Eugene Goodheart
DESIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
In recent years there has been an explosion of talk about
desire that has challenged the values of rationalist discourse, in par–
ticular the rationalist model of the self. Coherence, unity, whole–
ness, the value terms of that discourse have become suspect terms of
repression . The ordering impulse of reason has come to be seen as a
reactionary effort to contain dangerous vital energies, threatening
particular political, social, and economic interests that reason masks
in the guise of objectivity and impartiality . For instance, some ver–
sions of feminist criticism associate "reason" with patriarchal
domination and assert the claim of female desire.
Certain philosophers in the past have argued that the domi–
nance of reason is an illusion. Hume characterizes reason as the
slave of desire, and Nietzsche challenges the idea of reason as an
autonomous entity, contending instead that reason is no more than
"the state of the relations between different passions and desires ...
every passion contains in itself its own quantum of reason." What
distinguishes the view of what I call the contemporary ideologues of
desire is not simply its realism about the power of desire, but its
unambivalent
valuing of that power. The effect of "liberating" desire
from its subordinate place is to see it as autonomous and uncen–
sored. What does uncensored desire look like? As we might suspect,
it is the opposite of the rationalist view in which reason subordinates
desire in the interests of unity and coherence. The "self" as an ex–
pression of uncensored desire is in fact hardly a self at all: it is rather
"fragmented," "inchoate," "discontinuous." These are the words of
Leo Bersani, whose literary criticism has been "an experiment" in
unbinding, so to speak, the imaginations of poets and novelists - or
in some cases, in representing the unbinding process by which the
fragmented, the inchoate, the discontinuous is liberated in works of
imagination.
The seeds of the contemporary revolution of desire are to be
found in writers of the 1950s, Herbert Marcuse (in
Eros and Civiliza–
tion,
1955) and Norman O. Brown (in
Life Against Death,
1959) . In
the fifties, psychoanalysis, a revolutionary force in the decades of the
twenties and the thirties, had achieved an immense conservative au–
thority, indeed had become a way of life, a kind of secular religion
