| In his Preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault labeled the text a book of ethics. It is just as easy, given the tone of Anti-Oedipus and the intellectual milieu in France at the time, to dismiss this remark as a kind of tongue-in-cheek provocation as it is to dismiss the text itself as mere juvenilia left over from May 68. However, at the time of publication of Anti-Oedipus, Foucault was in fact struggling to reformulate moral philosophy himself and to give an entirely new significance to the word ethics. I would argue that Foucault noticed in Deleuze s work certain potential sorties from the various impasses of his own History of Sexuality project, and that the eight-year gap between the publication of volumes one and two can be accounted for, in part, by his need to radically rethink the trajectory of his sexual-ethics in light of Deleuze and Guattari s work. My PhD project, then, begins by taking seriously Foucault's claims about Anti-Oedipus and will proceed by attempting to show how the text is a book of ethics, that is, by attempting to extract an ethics from Deleuze's oeuvre. The project will necessarily involve a close investigation of not only Deleuze s own investments in Foucault, but also in Nietzsche, Spinoza, Lacan, Sacher-Masoch, and, perhaps most importantly, post-war cinema. Although Deleuze repeatedly called his work on Nietzsche and Spinoza practical philosophy (thus, with a nod to Kant, alluding to ethics without explicitly using the term) it is only late in his career, when he writes a two-volume history of cinema, that ethics qua micro-politics is dislodged from the domain of philosophy and becomes more concretely historical. |
