Between Desire and Pleasure

Frida Beckman is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her books include Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). She has also published extensively on Deleuze, where her books include Gilles Deleuze: A Critical Life (Reaktion Books, 2017), Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and the edited collection Deleuze and Sex (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

Frida Beckman has written an undoubtedly provocative account of the uneasy relations, even points of tension and contradiction, between feminist and queer conceptions of sexual pleasure and the deterritorializing philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. This book successfully opens sexuality out to new conceptions and new forces that link it directly to the most pressing political questions of today.

• Preface; Introduction; 1. A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault; 2. Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein, and Reich; 3. Folding, Individuation, and the Pleasurable Body; 4. Orgasmic Feminism; 5. Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing; 6. Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm; 7. Capitalism and Sexuality; Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious; Bibliography.