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FREEDOM IN THE IMPASSE OF A SELF- CONTRADICTORY DESIRE

by | Vol 43 (1/2) 2025

Abstract: In the last century, a misleading opposition has emerged between freedom and restriction, or more properly between individual desire and social structures. Deleuze, and the anti-psychiatric movement more generally, defended the notion of a ‘free desire’ liberated from the oppressive authority of social rituals. The problem with this opposition is that it misrecognizes the basic coordinates of desiring. The Lacanian perspective offers a different account: where social limits are removed, desire itself disappears. Free desire is for Lacan an oxymoron, insofar as desire constitutively operates in relation to the Other, and according to the signifying logic of the social. In other words, the biggest obstacle to desire is desire itself. What, then, is to be made of freedom, if freedom is its own limitation? In this paper, I argue firstly that the false opposition between desire and restriction must be rethought, that the ideology of a de-socialized, liberated desire is in fact the most enslaved form of desiring, directly in the service of the Other. I argue more specifically that freedom for Lacan emerges in a parallax act of recognition, by reframing the very position from which we speak of freedom.

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