Follow-Up; The Impossible Object: Why "Good Desire" Cannot Survive Divine Transformation

A follow-up to "The Paradox of Perfect Bliss" that explores some of the foundations of it's thought in order to more fully address a popular theological objection

Since publishing my analysis of how desire shapes our conceptions of heaven and meaning, I've encountered a predictable theological objection: "You misunderstand Christian transformation. We're not transformed to eliminate all desire, but only 'desire unto sin.' Pure, godly desires would remain - love for God, appreciation of beauty, creative expression. Your entire argument collapses once we make this distinction."

This objection reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how desire operates, one that becomes clear when we examine the psychoanalytic theory that informs much of my analysis. To understand why this theological distinction fails, we need to explore what Jacques Lacan argued about the origins and structure of human desire itself.

The Birth of Desire: How Language Creates Lack

Lacan's developmental theory begins with a counterintuitive insight: the very thing that makes us human subjects - our entry into language and symbolic thought - simultaneously creates the fundamental lack that drives all our seeking. This isn't a theological fall from grace, but the necessary consequence of becoming conscious, speaking beings.

In Lacan's account, the infant initially exists in what he terms an imaginary fusion with the mother - a state without clear boundaries between self and other, need and satisfaction. But as the child acquires language and enters what Lacan calls the "symbolic order" - the realm of words, rules, and social meaning - something crucial happens. Language, by its very nature, separates us from immediate experience. The word "mother" is not the mother; the word "hunger" is not hunger itself.

This separation creates what Lacan calls the "objet petit a" - the object cause of desire. This isn't something the child actually possessed and then lost, but rather the structural effect of becoming a speaking subject. The very act of symbolization creates a gap between ourselves and the world, and we spend our lives unconsciously trying to recover a wholeness that never actually existed in the first place.

This helps explain why human desire has such a peculiar quality compared to animal need. When a dog is hungry, it eats and is satisfied. When humans desire, we're never quite seeking what we think we're seeking. We pursue money, status, romantic love, spiritual experiences - always with the unconscious hope that this time, finally, we'll recover that lost sense of wholeness. But each achievement leaves us somehow still incomplete, still searching.

The Christian Recognition - and Misdiagnosis

Remarkably, Christian preaching often demonstrates profound insight into this dynamic. From the pulpit, pastors regularly observe that worldly pursuits never truly satisfy. They note how the wealthy still feel empty, how fame brings its own anxieties, how power corrupts and isolates. They recognize that there's something structurally unsatisfying about human desire - that we seem to be chasing something that always remains just out of reach.

This pastoral wisdom aligns perfectly with Lacanian insights about the nature of human seeking. The problem, however, lies in Christianity's proposed solution. While accurately diagnosing the endless quality of human desire, Christian theology treats this as a problem to be solved rather than the fundamental structure of human consciousness.

The theological narrative suggests that our sense of lack stems from separation from God - whether through original sin, fallen nature, or simple finitude. The promise is that through divine relationship in this life and complete union in the next, this fundamental emptiness can finally be filled. Heaven represents the state where desire finds its ultimate object and achieves final satisfaction.

Why "Good Desire" Cannot Survive Purification

This brings us to the theological objection mentioned earlier. Sophisticated Christian thinkers recognize that eliminating all desire would indeed create the meaninglessness problem I outlined. Their solution attempts to thread the needle: preserve "good" desires (love for God, appreciation of beauty, creative expression) while eliminating "sinful" desires (lust, greed, pride, envy).

From a Lacanian perspective, this distinction misunderstands how desire fundamentally operates. Desire isn't simply a neutral force that gets directed toward good or bad objects. Rather, desire gains its intensity and structure precisely through its relationship to prohibition, transgression, and lack.

Consider how prohibition actually functions in human psychology. The command "thou shalt not" doesn't simply oppose desire - it gives desire its particular form and urgency. The forbidden fruit becomes desirable precisely because it's forbidden. Remove the prohibition, and you don't get pure desire directed toward permitted objects; you get the collapse of the desire structure altogether.

This is why Lacan describes the law and transgression as fundamentally intertwined. What theology calls "sin" often points toward moments where desire exceeds proper boundaries - but these moments of excess aren't accidental corruptions of an otherwise pure system. They're the inevitable result of desire operating within any symbolic order that creates boundaries in the first place.

Furthermore, what we call "good" desires are themselves structured by the same dynamics. Love for God gains much of its intensity from the felt distance between believer and divine. Creative expression emerges from the gap between intention and execution, between what we want to say and what language allows us to say. Even appreciation of beauty involves a kind of longing - the beautiful object remains forever slightly beyond our complete possession or understanding.

The Role of Jouissance

This becomes even clearer when we consider what Lacan calls jouissance - that excessive, painful pleasure that goes beyond the pleasure principle. Jouissance emerges precisely from our conflicted relationship with prohibition and fulfillment. It's not simply "bad desire" that could be surgically removed, but rather the structural consequence of being speaking subjects caught between desire and law, pleasure and limitation.

The Christian concept of sin often points toward precisely these moments where desire becomes excessive, where it exceeds proper boundaries and becomes destructive. But from a Lacanian view, this excess isn't an accidental corruption of pure desire - it's the inevitable result of how desire operates within any symbolic system that creates boundaries and prohibitions.

You cannot eliminate the "sinful" aspects of desire while preserving its "pure" forms because the very mechanism that generates desire's intensity - its relationship to lack, prohibition, and the impossible object - is what theology associates with sin's effects.

Two Different Solutions to the Same Problem

This reveals a crucial difference between psychoanalytic and theological approaches to human incompleteness. Both recognize that humans seem structurally dissatisfied, always seeking something beyond what they currently possess. Both acknowledge that pursuing conventional objects (wealth, status, pleasure) never provides lasting fulfillment.

The theological solution promises that this fundamental lack can ultimately be filled - either through proper relationship with God in this life or complete union in heaven. It treats the structural lack as a wound to be healed, a problem to be solved, a separation to be overcome.

The psychoanalytic approach suggests something radically different: that this lack is not a bug but a feature. It's precisely what makes us human subjects capable of meaning, creativity, language, and genuine relationship. Rather than promising to fill the void, psychoanalysis helps us develop a different relationship to it - what Lacan calls "traversing the fantasy."

Traversing the fantasy doesn't mean achieving some enlightened state beyond desire. Rather, it means recognizing that the object we've been unconsciously seeking - the thing that would finally complete us - was never there to begin with. This recognition paradoxically frees us to engage more fully with actual relationships, creative projects, and meaningful activities, precisely because we're no longer unconsciously demanding that they provide total fulfillment.

The Impossibility of Pure Desire

This analysis illuminates why the theological distinction between "sinful" and "pure" desire fails on structural grounds. The very thing that makes desire dynamic and meaningful - its relationship to lack, prohibition, and the impossible object - is precisely what creates the possibility of what theology calls sin.

A consciousness that somehow maintained desire while eliminating all relationship to transgression, excess, and structural lack wouldn't be purified desire - it would be no desire at all. Such a consciousness might experience something, but it wouldn't be recognizably human desire as we understand it.

This doesn't mean that religious practices are meaningless or that spiritual development is impossible. Rather, it suggests that the most profound spiritual insights often involve learning to inhabit our fundamental incompleteness more gracefully rather than fantasizing about its eventual resolution.

The Jewish Sabbath, Buddhist mindfulness practices, and contemplative prayer can all transform our relationship to desire without promising to eliminate it. They show us how to find meaning and depth within the very structure of seeking and longing that makes us human.

Ethics Within Structure: Recognizing Desire Without Condoning All Expression

Before exploring the implications of this analysis, we must address a crucial distinction. Recognizing that transgression and prohibition are structurally intertwined with desire does not mean condoning every transgressive action or abandoning ethical judgment. Understanding how desire operates doesn't collapse the distinction between harmful and constructive ways of engaging with our fundamental incompleteness.

The Lacanian insight reveals why purely prohibitive approaches to ethics often fail - why "just say no" campaigns struggle, why religious communities that emphasize moral rules often generate the very behaviors they condemn. But this doesn't lead to ethical relativism or the abandonment of boundaries. Rather, it suggests that effective ethics must work with rather than against the structure of human desire.

Consider the difference between recognizing that humans will inevitably experience sexual desire and condoning sexual violence. Understanding that the impulse toward transgression is structurally built into human subjectivity doesn't mean all transgressions are equally valid or harmless. Some expressions of desire genuinely harm others, violate consent, or damage the social fabric that makes meaningful relationship possible.

The key distinction lies between acknowledging the universality of transgressive impulses and endorsing their unlimited expression. A psychoanalytically informed ethics might focus less on eliminating "bad" desires and more on developing mature ways of relating to our inevitable impulses - ways that account for their effects on others and on our capacity for genuine connection.

This parallels how we might distinguish between the structural necessity of lack in human experience and particular forms of deprivation that cause unnecessary suffering. Recognizing that some form of incompleteness is essential to human consciousness doesn't mean we should tolerate preventable hunger, systemic oppression, or avoidable isolation.

Living with the Impossible Object

Understanding desire's structural nature doesn't eliminate the human longing for transcendence or completeness. If anything, it can deepen our appreciation for why these longings persist across cultures and centuries. The mistake lies not in experiencing these longings, but in believing that they point toward an achievable state of final satisfaction.

Perhaps our religious and spiritual frameworks serve us best when they help us engage more fully with the present moment - with its mixture of satisfaction and longing, fulfillment and lack - rather than promising escape from the human condition itself.

This doesn't preclude the possibility of post-death transformation or divine encounter. But it suggests that any such transformation would be far more radical than traditional accounts typically acknowledge - so radical that the transformed consciousness would bear little resemblance to human experience as we know it.

The question then becomes: do we find meaning in fantasies of such radical transformation, or in learning to inhabit our current form of consciousness with greater depth and appreciation? The Lacanian insight suggests that our richest possibilities for meaning and relationship emerge not from transcending our fundamental incompleteness, but from learning to work creatively within it.

In this light, the endless quality of human desire reveals itself not as a problem to be solved, but as the very condition that makes love, creativity, meaning, and genuine encounter possible in the first place.