Desire, dissatisfaction, dispersal: The oddness of desiring God

Abstract An account of human subjectivity is built up from an analysis of the fundamental human desire for God. In conversation with Karl Rahner and Blaise Pascal, it is argued that this desire does not have any conceivable conditions of satisfiability. This leads to an account of human beings as fundamentally distractible, fragmented, opaque to themselves and non-self-identical; however, none of these are viewed as essentially problematic, arising instead out of the basic human–God relation rather than from a fallen condition. A range of implications for ethics and social criticism are briefly suggested.