Craving Assemblages: Consciousness and Chocolate Desire

In this paper, I use the case of a craving for chocolate to explain that a craving is
a desire for food emerging from a process whose components exceed conscious
awareness, and thus the idea that desire is something that can always be conscious
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ly controlled and resisted must be overcome. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of assemblage, I propose that understanding desire requires considering
the distribution and heterogeneity of agencies participating in the event of the
production of desire. I will suggest that the role of the brain in the production and
reproduction of desire is crucial if we want to develop more sophisticated ways to
consciously deal with our desire for food. I will introduce the difference between
molar and molecular strata of organization operating within the assemblage of
the craving to understand what kind of process should be triggered in order to
deal with our desire for food. I end the paper by suggesting that focusing on
the aesthetic properties of food in the generation of pleasure can be a powerful
conscious resource for producing what Malabou calls brain plasticity.