Désir de l’autre

If it were possible to read “désir de l’autre” less as a psychoanalytic mechanism and more as a formula to think about the ways in which one (impersonal) craves, wants, moves and is moved.

Of Spinoza one would retain the idea that desire (here the word in less important than the spectrum to which it refers: will, drive, push, conatus) is perseverance in being.

This force of perseverance has a tautological kernel, one (again impersonal, not a subject but a situation) desires to desire.

This tautology, what in other epochs has been named the “aesthetic”, cannot be disjointed from capitalism as a form of constant increased accumulation (M-C-M1).

The enactment, emplotment, efficacy of the tautology of desire works by the formula “désir de l’autre.”

A poem can only be desire when it is desire of the other.

As a footnote, other should be read an-other, just one (indeterminate, a) among many others. Does it matter which one? Yes because it so happens to be that one and not another. No because any other would work under certain circumstances.

One desires a poem an other desires. one cannot but desire an other, or rather, the desire of an other.

Here the tautology reappears but as a mechanism, as a transition, a transaction. That poetry itself is the sign and the matter of this transaction, makes it clearer that this transaction is the site of a mediation.

The erasure of mediation, and thus the end of the tautological force, might be the end of the poem, both in the sense that it makes the poem end, but also that it is its scope, its telos, that towards which it strives.