An Affirmative Theory of Desire

Abstract

Desire must be liberated. We must find ways better address the amalgam of feeling, intensity, richness, playfulness, desiring, passion, excitement, rage, suffering, life, becoming?in short, affect?that char acterizes teaching and learning moments.1 We must think through and with affect because something valuable, critical, something political, happens when we relate affectively each other across the spaces of the classroom. Consider what Lucia Perillo has say about our inability address affect. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education On Line, contemplates an encounter with a female student. The campus student newspaper contains news of a memorial service for a recently murdered student, and Perillo realizes that student had taken an introductory poetry class from her. Perillo, shocked and haunted, writes, she was by no means a person I knew well. I had only had her?'had' as we teachers say, an expression with implications both Victorian and sexual?in one class. So here we are, then, right in the messy middle of making sense of something affective in teaching moment. In recalling her experience of teaching student, Perillo identifies familiar seman tic and analytical tropes of sexuality, property, and morality. Perillo proceeds write an essay about the student, to protect what little I had before passed from my memory altogether. After reading the essay, her husband responds, this sounds homoerotic, and maybe is something you need stock into a drawer. Clearly, we know what he