Violence of Critique

The Deleuzian critical ethos is ineliminably entwined with the ideas of a violent paideia or cultural and moral training. The education of desire critique undertakes is the genetic principle of the experience of encounter, doubling the violence constitutive of freedom. The question is whether this sense of culture as a violent paideia undercuts the liberationist aspirations of critique, particularly because violence is so often used for the imposition of ways of thinking and acting that are met with resistance from minor and minority voices. Violence is a force for oppression, coercion, and bullying more often than for freedom and dogged self-evaluation. There are no easy answers here. A critical ethos does not, as Deleuze says, make history any less bloody. Even when the critical ethos is lived through an embrace of limitations, it does not make life less violent. It does, however, make it more free – and more celebratory. The emphasis in the ethical life of critique thus, most practically, moves from the protection of bare life to a dare to live life. That does not mean that preservation is unimportant, but that the conditions of creativity, meaning, and living be afforded the ethical weight they merit in producing a space of freedom.

The Theory of Faculties

Prior to Foucault’s articulation of anti-fascism as the Deleuzo-Guattarian ethical project, Deleuze described his work as a contestation of the “dogmatic” or “moral” image of thought. For this contestation, Deleuze turned in Difference and Repetition to a Kantian notion of critique as the examination of the limits and powers of the faculties. Deleuze’s theory of faculties is a theory of how the subject is produced as an identity through active syntheses that are themselves the produce of passive syntheses. The critical analysis Deleuze undertakes in Difference and Repetition builds on the analysis of habit formation in the process of subjectivation insofar as it offers a method of analysis that is itself disruptive of habits and identities. Deleuze’s “immanent critique” describes in facultative passive synthesis not only the genesis of experience from sensibility, but the breakdown of experience in the violence of encounter. Critique reveals that the movement from the empirical to the transcendental or “heautonomous” forms of the faculties, which happens via an internalization of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience, can be cultivated toward the ends of moving beyond the constraints of rule-governed, limited ways of thinking through the practice of critique itself.

The Deleuzian Subject

In his earliest work, Deleuze presents a relational theory of subjectivity in constant flux. The larval, passive flux becomes an active subject capable of saying “I” through the exercise of certain capacities or faculties, namely, the habit of forming habits. Though the exercise of habit formation is passive, the result is an activated subject with the capacity to intervene in its own passive processes, capable of undertaking the difficult, transformative, and liberating work of destroying old habits of thinking and acting in favor of creating new ones that embrace fluidity, ambiguity, freedom, and difference. Yet, this capacity for catalyzing transformative change is frequently subverted from the inside. This is the ethical problem at the center of Deleuze’s ontology of change: the very habits that produce the conditions of becoming an ethical subject also produce the desire for repression of the fluidity of becoming. That is, the desire for fascism is the companion of the movement of subjectivation.

Conclusion: Ethics and the Richness of the Possible

By drawing connections between Deleuze’s thought and the thought of Immanuel Kant, a space is allowed to emerge for exploring the development of an ethics from Deleuze’s immanentist reading of Kantian critique. This space calls for an adjustment in expectations surrounding what counts as ethics. For ethics is not merely the articulation of sets of rules or hierarchies of the good. It is also, and perhaps primarily, an attitude toward life that is habituated and cultivates a character. This character – dramatised by figures such as the Apprentice and the Russian idiot in Deleuze’s early work, and expanded to include the nomad, becoming-woman and the minor in his work with Guattari – expresses a way of living Deleuze’s ontology of intensive becoming. Moreover, the space created is one that could not be mapped without the comparison to Kant. The deep logic of the faculties that expresses the dynamic of powerlessness becoming power, the transcendental subject for whom a preparatory education of sensibility in culture is tantamount to the formation of a non-fascistic identity, the connection to the long tradition of critical thinking in education as ...

Critical Ethos

Fascism is inseparable from the oppression of others because it is an expression of the desire for repression of one’s own multiple, imbricated, and fluid selves. An ethical life that chooses freedom must therefore nurture those connections that will reinforce habits that foster qualities such as thinking, creativity, and questioning – especially self-questioning that leads to deindividuation. The theory of the subject Deleuze develops in his early work on habit and critique of the faculties is thus the ground of a set of ethical practices that cultivate moral judgment through habits of self-criticism. Because these habits of self-criticism must be lived, practiced, and re-evaluated, Deleuze’s critique is best understood in terms of the Greek notion of an ethos, a way of living the ideas implicit in one’s ontology as ideals. This ethos defined by critique necessitates a permanent creation of our selves as the form of responsibility the analysis of our selves as historical artifacts takes. Thus the critique would not be merely descriptive; it would be practical and it would take its goal to be resisting the forms of experience that constrain thinking – thereby freeing life itself to new potential.

Moral Destiny and Culture

There is a structural parallel between Kant and Deleuze on the relationship between culture and critique, a parallel which could be worrying given the widespread criticism that Kant’s moral system smuggled in Kant’s own racist, misogynist, and elitist “subjective presuppositions.” In contrast to Kant, however, Deleuze’s determination of culture does not presuppose empirical knowledge or pre-determined moral interests. Deleuze’s immanent critique does not presuppose any particular goal Deleuze may have wanted to impute to it beyond his definition of philosophy as “breaking with doxa” (DR 134). If culture is determined through immanent critique’s examination of the faculties’ intrinsic power, without either hierarchizing the faculties or imposing on them a certain ideal organization based on so-called “rational” constraints, Deleuze is not making an implicit appraisal in which certain cultures are more valuable than others. Rather, the critical ethos expressing Deleuze’s ontology is built on the constantly renewed evaluation of all presuppositions. As such, it does not limit possibilities of life but arouses life to expand to the very limits of its power.

Introduction: The Problem of a Deleuzian Ethics

Neo- and proto-fascisms have begun re-emerging in ultranationalist, authoritarian, and extremist consolidations of power across the globe. Even in the United States, where fascism was long dismissed as an historical or exclusively European problem, the popular emergence of rhetoric related to fascist ideology over the past decade has inspired widespread comparison and a new sense of the real, imminent danger that fascism poses. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, fascism was not just a ‘bad moment’ or an ‘historical error’: fascism has yet to be overcome (AO 29–30). Why this is the case and what we might do about it are the frame for understanding Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life. It begins with the argument that an account of the endurance of fascism would be better served by emphasising not how different ‘those people’ who support fascism are from ‘us’, who do not, but rather that at the basis of fascism’s allure for us all is the desire for our own repression. If such desire is constitutive of the productive cycle of desire itself, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, any ethics that hopes to create spaces of freedom must have anti-fascism at its heart.

Immanent Critique

From a practical point of view, immanent critique is the evaluation of our selves at the level described by the faculties. It is the evaluation of our “subjective presuppositions,” the goal of which is moving “beyond” them. Yet, because the presuppositions that limit our experiences and judgments are constitutive of all our experience, such a “beyond” slips through our fingers the harder we try to grasp it. This is why Deleuze emphasises the centrality of the experience of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience. Encounters allow us to glimpse the limits of thought and routes towards its tangible transgression. And while immanent critique cannot generate the experience of encounter, its lived practice cultivates habits of sensitivity and openness to encounters, operating as a form of anti-fascism within the self. Such sensitivity allows for the production of problematic ideas as vehicles for the reinvestment of critical practice into the selves’ passive flows. Deleuze’s use of Kantian critique to articulate a theory of faculties thus simultaneously provides the foundation for an ontology and points to a new model for a way of living.