Moon and Finger 21 – Desire, Language, and Haiku
Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Guest host today is Adam Graham.
Desire, Language, and Haiku
Introduction
There exists within haiku a tension between silence and expression that mirrors the complex relationship between desire and its unattainable fulfillment. This observation, which might seem to belong more to the realm of mysticism than literary criticism, in fact opens onto a rich theoretical terrain, one in which the tools of Western psychoanalysis and literary theory, as well as structural linguistics offer surprising approaches to analyzing the workings of English-language haiku.
The tendency in some circles to explain haiku almost exclusively through the lens of Zen Buddhism, invoking concepts like satori, selflessness, wordless presence, or even the archaic understanding of some transcendental haiku moment, has limited the critical approach available to haiku scholars, particularly those working within academic literary studies. Every time haiku is exclusively linked to the glowing mysticism of Zen Buddhism and the esoteric enigmas of purified enlightenment, an opportunity is missed to discuss haiku as a living, working literature that demands genuine craft and expertise with language. Also missed is the necessary work of embedding the study of English-language haiku into a larger academic literary discourse.
In joining in the work to help move English-language haiku into such discourses, this essay develops two related movements. The first draws on Ian Marshall’s essay “Jouissance among the Kire: A Lacanian Approach to Haiku”, and leans into the French theorist Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework, the triadic structure of the realms of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, to show how haiku can be understood as a linguistic event that produces jouissance, Lacan’s term for a transgressive, pre-verbal intensity that exceeds symbolization.
The second movement extends this analysis through the haiku theorist Richard Gilbert’s concept of collocation and Roland Barthes’ narrative codes, arguing that the structural features of haiku, its brevity, its cuts, and its syntactic play, enact at the level of form the same dynamic of desire that Lacanian theory describes at the level of the subject. Together, these frameworks suggest that haiku is not merely a brief poem about nature, but a concentrated site where the fundamental tensions of language and desire are brought to their most acute expression.
Lacan’s Imaginary Order and the Mirror Stage
Jacques Lacan was a twentieth-century French psychiatrist who revolutionized psychology and the humanities by integrating structuralist linguistics into theories of human psychological development. His framework traces the formation of the psychological subject across three experiential realms: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Lacan’s approach provides a powerful vocabulary for understanding not only individual psychology, but also the way in which language and culture function, as well as cultural artifacts, including haiku.
Lacan’s account of psychological development begins in the Imaginary Order, which is the pre-verbal world of the infant in which the world is known or experienced as a flow of images where there is no felt distinction between self and other. At some point during this stage, roughly between six and eighteen months of age, a child recognizes itself in a mirror and perceives itself as a unified whole. This is what Lacan calls the Mirror Stage: the child identifies with the coherent, unified image it sees reflected, and this identification causes the formation of what Lacan calls the Ego—a constructed, unified image of the self.
However, this identification with a unified image is, for Lacan, a fundamental misrecognition. The child does not experience itself as whole and unitary; it experiences itself as fragmentary and scattered. It cannot fully control its body, feels random and powerful urges it cannot manage, and is subject to needs that conflict with one another. The unified image of itself as Ego, layered upon this underlying sense of fragmentation, results in a situation in which the Ego is fundamentally alienated—based on an external, idealized image of unification rather than on the child’s actual, fragmented experience.
The Ego, in this sense, is largely an illusion, a construct that masks the subject’s true psychic reality. As a result, the idealized self-image becomes the very thing that causes the frustration and discomfort it promises to cure: the image of ourselves as whole and unified causes us to paradoxically realize and experience the fact that we are not whole and unified. The Imaginary Order is thus psychologically ambivalent. On one hand, it is pleasing because we get to imagine we are a whole, unified experience. On the other, it is discomforting, even terrifying, because this coherence is recognized at some level as an illusion. This contradictory state, frozen between the fantasy of wholeness and the experience of fragmentation, drives development toward the next stage.
The Symbolic Order and the Emergence of Language
To alleviate the distress of the Imaginary Order, the child enters what Lacan calls the Symbolic Order by learning language. Learning language is, in Lacan’s account, a peculiar and consequential event. It is, at its core, learning that the world is not you. This is a difficult and often overlooked lesson. The world becomes a realm of words as each object in the world acquires a word, and each word asserts a kind of separation: it says, in effect, I am not you. The Self-Other divide arises via the Symbolic Realm of words. However, a word is not a thing in the world, it is a referent to a thing. A word is like a menu that makes reference to a hamburger, but a menu is obviously not a hamburger. Language provides a false sense of wholeness and connection to the external world.
Each word not only refers to something real but, in that very act of reference, makes us acknowledge that the real thing is absent. The real thing is hidden behind the curtain of language. Language thus attempts to be a substitute for real objects and real experiences, but in that very attempt it makes us aware of the lack it is supposed to fill. The word coffee mug cannot be erased from one’s encounter with an actual coffee mug; the concept, the symbol, is always already draped over the object, cutting us off from the raw, unmediated experience of it. And every time language is used, which is to say, essentially always, a lack is experienced: the lack of an authentic encounter with the world as it is, prior to the symbolic structures that organize and simultaneously obscure it.
This pervasive lack creates desire. We desire, frustratingly and perpetually, that which Lacan calls the Real: a third realm that, unlike the Imaginary (tied to images) and the Symbolic (tied to language), lies beyond or outside of symbolization and representation entirely. The Real cannot be fully captured by language or images; it is the limit of what can be represented. We can never fully understand the Real because it is, by definition, beyond the capacity to be represented or integrated into a world of meaning. It is a gap or an absence. It is the dimension that exceeds and resists the symbolic order. Language, like the Ego, has a dual nature: it offers both completeness (symbolically) and incompleteness (in reality). It serves as a substitute for the lack of wholeness, but in doing so, it perpetuates that very lack.
Jouissance: Encountering the Real
Although the Real cannot be symbolized, it can, in certain moments, be encountered. This encounter with the Real is what Lacan calls jouissance, a sense of pleasure that pushes one to the limit of what can be represented or understood. Jouissance evokes experiences or emotions that are unmanageable, uncontainable, and unmediated. However, it is an experience that may not be entirely pleasurable or positive: it can be linked to extreme or transgressive forms of sensory experience, to compulsive behaviors in which pleasure and pain are inseparably linked, or to creative expression in which the artist pushes beyond the boundaries of convention and language, producing something that goes beyond ordinary meaning.
It is worth noting that while Marshall’s essay emphasizes jouissance‘s capacity to evoke the positive sense of unity associated with the Imaginary Order, namely the empowering sensation of oneness, jouissance is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, associated with the Real itself: a realm that lies outside both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Jouissance is certainly pre-linguistic, but it can also be pre-image. It is an uncontrolled, undefinable, transgressive rupture of intensity, which can be positively pleasurable, but also unsettling, even painful, as it exceeds and moves beyond the ordered structures of both image and language.
Haiku and Jouissance
Marshall demonstrates that haiku is a form deeply concerned with the concepts that Lacan identifies as central to human experience: desire and its connection to lack, a fragmented self, and the possibility of an immersion in experience beyond language. In this way, the popular account of haiku’s connection to Zen, its emphasis on oneness with nature, selflessness, and wordlessness, can be addressed not in some esoteric mystical way, but through a Western psychological and literary tradition that takes the form seriously as a linguistic art.
In Lacanian terms, a good haiku, through its play of language, produces jouissance, it sparks that intense, pre-verbal encounter with the Real that cannot be fully represented. Marshall offers a number of haiku in his essay that demonstrate this dynamic. One of them, by Gary Hotham, reads as follows:
Letting
the dog out
the stars out
The simple act of opening the door to let one’s dog out becomes a revelatory moment, a sudden, awe-filled experience with the vastness of the night sky. But it becomes revelatory through language. The phrase stars out is not merely a factual statement; it is a use of language that highlights language’s own involvement with absence, with lack. The words stars out are symbols, cardboard cutouts of the real experience of seeing the stars. The language hides the Real behind words. Yet, as we read the haiku, especially the final line, which through its parallelism with line two brings the structure of language front and center, we experience that lack. We understand we are reading language, and yet we sense what the cardboard cutout is a copy of. We see the contours, the outline of what is missing because language hides it: the real experience of being blown away in awe at suddenly seeing a night sky full of burning stars. The lack becomes visible precisely because of the language that produces it.
This effect is intensified by the formal choices Hotham makes: the repetition of the same semantic and rhythmic structure, the dog out / the stars out, creates a sense of equivocation between the two acts, between the mundane and the sublime, that propels the reader beyond the words into the experience they gesture toward. The sense of jouissance that pushes beyond words is both the experience of seeing the stars in the mind’s eye and the sudden pleasure of solving the riddle of the language, seeing the meaning while simultaneously experiencing the stars beyond the meaning of language. As Marshall notes, haiku “place us in the fraught position of being caught between lack and oneness, separation and unity. It is another form of haiku’s characteristic aesthetic of ma, or ‘betweenness.'”
Marshall is careful to observe that the jouissance haiku produces is not always a positive pleasure. This is, in fact, a point of significant importance. Haiku is a living art, and as such it must be able to address both the positive and the negative aspects of human experience. The following haiku, by Nicholas Virgilio, offers an example of jouissance in its more devastating register:
The autumn wind
has torn the telegram and more
from mother’s hands
This haiku functions, as Marshall demonstrates, through a layered structure of symbolic substitution. The telegram, gripped by the autumn wind, is torn from the mother’s hands. This haiku carries added weight: Virgilio’s brother was killed in Vietnam. As such, the telegram stands in for the son who is no longer there. It references the lack of her son in its literal content, i.e. the letter (language) is actually stating an absence, but it also functions as a symbol of lack in the Lacanian sense (“and more”): a piece of language, a stand-in, that causes the very lack it refers to in the moment of its being read. “The telegram,” as Marshall writes, “is a stand-in for the brother in the poem, its presence a reminder of his absence.”
Language causes the lack and thus the desire. Language demonstrates what is not there, but it is only in that demonstration that we sense what is not there, and thus causes us to desire that which is absent. The language of this haiku is constructed to push the reader, just as the language of the telegram has pushed the mother, beyond words, beyond the symbolizing of grief and the terror of loss, into an experience of grief. The poem shifts the reader into a sense of jouissance as a negative pleasure: the experience of encountering the Real that exists beyond words.
In both of these haiku, what is notable is the avoidance of intellectualization or explicit narrative construction. Both offer an immediate, embodied experience, evoking the kind of intensity and physicality that Lacan associates with transcending the Symbolic Order. Haiku, in this sense, taps into a deep pre-verbal realm of existence in which the self, as a symbol and locus of being, is momentarily dissolved in the richness of sensory experience, an encounter with the Real. Haiku, paradoxically, serves as a mechanism for moving beyond language through the use of language.
Desire, Death, and the Dual Logic of Language
To understand more precisely how haiku achieves this effect at the level of structure, it is necessary to extend the Lacanian framework in a direction that opens onto a deeper account of desire and its relationship to language. This requires attending to what might be called the dual logic of language: its simultaneous pull toward meaning and its resistance to closure.
Lacan’s account of the Symbolic Order produces a particular and somewhat unsettling consequence. If language perpetuates the sense of lack that it also attempts to address and alleviate, then the more language we acquire the more lack we experience, and the more desire is produced, as we become more and more desirous a wholeness that is constantly being substituted out with more and more words. Yet, our desire for wholeness and completeness is ominous. This is due to the fact that a desire for wholeness and completeness is a desire for the dissolution of the self-other binary. It is a desire for a return to the state of existence prior to the separation of self and world.
But to dissolve the self-other binary entirely, to go back to a moment of wholeness, would be to dissolve the self as we experience it. The self would disappear into the unity of wholeness; it would, in a meaningful sense, die. In desiring wholeness and the dissolving of the self-other binary, we desire the death of the self.
This offers a suggestive resonance with Freud’s concept of the death drive—Thanatos—the pull toward the cessation of tension that Freud identified as a fundamental component of psychic life. Yet simultaneously, we also desire life. We have an urge toward life and the pleasure of life; we enjoy the tension between desiring death and desiring life. The self-other binary titillates and stimulates. There is, it seems, a peculiar enjoyment in the play of existence that occurs within this tension.
Both of these desires, toward death and toward life, are, crucially, internal to language itself. Language contains the desire for death: it attempts, through meaning and reference, to dissolve the self-other binary and return us to wholeness or completeness. But language also contains the desire toward life: it perpetuates the self-other binary by pointing out, again and again, that we are always separate entities, cut off from the other, always lacking the Real. Language both bridges and enforces the gap it is trying to close.
Narrative Codes
This dual movement within language has a structural correlate in Roland Barthes’ theory of narrative codes. Barthes, the twentieth-century French literary theorist and philosopher renowned for his work on the interpretation of texts, observed that structures of language contain at least five codes that interact with readers. Two of these are of particular relevance to haiku.
The first is the Hermeneutic Code, which is primarily concerned with the absence of information. It describes how language structures offer an incomplete amount of information, creating a desire to seek explanations or solutions. The second is the Proairetic Code, which refers to the elements in a language structure that generate a sense of continuity and forward movement, a force that creates anticipation by implying a sequence within the language.
These two codes can be observed operating even in a single sentence. The sentence Here is a one-sentence example of these two codes at work enacts both: the Proairetic Code creates forward momentum and anticipation as the sentence unfolds. The opening Here is… creates a sense of anticipation: it generates the question of here is what? An answer is provided: a one-sentence example. Yet, immediately the term of generates another question, of what? The Hermeneutic Code generates a sense of incomplete information, a desire to know what the example will be, that is only resolved at the sentence’s end. Together, these codes structure the experience of being inside a text: the Proairetic Code gives us the life of the text, its movement and stimulation; the Hermeneutic Code gives us the pull toward its death, its closure, its meaning. Meaning is death.
This dynamic is directly analogous to the Lacanian account of desire. We read a short story because we want the story to end, we want resolution, we desire the language to die so that we can know what it means. Yet, at the same time we do not want it to die too quickly. We want the complications of narrative, the friction of character and plot, that slows the reading down and keeps us inside the life of the text. The desire for the story’s end is the desire for wholeness; the desire to remain in the story is the desire for experience, fragmentation, the pleasure of the living.
Collocation and the Push and Pull of Meaning
Richard Gilbert’s concept of collocation, introduced in his essay “The Disjunctive Dragonfly”, provides a further vocabulary for describing how haiku activates this dual desire. Gilbert defines collocation, within the context of haiku, as the grouping of words in an unexpected way that, when combined, disrupts conventional expectations in a reader. Gilbert offers several examples of haiku containing segments of collocation, of which some are the following.
fingerprints on the dragonfly
blowing off the stars
sixth obscure
tears of a bird
counting down the goodness
god autumn mosquito
Each of these phrases demonstrates the dual desire of language: the urge toward meaning (death), and the simultaneous urge toward experience, toward the play of language that resists settling down into fixed significance (life). In each phrase, there is a push toward meaning and a pulling away from it.
There are certainly haiku in which one side becomes too strong. When the push toward meaning is too forceful, texts become dull and inert, for example instruction manuals, quarterly earnings reports. These haiku fit what Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, in their introduction to Haiku 2015, call “comfort-oriented haiku,” a term they use while discussing Martin Lucas’s essay “Haiku as Poetic Spell.” On the other hand, when the pull away from meaning is too strong, texts become incomprehensible, difficult to inhabit as reading experiences. But the optimal balance, the precise calibration of push and pull, creates a profound experience. Language, in its best deployments, flows in between opposites: life and death, meaning and lack, presence and absence. In haiku, this inherent tendency of language is heightened and brought to what might be described as its pinnacle.
Haiku intensifies the tension of in-betweenness more than any other form of language, and it does so through a combination of two structural features: its remarkable brevity, and its formal use of the cut or kire. The cut is a formal feature of haiku that creates ma, the concept of betweenness and interval. Ma is the realm of the gap, the space between juxtaposed images or ideas. This space creates a moment of disjunction in the reader, who must do something to bring the two parts together. The gap, the ma, is traditionally understood as a rupture in the haiku that allows the reader to enter it.
A haiku by Peter Newton illustrates this dynamic:
beam by beam
the old barn taken down
to sky
Lines two and three, with the collocation of the words taken down to sky, create a cut in the haiku, a significant one, that causes a shift in the reader’s experience of the language. The phrase resists easy paraphrase precisely because it pulls in two directions simultaneously: toward meaning (deconstruction, loss, the sky revealed) and away from it (the unexpected preposition to, the sky as destination or outcome, the refusal of syntactic resolution). The reader is held in the tension of that in-betweenness.
But whereas the formal cut of a haiku, the space between its two primary juxtaposed images or ideas, is the most visible structural instance of this tension, there is something deeper happening. Every pairing of words in language has a cut between the two words, because every word and its subsequent word holds the tension between wanting to collapse into meaning and wanting to remain open to mystery. Consider the two words the cat. Between them there is a cut, an in-betweenness, small but present, a momentary wanting-to-know suspended before the resolution. The space is brief and not particularly charged. But it is there.
In haiku too every individual word generates a cut. In a good haiku, all of these individual cuts are profoundly experienced. The brevity of the form means that the push and pull between each word becomes significant: every word carries more weight because there are so few of them, but the spaces between every word also carry more weight. The haiku form supercharges the dual flows of desire that exist inside language: the desire for meaning and wholeness on one side, and the desire for play and experience and fragmentedness on the other.
Conclusion
Taken together, the frameworks of Lacan’s account of desire and the triadic structure of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real; Marshall’s application of jouissance to haiku; Gilbert’s concept of collocation; and Barthes’ narrative codes, these frameworks converge on a single insight: haiku is a sophisticated linguistic form that operates by concentrating and intensifying the fundamental tensions that are present in all language. The desire for wholeness and the desire for experience, the pull toward death (meaning, closure, the end of the text) and the pull toward life (play, fragmentation, the movement of language), the push toward meaning and the resistance to it. These forces are not unique to haiku, but haiku brings them to their sharpest and most concentrated expression.
The formal features of haiku, its brevity, its cuts, its collocational play, are not merely aesthetic choices or cultural conventions. They are mechanisms for activating, at the level of form, the same dynamics of desire that Lacanian theory describes at the level of the subject. Because in the end a haiku may be a psychological subject unto itself. A good haiku, paradoxically through its use of language, moves beyond the symbolic order; it produces jouissance, an encounter with that which exceeds symbolization. It is at once a poem about the world and a demonstration of the limits of representation. Haiku is a reminder that meaning is always also the site of the unknown and inexpressible, and that the most powerful linguistic experience is one that holds both truths in tension at the same time.
This analysis suggests that haiku’s critical vocabulary need not be limited to Zen Buddhism, wabi-sabi, or the aesthetics of mono no aware. Western literary and psychoanalytic theory offers a genuinely productive set of tools for illuminating how haiku works, and for situating it within the broader literary and intellectual tradition. Every time haiku is exclusively linked to glowing mysticism and esoteric spiritual language, an opportunity is missed—an opportunity to make the case for haiku as a rigorous literary art, one that takes craft and expertise with language, and that engages the most fundamental questions of human experience with uncommon economy and precision.
— Adam Graham
Works
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974.
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1996.
Gilbert, Richard. Poems of Consciousness: Contemporary Japanese and English-Language Haiku in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Red Moon Press, 2008.
Gurga, Lee and Scott Metz, Editors. Haiku 2015. Lincoln, IL: Modern Haiku Press, 2015.
Marshall, Ian. “Jouissance among the Kire: A Lacanian Approach to Haiku.” Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, thehaikufoundation.org/juxta/juxta-1-1/jouissance-among-the-kire-a-lacanian-approach-to-haiku/
Adam Graham is a professional artist based in Asheville’s River Arts District. A former educator, Adam brought his love of haiku into the classroom, using the form to sharpen his students’ attention to language and the living moment. His love of haiku reflects the same spirit of adventure and exploration that draws him to the mountains and trails of Western North Carolina. When he’s not in the studio or writing, you’ll likely find him somewhere outdoors.
At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 6 questions).
It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.
Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.
Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:
Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.
Introducing the hosts:
Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.
Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).
A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.
Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group. Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.
Comments: further discussion is invited below. Comments will close when this post is automatically archived.
A note on the comments: Once a discussion reaches more than 20 comments, we’ll use NEW tags🆕️ to make recent activity easier to follow. Keith and I will mark the latest comments so that readers who are following the conversations closely can quickly see where the discussion is currently active.
The tags are not personalized to individual readers; they simply indicate the most recent additions to the discussion. Because we’re doing this manually, there may sometimes be a delay before a new comment is tagged. Depending on how active a discussion is, we’ll generally mark the five most recent comments, and in more active discussions this may extend to the ten most recent.
The NEW tag🆕️ is a navigation aid, not an editorial judgment about the importance or quality of a comment.
THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.
If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator (the host of this post) or the President here.
Comments (0)