The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime can be carried over in a rough way to desire. Some desires, the beautiful ones, emerge from appetites, where an appetite is the aim to appropriate something already felt to be good, an adjunction in the positive sense, positive and inherently optional. If they are felt as increasing us they must be felt as increasing our freedom as well, since they lend us more of being in confirming it. Such appetites may lead to addictions, and hence to a negative kind of adjunction, a drastic loss of optionality, but to do so they must begin positively and in seeming to increase the self deform it into new and sinister figures. The other kind of desire is that whose effects famously described in Sappho 31, and cited by Longinus, is something that was never sought, but which destroys the self from the very outset. Here, what becomes compelling in the emotion is not anything gained through the process of experiencing it but its power to destroy the very nexus of gain and optionality, of the experience of an experiencer. Are the two modes of desire really all that different, one attacking frontally and the other from behind, or below? Each has its own way of being deadly, and each its own more or less subtle self-conceit.