Identifying as the owner of our purposes raises the question of which comes first. Is the content, some mind or body stuff, already purposive before we identify, before it is assumed by a consciousness, or does it become purposive only after we take, or put, it on, as if we are a pure searching that falls into the first mirror that offers, falling in with the first thing that promises us an adequate, but finally inadequate, definition? But then this question depends on the idea of identification. It is not so much that we are unable to give a clear account of identification as that, like self, it seems to be a name for something which we can only discover and unfold in the living of it. Dreams and fiction are laboratories of identification, but if the realisation of their potential depends on the possibility of standing outside their effects, while simultaneously indulging in them, then they seem to have largely failed. Insofar as a socially saturated world is read, or effectively perceived by one traversing it by means of fleeting identifications, it is possible to see some of what is going on. Here identification seems to name a force of attraction, a sort of gravitational force drawing one in to another. There is a very tiny moment in reading a face when there is only you and that other, and then you are them. This happens so fast that it can't be thought. And here oddly enough it is the attraction, in this case a small part of the coherent world of desire, that clearly comes first. The other is only seen, only comes into focus, by way of desire.