Toward a Deleuzian Ethics: Value without Transcendence

Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, Deleuze and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Page229, ISBN: 978-0748641161. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What, one might ask, has Gilles Deleuze to contribute to ethical discourse, given its current infatuation with rule-based problem-posing? Deleuze's critics on this score are found, not only in so-called mainstream contemporary ethics, but also among thinkers who claim explicitly to be working in Deleuze's shadow. He who found an affinity with and precursor in those very ethicists-Spinoza and Nietzsche-ostracized and marginalized by mainstream ethics today; he who praised Nietzsche's amor fati, and found exuberance in the Stoics, claiming that one must "make chance into an object of affirmation;" (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 60) he who defined ethics, as "not to be unworthy of what happens to us"(149)--what has he to offer in the way of an ethics? This is the question taken up in Deleuze and Ethics (2011)--the most recent addition to Edinburgh's "Deleuze Connections" series. Edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, the contents of this important work, in the spirit of Deleuze himself pursue various lines of flight, stemming from the questions surrounding a Deleuzian ethics, which faces two specific fundamental challenges: (1) It rejects the comfortable transcendent principles of evaluation of post-Enlightenment theories of ethics, comfortable because they reassure us that at the end of the day, there is a fact of the matter about right and wrong, and justice will prevail; (2) Correlatively, Deleuze's ontology forbids the absolute freedom of the subject. Constituted within a field of differential relations, a subject can never be an autonomous or purely rational agent who dispassionately chooses from among its various options. Freedom in contemporary ethics allows us to render judgments about how agents choose, and thus allows us to declare these choices as right or wrong, and their agents as good or evil. Moreover, without freedom, what possibility is there for action at all? Lacking freedom in the absolute sense, are we to resign ourselves to passive acceptance? In his chapter, Smith outlines a critique of transcendent values, centered precisely around their inhibitive nature: "What an ethics of immanence will criticize, then, is anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting--and what separates us from our power of acting is, ultimately, the illusions of transcendence"(125). The transcendencies of God, Self, and Moral Law prescribe ideals to which a world of becoming can never attain, thus casting a pallor of deficiency over all of life. Dictating to the body how it ought to be, but can never be, they serve a limiting and inhibitive role to desire. Explicating Nietzsche's theory of the drives, in parallel with Leibniz's discussion of freedom in The New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (odd bedfellows, at least on the surface), Smith points the way to a Deleuzian theory of desire, one that provides an account for how humans come to desire the limitations of transcendent morality, while at the same time motioning towards a way in which desire might create "conditions for the production of the new," (139) thus opening the question of freedom, genuine internal genesis. …