A Desire for What We are Not in Want of
Here is another approach to it: the thought that thinks more than it thinks is Desire. Such a desire is not the sublimated form of need, any more than the prelude to love. Need is a lack that awaits fulfillment; need is satisfied. Love wants union. The desire that one might call metaphysical is a desire for what we are not in want of, a desire that cannot be satisfied and that does not desire union with what it desires. It desires what the one who desires has no need of, what is not lacking and what the one who desires has no desire to attain, it being the very desire for what must remain inaccessible and foreign— a desire of the other as other, a desire that is austere, disinterested, without satisfaction, without nostalgia, unreturned, and without return.
~Maurice Blanchot
The Infinite Conversation ~ (Trans. Susan Hanson) ~ Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1993 / pg 53
