on longing

What is longing? In Seminar 11, Lacan writes that desire is "to lack what one has". Desire resembles longing; it must, although of course it is not the same. Longing: the word has distance contained in itself. Distance between the lover and the beloved is the originating point for anticipation, for desire; the lover longs for her beloved, she considers the value of what is made distant from herself.

Most simply, longing is desire for what is radically exterior; i.e., not the self. I cannot long for myself because I am never separate from it. Longing requires separation. If I am longing for my self, it is for a self I believe I have lost, a self which has become fragmented, articulated, which no longer belongs to my whole (my perceived whole). The subject who is paranoid or schizophrenic may be able to long for her self; her attachment to that self is fragmented in its own being. In a split subject this self-longing is easy to understand. In subjects who are more whole than fragmented, longing is directed outwards, toward the other, the beloved. What is not part of the self, what I love, I want to become part of my self. Longing, then, is linked to possession: I want you means also I want to own you. I want you for my own. You belong to me. Or with me: the feeling is essentially similar.

The function of longing is a paradox. It is necessary and it is intolerable. Barthes: this can't go on! is the cry of the lover away from the assurance of the love of her beloved. And yet it must go on: longing for the other is inescapable. I can never be fully with my beloved, if for no other reason than that of our separate skins, separate bodies. So I continue longing for just a bit more closeness, always just a bit more, and cannot attain it. But it is this tension between what I think I want and what I can ever attain which makes it possible for love to continue: if ever I were able to be as close to my beloved as I think I would like, I might lose interest. But the variable is not a constant variable; it shifts, and where I believed myself to be approaching the one I love I find in fact that there remain many unknown, even unknowable, reaches. A self-sustaining system.

Longing is the expression of desire for the ideal relation, which is only ever approached. Approach is anticipation, it is a provisional 'yes'--its orientation is towards the places where the beloved could be, in the future. It anticipates in both senses, then: in the sense of waiting, and in the sense of arriving before the other arrives. In this way it is both respectful and dismissive of the being and desires of the other; it says, I will wait for you, I hope you will come, and, simultaneously, I expect that you will be in this place (where we can understand 'place' to mean a physical location, certainly, but also a state, a kind of being)--a limiting thought, perhaps.

But, luckily, the role of the lover and the beloved in relation to one another is always one of gentle, loving transgression of the limits of being and of understanding.