Which doesn't mean the desiring individual; it means desiring consciousness itself.
He is our metaphysical poet, using the desiring, sexual body to ask poetry's eternal questions in distinctively contemporary ways.
In Swimming Home, the beautiful but fragile Kitty Finch has to field the desiring but often aggressive gaze of every character in the novel.
In George's view, they are "dualists" who believe the desiring mind is the locus of the authentic self, with the right to use the body to pursue its own ends.
As the desiring brother, he behaves from the beginning as if he were auditioning for a very mad Hamlet: his body is bowed, his voice barks, he is inclined to drop to his knees, to give speeches flat on his back, or, at a particularly tense moment, to execute a backward somersault.
The idea was to show that the female nude need not be portrayed only from the viewpoint of the desiring or appraising male but also according to a woman's own subjectivity -- and then to put the viewer in the position of the self-witnessing artist.
