The Race of Desire

Through a close reading of an all-but-forgotten text by Gilles Deleuze, “Sex-Pol in Action,” this article studies the racialization of desire. In “Sex-Pol in Action,” Deleuze argues that the FHAR (Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire), a gay liberationist movement in early 1970s France, radically reconceptualized desire as the “nonhuman . . . point within each of us where . . . identity . . . is abolished.” Deleuze hopes to distinguish this queer potentiality of desire from the racially fetishistic, “Arabophilic” desires avowed by many of the white gay men in the FHAR. Reading Deleuze's text against itself, however, the author troubles this easy distinction so as to suggest that desire itself—desire as the “nonhuman within human sex”—is always already racialized. The article suggests that this is the common function served by the FHAR's Arab “beast” as well as Deleuze and Guattari's “savage” (in Capitalism and Schizophrenia): that is, to serve as a container for desire as humanity's constitutive lack/excess, its most sub/superhuman traits. By rereading “Sex-Pol in Action” through recent theorizations of the racial plasticity of sex, the author contends that this text illuminates the racial antagonisms that continue to haunt Deleuzean and other queer imaginaries of desire, becoming, and (non)humanism today.