This is a striking truism by Jenny Holzer, part of a long sequence of sentences and aphorisms that blend two opposing rhetorics: the assertive impulse and almost didactic, aseptic information. Conceived for public spaces, often in block letters, mixed with the functional messages of the bleakest mass consumerism, they act where we are most exposed to an alienating impact and effect. Holzer’s powerful truism echoes this quote by Oscar Wilde: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy!”1 And with this other quote from Augustine, which pivots the axis to a new aspect: “Since what you want can happen, wish for what you can.”2

The issue becomes complicated. What seemed like a contemporary prayer or a song by Placebo3—who were inspired by Holzer’s truism—and where it also echoes ‘Wannabe’4, which was defined as a song that could have become a hit like so many, and instead became a phenomenon like so few, becomes a reality that has its roots in the essence of the split between needs and desires, between desire as will and as yearning, drive and libido. As usual, a great confusion that buries doubts in the form of certainties. Let us try to analyze this sentence: Protect me from what I want because I fear that what I want not only is not exactly what I need but also what is not good for me. Somehow, we do not take on this invocation and call on someone else who should know more than ourselves, asking them to give us not what we want but what we need. Desire is thus always under suspicion as soon as it departs from basic needs. Not only that, while need, once satisfied, gives fulfilment even if obviously temporary, desire is unpredictable, out of scale but above all, when it is achievable, it is disorienting.

The capitalist logic, no pain no gain, wins out here as well. The spectrum of suffering exempts from luck, and merit justifies gain. Although it would be great to replace the saying with “gain with no pain” (it happens but is hardly recognized, while “pain with no gain” seems to be more popular and part of the general whining). The point is probably related not so much to pleasure but to joy, to happiness, which always scares us a little because we know how fleeting and difficult it is to manage. Even Aladdin must go on a long inner journey of growth and awareness to understand when and why to rub the lamp and how to make his requests to the wise and cunning genie, who will regain his freedom through conscious, generous, and selfless desire.

But let’s pause for a moment on prayer, a practice common to many religions. It is the time of intimacy with the sacred to ask for something or give thanks for having obtained something (exemplary is the practice of votive offerings), while the opposite phase very much in fashion is meditation where it is the sacred that speaks to the person. In this last case, we are aware of the need to create specific conditions, while prayer seems possible even in the culture of mass and permanent distraction. It is not necessary to go to the desert and eat locusts and shrubs, it can be performed at any time and last a flash, but certainly there is a need for recollection and this word is suggestive. There is a need for gathering, for unity and convergence of our being in the world. Prayer prioritizes, it is lucid.

There is a difference between being needy and desiring. Confusion between these two concepts can lead to a few misunderstandings, primarily in interpersonal relationships. Need arises from the body, from an internal drive related to both primary needs that are fundamental to survival and secondary needs. Need arises from a lack and activates concrete behavior to obtain it, resulting in pleasure/frustration depending on whether one has succeeded in achieving it. The cycle of need is purely biological and ends when a need is satisfied. The need comes back, is the same every time, and its cyclical nature that keeps us alive. Desire is a word in which a star shines or does not shine (according to the etymology of the Latin word de sidus, devoid of stars). It is an aspiration, a need, a lack, a waiting for the stars to show themselves, show their light and guide us. In desire, the lack we feel is out of the body, it is a tension and sets us on our way.

Desire is proactive and makes the person take action to get to what they want. If need is like an on/off button, desire is a map that shows us which direction to go.
Desire and need take different paths. “The idea of infinity is desire,” says Emmanuel Levinas, we feel the lack of stars and would like to relate to broader horizons, and so desire becomes generative, projected toward something that does not yet exist, yet to be fulfilled. It is both challenging and threatening, as the object of desire, besides being obscure, is unstable and the goal uncertain. While need binds us to our weaknesses, desire, lives on the feeling of our ulteriority— it will always remain at a distance, a distance that is the very condition of its existence.

Need lives to be filled, desire lives to be desired. This is why consuming has become a compulsive need, with ambivalent characteristics: it soothes anxiety but forces one to consume more and more, the gratification of possessing drops, like blood sugar and becomes an exclusive drive transforming I am into I am what I consume5, the work of another great artist, Barbara Kruger, whose I Shop Therefore I Am, 1987, a reversal of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am”, is exemplary and iconic. So is Your Body is a Battleground, 1989, a feminist work initially conceived to support a demonstration for abortion rights held in Washington in April 1989, but which has become a symbol for the struggle of women and their rights. I believe it applies to all of us here today, battlefields with our needy and desiring bodies on the only planet available for now. I6. I would say we have done enough of that to know ourselves (and still be surprised by it all the time) and try to make decisions about the destiny we want and the world we are in, that is the one we have given ourselves so far. We could try to be wiser, more sapiens, and get a taste (etymology of the word sapiens)7that saves desire with all its synonyms and their vital nuances that enrich the sense of a hope and a possibility.

None of us want to be the normotic 8, normocinic bystander to the catastrophe that sees the climate getting hotter and our libido cooler. Instead, we might think of practicing a radical economy that describes an unprecedented symbolic and logical arc: from the essential to the superfluous skipping the useful. The essentials, in fact, include what defines the pure materiality of life but considers life itself also in its spiritual needs by freeing up time and energy9. A real luxury, an outflow, a displacement, as the Latin etymology suggests. The word dislocation indicates a surplus, the superfluous, the luxury, the qualis vs. the quantum, that extra of everything that is the real resource to be managed and shared in order not to be, every day10.

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1 Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act II, scene 4 – as well as the film Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by Ernst Lubich, 1925
2 Augustine, De trinitate, Book XIII
3 Placebo, Protect me from what I want, track B5 in Sleeping with Ghosts, 2003, https://www.placeboworld.co.uk/products/sleeping-with-ghosts-vinyl?_pos=1&_sid=fe30bed6f&_ss=r, in several interviews frontman Brian Molko states that this song “was inspired by the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer” and that “it is really a discourse with myself about my self destructive behavior.”
4 “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. So tell me what you want, what you really, really want”, Wannabe, Spice Girl, 1996
5 Erich Fromm, Avere o Essere?, Mondadori, 1977 and Zygmunt Bauman, Consumo, dunque sono, Laterza 2008
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo. Come si diventa ciò che si è, Adelphi 1969
7 Dominic Pettman, Ecologia erotica. Sesso, libido e collasso del desiderio, Tlon 2023
8 Christopher Bollas, L’ombra dell’oggetto. Psicoanalisi del conosciuto non pensato, Raffaello Cortina Editore 2018
9 Annarosa Buttarelli, Sovrane, Il Saggiatore 2013
10 Bob Dylan, It’s alright Ma (I’m only Bleeding), 1964 in Bringing It All Back Home, 1965 – “he is not busy being born, is busy dying”