Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos explores the potential Deleuze’s reformulation of Kantian critique has for developing a transformative ethical practice. The starting point is the idea that ontology implies an actual practical attitude that is not a theory but a choice about oneself. This ethical choice must be made today in relation to the myriad ways that what we are capable of doing and becoming have been limited, most troublingly by our desire for our own repression. Deleuze’s energetic, critical ontology leads him to seek to resist all forms of fascism within the self. This ethical orientation tow ... More

Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos explores the potential Deleuze’s reformulation of Kantian critique has for developing a transformative ethical practice. The starting point is the idea that ontology implies an actual practical attitude that is not a theory but a choice about oneself. This ethical choice must be made today in relation to the myriad ways that what we are capable of doing and becoming have been limited, most troublingly by our desire for our own repression. Deleuze’s energetic, critical ontology leads him to seek to resist all forms of fascism within the self. This ethical orientation towards the self within Deleuze’s ontology allows for the extrapolation of an ethos built on new habits of deterritorializing sedimented ways of thinking and behaving. The idea of critique as a way of life – Deleuze’s critical ethos – expresses the mode of living an ontology of becoming through a critique of subjectivity. Practically, this is lived as a form of self-directed moral pedagogy, the goal of which is developing in our selves the wisdom to perceive unanticipated features of moral salience, evaluate the principles we presuppose, affirm the limits those presuppositions impose, and create concepts that capture new ways of thinking about moral problems.