Writing on Desire: Cultural Contexts (1993)

Document Type : Keynote Address

Author

Cardiff University

Abstract

In this keynote address, Catherine Belsey re-examines the operations of desire across literature, ideology, and subjectivity—anchoring her critique in poststructuralist and psychoanalytic frameworks, particularly those informed by Lacanian thought. For Belsey, desire is not simply a private affect or biological impulse; rather, it is a culturally coded mechanism, structured by lack and inscribed within language. Her feminist intervention is clear: desire, far from being an apolitical interiority, is always already mediated by systems of power, discourse, and gendered meaning. Drawing from Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order, Belsey emphasizes that desire is never fully present or self-contained. It is haunted by absence and fundamentally split—an unstable force that literature can both mask and expose. In narratives of love, we see not only emotional entanglement but also ideological work: literature participates in the reproduction of heteronormative fantasies, yet it can also subvert them, laying bare the contradictions and fractures within dominant cultural scripts. Belsey argues that desire functions as a site of subject formation, a generative force through which individuals are constituted, reconstituted, and contested as subjects within culture. Through our longing—for recognition, for intimacy, for legibility—we are continually negotiating our place within (and against) social structures.
Foreword by Shereen Abouelnaga.

Keywords

Keynote speech delivered at the Second International Symposium on Comparative Literature (1992); published in the Symposium Proceedings: Encounters in Language and Literature, ed. Hoda Gindi, Department of English Language and Ltierature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (1993), pp. 33-47.

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