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Desiring Desire

How Desire makes us Human, all too Human

Anthony O’Shea

University of Sunderland, Tony.oshea{at}sunderland.ac.uk

This paper will consider three major conceptions of desire and how they relate to the human condition. For many desire is conceived either as lack, a ‘desire-for’, or as some affirmative force that enables us to ‘reach beyond ourselves’.This is desire reduced to a dualism in order to negate one pole in favour of the other. Georges Bataille offers a third way, where the two form a complex dialectic such that desire is both lack and affirmation. His theory demonstrates how desire reveals the sacred as a transcendental immanence rather than psychic ideal and where the profane follows rather than precedes the sacred. His desire is one that conceptualizes us as humans that occasionally catch glimpses of the sacred but these glimpses are insufficient to have and to hold it. For Bataille we cannot become God, we cannot have the sacred because we are human, all too human.

Key Words: desire • Georges Bataille • profane • sacred • transgression

Sociology, Vol. 36, No. 4, 925-940 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/003803850203600407
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