The ‘should’ disconnects us from our desires.
PART 1:
We draw up covenants and contracts so that if the other person; spouse, business partner, seller, buyer or whomever, desires something different than us, we have some kind of document protecting us. What is it protecting us from? It protects us from what they may want to do to us, or not do for us. It protects us from their desires.
At their essence, covenants protect us from the desire of the “other”.
The old covenant
In the old testament, we read stories about God making covenants with his people. From the perspective of the people, these covenants protect them from God’s wrath and destruction.
‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ Exodus 19: 4-6
God makes a covenant with the Isrealites. He will make them his special people, he will give them victory over their enemies, he will bestow upon them special status and protection. If they keep this covenant with God, they won’t be like the rest of the nations, vulnerable to their enemies, destruction, plague, famine, annihilation. We see throughout the Old Testament narrative that when they are unfaithful to the covenant, all manner of evil visits them. They are enslaved and defeated and lose their special protection.
Protection from what?
In that particular covenant – the protection was from God’s desire to punish. The wrath of God.
The old covenant involved a set of rules - laws to be followed.
It was a covenant of if-then, quid pro quo.
“If you obey me fully….”
But no one can do that.
All have sinned and fall short.
Not only that, the covenant itself produces a desire to violate it.
Paul says in the book of Romans chapter 7 :
I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.
You know how it is, once you can’t eat the brownie, there’s not much you want more than the brownie.
Philosopher Jacques Lacan said that desire is not a relation to an object, but rather a relation to the obstacle to that desire or the lack of the desired object.
Simply put, we want what we can’t have.
One could say that this law then helps us to know our desire, and in one way that is true. But the desire we come to know is only the one that is manufactured by the restriction itself. It is not the truest desire. I believe when Paul says he would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet”, he is saying that the restriction brings into LIFE the desire to transgress and break free of the restriction. It then becomes its own false desire and thus masks or disconnects us from our real desires.
You may have heard it said that whatever it is we truly want, that is what we already have. What this is saying is that we may think we want one thing, but what we have manifested in our lives is more indicative of what we truly want – our real desires. We may say that we want to lose 20 pounds because the restrictions and mores of our cultural group tell us we should weigh 20 pounds less, but the truer desire is that we want to enjoy and indulge in food. We distract ourselves from the truth of our real desires by saying we want something other than what we have.
It’s not just the old covenant in the Bible that produces this dynamic, but any obstacle, law or restriction.
The ‘should’ disconnects us from our desires.
1) It produces a desire born solely due to the obstacle or the lack (as in Lacan)
2) It disconnects us from our desire by keeping us focused on what we believe is the desire of the other. We try to become what they want, do what they want. We say we want the things that we know we should want.
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