Minor Ethics

Deleuzian Variations

Casey Ford, Suzanne M. McCullagh, Karen L.F. Houle, Casey Ford, Suzanne M. McCullagh, Karen L.F. Houle

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780228005636
• eBook ISBN: 9780228007005
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Empirismo in filosofia

Alongside the major narratives of ethics in the tradition of Western philosophy, a reader with an eye to the vague and the peripheral, to the turbulent and shifting, will spy minor lines of thinking – and with them, new histories and thus new futures.

Minor Ethics develops a new approach to reading texts from the history of philosophical ethics. It aims to enliven lines of thought that are latent and suppressed within the major ethical texts regularly studied and taught, and to include texts and ideas that have been excluded from the canon of Western ethics. The editors and contributors have put Gilles Deleuze's concepts – such as affect, assemblage, and multiplicity – into conversation with a range of ethical texts from ancient thought to the present. Rather than aiming for a coherent whole to emerge from these threads, the essays maintain a vigilant alertness to difference, to vibrations and resonances that are activated in the coupling of texts. What emerges are new questions, new problems, and new trajectories for thinking, which have as a goal the liberation of ethical questioning.

Minor Ethics takes up a range of canonical ethical questions and thinks through concrete ethical problems relating to drug addiction, environmental responsibility, xenophobia, trauma, refugees, political parties, and cultural difference. The responses to these concerns demonstrate the minoritarian promise of the opening up of ethical thinking.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on References
• INTRODUCTION Toward a Minor Ethics
• INTERMEZZO Affection and Becoming
• 1 The Affective Milieu of Ethical Life in Aristotle and Deleuze
• 2 Undoing the Self: Augustine’s Confessions as a Work of Ethical Becoming
• 3 Tamed Affect: A Deleuzian Theory of Moral Sentiments
• INTERMEZZO Repetition and Affirmation
• 4 A Memorandum for Past Millennia: Excising the Plague from Lucretius’s De rerum natura
• 5 Kierkegaard and the Logic of Sense
• 6 Amor Fati in Nietzsche, Shestov, Fondane, and Deleuze
• 7 Kant’s Conception of the Will: The Minor Categorical Imperative
• INTERMEZZO Assemblage and Multiplicity
• 8 Attention and Decreation as Deterritorializing Practices: Toward a Weilian Minor Politics
• 9 Toward a Minor Ethics of the Impersonal Life: Gilles Deleuze and Roberto Esposito
• 10 Césaire and Senghor alongside Deleuze: Post-Imperial Multiplicity, Virtual Assemblages, and the Cosmopolitan Ethics of Négritude
• POSTSCRIPT Minor Ethics and the Practice of History1
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index