Introduction: Desiring Politics and the Politics of Desire

What does thinking and acting with desire make possible that might otherwise and all too often be foreclosed? How might desire help orient action toward a horizon of becoming across which collective struggle can effect affective reparation and a more capacious politics? In some ways, desire seems to be taken for as much granted as space – that is, it's everywhere, but often difficult to articulate or analytically pin down. For us, what makes desire distinct, but not discrete, from the vocabulary of affect and emotion is that it operates as both absence and lack, on the one hand, and as a profoundly productive motor and motivating force, on the other. Desire moves in ways that presuppose, exceed, and complement the range of expressions that are taken up by scholarship in this journal. In this special issue, we privilege desire, in both senses, as central among the (dis)organizing, affective forces shaping political life.