beyond wishful thinking 19new desire, and take from others the cues that we are never adequately
able to give ourselves.
Th e result is exposure to a free- fl oating anguish that it has been
the aim of much of religion, philosophy, and art to quiet. Speculative
thought and religious practice, enlisted in the cause of self- help, have
oft en served as devices by which we cast a spell on ourselves the better
to free ourselves from the suff erings of insatiability. From them we gar-
ner the stories about the cosmos and our lives within it that make the
spell seem to be a reception of the deepest truths about the world.
At the center of the experience of insatiability lies the emptiness of hu-
man desires: their indeterminacy in comparison to the desires of other
animals. Th is negativity infl uences even those drives— for food and for
sex— that most clearly tie us to the rest of the animal world but that, in
the human being, have an unfi xed, inclusive, and roaming quality.
Th e emptiness of desire appears under two main aspects: it is mi-
metic (to use René Girard’s term), and it is projected (to use Karl Rahn-
er’s term). Th e preceding discussion has already suggested how each of
these traits of desire plays a part in the genealogy of insatiable desire.
Together, they help clarify the nature of our insatiability.
Because our desires are empty, the void will be fi lled up by other
people. To a large extent, we desire what those around us desire. Th eir
desires contaminate us; they take us over. Th is takeover establishes a
basis for both competition and cooperation, according to both the con-
tent of what is desired and the range of social alternatives available
for its pursuit.
If we failed to resist the imitative character of desire, even as we sur-
render to it, we would not be the context- shaped but context- transcending
individuals who we are. We would not be the beings whose relations to
one another are shadowed by an inescapable ambivalence because they
seek connection without subjugation and who understand, however
darkly, that “imitation is suicide.” Th ere is no making of selves without
connection in every domain of our existence, and there is no connec-
tion, in any realm of experience, without the risk of loss of self. “Accept
me but make me free” is what every human being says to another.
Th is confl icted relation both to the others and to the or ga nized con-
texts of life and of thought takes place in the midst of a struggle for the