Minor Ethics
Deleuzian Variations
A Deleuze-inspired approach to tracing the minor in texts from the history of philosophical ethics in the Western tradition.
Description
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.
Reviews
“A fun and rewarding read that opens up new approaches to ethics, in part through the interpretations of Deleuze, on his own and with Guattari, given here. Minor Ethics provides a forum and a format that extends remarkably accessible readings and applications of Deleuze and Guattari, in a way that can be used both at the undergraduate level of instruction and by the layperson interested in alternative approaches to ethics.” Tamsin Lorraine, Swarthmore College