The Impossibility Of Desire Within Romantic Love As Revealed In A.S. Byatts Novel

Desire represents one of the more elusive terms in Lacanian theory. In his paper on Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire, Lacan far from cedes 'to a logicizing reduction where it is a question of desire'.[1] According to Bowie, the only positive characteristic Lacan ascribes to desire is that it propels all acts of speech or refusals to speak, and all conscious and unconscious psychic representations. It is desire that maintains the movement of the chain of signifiers 'sustaining the endless play of condensation and displacement among ideas, or of metaphor and metonymy among signifiers.[2] Such mobility and adaptability enables Lacan to present a truer and more authentic portrayal of love in sexual relationships, which inevitably resists the cold, logical, robotic descriptions presented by other theorists on the subject of eros.…