Desire, Apathy and Activism

Abstract

This paper explores the themes of apathy and activism by contrasting the conventionally negative concept of motivational desire-lack with Deleuze and Guattari's positive concept of ‘desiring-production’. I suggest that apathy and activism are both problematically tied to the same motivational force: the conventional negativity of desire, which results in a ‘split subject’ always already ‘undone’ by difference. The philosophy of positive desiring-production provides alternative concepts of motivation and selfhood, not characterised by generative lack or alienation. On the contrary, this alternative ontology describes an identity that is not primarily ‘undone’ by difference, but ‘done’ or ‘made’ through the complex and piecemeal relations it forges with various aspects of the bodies it encounters. Understood as a complex multiplicity, the self or community accordingly has a primary, immediate and active interest in the quality of its multifaceted relations with others. Finally, I argue that some contemporary forms of activism can be read as practices aimed at creating and safeguarding the social conditions that foster the complex relational composition of selves and communities.