Affiliation:
1. Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick
Abstract
Abstract
This chapter focuses on a fifty-year period (1933–1984), during which the question of desire took centre stage. At the heart of it lies the effort to question the Cartesian cogito as the root of human subjectivity, and to explore desire as a deeper layer of human experience. This crucial shift from the ‘I think’ to the ‘I desire’, which began with Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, took two fundamental and ultimately incompatible forms: a transcendent one, for which desire signals the presence of a lack, an absence, or something that is always to come; and an immanent one, which recognizes the essentially productive nature of desire, or its power of subjectivation, for better or for worse.