20 beyond wishful thinking
fulfi llment of our desires, desires that we discover to be not really ours.
Th ey came to us largely from the infl uence of others. Unless we can
somehow criticize these borrowed desires, change them, and make
them ours, our ambivalence to other people and our re sis tance to the
context are powerless to free and to empower us. Th erefore it is not only
to other people that we are ambivalent; it is also to our own desires
because they are ours and not ours. Th is confusion enters into the ex-
perience of insatiability and endows it with its tortured and desperate
quality.
It is widely believed that these complications are the result of a his-
torically specifi c set of developments in society and culture, associated
with the ascendancy of demo cratic, liberal, and romantic ideals in
some societies over the last few centuries. Th e truth, however, is closer
to being the opposite: it is the power of these fundamental experiences
of the self, which no regime of society and culture can entirely override
or suppress, that accounts for the irresistible seductions of these forms of
life and consciousness. Th e prophetic voice in politics and in culture
would fall on deaf ears if it failed to fi nd an ally in the innermost re-
cesses of the self.
Desire is projected as well as mimetic. It is projected in a twofold
sense. On the one hand, it always yearns for something beyond its im-
mediate and manifest object. Th is something beyond shares in the
quality of the unlimited, the unconditional, the absolute, the infi nite.
Th us, desire is projected in the sense that it projects forward beyond its
visible horizon. On the other hand, however, the something beyond
remains remote and obscure. We approach it, almost always, by indi-
rection, mistaking it for something tangible and accessible, the proxi-
mate and visible object of our longing. Th us, desire is projected in the
sense that we project the hidden absolute onto a manifest, contingent,
and all- too- particular object.
In obsession and addiction, the disproportionate and even capri-
cious bond between the hidden horizon of the unlimited and the paltry
surrogate for it becomes extreme and paradoxical. It is, however, only
the limiting case of a pervasive feature of the life of desire. In boredom,
we experience directly the failure of the par tic u lar objects of desire,
and of the habits and routines surrounding their pursuit, to hold our
interest by engaging our capabilities. In every quarter, the phenome-