city (or Desert)/ 4.
ex-citement vs desire.
“If you dare to formulate an unpaid satisfaction through a removal, the issue placed at the center, promoted in its primacy, is: what is desire? And in this regard, I can only remind you that desire always necessarily places itself in a perspective of absolute condition.” [1]
If you dare to formulate an unpaid satisfaction, this already begins as an illusion, even a hallucinatory one, because the other is not there, nor is there a place for the other.
And if we intended to promote the primacy of desire by recalling the perspective of an absolute condition, we would receive the applause by the gods but not the possibility of making the desire a human domain, hence an ambition: such a condition – free from any bond, that is – does not build a city; it is ephemeral because it cannot deal with work and partnership.
But the appeal[2] (or ex-citation, or Triebregung[3]) that originates from another, a possible partner, will be able to face the reality, whether it yelds a profit or not.
Ultimately, the principle of pleasure can be removed when formulating a desire and an illusion: not as far as satisfaction, because satisfaction enters the experience of work.
A satisfaction, which as such can only be paid for, can nevertheless be denied by the Subject: certainly through a lie.
Marina Bilotta Membretti/ Cernusco sul Naviglio – August 21, 2026
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[1] ‘Jacques Lacan. Il seminario. Libro VII. L’etica della psicoanalisi 1959 – 1960’. Testo stabilito da Jacques-Alain Miller. Traduzione di Maria Delia Contri. Edizione italiana a cura di Antonio Di Ciaccia/ Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi (2008), p.340
[2] See ‘THINK!’, Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Cosa ti salta in mente ?’ martedì 30 gennaio 2018 www.giacomocontri.it See also ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri – SIC Edizioni (1998).
[3] See ‘L’Io e l’Es’, S. Freud (1923) in ‘Sigmund Freud. Opere’ Vol.9 Bollati Boringhieri editore (1989).