The Human as Desiring Machine: Anime Explorations of Disembodiment and Evolution

Abstract

Humans are desiring machines, but what is the nature of this desire? How can we conceive of a psychic structure so amorphous yet so intimately linked to our very nature? One could argue that desire operates as the fundamental motor of human endeavor on both an individual and socio-cultural level and that it represents the most instrumental force in the production of identity, social interaction, and society, hence marking desire as one of the most basic components in any definition of “the human.” Our investigation ended in the first chapter by turning toward desire and its relation to definitions of the human. Now we must return to this concept again because desire functions as perhaps the most central attribute of the human—it is the attribute that, in a sense, conditions all others. It is both a limitation of the human and the impetus that drives humankind to question and reach beyond its limits. If it is such a powerful and complex force, then how are we to consider desire’s structure? As we saw toward the end of chapter 1, Jacques Lacan argues that human identity is predicated upon a fundamental “lack” that acts as the crux and thrust of all human desire: “Desire is a relation of being to lack. This is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists” (Lacan, Seminar II 223).

The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us […] cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other.

—Sigmund Freud (Civilization 34)

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?). The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, “Lack, lack, it’s the common law.”

—Deleuze and Guattari (Plateaus 154)