‘Desire’ is an undoubtedly slippery concept, and one that seems constantly weighed down, as it were, by metaphysical, essentialist and discursive baggage. As we saw in the last chapter, it was for this reason that Foucault felt uncomfortable with Deleuze's use of desire, albeit subverted. A number of interpreters – Žižek chief among them – have since made this the basis of their critique of Deleuze and the micropolitics of immanence. It is essentially argued that by virtue of retaining desire as a primordial ‘micro’ essence or pre-social multiplicity, Deleuze ends up viewing power as a negative force concomitant with the macro level or macropolitical. It follows from this that ethical resistance (becoming a BwO, a Body without Organs) concerns liberating desire from the repressive effects of the macropolitical. With such a reading, Deleuze is said to be led right back into the very Marxian-Freudian repression hypothesis that Foucault painstakingly dissected as a production of modern power itself. Inasmuch as this vision speaks to the political theory of old, in which power is ‘anti-energy’ and freedom the negation of this energy, we would have to reject Deleuzian desire as a suitable contender for accounting for the agentic interiority of immanent/ relational power. As we know from the introduction, Žižek goes so far as to argue that an inherent impasse over the nature of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism – specifically the virtual as a surface effect versus a productive power – caused an otherwise apolitical Deleuze to turn towards Guattari and this ‘old’ idealist politics of desire which, while masquerading as radical chic, effectively transforms Deleuze into an ideologist of today's digital capitalism. Thus, not only is Deleuzian desire under question but also the very basis of ‘pure’ immanence and the philosophical thinking that precedes and informs it (i.e. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault).

Whereas it might be believed that ‘Deleuze proper’ faces an ontological deadlock that ultimately fails to account for the Outside/ Other, I begin this chapter by arguing that Deleuze's transcendental empiricism follows and draws on the previous three thinkers to construe the transcendental field – the ‘micro’ virtual multiplicity – in terms of a spatio-temporal folded depth derived and informed by a dynamic and forceful encounter with the folded Outside/Other – a ‘macro’ actual multiplicity.