Marjorie Gracieuse

This interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how the ethical and political problems we are confronted with today have come to focus largely on life. The contributors to this volume define and assess the specific meaning of life itself. It is only by doing so that we can understand why life has become an all-encompassing problem, why all questions, especially ethical and political, have become vital questions. We have reached a moment in history where every distinction and opposition is no longer in relation to life, but within it, and where life is at once a theoretical and practical problem. This book throws light on this nexus of problems at the heart of contemporary debates in bioethics and biopolitics. It helps us understand why and how life is understood, valued, cared for and framed today. Taking a genuinely transdisciplinary approach, these essays demonstrate how life is a multifaceted problem and how diverse the origins, foundations and also consequences of bioethics and biopolitics therefore are.

This thesis consists in emphasizing an all too often overlooked Deleuzian redefinition of the concept of ‘hierarchy’. Deleuze re-creates the sense of this old concept in order to break with the traditional representations of verticality, which have predominantly led philosophy back to the transcendence of established powers and the abstractions of opinion. To the order of representation and transcendence, always implicating the ideal of a unity as criterion of judgment and perception, Deleuze opposes a complex order in becoming. From this perspective, hierarchy no longer concerns the ontological separation between being and beings, or between thought and what it thinks. Rather, hierarchy, inasmuch as it is now integrated within the differential order of pure immanence, refers to the unequal perspectives that make up the extreme singularity of individuals as various modes of life. In addition to being an ontological feature of life as self-differing power, hierarchy constitutes a vital problem for thought, for it posits the question of exploring to what extent and by which means beings can actively possess their vitality and fully accomplish their power. It is through the problem of hierarchy, conceived as ethical differentiation of modes of existence and values, that the problem of freedom and of its relative degrees acquires, in Deleuze, a very concrete sense. It becomes one with an art of individual and collective experimentation, by which thought learns how to free itself from enslaving fictions in favour of a more intense existence