This Deleuzian Century

Book excerpt: According to Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) philosophy is not for the privileged few or the specialized ones: it is an activity that appeals to anyone who is attuned to the desire for the ethical life. Inspired by Spinoza’s concepts of desire and freedom, Deleuze’s ethical life is a life that aims at experimenting with sustainable ways of coping with the earth, with society, with the long term struggles and contemporary crisis that matter to us all. An ethical life defines thinking as the invention/intervention of new concepts and takes the risk of working with them in the real world. This book has been written in this spirit of free explorations of intensities. It explores the entanglements between art, activism and life in the service of training us to live ethically. Contrary to morality, which is the implementation of socially accepted rules and regulations, ethics requires an analysis of the power relations that structure our interaction as relational subjects, in order to enable us to deal with them. The original contributions presented in this volume aim to set these ideas to work in contemporary practices, exploring the ways in which Deleuze’s thought continues to be relevant at the start of the 21st century. As a product of the “Deleuze Circle”, an open collaboration between academics situated in the Low Countries started in 2008, the chapters in this book contribute to our ongoing conversations on how to live the ethical life today in academia, in art but above all in our multiple ecologies of belonging.