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June 06, 2006
There is a strange relationship between poststructuralist ethics in Continental philosophy and the dominant Anglo-American traditions of moral philosophy. For some reason moral philosophy, as a discipline does not score highly in poststructuralist philosophy or in French philosophy as a whole, whilst a lot of Anglo-American moral philosophy is hostile to poststructuralism---the standard charges are relativism and nihilism---and denies its ethical concerns.
Yet ethical concerns abound in poststructuralism: recall Deleuze's ethics of immanence, Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference, Foucault's ethical relationship of care-for-self, and Derrida's and Levinas' emphasis on alterity. These ethical concerns in poststructuralist philosophy indicate that a liberal individualist definition of the subject is seen to hinder the development of new modes of ethical behaviour. Ethics becomes a discourse about forces, desires and values that act as empowering modes of being, whereas morality is the established sets of rules. What we have is a critique of liberal individualism and its replacement by a different, non individual conception of subjectivity.
For instance, the neo-vitalism of Deleuze, with its reference to Bergson Nietzsche and Spinoza, works with a conception of the subject as a radically immanent intensive body, that is an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an 'individual' self. This intensive and dynamic entity is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough to sustain and to undergo constant, though, non-destructive, fluxes of transformation. It is the body's degrees and levels of affectivity that determined the modes of differentiation. Joyful or positive passions and the transcendence of reactive affects are the desirable mode. The emphasis on 'existence' implies a commitment to duration and conversely a rejection of self-destruction.
It is the deconstruction of the liberal humanist individual that marks a central fault line between Anglo-American moral philosophy and poststructuralist ethics. As one's identity is produced between self and other then the identity of the self becomes dispersed into the other. Hence the shift towards the openess of others.
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but.... isn't Capitalism and Schizophrenia a work of ethics.. you posted that a while ago. then there are the last few books and most of the lectures of foucault... to me they look like ethics. more of the ethics along the lines of aristotle than say the ethics along the lines of wittgenstein.... the thing is that anglo-american philosophy thinks that ethics and human endeavor will all be resolved if we can just be clear and simple, even if clear and simple does not map onto human activity.... most should as well be economists in the way treat moral issues.