Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics

My title raises two questions—What is an immanent ethics? and What is the philosophical question of desire?—and my ultimate focus concerns the link between these two issues: What relation does an immanent ethics have to the question of desire?Historically, the first question is primarily associated with the names of Spinoza and Nietzsche (and behind them, Leibniz), since it was they 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, Kant), since it was they who formulated the modern conceptualization of desire in its most acute form: that is, in terms of unconscious desire. It was in Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, that Deleuze (along with Félix Guattari, his co-author) would attempt 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 would claim, famously, that “ Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time”—thereby making explicit the link between the theory of desire developed in Anti-Oedipus with the immanent theory of ethics Deleuze worked out in his monographs on Nietzsche and Spinoza (AO xiii).

My approach to these questions falls into three parts. In the first, I want to isolate two issues that lie at the heart of an immanent ethics. In the second part, I would like to examine in some detail two sets of texts from Nietzsche and Leibniz, which will flesh out some of the details of an immanent ethics. I will conclude with some all too brief comments on the nature of desire and a number of themes found in Anti-Oedipus.