Accueil
"To many, Deleuze and Guattari were (and are) not only the theoretical voice of this movement, but its conscience as well. In defiant response to the TINA (“There is No Alternative”) doctrine of neoliberalism, Deleuze and Guattari offer a moral and political vision in which possibilities – multiplicities, differences, in short, alternatives – are infinitely augmented and expanded. Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy promised to be an anarchism for postmodernity.
Perhaps the global justice movement has not altogether failed, but it certainly has not come anywhere close to succeeding. Indeed, it is now buried so deeply underground that we are hard-pressed to recognize its contemporary relevance. The same is true, or so it is said, of Deleuze and Guattari with respect to moral and political concerns. Witness, again, the many critics who claim that Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy aspires, at best, to describe systems as they are and to enumerate the conditions of possibility for their transformation; or, at worst, adopts quietist or even collaborationist views towards the systems it exposes and, in all events, fails to take any firm position on how they “ought to be.” This is essentially the critique levelled by Boltanski and Chiapello, who argue that Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy is simply the most recent iteration of what they term “the spirit of capitalism,” the ideology which justifies and reinforces capitalist domination. [...] Žižek, too, identifies a reactionary element in Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy while simultaneously acknowledging its important contributions to anti-capitalist resistance movements." (p.2)
"The academic domestication and fetishization of Deleuze (or, worse still, the accusation of Deleuzian-Guattarian vanguardism) is a cause of legitimate anxiety." (p.3)
-Nathan Jun, Introduction à Daniel W. Smith & Nathan Jun (eds.), Deleuze and Ethics, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 222 pages.
"It is my position that the dominant traditions of ethical thought are almost entirely useless with respect to genuine ethical problems, and that fundamentally they approach the question and problem of ethics from the wrong side, focusing as they do on rule-based models of ethical deliberation. The HPV vaccine controversy is a sort of parable for the impotence of this sort of ethical thought – dominated by utilitarian and Kantian deontological models of ethical deliberation – fi t only for classroom exercises where students are made to apply abstract rules and principles that have little bearing on the sort of situations that evoke ethical controversy. In place of these transcendent rule-based models of ethical deliberation where everything is known in advance, I propose a problem-based model of ethical composition without pre-existing archè or foundation, where the ethical is not understood as the application of pre-existent moral principles to particular situations, but is conceived as the emergence of a problem and the re-composition of a collective undertaken in response to this problem. With such a “model” of ethical thought perhaps “the problems of ethics” – a dear pedagogical tool used by philosophy professors to torment undergraduates by requiring them to jump through hoops by applying various ethical theories to particular situations – can attain a higher dignity, denoting not the subsumption of a content to a particular ethical scheme, but rather the inventiveness proper to the domain of the ethical. Working towards this end I will draw heavily on the ethical thought developed by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition." (p.22)
-Levi R. Bryant, "The Ethics of the Event: Deleuze and Ethics without Αρχή", chap. 2 in Daniel W. Smith & Nathan Jun (eds.), Deleuze and Ethics, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 222 pages.
