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Title: Notes on Desire
Author: David Graeber
Date: 2012
Language: en
Topics: notes, desire
Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/desire/

David Graeber

Notes on Desire

David Graeber: The idea that alienation is a bad thing is a modernist

problem. Most philosophical movements—and, by extension, social

movements—actually embrace alienation. You’re trying to achieve a state

of alienation. That’s the ideal if you’re a Buddhist or an early

Christian, for example; alienation is a sign that you understand

something about the reality of the world.

So perhaps what’s new with modernity is that people feel they shouldn’t

be alienated. Colin Campbell wrote a book called The Romantic Ethic and

the Spirit of Modern Consumerism [1987], in which he argued that

modernity has introduced a genuinely new form of hedonism. Hedonism is

no longer just getting the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll or whatever but

it’s become a matter of selling new fantasies so that you’re always

imagining the thing you want. The object of desire is just an excuse, a

pretext, and that’s why you’re always disappointed when you get it.

Campbell’s argument makes total sense when you first read it. But in

fact, again, it’s backward. If you look at history—at, say, medieval

theories of desire—it’s utterly assumed that what you desire is—

Michelle Kuo: God.

DG: Or courtly love, yes. But whatever it ultimately is, the idea that

by seizing the object of your desire you would resolve the issue was

actually considered a symptom of melancholia. The fantasies themselves

are the realization of desire. So by that logic, what Campbell describes

is not a new idea. What’s actually new is the notion that you should be

able to resolve desire by attaining the object. Perhaps what’s new is

the fact that we think there’s something wrong with alienation, not that

we experience it. By most medieval perspectives, our entire civilization

is thus really a form of clinical depression. [laughter]

— “Another World: Michelle Kuo Talks with David Graeber” in Artforum

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Insofar as it is useful to distinguish something called “desire” from

needs, urges, or intentions, then, it is because desire:

is always rooted in imagination

tends to direct itself towards some kind of social relation, real or

imaginary

that social relation generally entails a desire for some kind of

recognition and, hence, an imaginative reconstruction of the self; a

process fraught with dangers of destroying that social relation, or

turning it into some kind of terrible conflict

— David Graeber, “Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and

Desire”