Book review: Anastosios Korkotsides, Against Utility-Based Economics: On a Life-Based Approach (Routledge, Oxfordshire, UK and New York, NY, USA 2013) 296 pp

What is desire and why is it that we, as humans, desire? This may seem like an odd question to ask at the beginning of a book review, but I think it is absolutely necessary that we should proceed in an orderly fashion. The word 'desire', according to our etymological dictionary, derives from the Latin term desiderare, a verb that means to 'long for, wish for; demand, expect'. To desire, then, is to want something that we do not have. We desire, as Korkotsides recognises, because we lack (p. 100). We lack what? Everything and anything – and that is why we desire. If we did not lack something we would no longer, by definition, desire. Thus desire is sustained upon the basis of lack. Korkotsides's book revolves around the central question of desire; one which he derives from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, either directly or second-hand from the post-structuralists who followed in Lacan's wake. This implicit source is not unimportant, as we shall see in what follows.