place for him the world. No such assurance is ever enough, because every assurance is both ambiguous and revocable. Even if we can accumulate enough of scarce material resources, we can never get enough of the even scarcer immaterial ones. What is given to one man is taken from another, so that we find ourselves in a circumstance of perpetual dissatisfaction. Only love, freely given but easily destroyed, could free us for a while from this endless yearning.
A fourth root of the insatiability of desire is that we seek, in the satisfaction of our desires, not just to rid ourselves of the pains and privations to which they refer but also to supply a response to both death and groundlessness. A man may seek to become rich because he cannot become immortal or because he cannot find any more reliable grounding for his existence. This ceaseless metonymy, this trading of the ultimate for the homely, is bound to disappoint him.
There is a common element in these sources of insatiability. We cannot access the absolute, the unconditional, the unlimited. Therefore, we try to get it from the limited. We are unable to convince ourselves that, despite our mortality and our groundlessness, everything is all right. Therefore, we use whatever material and immaterial resources we are able to obtain to compensate for the fundamental defects in life that we are powerless to redress. We can never achieve enough acceptance from one another. Therefore, each of us continues the hunt for more tokens of assurance that there is an unconditional place for him in the world. We cannot restrict our strivings to a limited set of objects and goals. Therefore, we walk a treadmill of desire, satisfaction, boredom, and new desire, and take from others the cues that we are never adequately able to give ourselves.
The result is exposure to a free-floating 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 often served as devices by which we cast a spell on ourselves the better to free ourselves from the sufferings of insatiability. From them we garner 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 human desires: their indeterminacy in comparison to the desires of other animals. This negativity influences 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 unfixed, inclusive, and roaming quality.
The emptiness of desire appears under two main aspects: it is mimetic (to use René Girard’s term), and it is projected (to use Karl Rahner’s term). The 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 filled up by other people. To a large extent, we desire what those around us desire. Their desires contaminate us; they take us over. This takeover establishes a basis for both competition and cooperation, according to both the content 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 surrender 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.” There is no making of selves without connection in every domain of our existence, and there is no connection, 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.
This conflicted relation both to the others and to the organized contexts of life and of thought takes place in the midst of a struggle for the fulfillment of our desires, desires that we discover to be not really ours. They came to us largely from the influence of others. Unless we can somehow criticize these borrowed desires, change them, and make them ours, our ambivalence to other people and our resistance to the context are powerless to free and to empower us. Therefore 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. This confusion enters into the experience of insatiability and endows it with its tortured and desperate quality.
It is widely believed that these complications are the result of a historically specific set of developments in society and culture, associated with the ascendancy of democratic, liberal, and romantic ideals in some societies over the last few centuries. The 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. The prophetic voice in politics and in culture would fall on deaf ears if it failed to find an ally in the innermost recesses 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 immediate and manifest object. This something beyond shares in the quality of the unlimited, the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite. Thus, 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 indirection, mistaking it for something tangible and accessible, the proximate and visible object of our longing. Thus, 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 capricious 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 particular objects of desire, and of the habits and routines surrounding their pursuit, to hold our interest by engaging our capabilities. In every quarter, the phenomenology of desire bears the mark of our insatiability and reveals its connection with our powers of transcendence, with our longing for the infinite.
The projected quality of desire shows, as well, how our insatiability relates to our mortality and our groundlessness. The brevity of life lends urgency to the pursuits of desire: our time will end while we continue to seek one unworthy object after another, each the proxy for the unreachable horizon of that which could satisfy us. The terrors of death grow in the imagination with the expenditure of life on this equivocal chase.
Our uncertainty about the grounding of our existence (or rather the failure of all the available proposals to ground it) leaves us without a route by which to go from the tangible and defective particulars that we can grasp to the intangible and indiscriminate absolute that we voicelessly seek.
We have not understood our insatiability until we have formed a view of whether and under what conditions we might overcome it. In describing insatiability as an incurable defect in the human condition, I mean to claim that we cannot escape it, not at least without prejudice to the attributes that make us human and that might make us more human by making us more godlike.
Consider first the suggestion that in certain societies and cultures men and women cease to experience desire as insatiable. Insatiability would then be a local rather than a universal feature of human experience. Those who study savage societies from the vantage point of the ideas that have been dominant in modern anthropology often represent those societies as marked by a theology of immanence and a pragmatics of sufficiency.
The theology of immanence, in contrast to the spiritual beliefs that have been dominant since the religious revolutions of the first millennium B.C., places the sacred or the divine squarely within the natural as well as the social world. It thus provides no basis for a personal or impersonal divinity transcending what is manifest in this world in which we find ourselves. If our insatiability has theological or cosmological presuppositions, these presuppositions are denied by such a view of the world.
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