Virtue Ethics in Deleuze and Badiou: An Ethics for Social Fragmentation (original) (raw)
Deleuze and Badiou develop an ethics that is deeply indebted to a Sophoclean account of the virtues, a touchstone point they owe to Hölderlin as much as to Lacan. Sophoclean insights into the self and time, specifically coming out of Hölderlin’s short commentary on Oedipus and Antigone provide the background for a form of non-principle based and antinomian virtue ethics. Both Badiou and Deleuze present a critique and an elaboration on Lacan’s theory of desire and the law that goes beyond the impasses of misrecognition and fatalism in Lacan’s middle-period, what Jacques Alain-Miller refers to as the period of “impossible jouissance.” To elaborate upon the role of virtue and ethics in their thought, I analyze Stephen Crane’s classic American novel, The Red Badge of Courage, where the virtue of courage is developed through the young protagonist Henry Fleming, a timid private fighting in the Union Army during the Civil War. Both Badiou and Deleuze reference this novel as presenting the best example of the event although they do not elaborate upon this point. While there are few, if any contemporary philosophical analyses of this novel, it reveals a remarkable theoretical framework of courage and the virtues, developed in a sequence of battles and skirmishes from the perspective of the young protagonist Fleming. I diagram the four-part process of the subject in the novel and I demonstrate how the action of the novel provides a heuristic model for a process-based and dialectical theory of courage. I then apply these four-part sequences to Badiou’s and Deleuze’s theory of time, the subject and ethics. From this touchstone point of the novel, I argue that Badiou’s “Promethean Ethics” and Deleuze’s “Ethics of the Crack” present two distinct models for thinking the invention of a revolutionary subject and the inhabitation of a new outplace beyond the time and laws of the state or the social. I argue that the question of the invention of the ‘outplace’ is pertinent to thinking impossible ethical subjects of late capitalism today from the precariat, to the heroin junkie, to the slum dweller. Secondly, I argue that the concept of virtue is relevant to both thinkers because in the psychoanalytic process of sublimation, the subject requires the cultivation of virtue (fidelity in the case of Badiou and prudence in the case of Deleuze) in order to manage self-loss and the fragmentation of the ego. More generally, I suggest that continental philosophy does indeed have a stake in the tradition of virtue ethics despite its non-principled and antinomian orientation.
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Wales, is perhaps best known for his translation of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), although he has made other notable efforts on behalf of disseminating continental thought, including translating Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995), editing Deleuze: A Critical Reader for the Blackwell Critical Readers Series (1996), and editing the untimely Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (1993). In addition, Patton has written a number of excellent, widely-reproduced papers in which he backlights key, load-bearing concepts from Deleuze and Guattari such as “the War Machine, ” “the event, ” and “difference,” while preserving their shadowy idiosyncratic beauty as only a scholar of Patton’s calibre can do. Eugene Holland succeeds similarly well with concepts from Anti-Oedipus in his Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (1999).
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Concepts such as ethics, values, and normativity play a crucial – if subtle and easily overlooked – role in Deleuze’s overall philosophical project. The essays in this collection uncover and explore the ethical dimension of Deleuzian philosophy along diverse trajectories and, in so doing, endeavour to reclaim that philosophy as moral philosophy.
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