Desire and Failure

Sometimes people complain that too many philosophers say they are talking about sex, but then say little or nothing about the important issues that one might expect them to address. If such is the expectation, this chapter will be another cause for disappointment. Discussions of sexuality and desire in the work of Deleuze are not what ‘common sense’ might lead us to expect. The erotic is demystified, less ecstatic than a dimension of everyday encounters, habits, practices and even infrastructures. Intimacy is ‘de-sexualised’ and non-appropriative, creative of in-between spaces and interstices; the intimate distances of ‘becomings’, of trust and its relation to democracy. One imagines here moments like sitting in a ward, drawing or gently massaging the bodies of women who are HIV+ with stage 3 or 4 AIDS, or the tender camaraderie of a group of ex-political prisoners which forecloses ready stereotypes about men and soldiers, or an ant struggling to climb up a leaf, writing, or the look in a student's eyes at the encounter with a new thought. Sexuality and desire are not narrowly defined in Deleuze and Guattari's work as they are in other discourses and in ordinary speech.