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Immanence and anarchist ethics

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thesis
posted on 2018-11-26, 09:36 authored by Elizabeth N. Vasileva
their rejection of classical anarchism, various postanarchist thinkers adopt a position of epistemological critique and reduce their metaphysics to a minimal conception of the self and broad, common knowledge statements about politics. Morality in the form of coercive rules or obedience to norms is rejected, whilst ethics in the form of guidelines or suggestions is taken to be desirable, and even necessary, for anarchist politics. The main argument of the thesis takes up the postanarchist critique of morality, taking seriously the concerns that essentialism, universals and representation are contestable and open to fallibility, and suggests that a further contradiction exists between anarchist principles and transcendent ethical systems. As long as postanarchist metaphysics appeal to transcendence, there is a possibility for anarchist ethics to become coercive. This work s original contribution to knowledge is the introduction of immanent metaphysics as a foundation for anarchist ethics. This is done primarily through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his critique of transcendence. The argument begins by outlining Deleuze s metaphysics of difference which are to underpin the rest of the discussion on anarchist ethics. Following this, the thesis draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and others to explore the political and active aspects of immanent ethics. The final part sketches anarchist ethics in immanent modes of existence.

Funding

Loughborough University.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Publisher

© Elizabeth Vasileva

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2018

Notes

A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.

Language

  • en