The Habit of Forming Habits

Perhaps, as Kristeva has suggested, the secret of ethical life is hidden in the stories we tell about ourselves. Whether these stories are told out loud and in groups or silently to ourselves is not what matters. What matters are the repetition of narrative tropes, the subtle expectations and exigencies they frame, the patterns woven through relationships, the creative investment in the process of narrating, and the simultaneous production of activity and expression of overlapping horizons of meaning. Of course, these stories are not entirely sui generis. They have an archetype. This archetype can be found in the story told about the formation of subjectivity. There is a wide appreciation in philosophy today that the story of the emergence of the subject is far richer and more complicated than the modern Western tradition has acknowledged. However, few if any contemporary philosophers have gone as far as Deleuze in freeing the story of the subject from its traditional rootedness in representational knowledge and identity. For Deleuze, representational knowledge and identity are two of the implicit biases or ‘subjective presuppositions’ that have prejudiced the history of philosophy (DR 129). This prejudice has limited the possibilities of living that traditional philosophies can allow.

Like many French thinkers of the 1960s, Deleuze looked for real social and political change in resistance to the imperialistic and paternalistic styles of relating endemic to European culture. But the change Deleuze sought was more difficult to achieve than that of replacing a head of state (which is, of course, difficult enough in itself). So he conceived an entirely new ontology that would provide a novel set of stories capable of resisting the dogmatic biases of the past. As Deleuze saw things, beyond the ordered, formed being of the everyday there lies a sensible flux of ‘energetic materiality’ in continuous variation and development. In other words, things are processes. In like manner, his theory of the subject emphasises its becoming in a never-ending process that refuses the exclusivity necessitated by identity and the common-sense presuppositions smuggled in by representational knowledge. While contemporary stories developing Deleuze's new ontology and his theory of the subject abound, there is a distinct lack of stories focusing on the kind of life this subject should live.