5 - Faith, Creation and the Future of Deleuzian Subjects

Summary

Having now established some of the basic elements of a Deleuzian-Kierkegaardian notion of selfhood – one which is adequate to the concept of ethics sketched in the earlier chapters – I want to elaborate some of the ideas discussed there in the direction of a possible political interpretation of these questions, if only for the sake of indicating the kinds of productive directions in which a comparison of the two philosophers might be taken. One recent direction of research that has been interestingly adumbrated in Kierkegaard scholarship has to do with the subtle political value of his thought, showing how the Kierkegaardian emphasis on possibility and embodiment might contribute towards ideas about political materialism and non-teleological thinking. On the other side of things, one element of Deleuze's reading of Kierkegaard that has been taken up in secondary literature (to some extent) is the category of ‘belief’, which, as we have seen, serves in Deleuze's later writings as a central concept related to the open-endedness of the relationship between the individual and her environment or ‘world’. In this chapter, I want to bring some of these themes together in order to show how – for Deleuze – the category of belief can serve to link an implicit political dimension to his ethical thought, and to confirm this account through an indication of some of the recent developments in Kierkegaard scholarship that move Kierkegaard's supposedly individualistic account in the direction of a collective politics. In particular, we will see below how the category of belief, which draws upon notions of identity distinct from private, individualistic concerns as well as from overly generalised ‘group’ concerns, allows for a mode of political engagement that brings individuals into an immediately political domain, one where political action need no longer be mediated through loci of stereotyped, ‘collective’ enunciation – that is, it will be possible to draw the radical individuality of actors directly into contact with an immediately political set of effects. Using this account, we can see how contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship has begun to move in similar directions to certain branches of Deleuze scholarship, by emphasising the collective dimensions of individual subjectivity, and therefore opening new possibilities for political engagement through the activity and creativity of individuals.