Kierkegaard, Deleuze and the Self of Immanent Ethics

This chapter explores some of Deleuze’s references to Kierkegaard in his later works (including his co-authored works) to highlight a set of concepts adequate to a joint Deleuzian-Kierkegaardian conception of selfhood, beyond the set of concepts typically used in “substantialist” accounts of personal identity. Here the chapter focuses on several concepts from Deleuze’s Cinemabook as well as A Thousand Plateausin which elements of “impersonality,” “haecceity” and a kind of porous exchange with one’s surroundings constitute main features of the “singular” self. These concepts are supplemented by two often-underemphasized dimensions of the Kierkegaardian self: namely the concepts of transparency and immediacy as arguably de-personalizing elements, marking the individual’s indifference to conventional and inherited understandings of their own identity. The chapter concludes with a statement of the value of such an account for avoiding the “dual pitfalls” of overly substantial, as well as overly “dissolved,” conceptions of identity: the picture of selfhood gained from a comparison of Deleuze and Kierkegaard’s accounts is one in which an open-ended and developing self nonetheless maintains some minimum coordinates of stability, paceinterpreters of Deleuze who emphasize the self-destructive tendencies of the latter’s thought.