Desire and the City: The Freedom and Tyranny of Being Human

ABSTRACT For Freud, all desire is sexual desire. That includes the desire to know, philosophia, erotic love sublimated into the love of wisdom. Yet, as Nietzsche notes, the origin of such desire was, “like the beginning of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.” If all desire is, in some sense, erotic, all desire is also sadistic; even the most sublimated of desires is at bottom a desire for cruelty. It was in order to constrain human desire, insatiable, oppressive, cruel, that our ancestors instituted the first laws and created the first society. Yet one form of desire—female desire—is still felt by society to pose a serious threat. In this work, I examine the tension that exists between desire and civilization, the philosopher and the city, with the hope of better understanding what it means to live as sexual beings in community with others.