Desire satisfies the requirement for identity without solving it, rather it feeds it. When you want something you no longer need wonder who you are to want it, whether you are entitled to it or not, the desire seems to be self-founding. You cannot be alienated from your desire, only from the desirer within you who assumes it - Jekyll and Hyde, for example; the self can be split far more easily than desire which being conditioned by imagination is subject to non-contradiction, or non-synthesis. My wanting overrides everything else and the entire world is simplified in accordance with it; there is a cognitive component to desire which lags behind and never fully succeeds in aligning the world to it - it inherits the contradictions that desire thoughtlessly strews. Love, in the romantic sense is touted as a complete resolution of the problem of identity via a mutual election, but this is a sublimated form of desire, a wild but predictable concretisation of metaphors, and taken by itself is subject to all of the same shortcomings, opacity, dependence on imagination, non-contradiction. We are born without an identity but with a pure and open sense of self. As this is lost identity arises from the resulting insecurity and it expands and evolves over the course of the life until it is shredded and cast off as death approaches. Proximity to death produces a restoration of self, even if only momentary, and a corresponding reduction in the anxious need for an identity to fill its place. The course of life is a weaving in and out of a sense of self and a sense of identity, the two belonging to entirely different dimensions of being.