3 - Kierkegaard as a Thinker of Immanent Ethics

Summary

Having now established some idea of where Deleuze and Kierkegaard stand on the nature of personal identity, I want to turn more directly towards the two philosophers’ ethical thought, insofar as this is related to some of the normative features of repetition from the previous chapter. Having shown that both Deleuze and Kierkegaard are primarily interested in those sorts of practices which serve to free the individual from the stability of their identity, we can here look at the ways in which this normative ideal serves as part of a more general orientation in the two philosophers towards an ethics that we can call – following Deleuze's nomination – ‘immanent’ ethics. What this means is that in this chapter I am interested in showing how Kierkegaard's ethical thought, which has been read in all sorts of directions by his interpreters, in fact may be best understood in terms of the Deleuzian distinction between so-called ‘transcendental morality’ and immanent ethics. In making this argument, I will also need to respond to an intuitive criticism of my comparison between Deleuze and Kierkegaard, to the effect that Kierkegaard in fact breaks with Deleuze's basic orientation towards immanence by virtue of his necessarily ‘transcendental’ orientation. Showing how Kierkegaard can be understood as, in fact, a strong representative of immanent ethics, and moreover how Kierkegaard's very understanding of transcendence can be shown to harmonise with Deleuze's understanding of immanence, will provide us with an important set of tools for the exchange of thought between the two philosophers: Deleuze can be read in terms of a distinctive form of transcendence as it is understood through a Kierkegaardian framework, just as Kierkegaard can be understood in terms of the category of immanence in the way that Deleuze understands it. As I argue at the end of the chapter, this capacity for a more generalised conceptual exchange between the two philosophers on their normative thought offers readers a number of useful consequences; among them, Kierkegaard will be seen to offer to thinkers of Deleuzian ethics a set of ethical concepts and practices that will avoid some of the more nihilistic aspects of Deleuze's thought.