Desire is an emotion in the present for something that exists in the future.
When I met Sarah, I desired her. The person, the life we would have together, the family we would share, I desired it all. And we set out to do all the things.
When Sarah was expecting our first child, Cassidy, we spent nine months having all sorts of new and interesting conversations; what type of parent do you want to be? What type of life do you want to live? How big do you want our family to become? And with our second, Patrick; what type of family do we want to become? What type of world do we want to leave our children?
These are conversations loaded with desire.
This is a well-worn path of human experience. Desire is a potent emotion that propels us through life, moving us to pursue goals, a person, an object, or an ideal. It may be ignited internally or inspired externally.
In her book What IS Sex?, Alenka Zupančič explores the Lacanian notion that we can get the same satisfaction that we get from sex from any number of activities, like talking, writing, or painting. She argues that sexuality is a short circuit between the ontological (how we exist in the world) and epistemology (how we know the world), meaning that sexuality and knowledge are symbiotic, interconnected in complex ways.
This implies that desire (as a component of sexuality) is not just a biological or personal feeling, but something that interacts with our understanding of existence (ontology) and our acquisition of knowledge (epistemology). It also suggests that our desires can influence, and be influenced by, our understanding of the world and ourselves.
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