Desire

The simplest formulation: desire is "appetite for something generated by social prohibition." But this requires unpacking. The prohibition is not an external constraint placed on pre-existing desire. The prohibition constitutes desire. Before the originary scene, there is appetite — the animal drive toward food, toward the desirable object. After the originary scene, there is desire — appetite shaped by the recognition that others share it, that taking would trigger violence, that the object is not mine to take. That recognition is the prohibition; the shaped appetite is desire.

Desire and the sign. The originary sign is the deferral of desire, not its satisfaction. This is crucial: the sign does not give you the object; it substitutes for the act of taking the object. Desire persists through the sign — it is transformed by it, given a shared orientation, directed toward a center rather than toward the object's immediate appropriation. The sign converts desire from a force that converges on the object to a force that circulates around the center.

Mimetic desire. Desire is mimetic — we desire what others desire. This is not a contingent fact about human psychology but the structural outcome of the originary scene. Every participant desired the central object because every other participant desired it. The object's desirability is constituted by the shared orientation toward it, not by its intrinsic properties. This is why desire is so difficult to satisfy: the object of desire is always partly the desire of others, which cannot be possessed.

Aesthetics and desire. Katz follows Gans in defining the aesthetic as the oscillation between desire and deferral — the pleasure of approaching the desired object without the violence of appropriating it. Art is the cultural institution that converts desire into the sustained deferral of the aesthetic: you can have the object in imagination, can circle it indefinitely, can approach it asymptotically, without the crisis of actual appropriation. This is why art has a civilizing function: it channels desire into forms that do not threaten the center.

Desire and resentment. Every desire that cannot be satisfied — every desire whose object is permanently in the possession of another, or permanently occupied by the center — generates resentment. Resentment is the structural consequence of desire under conditions of scarcity and hierarchy. The question is not how to eliminate resentment but how to convert it from destructive (aimed at demolishing the center) to productive (aimed at generating the disciplines that make center-approach possible).