Lacan retranslated on the model of Ein neues Subjekt: it is new that there is a subject, and new that there is this desire that had been rejected. At the end and in what follows, this new desire is inscribed, is written, an effect of the resolution, of the reduction of the paradoxes of jouissance, of the paradoxes of love, and of the paradoxes of desire, because of the inexorable real. The desire of the analyst is a desire to know once the desire from knowledge and its love has fallen; this desire to know is the chance to give to the unknown the fullness that comes back to it; what remains is the unknown.

Translated by Susan Schwartz