Prof. Andrew Norris

Research Project

Critique of Desire

If one considers contemporary political economy in the West through the prism of desire, two things come into focus. The first is that the economic aspect of this system runs, as it has throughout modernity, on a principle of unlimited desire. Indeed, the modern age may be defined by the autonomy of desire and the rejection of Christian and classical restrictions upon its satisfaction. The second is that the political aspect of the system increasingly runs on a set of feelings—resentment, rage, fear, xenophobia—that can only loosely be described as desires. While certainly powerful drives that demand to be addressed, such political emotions are not focused upon a shining object of longing or sidus that might bring satisfaction, but react to threats and offenses that constantly renew themselves. Such a reactive politics is unable to affirm either our current economy or any alternative to it. Conversely, our economy is constitutively resistant to the establishment of stable institutions and norms, as is plain in the neoliberal fetishization of liberty and its insistence that liberty be conceptually divorced from all other values or practices. The only freedom that matters is, as the phrase has it, the freedom to do what one wants. Understanding the crisis of our political economy thus entails a radical critique of desire, one that addresses questions both of limit and of object.