The Place of Ethics in Deleuze's Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence

Michel Foucault, in his preface to the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (and revealingly, with apologies to its authors), wrote that “ Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time” (AO xiii). Foucault’s comment was clearly meant to be provocative. It is true that France does not have a strong tradition of “moral philosophy”; the concerns of the discipline, it has been suggested, were largely taken up in France by the various human sciences such as psychology and sociology.Yet Anti-Oedipus was itself a work known primarily as a critique of psychoanalysis, and it bore little resemblance to what usually passes, in academic circles, for moral philosophy. For Foucault to insist that it was a book of ethics was tantamount to forcing his readers, at the very least, to regard the notion of “ethics” in a new manner. At the time Foucault wrote his preface, in 1977, he was himself, we now know, in the process of recasting the entire History of Sexuality project around precisely this reformulation of “the ethical question.”What was the basis of this reconceptualization of ethics that Foucault recognized in Deleuze’s philosophy, and which he later explored, in his own manner, in his last works?

Deleuze nowhere explicitly attempts to put forward what could be called an “ethical theory” of his own. Yet he has always identified Spinoza and Nietzsche as his two primary philosophical precursors, and wrote important monographs on each of them.These two thinkers, in Deleuze’s work, constitute a kind of “minor” tradition of ethical thought. What they have in common is an attempt to rethink ethics (and philosophy as a whole) from a purely immanent point of view.