Immanent Ethics Research Articles

Immanent Ethics and Deconstruction

This paper endeavors to argue that Derrida’s deconstructionist ethics can be construed as an embodiment of immanent ethics. To achieve this goal, it commences with Friedrich Nietzsche’s articulation of immanent ethics, drawing a contrast with formalist and conformist accounts of morality, exemplified in Kant. Following that, the paper explores the ethical thoughts of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to establish a connection between immanent ethics and the problem of life. In this context, we observe how immanent ethics redirects ethical concerns from human consciousness to the domain of life, modes of existence, the unconscious desire and its exteriority. Within this framework, the paper characterizes Derrida’s ethics of deconstruction as a convergence of the immanence of deconstruction and deconstruction as a creative mode of life. As a result, Derrida’s formulation of ethical challenges within the context of aporias, impossibility, and responsibility can be understood as a call for resistance against conformity to established forms of life. This imbues deconstruction with an intrinsic ethical-political character.

Forgiveness as the Way to Salvation: A Soteriological Account of Forgiveness in the Religious Writings of Kierkegaard and Its Meaning for Immanent Ethics

Forgiveness as the Way to Salvation: A Soteriological Account of Forgiveness in the Religious Writings of Kierkegaard and Its Meaning for Immanent Ethics

A Political Ecology of Ecologies

In this short paper I discuss a day spent with a group of students in Glen Almond, Perthshire, in 2018. As I write this now, in 2022, I have the opportunity to situate my present thinking in the story and to think with the idea of a political ecology of ecologies, derived from an immanent ethics. I speculate that competing ecologies are themselves ecological as they perform materially in the world, and that creative research of the everyday enactments of multiple ecologies provides a form of critical environmental and social education.

Becoming-elemental – a thermal imaginary in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene problematic calls for imaginative aesthetic experiments fostering more-than-human thought and sensibilities. In this thought experiment, I draw on a sensing device in conjuring a thermal imaginary that decenters the human, espying a glimpse of a strange and uncanny world-without-us. The imaginary is a speculative performance in elemental attunement – becoming-molecular, becoming-imperceptible in the generative potentia of planetary heat – opening a pathway in rethinking bodies and worlds as emergent in, and through, forces elemental and cosmic in scope. The thermal imaginary accentuates the elemental as exorbitant, anonymous, and nonpossessable, an earthly plenum beyond any final capture, possession, mastery and control. Elemental alterity, the very strangeness of the earth, rises in the thermal imaginary as a summons, a calling from the “outside,” gesturing toward an immanent ethics of radical openness working in, and through, earthly bodies always already exposed and vulnerable in the force of the elemental. We must be open to the elemental summons, expanding capacities for what a body can do, moving beyond spinning reductive and redemptive Anthropocene narratives for saving this world. There can be no new bodies and worlds to come in the absence of an elemental ethics worthy of the earth itself.

El último Habermas y Baruj Spinoza. (Sobre el proyecto inmanente de un ser finito)

This paper deals with the unexpected and singular presence of Baruj Spinoza in the recent History of Philosophy published by Jürgen Habermas. On the matter, from current perspective, spinozist ethics of immanence is considered allows to overcome deontological limits that even today condition the ethics of discourse

Threats to Decolonial Immanent Ethics

The last three decades have witnessed a distinct shift in the identity and purpose of higher education across the world. From being a site for predominantly public institutions offering a Humboltian social good, higher education has morphed towards narrowly responding to powerful national economic growth imperatives. Both public and private institutions now compete aggressively along neoliberal market principles to provide an economic good. African higher education is not immune to such persuasions. There is now aggressive competition for students, personnel, and physical and economic resources. An insidious performativity discourse has become normalised, emphasising outcomes, throughputs, and performance measurements. This culture is likely to impact the work of the academe, especially as it relates to research and scholarship, is without question. There is little contention that the understanding and application of fundamental ethical principles in the conduct of research is likely to be threatened. Contemplating (South) African research ethics in institutions whose governance is inspired by the traditional colonial (Anglo) model that pledges allegiance to a heterosexual white male value system, which requires a critical deconstruction in the face of transformation and social cohesion discourses that urge the rejection of race and race markers and a discounting of identity politics. This conceptual article considers how we might mitigate the deleterious effects of a neoliberal higher education milieu and the marginalising of (Black) race as a compelling socio-cultural resource. This paper argues for a transition from a narrow, technical, ethical compliance towards understanding and applying Deleuzian immanent ethics.

Posthuman Knowledge

Posthuman Knowledge

Sustainability Beyond Instrumentality: Towards an Immanent Ethics of Organizational Environmentalism

In research on organizational environmentalism, there has been a repeated call for ways to go beyond the business case for sustainability frame. While the business case frame assumes that developing eco-friendly solutions can benefit firms financially, this article highlights the importance of challenging established understandings of sustainability. To this end, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between morality and ethics. Morality involves passing judgements on the basis of values. Ethics provides an immanent evaluation of the principles by which specific solutions are considered sustainable. Analysing interviews with architects, building engineers and business developers, the article shows how these actors reflect on the values that form the basis of their practice, but also try to imagine new ways of working with sustainability. In conclusion, the article suggests that an immanent ethics of organizational environmentalism can allow for the values that inform environmental efforts in organizations to be evaluated as well as alternative visions of sustainability to be created.

Kierkegaard as a Thinker of Deleuzian Immanent Ethics

In this article, I present an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s ethics in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between immanent ethics and transcendent morality. I argue that Kierkegaard’s skepticism towards moral prescription, his emphasis on the single individual as the basis of normative evaluation, and his view of Christianity as somehow “beyond” the scope of moral obligation are all functions of a Deleuzian conception of immanent ethics as a non-moralistic form of normativity. On this basis, I argue for two conclusions: first, that Kierkegaard’s work is better understood through this frame-work than through either aretaic or deontological frameworks; and second, that Deleuzian ethics is better served by Kierkegaardian illustrations like patience and stillness, than by the tropes of destruction that are often associated with it. Dans cet article, je présente une interprétation de l’éthique de Kierkegaard du point de vue de la distinction deleuzienne entre l’éthique immanente et la moralité transcendante. Dans cette perspective, je soutiens que le scepticisme de Kierkegaard quant à la prescription morale, sa conception d’un christianisme « en dehors » du champ de l’obligation morale, et l’accent qu’il fait porter sur le seul individu comme étant la base des évaluations normatives, sont tous fonction d’une conception deleuzienne de l’éthique immanente, en tant que forme amorale de la normativité. Sur cette base, j’affirme deux conséquences : la première, que l’oeuvre kierkegaardienne est mieux comprise selon ce cadre que selon, d’une part, le cadre de l’éthique de la vertu, et d’autre part, le cadre déontologique. La deuxième, que l’éthique deleuzienne s’illustre mieux par les exemples kierkegaardiens, comme ceux de la patience et de la tranquillité, que par les tropes de la destruction auxquels elle est souvent associée.

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+322.

<i>The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism</i>. Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+322.

Blue Seattle: Immanent ethics and contemporary urbanisation

This paper asserts that critical investigations into the urbanisation process should consider the actually existing ethics of the process itself, without defaulting to transcendent normative principles. Grounded in an ontology of immanence, as presented in Deleuze and Guattari's (9) political philosophy, I argue that attention must be paid to the production and transformation of normativity. Using the redevelopment of the South Lake Union (SLU) neighbourhood of Seattle – (in)famously home to Amazon, but largely envisioned and developed by Paul Allen's investment and philanthropic organisation, Vulcan – as an analytical starting point, this paper sketches out a profile of the “blue” dimension of the genesis of Seattle's environmental ethic, from early efforts to reshape the region's hydrology and address water pollution in Lake Washington, through efforts by governmental bodies and Vulcan to protect water quality and salmon habitat, and on to a large‐scale infrastructure project – the Elliott Bay Seawall replacement – that includes features to enhance biodiversity and ecological functioning in the nearshore environment. In tracking these movements, I identify the emergence of an explicitly post‐anthropocentric ethic from what initially appears as an aesthetic concern, while also highlighting the ongoing complexification of an earlier engineering ethic that dates back to the earliest attempts by settlers to manage the natural environment.

Logic of care versus logic of choice in modern concepts of medical practice

The article compares two fundamental and conflicting principles in the ethical interpretation of clinical experience — the patient&amp;#39;s right to medical choice and care as an immanent ethics of healing. Conceptual attempts to theoretically and empirically justify an unconditional priority of care in modern social and humanitarian research of medicine, as well as the desire to include the logic of choice in the logic of care are made from different methodological perspectives and on the basis of different intellectual traditions. Thus it is more important to compare the key concepts of care on this issue in order to reveal the global trend in understanding the essence of medical experience. The article offers a comparative analysis of the following: firstly, the arguments of an American researcher Joan C. Tronto, formulated in the context of universal political theory and ethics, but relevant to the field of medicine, secondly, the theory of care of the German doctor and philosopher of medicine Klaus Dörner and his opposition to the principle of autonomy, carried out in the practice of informed consent, thirdly, “involved ethnography” of the logic of care, carried out by the Dutch philosopher and anthropologist Annemarie Mol. The comparative analysis of the main texts of these authors on this problem revealed many general statements expressed by them, mainly, the general idea that in the case of chronic disease, which is a typical case of pathology in modern society, the most important is the logic of good care, the logic of interdependence of all subjects of care as a process, and that it is not the political opposition of power and equality here that comes to the centre, but the opposition of care and neglect in everyday medical practices.

Doing little justices: speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics

This article develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The article is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures, multiplicities, processes, and speculative thought experiments. Drawing on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy in conjunction with recent new materialist thought, the article proposes the concept of ‘doing little justices’ as a way of enacting micropolitical interventions into everyday patterns of environmental thought, learning, sociality, and behaviour. The concept of ‘little justices’ is further elaborated through the analysis of vignettes that problematise issues of climate change, human exceptionalism, ecological sovereignty, and environmental justice with university students in the fields of education and the philosophy of law. The article concludes that an immanent ethics cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values or prescriptions for environmental education, but should proceed through a speculative process of creative experimentation and negotiation in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and potentials for co-existence.

An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: ‘The Incorporeal’

In this interview with Vikki Bell, Elizabeth Grosz explains some of the key concepts and arguments in her book The Incorporeal (2017), including how this book sits with her earlier interventions, the appeal of Simondon’s concept of the pre-individual, Ruyer and the notion of directionality, and why reading the Stoics helps us understand current Deleuzian-inspired debates on immanent ethics.

Something, Everything, Nothing; Or, Cows, Dogs, and Maggots

This article tries to locate the missing something that enables radical social projects to persevere, in this case, the social project of animal activism in India. The author argues that we will find the missing something buried in and by the tyranny of consistency (or contradiction thinking), which demands that any ethics in an oppositional or oblique relationship to the way things are account for its apparent inconsistencies or contradictions. The tyranny of consistency steals the something actors need by collapsing something with everything, so that what we are left with (because everything is impossible) is nothing, which is both impossible and extinguishing. The author argues through her ethnography that the creative lived response to the tyranny of consistency is immanent ethics, an ethics that is committedly, if inconsistently, inconsistent.

Spinoza, Ecology, and Immanent Ethics

Spinoza, Ecology, and Immanent Ethics

Alternative Forms of Spirituality and the Socialization of a Self-Enhancing Subjectivity: Features of the Post-Secular Religious Space in Contemporary Romania

AbstractMy paper focuses on the shift in religious values in post-socialist Romania and explores the emergence of alternative spiritual beliefs and practices among the younger generations socialized during the post-communist period. It analyses some of the changes that occurred in the wider traditional religious field and looks at the various spiritualized technologies of the self that produce a distinctive type of religious subjectivity and an immanent ethics of authenticity. By departing from the idea of an integrated religious community and from the relational understanding of religious transformation, the field of alternative spiritualities operates a radical break with traditional religion and emphasizes the possibility of spiritual self-realization and self-discovery. It is this process of the individualizing sacralization of the self that constitutes the object of various workshops, blogs, personal and spiritual development literature, courses, spiritual retreats and counselling services. My research looks at how innovative technologies of the self are developed within these spaces that emphasize creativity, wellbeing and a new understanding of subjective interiority that learns how to find in itself the resources it needs to live in a spiritualized ontology of the present.2

Imaginary Worlds and Real Ethics: Alterity and Transpositioning in Murakami Haruki's Fractal Realism

Much recent ethical criticism theorizes novels as becoming ethically effective through readers’ oscillation between immersion in mimetic worlds and subsequent reflection on that experience. Murakami Haruki, however, presents readers with irreducibly fictional realities that refuse totalizing immersion and that require characters to take responsibility for interacting with manifestly imaginary beings. Each of these realities comprises what I identify as multiple world systems, or narratively constructed semiotic domains such as those of cults or coteries, whose borders with other world systems become the sites of dramatic action and ethical transformation. In essence, Murakami presents us not with single verisimilar realities but with what I call fractal realism, recursively constituted fields of representation wherein characters and readers alike must continually adapt their modes of response to accommodate the differing ethoses established by multiple fictional worlds. This essay identifies some of the ways that theorists of the novel must adjust their models to deal with such quirky, metafictional texts. In addition, to flesh out the immanent ethics of reading at work in Murakami's fiction, I suggest that we might draw from theories of reader response figured in scholarship on “surface reading” and also on the idea of “twofoldness” in aesthetic apprehension theorized by Richard Wollheim.

Mauri-Ora: Architecture, Indigeneity, and Immanence Ethics

Where does life live? What is alive? In modernist/dualist thinking, we might assume that life lives through cause and effect—an acting of someone onto something. When conceived through an Indigenous-Māori concept of mauri—life vitality— the immanence of living as a relational field is revealed. An ethical imperative to sustain the wellness of the life-field, mauri-ora, is concurrent with the concept of mauri. This paper philosophically probes the immanent and ethical conditions of this life-field and its relational sustenance as the very ground for design thinking. Here, I explore an architectural project, Te Uru Taumatua, as a case for thinking through mauri-ora (life-field) as immanent ethics in relation to an evocation of ecological vitality. This project becomes a bridge for thinking immanent connections across Indigenous-Maori and contemporary ecological thinking. This paper argues that architecture’s role as an Anthropocenic actor creates the conditions necessary to instantiate socio-ecologically situated immanent ethics as design ethics. What is fundamental to this approach is to reveal how ecological design is a thinking manifest here, in this case study, as the relation of mauri to mauri-ora. Here, Te Uru Taumatua helps to explore an understanding of mauri-ora as an immanent ethics which bridges (design) thinking and practice.

On embracing an immanent ethics in urban planning: Pursuing our Body-without-Organs

This article draws attention to urban planning’s apparent reluctance to engage with the ethical and political dimensions of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. It puts forward the hypothesis that planning, as a discipline, is fundamentally inhospitable to the idea of autonomy, and it raises the question of whether planning can survive a radical engagement with an immanent ethics. In other words, if planning questions its close ties with the state and its assumptions about people’s capacity to live together, if it opens itself up to lines of flight, is deterritorialized, becomes imperceptible, is it still urban planning? Six proposals for an urban planning that embraces Deleuzoguattarian ethics are presented.