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.As Durkheim noted, one of the ironies ofmodernity is that although complex societies are heavily dependent uponmigration, they are less able to assimilate immigrants than those characterized bymechanical solidarity.Like all narcissistic fantasies, the image of the self thatinspires migration is forever elusive even Disney World is not pure Disneyfragmentation and alienation are the almost inevitable outcome, for even if theymanage to make the journey, many migrants discover that the Ideal-I has movedon, leaving them once more a fragmented body, a mere  inchoate collection ofdesires (as Lacan describes it).28 In the case of migration to more complexsocieties (which is the predominant form of migration in the modern world),there is a sociological explanation.Unlike the unified reflection glimpsed in thesmoothed surface of their destination, most migrants find that movementinevitably involves a painful accommodation to the striations of modernitydivision of labor and the separation of economic from social roles.But suchfragmentation is lack rather than loss.And as both Lacan and Plotinusemphasize, fragmentation is also desire, and desires, unlike narcissistic fantasies,can easily be shared.Lacan s famous insistence that desire is le désir de l Autre is routinely tracedto Kojève s claim that desire is either the desire for the desire of another person( I want him to want me ) or else the mimetic desire for something that isalready desired by another.Plotinus reached the conclusion through a ratherdifferent route.Given that our bodies qua bodies have sensations but no volitions,SMOOTH POLITICS 229while our natures have no sensations and so no desires, how is desire possible?Answer: through the relationship between the two; our nature picks up theunformed desire of the body and, like a mother who makes the inarticulatedesires of a child her own, acts upon them.So for our nature,  le désir vient d unautre, et existe pour un autre (as Bréhier s translation has it).29 This seemsclose to Lacan in the emphasis on the way in which identification with anotherresults in desiring what the other desires not just because the other desires it butinstead of or on behalf of another.For Lacan, the strange workings of thisprinciple were exhibited in Anna O. s phantom pregnancy around the time heranalyst Brauer had a child.30 But was Anna s desire for a child Brauer s, orBrauer s desire Anna s? It makes no difference; both desires are vicarious.Desire is also of central importance to Hardt and Negri.For them, however, itis not migration that leads to desire, but desire that leads to migration (213).LikeDeleuze and Guattari, for whom the Body without Organs is  that which onedesires and by which one desires, they make desire immanent within themultitude.31 Their version of  assembling, assembled desire is the nomad horde constituted  through the desires of the multitude as counter-Empire.32 InLacanian theory, by contrast, desire is mediated rather than assembled.Thedesire of the other is often not so much desire of another as of the Other, thesymbolic order.The conclusion usually drawn from this is that desire is alwayssocially constructed, and that there can be no opposition between heteronomousdesire (what the Other wants) and autonomous desire (what I really want).Unlike mimetic desire, vicarious desire is socially transmitted rather thanconstructed, and so insofar as Lacan s account carries with it traces of Plotinus sit is open to reinterpretation.Neverthless, the essential point remains.Desirepresupposes a system of difference, a striated space.But what is its effect? One of the few political theorists to consider thepossibility of something like vicarious desire was John C.Calhoun, the Southernapologist for slavery who features in Negri s Insurgencies as a theorist ofconstituent power.33 Like others in the republican tradition, he took individualselfishness to be the basis of all political life and the motivating force behind theconstituent prin ciple [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]