Deleuze and Guattari chide Lacan for assuming, with most of the Western philosophical tradition, that desire expresses a lack. They suggest instead that desire is productive, that we are “desiring machines.”
Why would everyone think that desire expresses lack? Calvin would say it comes from a confusion of the present state of man with the original state, the assumption that fallen human beings straightforwardly point to the character of human nature as such.
John Paul agrees. Far from being part of the original creation, the lust or concupiscence of which 1 John speaks is a result of the “damage” and “deficiencies” and “limitations” that come with sin: “Concupiscence is to be explained as a lack, as a lack, however, that plunges its roots into the original depth of the human spirit.” Postlapsarian desire, not desire as such, arises from the desperation of loss.
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