[T]he analysis of desire is immediately practical and political … for politics precedes being. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 203)

Central to the creation of a postcolonial concept of agency is the need to reconsider the nature of power and desire, which together constitute the conditions and the impetus for social action. The first aim of this chapter is to present an alternative perspective on power, not conceptualised in relation to mastery. This is found in Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, and in Foucault's elaboration of this in Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality. However, Foucault's analysis is largely limited to the constitutive effects of power upon the subject, and the scope for constructive agency is often not understood or is obscured in readings of Foucault's work. I will suggest that this problem arises because Foucault does not adequately emphasise desire as a causal component of agency. While there are constant references to desire made in the context of his history of sexuality and his later work on the ethical practices of the self, ultimately Foucault shows how a concept and practice of ‘desire’ is produced in modernity as an effect of power, captured by discourses of sexuality and morality, and reduced to an aspect of pleasure. This obscures the way the force of desire itself acts as a cause in the production of social forms.

The second aim of this chapter is therefore to place Foucault's causal concept of productive power in relation to a complementary concept of desire, which is not conceptualised in relation to ontological lack and appropriative satisfaction.