Objects of Desire:
Made in Queens

For Freud, Wunsch (wish; desire) and das Unbewusste (the unconscious) are intertwined. Wunsch, the unconscious desire, mobilizes drive.

Lacan follows Freud and positions desire at the center of his ideas. Desire forms the essence of the Lacanian subject. As Lacan says, “le désir de l’homme est le désir de l’Autre” (1966, p. 814) (“man’s desire is the Other’s desire” (2006, p. 690)). The Lacanian subject is forever caught in the metonymic chain of desire, with the Other asking “Che vuoi?” (Lacan, 1966, p. 815) (“What do you want?” (2006, p. 690)). When we desire, the thing itself—la chose, das Ding—is not the cause of desire. Instead, the cause of desire is what Lacan refers to as the objet (petit) a (often left untranslated). The objet a “is strictly situated within the dimension of semblance” (Nobus, 2000, p. 130). It represents the constant sense of lack that a subject experiences and that fuels the quest for fulfillment, for knowledge, for possession, for recognition, for validation, for relationships, for x . . . . That cause of desire is embedded in the objet a, and implicit in this is the idea that desire is endless. Only the object of desire—not its cause—is interchangeable.

***

The same day on which I was attending the new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera, I was reading about what seems to have been one of the greatest art-world crimes ever. It appears that between the mid-’90s and 2008 the once-renowned Knoedler art gallery in New York City was selling forgeries of paintings by famous American abstract expressionists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko. There is a Netflix documentary titled Made You Look (2020) regarding this massive fraud. Among the forgeries was this fake Rothko:

What initially prompted my curiosity was my having seen a (genuine) red Rothko in a different film. The Rothko in that film caught my eye, and I learned that it was part of Rothko’s Seagram murals, originally commissioned by the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Rothko ultimately withdrew from the commission and, in 1969, gifted nine of the Seagram murals to the Tate in London. I had been at the Tate in the past two years and had seen the Rothkos there. But I had not seen this particular red Rothko, which I was lamenting as I was looking forward to the contemporary adaptation of Carmen.

***

Instead of nineteenth-century Spain, the Met’s new production places Carmen in the context of a contemporary American industrial town near the border with Mexico. The cigarette factory is replaced by an arms factory, and we now have gun smuggling, bullriders, cowboys, and clowns. Carmen does not wear a sevillana dress. Rather, she is dressed in denim cutoff shorts and turquoise cowboy boots. Instead of a narrative of a tragedy fueled by passion, jealousy, and betrayal, this production confronts viewers with a powerful scene of femicide. Reviews have praised the young mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the role of Carmen. However, the feminist lens that the new production brings to the opera has not necessarily been well-received by reviewers. This itself could be material for analytical thought.

There is much to say about the dynamics the new production of Carmen confronts the spectator with, which he/she/they might want to disavow. One could analyze along similar lines the denial and disavowal engaged in by all the participants in the Knoedler forgery. However, this essay is only intended as a short reflection on desire.

***

The fake Rothko was considered beautiful (which it is), was coveted, and sold for $8.3 million. The fake Rothko had a home and was loved by its buyer until it was discovered that it was a forgery and that its creator was not Mark Rothko but in fact Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese immigrant living in Queens. The fake Rothko bears the label “Made in Queens” just as our ego bears the label “Made in Id” (Green, 2005, p. 106). The ego is just an illusion in the register of the imaginary.

Carmen (or “Carmencita“) is the object of desire of all the men that consistently surround the arms factory. Their lecherous eyes and lascivious words follow the entrance of each woman as she enters or exits the factory. Many men are soldiers (representing the Law). Carmen is seen as the most beautiful, desired by the men in the same way an art collector might covet a Rothko. But clearly it is not only her beauty that fuels this desire but her inaccessibility. Indeed, a natural question one might have had during the Knoedler fraud—and that would in fact have revealed the fraud—is this one: how was a painting by one of the most important abstract expressionists, perhaps one of the greatest painters in history, even available for purchase at that price?

Carmen herself presents herself as that unattainable object. In some of the verses of the famous “Habanera” aria, she sings:

L’amour est enfant de bohême,
il n’a jamais connu de loi.
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime;
si je t’aime, prends garde à toi! . . .

L’oiseau que tu croyais surprendre
battit de l’aile et s’envola.
L’amour est loin, tu peux l’attendre;
tu ne l’attends plus, il est là!

Tout autour de toi vite, vite, il vient,
s’enva, puis il revient, tu crois le tenir,
il t’évite, tu crois l’éviter, il te tient!

(Love is a gypsy child
that knows no law.
If you don’t love me, I’ll love you.
And if I love you, you’d better watch out! . . .

The bird you thought you caught,
beat its wings and flew away.
With love far away, you can be waiting for it,
and when you least expect it, there it is.

Love is all around you. It comes
and goes, and then it returns. You think you’ve caught it,
and then it escapes, catching you later by surprise!)
(Bizet et al., 2001, p. 11)

It is the illusory, narcissistic ego, with the subject’s desires, fears, and anxieties that shapes the objet a as a screen for projections, as a way of organizing and harmonizing the subject’s own desire. It’s important to keep in mind that the objet a is not the object itself but a function of concealing lack.

There is a rich fantasy surrounding what an object can provide. But the idea of obtaining something from the Other—of owning something—is an illusion. Obtaining the object of desire will not bring satisfaction, since whenever the object is obtained, without a doubt there will be something more that is desired. In this dynamic, there is also a negation of the knowledge that the Other lives in a state of lack as well, caught up in its own chain of desire. As Fink (1999) says, “Human desire, strictly speaking, has no object. Indeed, it doesn’t quite know what to do with objects. When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it. Desire disappears when it attains its ostensible object” (p. 51).

Carmen wants Don José. And once he leaves his girlfriend, deserts the army, and becomes an outlaw to prove his love for her, she suddenly changes her mind. She now wants Escamillo. Escamillo wants Carmen and is well aware when he first lays eyes on her that Don José wants Carmen. Don Jose kills Carmen because he can’t accept that now she loves another, and as soon as she is dead, he is full of regret and in deep despair over his loss.

The fake Rothko was covered with a cloth when the art collectors came to see what they could purchase. They were not looking for a Rothko. However, once that possibility was in front of them, the Rothko became the object of desire, which was discarded once it was deemed a forgery.

The object of desire can’t provide anything but a temporary satiation. Because total satisfaction is impossible, one can never obtain the thing itself, whether the object of desire is disguised as a relationship, a piece of art, knowledge, recognition, validation, reparation, happiness, or any number of other “things.” Acceptance of the underlying lack and the metonymy of our desire is perhaps the best solution. That solution does not preclude the enjoyment of a magnificent piece of art made by Rothko or made in Queens and an opera production with cultural undertones of nineteenth-century Spain or present-day America.

references

Avrich, B. (Director). (2020). Made you look: A true story about fake art [Film]. Melbar Entertainment Group.

Bizet, G., Meilhac, H., & Halévy, L. (2001). Carmen (B. D. Fisher, Ed.). Opera Journeys Publishing.

Fink, B. (1999). Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory and technique. Harvard University Press.

Green, A. (2005). Key ideas for a contemporary psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and recognition of the unconscious (A. Weller, Trans.). Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Éditions du Seuil.

Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). Norton.

Nobus, D. (2000). Jacques Lacan and the Freudian practice of psychoanalysis. Routledge.