2. Desire and Consumer Culture Theory
We learn to desire by copying others’ desires,
and our desire is produced, fundamentally, in
response to the desire of another.
3. “Machine of Desire” (in Deleuze and
Guattari’s phrase)
Literary texts are not only about how and why
characters desire each other and what happens to those
desire. Literary texts also produce desire. They make
us desire, in reading. We desire solutions, we desire to
get to the end of the story, we desire pleasure or
sadness. We always desire an end, but that this end is
not the end of desire.
4. Desire Theory (by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)
Desire is structured by a triangular relation to rivalry.
Take three people: A, B, and C. A, let us say, desire B.
Why? Normally, we would assume that A desires B
because B is desirable. But for Sedgwick, things are
rather different.
B is a woman and A and C men. The woman is the
object of desire, while the two men are rivals. Love
stories often concern the rivalry of two men for a
woman, in which the rivalry itself indeed becomes more
important than the desire for the woman.
5. Sedgwick develops the insight that in Western
culture, in stories, novels, films and so on,
relationships are most commonly structured in terms
of what she calls ‘homo-social desire’. (not the same
as homosexual desire.)
In a male-dominated society, there is a special
relationship between male homosocial desire and
the structure for maintaining and transmitting
patriarchal power. While love stories narrate the
desire of a man for a woman, the really important
relationship is that between two men, either as rivals
or as friends.
Women tend to be tokens of exchange, as mere
objects of desire. Patriarchal society excludes
women even from relations of desire.
6. Desire: Right or Wrong
In 1954 Alan Turing, the inventor of the first modern
computers, killed himself. Two years earlier, he had
been prosecuted for having sex with another man. His
crime had been to desire the wrong person, to have the
wrong desire. There is a terrible irony here. The man
who has transformed our world by the manipulation of a
binary system (on / off), was prosecuted thanks to
another binary system – right / wrong, good / evil, moral
/ immoral, or legal / illegal.
7. Is It Possible that Desire Is More Complex?
The most influential philosopher of desire has
been Freud. For Freud, all desire goes back to the
child’s original desire for the mother. Most
arguments against homosexual acts rely on
assertions about what is “natural.” But if we
accept Freud’s arguments, we find that the appeal
to the natural is highly questionable.
