1 Desire Is Not Possession, but Orientation
Desire is often spoken of as if it were a hunger: a private lack that seeks satisfaction in an object. In everyday speech, we “want something,” “yearn for it,” “try to get it,” “have it,” or “lose it.” The grammar of possession saturates our metaphors of desire. But what if this is not the most helpful way to think about wanting?
This series proposes an alternative: that desire is not a form of ownership, but a form of orientation — a way of being turned toward the world, entangled with it, directed through it.
In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), mental processes — the processes of consciousness — are classified into types. One such type is the desiderative, including verbs like want, wish, hope, fear, long for, and believe in. These are not descriptions of inner containers of emotion. They are projections: the speaker positions themselves toward a possible future or state of affairs. To desire is to mean — not just about the world, but toward it.
When a child says “I want to be an astronaut,” they are not expressing a transaction with a future object. They are articulating a stance toward the world — one of openness, aspiration, and alignment with certain values. That desire orients them. It brings parts of the world into relevance (rockets, stars, exploration) while backgrounding others. Over time, that orientation may be reinforced or redirected. The child may become a physicist or a teacher or a poet. But the initial desire was not a failed possession. It was a direction taken — a line of flight.
This shift from possession to orientation is crucial for a relational ontology. It allows us to see desire as something fundamentally ecological. We are not sealed units pursuing self-contained goals. We are situated beings, always already interwoven with contexts, histories, and others. Our desires emerge not from inner voids, but from our participation in a world that is already meaningful — and always becoming more so.
When we treat desire as possession, we often reduce it to commodity: “I want this thing.” But when we recognise desire as orientation, we begin to ask: “What kind of world am I aligning with? Who else is affected by this orientation? What does this desire make possible — or impossible?”
To desire is to lean. To angle oneself. To feel the pull of something not yet realised. In this view, even unfulfilled desire is not failure; it is trajectory.
In the posts to come, we will explore how desire participates in world-making, how it is patterned by language, how myth expresses collective longing, and how to cultivate a more ethical stance of wanting-with.
2 Desire as World-Making
Desire is not just something we feel — it is something we do. And in doing it, we help bring worlds into being.
The metaphor of desire as lack has long dominated Western thought. From Plato’s eros to Freud’s drive theory, desire is imagined as a deficit to be filled. But if we approach desire as orientation rather than possession, a different ontology emerges: desire becomes a generative force. It is not the shadow of what-is-missing, but the movement of what-is-becoming.
To desire is to make selections: from the endless flow of experience, we highlight, foreground, and follow certain paths. These selections are not neutral. They form patterns of attention, care, memory, and meaning. Desire links objects, people, places, and possibilities into constellations. These constellations shape not only how we see the world, but what the world becomes.
This is why desire is never private. Even our most solitary longings are saturated with the social: shaped by language, culture, history, and ideology. When I say “I want,” I am already participating in meaning systems that predate me and extend beyond me. My desire is mine only in the sense that it is my way of orienting through our shared world.
In this sense, desire is performative. It helps enact the realities it projects. When a community desires freedom, dignity, or justice, it is not simply naming what it lacks — it is constructing the horizon toward which it moves. The same is true of desire for wealth, power, or purity. Desire doesn’t just express a world; it helps institute one.
This is most visible in collective narratives. Myths, ideologies, spiritual traditions, even branding campaigns — all shape desire by telling stories of what is worth wanting. They offer orientations: toward salvation, success, belonging, transcendence, or transformation. And in orienting ourselves within these stories, we contribute to their ongoing enactment.
This is world-making — not in the sense of solipsistic fantasy, but in the deeply relational sense that meaning and reality are always co-constituted. What we desire matters, because it matters materially: desire directs action, binds communities, configures values, and inflects possibility.
We live in the worlds our desires help sustain.
In the next post, we’ll explore how this plays out in language, especially through the grammar of desiderative mental processes. But for now, let us pause and ask:
What kind of world is your desire making possible?
3 The Grammar of Desire
If desire is a way of orienting toward the world, then language is one of its most powerful instruments. Not because language represents desire, but because it enacts it. And like all enactments, it has a grammar — a set of patterned ways in which desire is construed and made real in meaning.
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers us a useful lens. In this model, meaning is shaped by processes, each type bringing its own ontological commitments. Among these are mental processes, which are concerned with the inner life of consciousness. These divide into two major subtypes:
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Cognitive: thinking, knowing, perceiving
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Desiderative: wanting, hoping, fearing, longing
Where cognitive processes tend to project propositions — statements about what is or might be — desiderative processes tend to project proposals. They construe what ought to be, or what is wished for, feared, sought, or resisted.
In other words, cognition aligns with probability; desire aligns with obligation and inclination. And this distinction is not only grammatical — it is ontological. Knowing and wanting are not simply different acts of mind; they are different ways of participating in the unfolding of meaning.
Consider:
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I know she’ll come (projection of a likely proposition)
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I hope she’ll come (projection of a wished-for proposal)
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I want her to come (projection of a desired outcome)
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I fear she’ll come (projection of an unwanted possibility)
Each of these projects a different relation between self and world. The subject is not static, but dynamically involved in shaping — or resisting — the potential actualisation of meaning.
What this tells us is profound: desire is not just a content of thought; it is a semiotic relation. It positions the subject toward the possible. It is a kind of leaning-into the world, through language, shaping not only what is said, but what is pursued, avoided, imagined, or enacted.
The grammar of desire thus gives us access to its social life. For while desire often feels deeply personal, it is always already public — expressed in genres, echoed in clichés, institutionalised in rituals, entangled in systems. Even the way we say “I want” is shaped by norms and narratives far beyond our control.
And this matters. Because if we learn to read the grammar of desire, we can begin to recognise how we are positioned — and how we might reposition ourselves and others. We can begin to ask not only what we desire, but how that desire is structured, and who it serves.
In the next post, we’ll pursue this line of thought into the domain of myth and belief — not as failures of knowledge, but as projects of affective commitment. What are we really doing when we believe in something?
4 Belief and the Affect of Commitment
What does it mean to believe in something?
Not just to believe that something is true — as one might believe that the Earth orbits the sun, or that tomorrow it will rain — but to invest oneself in a proposition as a matter of affective commitment. This kind of belief — the in kind — is not primarily cognitive, but desiderative. It is not about verification, but about orientation. It is not a claim about what is, but a gesture toward what matters.
And that makes it a different kind of act entirely.
To believe in justice, in love, in an afterlife, or in a mythic figure — these are not statements waiting for falsification. They are semiotic investments, alignments of the self with a world that is not fully present, but powerfully imagined. They are expressions of desire: to hope, to belong, to be vindicated, to resist despair.
In this sense, belief is a mode of world-making. It projects not the probable, but the desirable; not the actual, but the aspirational. And it does so not merely at the individual level, but across collective life. Myths, rituals, symbols, and shared narratives function as technologies of belief, drawing communities into participation with imagined orders.
We might say, then, that myth is not failed science, but a different kind of knowing — one that binds affect to meaning. Not knowledge about the world, but knowledge with and through the world, as experienced by those who live within its semiotic textures.
To say “I believe in God” or “I believe in love” is not to offer a hypothesis. It is to position oneself toward a value, and to dwell there. It is to enact a certain kind of self-relation and world-relation — one marked by commitment, vulnerability, and continuity. Even when such beliefs are not epistemically justified, they are ethically meaningful.
That is why belief in this sense cannot be reduced to credulity or illusion. It is not naïve cognition, but affective alignment. It may indeed be wrong in factual terms, but it can still be right in relational ones. The question, then, is not always “Is it true?” but “What is made possible by this believing-with?”
To believe in something is to live toward it — to hold space for it in one's semiotic horizon. And that changes everything.
In the next post, we will explore how such desires and beliefs implicate us in ethical relations, and how the act of wanting is never neutral — but always already entangled with the lives of others.
5 Desire and the Lives of Others
Desire is never solitary.
Even when it feels like the most intimate expression of our inner life — a longing, a wish, a hope — it is already shaped by our relations with others. We come to want not simply through personal inclinations, but through shared imaginaries, inherited grammars, and relational attunements. Desire is, in this sense, always co-constituted.
This is not just a sociological point; it’s an ontological one. If the world is not made up of discrete entities but of relations, then our wanting is itself a kind of becoming-with. Every desire takes shape within a landscape of others — human and nonhuman, present and absent, remembered and imagined.
And so, we must ask: Whose life does our desire depend on? And whose life does it affect?
To want something is not neutral. It implicates us in the lives of others, because what we want often demands something of the world — its resources, its attention, its compliance. When we want to be recognised, supported, admired, believed — these desires make claims on others. Even the desire to be left alone is a relational move, marked by withdrawal rather than engagement.
If we are to take desire seriously, then, we must begin to see its ethical dimension. This means asking not just what we want, but how we want — and with whom. It means becoming attuned to the affective costs of our wanting, and to the structures of exclusion or extraction that our desires may unconsciously participate in.
Much of the violence in the world is justified by desire: the desire for safety, for purity, for certainty, for greatness. But so too are acts of care, solidarity, and resistance. The difference is not the presence or absence of desire, but the way it is oriented — whether it opens us to the lives of others, or seeks to secure itself at their expense.
To desire well is to desire with. It is to recognise that our longings do not begin or end within us, but are woven into shared fields of affect and meaning. It is to ask not “How can I get what I want?” but “What kind of world does my wanting help bring forth?”
And that is the beginning of an ethics.
In our final post, we will explore this ethical dimension of desire more fully — asking what it might mean to want-with rather than want-over, and to live desire as a shared responsibility rather than a private pursuit.
6. The Ethics of Wanting-with
If knowing is not about grasping an object but about participating in a world, then desiring is not about seizing a prize — it is about living-with a world.
Desire, we’ve seen, is relational through and through. It arises not in isolation but in the dense weave of encounters, histories, imaginaries, and attunements. And if that is true, then the way we desire is never just a matter of private feeling — it is always also a matter of public ethics.
This gives rise to a crucial distinction: wanting-over versus wanting-with.
Wanting-over sees desire as a zero-sum game. It treats the world as a resource to be used, others as obstacles or instruments, and fulfilment as a matter of control or acquisition. It underwrites extractivism, domination, and coercion — not just in economies, but in relationships, cultures, and spiritualities.
Wanting-with, by contrast, sees desire as an act of attunement. It recognises the other as co-participant in the field of becoming. It seeks not to bend the world to one’s will, but to form desires in relation — to want in ways that are mindful of others’ flourishing, of shared possibilities, of mutual transformation.
This is not an ethics of self-denial. It is not about suppressing desire or sacrificing joy. On the contrary, it invites us into richer, deeper, more sustaining forms of longing — desires that are not about possession but about connection, not about certainty but about openness, not about purity but about participation.
It challenges the myth of autonomous desiring subjects and instead affirms the reality of our interdependence. Our wants are never just ours; they emerge in worlds already shaped by care, by trauma, by power, by dreams. To want-with is to acknowledge this — and to choose to desire in a way that deepens, rather than denies, the web of life we’re part of.
This also invites a new spiritual imaginary. In place of myths of reward and punishment — of a God who satisfies the faithful and punishes the unbeliever — we might begin to imagine divinity itself as the desiring-with of all that is: a longing not to control, but to co-become. A yearning not to judge from above, but to join in love. A desire that honours the freedom of the other without withdrawing from relationship.
Such a vision does not end desire. It deepens it.
And so we end not with answers but with an invitation:
To become aware of what we want.
To trace where those wants come from.
To notice who they touch.
And to ask, again and again:
Is this the kind of wanting that makes the world more whole?