Alexandre Kojève believed that the desire to be desired, the ambition to be socially recognized and admired, is precisely what makes us human, what distinguishes us from animals. Kojève speaks about this desire as a genuinely “anthropogenic” desire. This is desire not for particular things but for the desire of the other: “Thus, in the relationship between man and woman, for example, Desire is human only if one desires not the body but desire of the other.” It is this anthropogenic desire that initiates and moves history: “human history is history of desired Desires.” Kojève describes history as moved by the heroes that were pushed to self-sacrifice in the name of mankind by this specifically human desire—the desire for recognition, for becoming an object of society’s admiration and love. The desire for desire is what produces self-consciousness, as well as, one can say, the “self” as such. But at the same time, this desire for desire is what turns the subject into an object—ultimately, a dead object. Kojève writes: “Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on Earth.” The subject of the desire for desire is not “natural” because it is ready to sacrifice all its natural needs and even its “natural” existence for the abstract Idea of recognition.
-- https://www.e-flux.com/journal/82/127763/art-technology-and-humanism/