Conclusion: Kierkegaard and Deleuze – Philosophers of Existence

Summary

What have we accomplished in this book? A few things. We looked at a particular trajectory within the history of philosophy that led from the Kantian problem of noumenal self-knowledge to Kierkegaard's and Deleuze's efforts to grasp and reconstruct a sense of identity beyond the bounds of unity-based notions of selfhood. We saw how both Kierkegaard and Deleuze struggled to reformulate a conception of philosophy and philosophical thought in the wake of this development, as well as to understand what it means to exist, normatively speaking, within a world that has become ineffable to mere rational thought. Moreover, we reformulated both Kierkegaard's and Deleuze's thought in terms of their conceptions of normativity, so that Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity fell more in line with the non-transcendent account of ethics that Deleuze called ‘immanent’ ethics. We followed Deleuze's appropriations of Kierkegaardian thought – especially the value of faith or belief ‘in the world’ – for a deeper understanding of the nature of the self of immanent ethics and supplemented this account with some distinctly Kierkegaardian ideas about selfhood. And, finally, we took this reformulation of normativity in the direction of a political application of the notion of selfhood developed, so that selves had a deeper and more generative contact with the social and political world.

This, at least, concludes a certain arc implied in the opening of this book: that Deleuze's and Kierkegaard's critique of the Kantian account of selfhood – their rejection of a rational morality sufficient to ground stable notions of selfhood in the capacity to impute moral responsibility to the subject – would lead them to reconsider both their broad accounts of ethics, but also to reconsider what kind of subject or self could adequately participate in such a conception of ethics. But I would suggest that this is only one line of thought which links Deleuze and Kierkegaard's thought. Along the way we had the opportunity to discuss ideas about Kierkegaard's pseudonymity, about the role of writing and language in Deleuze, and about the complex relationship between the categories of immanence and transcendence in both philosophers’ work. In my view, these aspects, amongst others, can only suggest a richness that exists in the relationship between Deleuze's and Kierkegaard's thought.