Desire begins with jealousy. This is the opinion of Jean-Pierre Dupuy (b. 1941), a French-American philosopher, professor at Stanford University and a member of the French Academy of Technology. Using a variety of materials - from Proust's novels and Shakespeare's plays to capsule coffee advertisements - he proves that desire is based not so much on imitation, as Rene Girard believed, as on the exclusion of the subject from the world to which he would like to belong and which, precisely because of its inaccessibility, becomes desirable and attractive for him. The author explores the mechanism of jealousy and discovers its effect in various spheres of our life: in love, in family, in career — and even in politics. The book includes an afterword by Olivier Ray (b. 1964), in which the French philosopher and expert on transhumanism correlates the theory of jealousy with psychoanalysis.