Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gq7q9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-20T20:38:33.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Nathan Jun
Affiliation:
Midwestern State University
Daniel Smith
Affiliation:
Purdue University
Get access

Summary

My title raises two questions, each of which I would like to address in turn. What is an immanent ethics (as opposed to an ethics that appeals to transcendence, or to universals). And what is the philosophical question of desire? My ultimate question concerns the link between these two issues: What relation does an immanent ethics have to the problem of desire? Historically, the first question is primarily linked with the names of Spinoza and Nietzsche (as well as, as we shall see, Leibniz), since it was Spinoza and Nietzsche who posed the question of an immanent ethics in its most rigorous form. The second question is linked to names like Freud and Lacan (and behind them, to Kant), since it was they who formulated the modern conceptualization of desire in its most acute form – that is, in terms of unconscious desire, desire as unconscious. It was in Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, that Deleuze (along with Félix Guattari, his co-author) attempted to formulate his own theory of desire – what he would call a purely immanent theory of desire. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault claimed, famously, that “Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time” (Foucault 1977: xiii) – thereby making explicit the link between the theory of desire developed in Anti-Oedipus and the immanent theory of ethics Deleuze worked out in his monographs on Nietzsche and Spinoza.

Type
Chapter
Information
Deleuze and Ethics , pp. 123 - 141
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×