Desire is not driven by the optimisation of freedom of an enlarged self although something like this appears in the mirage that it projects. In the satisfaction of desire, however, there can be a kind of ecstasy which intimates that its source is in our original nature. There is a standing apart from the entire process of life as it has been experiences up to that point, leaving it intact but disengaged; we are disengaged from it, untouchable, all the polyphonic participation of the finite predicament is lifted into aesthetic enjoyment, where sensation is an end in itself. In such a state it is easy to feel as if we are more true, and generally there is no other, the other essential to eliciting the state having collapsed into the enlarged and mirage-like self. This fullness of satisfaction seems an immature and narcissistic form of religious experience. The resulting dialectic of desire thus circles around the origin of consciousness or of being as located in the mind. Formations come about, born of the surprising intensity of certain acts, which unfold their own kind of topology, laying out cardinal directions which relativise subject, object and mediation, developing thought which is more or less true to this formation and to its overturning. Formations succeed each other in endless variety and we assume that these are all states of the same self, never wholly given in any of them. The idea of the quest for this self arises, an infinite quest since there are only ever disparate fragments reflecting the endless reflexivity of the mind, like pieces of a puzzle that never add up. Each state has its own version of what the self is for it, versions immanent to the mental world, but projected into some impossible priority of self-reflection. Impossibility fascinates, fascination is identification, and identification is subjectification. As against this there is only the slow and difficult development of discrimination of mind from self.

Motives and desires go through a filter or transformation in being thought about and deliberated upon whose character is approximately that of the categorical imperative. 'I' in consideration becomes 'one', which is always a 'one' of all; the perspective from here is only understood in a geometry in which each point is also the origin of a perspective from there, as an objective event seen from here and from everywhere else. The element of wilfulness is much attenuated after such treatment and in fact the original and its transform are present to us side by side, tactically interchangeable, the military and political wings of desire. On the other hand objects of desire are only constituted in being spoken and so there is no unmediated desire, the distinction or polarity being within the political context, between avowable and unavowable desires, while the very line between these is itself subject to continual renegotiation both privately and more significantly within the culture. These form part of an interdependent system, which is not aimed at grand satisfactions so much as at its own stability. Desires are expendable, they die in being met, but the point is to not lack further desires, the desire to keep desiring is perhaps not desire in the original sense, but arises so that the process can be kept in motion. It requires only a further slight shift in the logic by which objects of desire are conceived, as if we agree to a substitution or a deferral, that I seek not the unsubstitutable bliss of my true nature but the achievement of that goal by a one, or a we, by myself as an instance. To awaken is to realise freedom from the matrix of desire born from the oneness of the subject and its categorical imperative.

To know how it is, or for the mind to have stood there, to have placed its footprints on this piece of country, so that the mental gyrations of the knower are just vagaries of the wilful subject. He felt the falseness of his citizenship in the world dedicated to knowing, to the great knowing project, when he belonged to the greater commonality, the largest and least distinguished tribe, the world of willing and feeling. Truth was cold and he was burning, and all he knew was the politics of warmth. To will, or in its primitive form, to want, was the first experience. Out of the background of wanting without any object or agency the formations of body and mind begin to crystallise, one seizes upon breathing before there is a one. It develops with great vehemence but without any choice and by the time it glimmers consciously it is already the proof of an 'I', its need and fantasm of proof. To be a creature of will is to aspire to impose ones unprecedented recognition on a prior world, it is to be an imposter in paradise, to thrust oneself forward and compel recognition. This is the fundamental carnivorousness of the will, to extract energy and life from what was already energy and life and complete without one; and again to yield up that life, or some of it, with the appropriate grimaces or smiles in accordance with the rules of exchange that you have embraced. All of this lay crudely exposed a little way beneath the surface, and it was not denial or repression which transformed it into the respectable narratives of motives and objects and relations which was the equal currency of inner and outer worlds, but its finer development, the stabilisation and interference of rays of intention which had barely diverged from their common origin.

He could on occasions mistake another's face for his own face, which remained unseen, or at least unstudied by him. Every other was at times, or always, a certain person and the presence of such a one in a common space was in every case the assertion of a kind of private empire. They drew the world around themselves. They are there in the pursuit of a purpose, they carry their history and their ancestry along with them, and there is something inviolable about it even when it seems wholly conventional. Call it for simplicity an energetic signature, and it was, as it turned out, the only way he identified himself in the space of his mind, so it was no surprise when it showed up out there, perfectly exemplified in the breathing world, in a face, in a fleeting look. Sometimes it is easiest to understand the tap root of another's persistence by considering them the expression of the will of their parents and grandparents, of all the dead that trail behind them, forming a sort of ethical substance. There are things held sacred, things they would kill for, or if not them, since they espouse a thoroughly modern relativism and humanism and don't own up to or acknowledge such fealties, their fierce ancestors, bound to them by blood. Each relationship demands the sacrifice of a quantity of futurity, which may be a willing sacrifice, but the locus from which it is initiated may not be clear, may be neither the sacrificer nor the recipient. What if I meet you and willingly pledge all of my future to you? How can I know who you are before this happens? There is a teleology in purpose and in desire, one that goes beyond avowable ends. What are the minimal conditions for a situation to command a teleology?

Consider the identification with a character in a movie - could you say, 'I didn't mistake myself for this character, but the character mistook itself for me'? This is especially curious, since the desire to investigate it is the very desire of just such a character. Does this illuminate what is known as negation? It is not the holding of two contradictory positions at once, but two contradictory propositions that are expressions of exactly the same position. I do not mistake myself for a character - this is 'I'and it has nothing to do with any character all of whom are shadow puppets in the objective - but the object in order to emerge into self-awareness, to have inner motives and such, must be lent some kind of life. So, in so far as the character lives, it lives out of my life, its self is my self, cannot be any other, and so you could say that it identifies with me. This same logic can be applied to the everyday presentation of the world, or to its worlding, which is both utter transparency, allergic to content, and at the same time full and intimate embodiment, the functioning of form in a world of form. This odd asymmetric identification is the nature of the body. To think, 'But I have only ever known this body' - no, that's not right, it's only the body talking, with borrowed energy, fashioning all the notions of a particular, private, enduring essence.

In order to fully perceive the actions of others we create simulations in our minds of the same action as it would be if we ourselves were doing it. This enables us to feel the action internally and thus to prepare the nervous potentials required for repeating or mimicking the same action. This is a fairly well-accepted picture of an efficient computational matrix for a trait with obvious evolutionary advantages when present in a certain degree. A simpler way of describing it is to say that we perceive actions via our kinaesthetic body. It then becomes clear that we perceive more than the actions of others in this way and that our entire orientation in the spatio-temporal world of physical objects is mediated by such a body in complex ways that are more subtle than mere mirroring. The architectural and decorative arts doubtless provide many examples of this. If this way of thinking of a kinaesthetic body is accepted then why not extend it to other sorts of internal bodies such as a thought body, a feeling body and a will body, as well as an energetic body. There is thus a subjective sense of high neural engagement in that we are peripherally aware of how much work our brains are doing to construe complete immersive realities, the quantum of work seeming to bear a geometric relationship to the number of polyphonic perceptual tracks. Here work may be exhausting but it is also stimulating; we crave and greatly enjoy high engagement and only belatedly notice that it has tired us out, but with a good kind of tiredness. Again, through the will-body we are opened to a world of competing wills, it is the world of the warrior and the hunter in a very general sense. It also mediates the kind of perception with which we enjoy sports and games and with which we throw ourselves into political and ideological struggles. To be immersed in the world is to have a polyphonic or multi-layered body fully engaged on all levels, so that the body and the world lack any clear demarcation. The two are phenomenologically as different as can be since the body says I in the teeth of the world, but the boundary between them is mobile.

It is not hard, following the clues in grammar and once one has seen the trick performed elsewhere, to find seams or splits in the structure of consciousness such as are normally concealed behind its definitive singleness and simplicity. These can arise in temporal or spatial dimensions, but also in more abstract dimensions such as the conative, causal and inter-subjective - even to attempt to name them is to suggest new ones. But a split in consciousness is not merely a distinction, it is a dialectical complex with a peculiar knotted topology which can neither be resolved not even properly pictured; it is re-entrant, but it returns or reflects back to itself with a twist or modification that is no less complex than the entire structure itself. In other words, the identical knottedness exists in the meta-structure as in the structure, and so on as far as one can go - since what is being modeled is nothing but this very meta-. It is quite possible that none of this has anything to do with consciousness, which is in fact so utterly single and simple that it entirely escapes notice, the resulting forms are not even what fascinates and lures it. Consciousness is not fascinated by anything, but these structures of mind believing that they have lured consciousness merely strive to fascinate themselves. Be that as it may, a lot of ink is spilled elaborating these notions with more or less skill and audacity and for a variety of ends. What they have in common seems to be the idea of trying to alter a system in which one is always already compromised, in fact a system in which one is helplessly subsumed and from which the only hope of escape arises not from an original will to freedom but from the necessary incompleteness or better, the failed completeness, hardly subtle, of the system itself.