Leonard Lawlor

What you are about to read is based on my work in progress called The Disparate: Deleuze’s Ethics of the Univocity of Being. My book attempts to extract a kind of ethics from the three theoretical books Deleuze published at the end of the Nineteen-Sixties: Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968); Difference and Repetition (1968); and Logic of Sense (1969). Its widest aim lies in systematizing this ethics of the univocity of being. The first part of the article is theoretical. It concerns the ontology found in Difference and Repetition. The primary ontological concepts are those of the fold and multiplicity. The second part is practical. Here, I make a preliminary attempt to systematize the ethics of the univocity of being. Power is the hinge between the two parts, between the theory and the practice. For Deleuze, the meaning of being is power and the ethics of the univocity of being is an ethics of power. However, at the bottom of the ethics is the experience of powerlessness, even the experience of sadness. Only the experience of sadness puts one on the way to a beatific existence.

Editorial by Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Bregham Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch, Alex Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, Robin Holt, Leonard Richard Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, Edward McGushin, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Giovanni Mascaretti, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Annika Skoglund, Dianna Taylor, Thomas Lin, Mathias Mollerup Jørgensen & Rachel Raffnsøe.

This small essay is part of a book project called “Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside” (under contract with Indiana University Press). Examining key texts in Bergson, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault, the book lays out a kind of narrative. The narrative aims to show that these thinkers contain conceptual components from which emerges a research program. There are four components: the overcoming of metaphysics (understood as Platonism); the starting point in immanent, subjective experience; the transformation of immanence into multiplicity; and a new form of thinking adequate to multiplicity. The crucial component is the transformation of immanence into multiplicity. Multiplicity is the outside.