When Spinoza talks of desire in Ethics, he talks of it in terms of ‘affects’, which is his attempt to subsume human passion into the realm of that which is ‘natural’. Desire is, therefore, for Spinoza is more than appetite insofar as it is the recognition and consciousness of one’s appetite. Thus, Spinoza’s conception of desire is one that is the ‘human essence’ insofar as it presupposes a human consciousness (as human consciousness is, after all, the ‘essence’ of being human) to make it felt. Hence, Spinoza’s formulation of desire rests on the assumption that the human consciousness is extricable from, and indeed exists before, desire or else desire cannot be realized, always being ‘appetite’ without human consciousness.
Spinoza’s view fails
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Thus, Spinzo fails to account for the discrete cultural contexts in which desire is articulated and fails to critically analyse it as a product of power relations which make various types of desire possible while others become taboo.
Hence, for a more critical interpretation which accounts for the workings of desire in the formation of the consciousness, I shall turn to psychoanalysis (both Freudian and Lacanian). In his essay “On
Narcissism: An Introduction”, Freud talks about bodily pain and how it causes desire to withdraw from
‘love objects’, as he puts it. This ‘withdrawn’ desire is then reinvested in the body of the person. As feminist philosopher Judith Butler points out in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex,
Freud’s use of metaphor and analogy in his analysis of narcissism, especially when he continuously switches between talking about physical and imaginary pain, raises questions on what counts as the body itself. She argues that the body part comes into ones consciousness only after it is invested with libidinal desire, pointing out that Freud states in The Ego and The Id that it is only through the investment of desire into our organs that we become conscious of them (i.e., we know them