Desire and World in Deleuze and Sartre

The relations between Deleuze and Sartre are numerous; however, they have not so far been systematically analysed. From their very admiration for Spinoza to their fierce criticisms of Freud, they both established a theory of desire that displace it from the field of subjective psychology to the one of the most fundamental ontology. In fact, of all the French philosophers who criticised Freudian psychoanalysis after the Second World War, they both proposed an explicit alternative to it, an alternative thought in terms of existential psychoanalysis in Sartre and of schizoanalysis in Deleuze. In this text, the author shows that beyond the full positivity of desire in Deleuze and its negative determination in Sartre, both philosophers think desire in relation to a world, not to a world in which desire appears, but rather to a world created from it. There is no desire that does not presuppose the creation of something like a world of desire. Thus, it is possible to establish a bridge between Deleuze and Sartre on the basis of their conception of the creative force of desire, that is to say, on the basis of its revolutionary potentiality.