Desire, Affects and Assemblage: A Deleuzean Analysis of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Abstract

This paper is the study of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desiring-production or productive unconscious through a qualitative analysis of Muhammad Hanif’ novel 'Our Lady of Alice Bhatti' (2011). Desiring-production involves three passive syntheses that give rise to desiring machine/subject/self. Desire, Deleuze and Guattari assert is the productive force of life that produces persons, classes and interests from coded affects. Subject, they insist is a form of transcendental field. Literature they believe is an act of thought and a machine of expression that shatters thinking into affects and percepts, and is related to health. Writers are similar to clinicians or symptomatologists who diagnose the ills of thought. The study employs Deleuze and Guattari’s empirical Transcendentalism or assemblage theory to investigate the hypothesis that we can improve our affects or receptivity to the world by creating assemblages with defined affects. Given this analysis, the research calls for critical thinking in general to turn to the notion of the subject that precludes fixed identity.

Keywords: Desiring-production; affects; style; Deleuze; Hanif.