Reading Lacan, Part III

In which I attempt to dispel all the things I think I know about Lacan.

Once upon a time I took a class called Marx, Politics, and Theology at UVA. The professor asked us to please forget everything we thought we knew about Marx. All semester long, however, we kept slipping into some truisms about what Marx really meant or what he was trying to accomplish. He kept calling us on it. I found this activity very useful, so I sometimes try to externalize the things I think I know, in hopes that I can discard them if they don't turn up in the writing itself.

1) Lacan talked about something called the Mirror Stage, in which an infant recognizes its reflection in the mirror and can for the first time imagine its whole body, instead of merely seeing the separate parts visible to the eye.

I don't really think I know the implications of this, except what I've read elsewhere by people who are riffing on it.

2) Lacan made a distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
The Imaginary is connected to the Mirror stuff up above. The Real is reality, which we can't ever get to, because we constantly access it only through the veil of language or narrative--The Symbolic.

Again, I think this sounds pretty cool, but I don't really know what's at stake.

The big missing piece, the one I can't even put into a coherent sentence, is what Lacan thinks about Desire. I know it's an important word, one that will give his concepts some heft, but I don't know what he means by it.

So now, my goal is to try to ignore all this while I begin reading. Whenever I find myself trying to use these shards to build something, I pinch myself.