ABSTRACT
The aim of this essay is not to explain what desire means, but to show how the concept gets constructed and how it works. Creating concepts is the principal task of philosophy, and part of what this entails is extracting elements or dynamics from the works of other philosophers and combining them in new and productive ways. Perhaps surprisingly, but in fact like much in his work, Deleuze's concept of desire has its source in Kantian philosophy. But its construction also draws on elements from Bataille, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza and, of course, Freud and Lacan. Moreover, Deleuze historicizes the concept of desire in a manner that is crucial to the way it works.
