Chronicles of Love and Resentment IX Chronicles of Love and Resentment Eric Gans Paradoxes of Love and Resentment No. But there is a species of thought-structures that survive not as a models of reality, but because they cannot be thought away. These are the structures of paradox . Paradox depends on self-reference .
Structures are paradoxical when they refer, directly or indirectly, to themselves.
But everything human is self-referential. Our consciousness necessarily includes itself in what it is conscious of. Unlike animal appetite, human desire is enacted on an imaginary scene where I see myself through the eyes of the community that gives value to my choice. But to desire and to see oneself desire are contradictory operations. The fulfillment I envisage in the first case is incompatible with the second, where I imagine myself on the periphery of a circle with the object of my desire at the inaccessible center.