In our everyday lives, we constantly fall prey to imaginary lures which promise the healing of the original/constitutive wound of symbolization, from Woman with whom full sexual relationship will be possible to the totalitarian political ideal of a fully realized community. In contrast, the fundamental maxim of the ethics of desire is simply desire as such: one has to maintain desire in its dissatisfaction. What we have here is a kind of heroism of the lack: the aim of psychoanalytic cure is to induce the subject to heroically assume his constitutive lack, to endure the splitting which propels desire. A productive way out of this deadlock is provided by the possibility of sublimation: when one picks out an empirical, positive, object and "elevates it to the dignity of the Thing," i.e. turns it into a kind of stand-in for the impossible Thing, one thereby remains faithful to one's desire, without getting drawn into the deadly vortex of the Thing...

Slavoj Zizek, From Desire to Drive: Why Lacan is Not Lacaniano (1996)