ABSTRACT
In this chapterI call into question, and explore an alternative to, an assumption that has governed much philosophical and psychological theorizing about the self, namely, the assumption that desire is primordial in us and that all other motivations are derivatives of it. The infant’s primordial existential experience is not desire but felt-need. And felt-need, as Freud’s essay on our earliest anxieties suggests, is experienced as a traumatizing vulnerability: in her needfulness, the infant is dependent on alterity as alterity, and exposed to the dreadful absence of alterity. The very young child is also vulnerable to alterity and affect-able by it because it’s able to astonish her: she can be startled by the wondrous, overwhelmed by the awe-full. Astonishment impassions, and passion is donative: it moves the child to give herself to, and so become a participant in, what awakens it in her. But giving oneself to alterity is also traumatizing: it exposes one to the possibility of being rejected by the other. We need alterity—and dread its absence. We’re drawn to alterity—and draw back in dread from an encounter with it. Here, I argue, is the locus of our primordial psychic ambivalence: we’re impassioned by alterity—and desire to recoil from the traumatizing vulnerability that exposure to alterity entails. What’s primordial isn’t desire but the affective vulnerability, the vulnerable affectivity, that desire tries to repress.
