4 - Kierkegaard, Deleuze and the Self of Immanent Ethics

Summary

… but if the world has become a bad cinema, in which we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in the world and in vanished bodies?

A primary theme of the previous chapter had to do with the nature of Kierkegaard's conception of ethics as ‘immanent’. Although we found, in Deleuze's work, several places where themes of willing, affirmation and choice guided the concepts of normativity, I also pointed out that Kierkegaard's reflections on practical virtues like patience and faith served as a valuable counterweight to some of the more Romantic tendencies of Deleuze's work which emphasised values of self- and identity-destruction. In making this claim, I looked, in particular, at Tamsin Lorraine's call for some alternative values adequate for selves in process of being formed or re-formed under conditions of exclusion or marginalisation.

In this chapter, I want to pursue this theme and – in doing so – return to a central concern of this book by addressing the question of the nature of selfhood insofar as it corresponds to the modified conception of ethics we discussed in the previous chapter. Recall that we began this book by reflecting on the ways in which a Kantian response to the impossibility of noumenal self-knowledge led to a choice for moral judgement as sufficient for the determination of the nature of the self. The persistence of identity across time (known as ‘personality’, in Kant's vocabulary), the immortality of the soul as sufficient for an endless process of moral self-improvement, and unconditional freedom sufficient for an attribution of moral responsibility or blame became, at least, postulates of human selfhood, such as were necessary for a framework of moral judgement. If, however, such a set of ethical coordinates – in particular the values of moral judgement and deontological obligation – are absent from Kierkegaard and Deleuze's ethical accounts, what might remain of a concept of selfhood? How might the nature of the self be understood under this new ethical paradigm, in which becoming is more closely integrated with the kinds of ethical ideals that these philosophers propose?