Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics
Theory, Subjectivity, and Duration
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Explains how the work of Deleuze and Guattari speaks to feminism and other progressive movements.
Description
In Deleuze and Guattari's Immanent Ethics, Tamsin Lorraine focuses on the pragmatic implications of Deleuze and Guattari's work for human beings struggling to live ethical lives. Her bold alignment of Deleuze and Guattari's project with the feminist and phenomenological projects of grounding human action in lived experience provides an accessible introduction to their work. Lorraine characterizes Deleuze and Guattari's nonfoundational approach to ethics in terms of a notion of power that comes into skillful confluence with the multiple forces of life and an immanent principle of flourishing, while their conception of philosophical thought is portrayed as an intervention in the ongoing movement of life that she enacts in her own exploration of their ideas. She contends that Deleuze and Guattari advocate unfolding the potential of our becoming in ways that enhance our participation in the creative evolution of life, and she characterizes forms of subjectivity and cultural practice that could support such evolution. By means of her lucid reading taken through the lens of feminist philosophy, Lorraine is not only able to present clearly Deleuze and Guattari's project but also an intriguing elaboration of some of the project's practical implications for novel approaches to contemporary problems in philosophy, feminism, cultural theory, and human living.
Tamsin Lorraine is Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy and Gender, Identity, and the Production of Meaning.
Reviews
"…Tamsin Lorraine expertly maps out the Deleuze-Guattarian ontological and conceptual landscape that opens up such new vistas and possibilities for being and thinking … [her] book is of import both to philosophers unfamiliar with feminism and to feminists put off by Deleuze and Guattari. She proposes a way of theorizing that should appeal to all those interested in accounting for the irreducibly complex reality of our lives, and in participating in the changes in thinking, feeling, relating, and becoming that such a novel approach requires. " — philoSOPHIA