In desire there is a peculiar mix of our directed and assertive intention towards the object that we seek, with the looming despair of the nothingness we fear. Our hope drives us forward but the pain that hope seeks to eclipse is always present. The pain is in the not knowing, the insecurity of belief and we push ourselves forward with words and creations and emulations of reality as if to override the passivity of being nothing more substantial than petals in the wind, buffeted around by the force of our own desire – an oscillation between our own somethingness and nothingness that we cannot control however much we try to. Going back to what I was saying about Derrida, I’m not sure if these ambiguous forces arise entirely from ourselves or are ‘out there’ in the world and affect us from without which is of course everyone’s question on the existence of God. We are torn between creating and controlling our own lives, our individual and autonomous agency, where we seek to make ourselves into something substantial, and the way that this desire itself renders us fallible, vulnerable and weak. To have faith in our desires, to keep going and believe that we are going in the right direction we delude or convince ourselves that we are right, suspecting all along that we are not. For the individual, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are abstractions that we have invented to patrol and regulate the force of our belief, our creating and loving and all the other things we push out into the world. It is society that ties our individual right and wrongs together and seeks to harness individual energies into a bigger more collective force, but for the individual, belief holds within it the possibility of delusion and it is as though the more we encounter belief, the closer we step towards the possibility that we are indeed deluded. Belief and delusion share close borders with each other and we patrol these borders to monitor our own intention and progress, and draw on the fear of our delusion to bolster our belief. The two belong to the same desire, the same force.