Deleuze and the Ethics of Immanence: Beyond the Illusions of Consciousness Jernej Markelj School of English, Communication & Philosophy, Cardiff University, 2019 Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Critical and Cultural Theory) Acknowledgements Given the philosophical approach adopted by this thesis, it would be most appropriate to simply thank ‘all the contributing factors’ that led to its creation, but that would, perhaps, be too pedantic. I’d therefore like to begin by thanking my supervisor, Peter R. Sedgwick, for always having my back. Peter’s kindness and encouragement have been as indispensable in the writing of this thesis as his careful readings and lucid observations. I’ll always be grateful for his patience and support. I am also grateful to my co-supervisor, Jussi Parikka, for his critical engagement with my project, his inspired reading suggestions, and his continuous practical advice. I would like to thank Laurent Milesi for his help in the first year of my PhD and his support with my funding applications. I owe a great deal to Rhian Rattray for being so caring and resourceful. I hope she knows how much of a difference her efforts have made for so many of us. I appreciate the contributions of Marija Grech who, in spite of her own busy schedule, always found time to help me in so many ways, and to Claudio Celis, Irene Scicluna, and Chris Müller, for our many discussions and their insightful comments. My thanks go to Chris Weedon for her invaluable advice and for making me feel so at home in Cardiff. I would like to thank my supportive Spinozist Twitter-friends Bosco, Brent, Raphael, and Thomas, for providing me with an environment in which my enthusiasm for Deus sive Natura did not seem out of place. A major thank you goes to Marko, John and FuckTheory (FT) for accelerating my interest in philosophy. To the anonymous online theorist, FT, I owe much of my understanding and a few of my examples. If you are interested in philosophy and pedagogy done in the most lucid way possible, I encourage you to seek out his Patreon. I would like to thank my Slovenian friends Nina, Mito, Jaka and Janez. I remain close to them despite the distance. I thank them for always being there when I needed them most. Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful parents Viktor and Tanja, and my grandparents Marija and Stanko, for their unconditional love and support. Without their light-heartedness and positivity, I wouldn’t be attracted to the kind of philosophy that I am. i I am thankful to my funders South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, and Cardiff University. You can’t imagine how much it has meant to me to be able to pursue this research. ii Abstract This thesis eXamines the idea of immanent ethics as it appears in the work of Gilles Deleuze by mapping its emergence in his most relevant works (including those co- authored with Félix Guattari). My analysis adopts an innovative perspective: it suggests that Deleuze’s ethical imperative can be best understood in terms of overcoming the illusions of conscious agency. My argument is organised around two particular illusions that are normally held to relate to the supposed primacy of consciousness – that of free will and that of value. I demonstrate that, for Deleuze, overcoming these illusions can be achieved by becoming attuned to the immanent organising principle of reality, which can, in a human sense, be called the unconscious. It is the unconscious forces that constitute effective agency, while the conscious self is capable of activity only insofar as it is able to express and restructure the unconscious forces which constitute the possibility of its activity. From this perspective, I trace the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought from his work on Spinoza and Nietzsche, where he conceptualises immanent ethics through idiosyncratic readings of these philosophers, to his co-authored work with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, where a new account of the ethics of immanence is presented. This ethical approach takes the form of a materialist psychiatric practice called schizoanalysis. By eXamining the development of Deleuze’s immanent ethics, I seek to isolate and clarify its main conceptual elements. I show how schizoanalysis both embraces and diverges from Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza and Nietzsche, and suggest that its aim is that of dismantling normalised subjectivity to produce new thoughts, feelings and desires. Such a dismantling is the precondition for any future articulation of a genuinely immanent ethics. iii Table of Contents Introduction – Deleuze and the Whirlwinds of Immanence ................................. 1 i) Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 ii) Literature Review ...….......................................................................................... 11 iii) Chapter Overview ............................................................................................... 17 Chapter 1 – Dreaming With One’s Eyes Open: Spinoza and the Discovery of the Unconscious ……………………………….............................................................. 22 i) Collapsing the Empire within an Empire: Constructing Spinoza’s Plane of Immanence ……...................................................................................................... 26 ii) The Bondage of Consciousness: Enslavement to Imaginary Freedom …………. 38 iii) Rectifying the Illusions of Consciousness: From Bondage to Passions, to the Freedom of Necessity .............................................................................................. 56 Chapter 2 – Nietzsche's Becoming Active: Value Beyond the ‘Free’ Subject .. 74 i) The Ontology of Difference: Active Force and the Affirmative Will to Power ……. 78 ii) Becoming Reactive, Becoming Conscious: The Slave Triumph and the Fallacy of the Free Subject ………………………...................................................................... 90 iii) The Becoming-Active of Consciousness: Affirmative Evaluation and the Eternal Return ……………………....................................................................................... 104 Chapter 3 – Schizoanalysis: Dismantling Oedipal Consciousness ……….... 123 i) The Schizophrenic Univocity of Being: Mapping the Productive Unconscious ... 127 ii) Capitalism and Paranoia: Repression and the Recoding of Persons ……...…… 146 iii) Schizoanalysis as Immanent Ethics .................................................................. 161 Conclusion ……................................................................................................... 174 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 189 iv Introduction – Deleuze and the Whirlwinds of Immanence i) Introduction Subjectivity as such presupposes the illusion that things could be different. To be a subject is to be unable to think of oneself as anything but free — even if you know that you are not. The barrier that means that this cannot be faced is transcendental. – Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie1 Consciousness is a fetish. (A reification of productive forces.) – @qdnoktsqfr on Twitter2 This thesis eXamines the idea of immanent ethics as it appears in the work of Gilles Deleuze. By mapping the emergence of immanent ethics in Deleuze’s most relevant works (including those co-authored with Félix Guattari), I aim to clarify and develop its main components. I suggest that Deleuze’s ethical imperative can be best understood in terms of overcoming the illusions of conscious agency, which, for Deleuze, can be achieved by becoming attuned to the immanent organising principle of reality – what, in a human sense, can be called the unconscious. It is the unconscious forces that constitute effective agency, while the conscious self is capable of activity only insofar as it is able to eXpress and restructure the unconscious forces which constitute the possibility of its activity. Tracing the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought from his work on Spinoza and Nietzsche, where he conceptualises immanent ethics through idiosyncratic readings of the work of these philosophers, to his co- authored work with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, which develops an independent account of the ethics of immanence, I organise my argument around two specific illusions of consciousness: the illusions of free will and value. To set up the problematic of the illusion of free will or autonomous subjectivity, one can consider a passage from Gustave Meyrinck’s 1927 novel The Golem: 1 Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), p. 44. 2 23 April 2019, <https://twitter.com/qdnoktsqfr/status/1120632010324602880> [accessed 6 August 2019]. 1 Isn’t it strange the way the wind makes inanimate objects move? Doesn’t it look odd when things which usually just lie there lifeless suddenly start fluttering. Don’t you agree? I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house. A moment later they seemed to have calmed down, but then once again they were seized with an insane fury and raced all over the square in a mindless rage, crowding into a corner then scattering again as some new madness came over them, until finally they disappeared round a corner. There was just one thick newspaper that couldn’t keep up with the rest. It lay there