Risks and pleasures: a Deleuzo- Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education Michalinos Zembylas * Open University of Cyprus (Submitted 26 November 2004; resubmitted 28 February 2005; accepted 18 August 2005) This article provides an analysis of a pedagogy of desire from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. A pedagogy of desire can be theorised in ways that mobilise creative, transgressive and pleasurable forces within teaching and learning environments. It also enables a new view on affect in education as a landscape of becoming in which forces, surfaces and flows of teachers/students are caught up in a desiring ontology. This marks an attempt to reclaim the notion of desire away from a purely negative, repressive or libidinal framework. The claim of pedagogy of desire is that through the mobilisation and release of desiring production, teachers and students make available to themselves the powerful flows of desire, thereby turning themselves into subjects who subvert normalised representations and significations and find access to a radical self. Some strategies and practical implications are offered to suggest how this approach to pedagogy may function in educational contexts. Imagine a city where there is no desire. … A city without desire is … a city of no imagination. Here people think only what they already know. (Carson, 1998, p. 168) There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 155) Few, if any, pedagogues would deny that desire enables teaching and learning to occur. The forces of desire—both the desire to teach and the desire to learn—are central in teaching and learning and can lead to rewarding or malevolent pedagogical encounters (McWilliam, 1996). Most pedagogies operate in subtle ways that inevitably result in some form of ‘seduction’ or ‘coercion,’ in spite of the best intentions of teachers (Bracher, 1999a). Desire is both present and invisible in students’ and teachers’ pedagogical relations, and might involve risks as well as *5 Ayiou Antoniou, Strovolos 2002, Nicosia, Cyprus. E-mail: m.zembylas@ouc.ac.cy British Educational Research Journal Vol. 33, No. 3, June 2007, pp. 331–347 ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/07/030331-17 # 2007 British Educational Research Association DOI: 10.1080/01411920701243602