Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love

Abstract

Have you ever wondered what makes you wake up in the morning? Why not just lay down, stay, and eventually disappear? What is the wanting, the energy, and the grace of liveliness? Desire is at the core of liveliness, and this book explains why it is so. Desire is much more than a mere appendix to love, sex, or our craving to have the latest fashion item. It is what allows the most personal and unique expression of each of us.

Desire: Subject, Sexuation, and Love is a work of gratitude to the Lacanian tradition and feminist philosophy. It creatively uses the story of “The Little Mermaid” by H.C. Andersen, as well as art and popular culture to explain the complex landscape of desire and its relation to love and sexuation. Much of the criticism of psychoanalysis from gender studies and poststructuralism is based on a superficial reading of Jacques Lacan, and Munar corrects this, providing in the first half of the book a rigorous and clear analysis of Lacanian subjectification and sexuation, elucidating their relationship to the nature of desire and love, in order to modify overly simplistic and erroneous interpretations of his thinking on desire.

Desire is essayistic and poetic philosophy, drawing upon and playing with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, biography, poetry, and art. As the reader enters the second part of the book, the focus on Lacanian theory recedes, opening a space that is more paradoxical and multiple where Munar engages in creative form as an expression of critique, transforming our understandings of desire and love, which always elude us while also always being present.