ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 introduces Deleuze’s conception of desire that is further used to recalibrate and reorient critical thought. It focuses on the representational limits of desire and its repercussions for (thinking) subjectivity. I reconstruct nature and function of desire drawing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a dominant cultural reservoir of (the knowledge of) desire. Consequently, I analyze desire in terms of lack, law, natural disposition or spontaneity and pleasure, tracing its negative image in the history of Western philosophy in general and in psychoanalytic discourse in particular. The latter section focuses on the affirmative theory of desire as promulgated by Deleuze and Guattari and considers its creative role in reinventing the way we think and express our subjectivity, importantly, through sexual difference.
