What would it be, Freud asks through the disordered medium of psychoanalysis, to believe in curiosity as opposed to believing in science, or religion, or politics, or in psychoanalysis, or even in nothing?

the acquisition of language has waylaid, or even kidnapped, our wanting (what, we may wonder, is the transformation involved in eventually putting words to wants?).

What this shows is how difficult it is to tell the difference between what we think we are left out of and our projected imagining of it. We are likely to imagine that we are left out of the thing we think we most need. Tell me what you feel left out of and I will tell you what you think you want.

Modern people, we take it – at least in so-called detraditionalized societies – leave home to find, and to find out, what their parents can’t give them; the family circumscribes and defines and tries to fashion the child’s wanting, and then the modern child’s wanting exceeds what the family can provide.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, but as it turns out you may have to travel hopelessly and never arrive. You will certainly never arrive at exactly what you had anticipated.

Exclusion, as both Hamlet and Paradise Lost show us, is the medium for self-recognition. An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of s

To be interested in childhood, as I say, is to be ineluctably interested in curiosity. The child, who knows very little – and who is not known for his empiricism – is exorbitantly curious.

Tragedy is what is created by people who refuse to give up.

If wanting is catastrophic, not wanting might seem to be some kind of solution, some kind of self-cure. The so-called ‘resolution of the Oedipus complex’ entails learning how to not want. And not wanting can only really mean wanting differently, wanting otherwise.