Desiring assemblages: A case for desire over pleasure in critical drug studies

Abstract

While critical drug researchers have long pushed for an acknowledgement of pleasure in discourses of drug use, few have explored the alternative possibilities offered by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire. In this paper I map out some of the conceptual differences between pleasure and desire and explore the opportunities opened up by attending more closely to desire in critical drug studies. I suggest that while discourses of pleasure do make an important intervention into and against dominant narratives of risk, harm, and addiction, they may inadvertently be working to keep in place the very binaries and forms of neoliberal western subjectivity that support those narratives. I argue that a Deleuzo–Guattarian ontology of desire is a better tool with which to make sense of the complex relations that form between drugs and bodies, challenge medical and criminal responses to drug use, and bring forth assemblages that enhance, rather than diminish, bodily capacities.