Deleuze and the Question of Desire: toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics1

The title of this paper raises two questions, each of which I would like to address in turn. The first question is: What exactly is an immanent ethics (as opposed to an ethics that appeal to transcendence)? The second question is: What is the philosophical question of desire? My ultimate question concerns the link between these two issues: What relation does an immanent ethics have to the question of desire? Historically, the first question is primarily linked with the names of Spinoza and Nietzsche (as well as, as we shall see, Leibniz), since it was Spinoza and Nietzsche who posed the question of an immanent ethics in its most rigorous form. The second question is linked to names like Freud and Lacan, and behind them, to Kant, since it was they who formulated the modern conceptualization of desire in its most acute form—that is, in terms of unconscious desire, desire as unconscious. It was in Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, that Deleuze (along with Félix Guattari, his co-author) would attempt to formulate his own theory of desire—what he would call a purely immanent theory of desire. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault would claim, famously, that “Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time”—thereby making explicit the link between the theory of desire developed in Anti-Oedipus with the immanent theory of ethics Deleuze worked out in his monographs on Nietzsche and Spinoza.2