In Pursuit of Necessary Joys: Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Becoming Active

Abstract

This article explores the possibility of a thoroughly materialist conception of ethics through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Focusing on Deleuze’s rigorous philosophical engagement with Spinoza’s Ethics, I show how an ontology of bodies and their encounters demands a radical rearticulation of the field of ethical problematics, one that exceeds the experiences of individualized subjects and that, for this reason, cannot be founded solely on a sense of responsibility toward nonhuman others. The following discussion presents Deleuze’s Spinozian ethics as a process of “becoming active” through the pursuit of joys that, in their irreducibility to the subject’s world, are no longer human. To this end, I explore how a Deleuzian ethics tears the field of ethical problematics away from contemporary discourses concerning the survival of humanity as a species, and, moreover, opens up the question of ethical responsibility to the activation of inhuman joys.