Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics

Tamsin Lorraine

Description

In Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics, Tamsin Lorraine focuses on the pragmatic implications of Deleuze and Guattari's work for human beings struggling to live ethical lives. Her bold alignment of Deleuze and Guattari's project with the feminist and phenomenological projects of grounding human action in lived experience provides an accessible introduction to their work. Lorraine characterizes Deleuze and Guattari's nonfoundational approach to ethics in terms of a notion of power that comes into skillful confluence with the multiple forces of life and an immanent principle of flourishing, while their conception of philosophical thought is portrayed as an intervention in the ongoing movement of life that she enacts in her own exploration of their ideas. She contends that Deleuze and Guattari advocate unfolding the potential of our becoming in ways that enhance our participation in the creative evolution of life, and she characterizes forms of subjectivity and cultural practice that could support such evolution. By means of her lucid reading taken through the lens of feminist philosophy, Lorraine is not only able to present clearly Deleuze and Guattari's project but also an intriguing elaboration of some of the project's practical implications for novel approaches to contemporary problems in philosophy, feminism, cultural theory, and human living.
Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1. INTRODUCTION

Intuition and the Durational Whole
Theory

2. A GENEALOGY OF (IN)HUMAN EXISTENCE

(In)human Genealogy
Faciality and the Majoritarian Subject

3. FEMINIST CARTOGRAPHIES AND MINORITARIAN SUBJECTIVITY

Feminist Cartographies
Minoritarian Subjectivity and the Question of Identity

4. BODIES, TIME, AND INTUITION

Intensive Plateaus
Philosophy, Art, and Intuition
Becoming-Woman and Lines of Flight

5. ETHICS, TRAUMA AND COUNTER-MEMORY

Spinoza’s Joy and Nietzsche’s Gift-giving Virtue
Trauma and Counter-memory
Witnessing New Territories

6. NOMADIC SUBJECTIVITY, ETHICS, AND POETICS

Spinozist Ethology
Minoritarian Subjectivity
Theory
Conclusion

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Philosophy
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781438436647
• Langue: English

Extrait

A volume in the SUNY series in Gender Theory

Tina Chanter, editor

Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics
Theory, Subjectivity, and Duration
TAMSIN LORRAINE

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lorraine, Tamsin E.
Deleuze and Guattari's immanent ethics : theory, subjectivity, and duration / Tamsin Lorraine.
    p. cm. — (SUNY series in gender theory)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3663-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995. 2. Guattari, Félix, 1930–1992. 3. Ethics. 4. Feminist ethics. I. Title.
B2430.D454L67 2011
194—dc22                                                                                                       2011003167
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface
The reading I give here of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conceptions of theory, subjectivity, and ethics is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's innovative approach to two problems with which I have struggled throughout my adult life. The first problem is that of how to be ethical in an age where traditional approaches to grounding transcendent values in God or reason appear to be increasingly suspect, and the second problem is that of how to conceive of the practice of philosophy in a way that manifests its pragmatic importance to living as well as the aesthetic pleasure it can bring to its practitioners.
As a woman and a feminist who came of age in the 1970s, I was drawn to philosophy for its skeptical attitude; it was by taking a philosophical step back in order to reconsider the assumptions informing my conceptions of truth and ethics that I was able to rethink what I had been told about what it meant to be human or what we could hope for as human beings struggling to live with one another in productive harmony. This critical endeavor gave me important tools in investigating and analyzing reality in light of human subjects marginalized in various ways from the mainstream and opened my eyes to more inclusive ways of conceiving what it meant to be human and how we might better work toward a society that could support our collective humanity. My love of philosophy has thus always had a pragmatic edge to it that spoke to my need to resolve the dissonance I experienced in trying to live ethically as I faced particular life problems (Why did the “right” thing sometimes feel so “wrong”? To whom could I turn for answers when neither specific authority figures nor rational argument could supply completely satisfying solutions?). Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on a pragmatic conception of language always implicated with the situations of embodied subjects of a particular time and place responding to specific problems along with a conception of human beings as evolving creatures struggling to unfold their capacities to live in always novel circumstances in response to life conceived as becoming, spoke to my need to take an ethical approach more creative than that of applying moral rules or transcendent ideals—an approach that was more attuned to the skewed perspectives of embodied subjects facing unanticipated and even unintelligible (at least according to “normal” or “acceptable” ways of understanding social reality) dilemmas.
Deleuze and Guattari's conception of philosophy not only spoke to the way philosophy has enabled me to resolve some of the dissonance of day-to-day living, it also captured the aesthetic pleasure I often derive from the unexpected perspectives arrived at by unfolding lines of thought I would never have otherwise traveled. It has been one of the great pleasures in my years of teaching philosophy (as well as one of my great frustrations when, as I often do, I fail) to communicate to my students the inherent joy of carefully pursuing the intricacies of the webs of beliefs—with all their implicit nuance and affective charge—that structure the meaning of our lives. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of philosophy as a form of thought that creates concepts through a principle of consistency unfolded in attentive pursuit of the nuances of the meaning of concepts in relation to other concepts, not only gave me a way of understanding the pleasure practicing philosophy gives me, but a way of reading philosophy that opens up the unexpected perspectives it can create rather than closing them off as often happens when we, as we all to often do, become more entrenched in marking territory than pursuing ideas.
In my reading of Deleuze and Guattari I not only attempt to present conceptions of an immanent ethics and philosophy as the creation of concepts that are drawn as consistently and rigorously from a reading of their concepts as I can manage, but I also have attempted to enact the conception of philosophy that I draw from their work: an approach that emphasizes the rigor and creativity philosophy can contribute to cultural debates without ever losing sight of our ongoing and embodied immersion in a world to which we must respond. In that spirit, I have refrained from engaging in debates of interpretation and instead deliberately chosen to take from Deleuze and Guattari as well as the secondary commentaries that have inspired me in the pursuit of this particular project what speaks to the pragmatic concerns of individual human beings wondering, from their very specific locations, how to live ethical lives. In doing so, I have, I hope, not only shared some of these implications, but also some of the joy of carefully working through some of their concepts in light of such implications. I thus hope not only to suggest an innovative approach to ethics that I believe could speak to some of our current ethical impasses, but also to introduce some of my readers to the pragmatic and even aesthetic pleasures, as they are described and enhanced by Deleuze and Guattari's characterization of the process of philosophical thinking, of what might at times seem to be the overly careful approach of the philosopher to a set of texts.
The view of philosophy I develop and enact here suggests that multiple theories from multiple locations can and should be read in light of situated problems in order to encourage the cross-fertilization of productive connections. I have accordingly made some connections between Deleuze and Guattari's work and work that is not inspired by a Deleuze–Guattarian perspective in order to draw out implicit tendencies in both that provoke new insights into ethical forms of being-human. I present my reading of Deleuze and Guattari from the perspective of my own lived experience as a woman and a feminist philosopher with the specific investments of my location and I exemplify my reading as vividly and forcefully as I can through the problems and examples that I draw from that location. I do not mean (nor do I expect) that my own trajectory through the work of Deleuze and Guattari should be taken as an exhaustive rendering of the use of Deleuze and Guattari for an immanent ethics or feminism, or even that some of the positions I elaborate in light of my interests and location will necessarily coincide with that of other ethical or feminist perspectives inspired by their work. In fact, it is part of the understanding of philosophy that I derive from Deleuze and Guattari's work that different readings should instigate different “counter-effectuations” of the philosophical concepts that may be brought to bear on the problems of specific locations. I hope to follow in the footsteps of readings of Deleuze and Guattari given in books like Rosi Braidotti's Transpositions ( Braidotti 2006 ) and Todd May's Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction ( May 2005 ) by fostering the unfolding of further “transpositional” connections readers of Deleuze and Guattari can make rather than blocking such connections by insisting on and defending any one way of conceiving their work.
Entering and engaging the Deleuzian and Deleuze–Guattarian project set forth in the many books by Deleuze written on his own as well as in partnership with Guattari is an exhilarating as well as sometimes frustrating experience. Exhilarating because of the almost breathless inventiveness of the terrain it opens, frustrating because just as one becomes familiar with one set of concepts, another set is introduced. Although this may be somewhat disorienting at first, what one finds, if one keeps at it, is that the concepts all start to cohere and resonate on a plane of thought that entails a shift in one's perspective. Deleuze and Guattari's concepts unfold and support a way of perceiving a wide range of experience in terms of dynamic process and an intuitive understanding of life as creative evolution where any one life-form is but a partial and fleeting moment of space-time in a larger durational whole. Deleuze and Guattari attempt to introduce not only some new concepts, but also a way of thinking premised on a shift in our relationship to time. The proliferation of concepts in their works creates a topography one can explore from this new perspective. In this book I explore this perspective with an emphasis on its phenomenological effects on lived experience in order to present its ethical implications as vividly as possible. Pursuing the conception of human subjectivity their work evokes from the embodied locations of actual thinking has pra