p. 10

The Greek word eros denotes "want," "lack," "desire for that which is missing." The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. This is more than wordplay. There is a dilemma within eros that has been thought crucial by thinkers from Sappho to the present day. Plato turns and returns to it. Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one's posession nor in one's being: eros entails endeia. As Diotima puts it in the Symposium, Eros is a bastard got by Wealth on Poverty and ever at home in a life of want. Hunger is the analog chosen by Simone Weil for this conundrum:

'All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion."

Emily Dickinson puts the case more pertly in "I Had Been Hungry":

So I found
that hunger was a way
of persons outside windows
that entering takes away.

Petrarch interprets the problem in terms of the ancient physiology of fire and ice:

I know to follow while I flee my fire
I freeze when present; when absent, hot is my desire. ("Trionfo d'Amore")

Sartre has less patience with the contradictory ideal of desire, this "dupery." He sees in erotic relations a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror-game that carries within itself its own frusteration. For Somone de Beauvoir the game is torture: "The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love . . . " Jacques Lacan puts the matter somewhat more enigmatically when he says "Desire . . . evokes lack of being under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other's being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request."

It would seem that these various voices are pursuing a common perception. All human desire is poised on an axis fo paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies. Les us return once more to the poem of Sappho with which we began. This fragment, as it is preserved in the text and scholia of Hephaestion, is followed without a break by two lines in the same meter, which may be from the same poem:

Atthis, your care for me stirred hatred in you
and you flew to Andromeda.

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. The invented Eros to express it.