Poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) teach us that desire is assembled, crafted over a lifetime through our experiences. For them, this assemblage is the picking up of distinct bits and pieces that, without losing their specificity, become integrated into a dynamic whole. This is what accounts for the multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction of desire, how desire reaches for contrasting realities, even simultaneously. Countering theorists that posit desire as a hole, a gap, or that which is missing (such as, and somewhat famously, Foucault) Deleuze and Guattari insist that desire is not lacking but “involution” (p. 164).[4] Exponentially generative, engaged, engorged, desire is not mere wanting but our informed seeking. Desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire. It is closely tied to, or may even be, our wisdom. […]
Eve Tuck, ”Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”, Harvard Educational Review, Vol 79, No 3, Fall 2009
Eve Tuck, ”Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”, Harvard Educational Review, Vol 79, No 3, Fall 2009