Nomadic ethics

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Deleuze’s engagement with ethics – both his specific monographs on Spinoza’s thought and the more extensive engagement with the ethical implications of affirmative nomadic ontology throughout his work – constitutes the core of his philosophy. This claim needs to be contextualized from the outset in two ways. Firstly, Deleuze’s ethics of freedom and affirmation offers a robust reply to the doxa -driven belief that any attempt at challenging or decentering the traditional, universalistic view of the moral subject can only result in moral and cognitive relativism. This intellectually lazy position enjoys high popularity in the current global climate of political conservatism, which paradoxically rejoices in public display of interest in moral values and has branded new forms of bio-ethics, corporate ethics, media ethics, and so forth. This quantitative proliferation of ethical brands in the age of advanced capitalism leaves untouched the qualitative issue of what constitutes the core of an ethical subject. Against the common-sense belief that only steady identities resting on firm grounds of rational and moral universalism can guarantee basic human decency, moral and political agency, and ethical probity, Deleuze’s philosophy proposes a post-humanistic but robust alternative through his nomadic vision of the subject. My argument in this essay is that such a vision can provide an alternative foundation for ethical subjectivity that respects the complexity of our times while avoiding the pitfalls of postmodern and other forms of relativism. Secondly, there is a contextual consideration: Deleuze’s innovative neo-Spinozist ethical stand strikes a distinctly affirmative note in relation to the rest of the poststructuralist generation. The following discursive alignments can be seen at present in poststructuralist ethical thought. To start with: the later Foucault has produced a form of residual Kantian thought that stresses the importance of bio-politics and bio-political citizenship as a form of moral accountability.

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