A Potência Revolucionária do Desejo: Uma abordagem ético-política do desejo no Espinosa do Deleuze

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyze the concept of desire in Spinoza through the lens of Gilles Deleuze, emphasizing its ethical-political implications and its relevance in contemporary thought, especially in Anti-Oedipus. The investigation adopts an interdisciplinary approach between Philosophy and Psychology, examining the critique of the conception of desire as lack through Deleuze's reclaiming of Spinozan thought, as developed in Ethics. The study seeks to demonstrate that Deleuze's conception of desire in Spinoza constitutes an alternative proposal to the philosophical and psychological tradition, implying profound ethical-political consequences. Spinoza inaugurates an affirmative ontology in which desire is understood as an expression of the very potency of existence (conatus). This immanent basis prevents desire from being reduced to a transcendent ideal or a constitutive privation, placing it in rupture with the philosophical tradition that, throughout the centuries, has associated desire with lack, decisively influencing the foundations of psychoanalysis and psychology. The research path articulates the analysis of Part III of the Ethics, highlighting the theory of affects, the distinction between appetitus and cupiditas, and the critique of teleological prejudice, the reading developed by Deleuze in Spinoza and the problem of expression. From this axis, it demonstrates how the Spinozan ontology of desire, as interpreted by Deleuze, finds decisive continuity in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari deepen the critique of the psychoanalytic conception of desire as lack and denounce the social, political, and clinical devices responsible for the production of weakened subjectivities. Finally, in light of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, the research develops a diagnostic analysis of modes of life, understanding desire as an ethical criterion for evaluating the degrees of potency, encounters, and forms of existence produced within these configurations. Desire thus emerges as an immanent production and creative force of the real, in opposition to the logics of repression, representation, and submission. By detaching it from negativity and transcendent morality, its ethical-political consequences become evident: thinking of desire as potency implies rethinking the modes of subjectivation, the forms of organization of the social body, and the power strategies that operate from lack. Thus, this research argues that Deleuze's reading of Spinoza not only reinterprets but extends and updates his ontology of desire in Anti-Oedipus, providing fundamental theoretical tools for a radical critique of the structures that produce lacking subjectivities and opening space for affirmative practices of existence.