Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable

Abstract

In this article, Eve Tuck grapples with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of desire, finding it simultaneously generative and unsatisfying. Recognizing that Deleuze will not ‘say’ what Tuck wants him to say about desire – that it is smart, and constitutes expertise – Tuck reasons that there is only one thing she can do: break up with Deleuze. The article is organized into several break‐up rituals, and in each of the rituals, the author works to understand, interrogate, expand, and extend conceptualizations of desire. In these ways, an articulation of what it means to value the irreconcilable is presented.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• desire
• valuing the irreconcilable
• theory use
• indigeneity

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors and reviewers for their insights, additions, and helpful suggestions on this article.

Notes

1. ‘(I)t is always on the most deterritorialized element that reterritorialization takes place’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, 221).

2. ‘American Indian metaphysics has the advantage of framing all questions of knowledge as fundamentally moral questions that literally reside in our everyday life’ (Deloria and Wildcat 2001, 150).