Temporality and belief : time of the political from the perspective of an ethics of immanence in the philosophy of Deleuze

Abstract

The political as object of philosophy is conventionally caught up, vis-à-vis philosophy, in its status as object. They are together but held apart in that the relation between the political and the philosophical tasks is one in which philosophy assumes the function of reflection upon the conditions of the political, while the political itself can be said to be romanticized in this amorous distance between the two. The philosophy of Deleuze (and Guattari) which is considered in this study as a forceful break with and turning away from this precise attitude which both weakens thought and strips the political off of its vital force, is often criticized in contemporary philosophical studies as being apolitical. This situation is considered here as a consequence of the contemporary understanding of the domain of the political as a universal given of a certain order. To challenge this conception, Deleuze’s philosophy is reconsidered first in relation to Spinoza in terms of the ethics of immanence, and then in relation to Bergson in terms of temporality in order to determine the specificity of his thinking of politics both in relation to an in difference from both. It is suggested here that once the political is subjected to such a treatment by Deleuze, it assumes a direction of change in that this divergence can no longer be contained within the contemporary understanding of the political but requires thinking of politics in another way.