aww thanks for the kind words! i think if you pressed me to justify that phrasing more rigorously, i'd probably say i'm only sure it's true in the most literal sense -- ie, desire is transitive; it requires an object, and objects must be something you can represent at least to yourself and probably also to others in your mind. an intransitive desire is something else: longing? pain? melancholy? so there's political work, i think, in being able to turn longings into desires proper. some of this language is coming out of me having to re-read Kant for a chunk of my dissertation, who has a whole cognitive system where he makes careful distinctions between mental faculties like your faculty of receiving sensory information, your faculty of re-presenting that sensory information in your head when its object is absent, your rational ability to turn that sensory information into a concept that is shareable with others, etc. these are the kinds of philosophical distinctions i'm glad to have a platform where i don't have to bore people with them and can write a little more loosely, haha!
aww thanks for the kind words! i think if you pressed me to justify that phrasing more rigorously, i'd probably say i'm only sure it's true in the most literal sense -- ie, desire is transitive; it requires an object, and objects must be something you can represent at least to yourself and probably also to others in your mind. an intransitive desire is something else: longing? pain? melancholy? so there's political work, i think, in being able to turn longings into desires proper. some of this language is coming out of me having to re-read Kant for a chunk of my dissertation, who has a whole cognitive system where he makes careful distinctions between mental faculties like your faculty of receiving sensory information, your faculty of re-presenting that sensory information in your head when its object is absent, your rational ability to turn that sensory information into a concept that is shareable with others, etc. these are the kinds of philosophical distinctions i'm glad to have a platform where i don't have to bore people with them and can write a little more loosely, haha!