Anatomies of desire: Education and human exceptionalism after Anti-Oedipus

Abstract

In line with Andrew Culp’s work Dark Deleuze (2016) and in opposition to the tendency in some education studies communities to selectively engage affirmative and vitalist dimensions of Deleuze’s work, this article engages the radical critical theory foundation of Anti-Oedipus (1972/2009) by exploring anatomies of desire at work around students and animals in educational practice. Desiring-machines, with their capacity to produce repression as much as revolution; freedom as much as fascism and slavery take on specific and outlandish manifestations in the presence of animals in different educational settings. Drawing on ethnographic data from upper secondary school and higher education, the article identifies the subjectivation of students to implements of animal killing and control, and to the risk of physical harm accompanying work with wild animals, as constitutive anatomies of desire in these settings. The article argues that the way society and education make use of animals is emblematic of multiple and accelerating social-ecological crises. Emerging from Deleuze and Guattari’s unsettling question, why we invest in the systems that destroy us, is not only a hierarchical human exceptionalism, but an invasive human expansionism that forces itself upon other species as well as upon philosophy of education in the 21st century.