Supplement

Abstract

In this supplement to a work co-authored with André Cresson, David Hume, sa vie, son œuvre, left untranslated until now, Deleuze lays the groundwork for what he will later develop as an “ethics without morality.” Contrary to morality, ethics engenders its general rule for action out of the immanence that grants it the power to affect and to be affected, that is, to increase or decrease its capacity to compose new empowering relations between beings, and between beings and the world. The power to act is synonymous with the capacity to imaginatively create relations, in order to exist. In this way, the imagination reveals its ontological significance. Here we discern Deleuze’s Humean impulse encountering a fundamental Nietzscheanism. The translator’s introduction attempts to make explicit his specific philosophical motive, at this point only formative but, eventually, foundational for his later thought.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• Hume
• morality
• relations
• imagination
• empiricism

Notes

This translation combines the two sections “L’Œuvre” and “Complément sur l’œuvre” from the original French edition. The translator would like to thank Raluca Ramaniuc and the anonymous Angelaki reader for their rigorous proofreading and suggestions.

1. David Hume, “Letter to a Physician” in Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 348. Available English editions of Hume's works have been used. [Translator's note.]

2. The work Deleuze has most in mind here is Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776). [Translator's note.]

3. The listing of Hume's works immediately following this paragraph has been omitted. [Translator's note.]

4. In the original French text there is an obvious typesetting mistake. The first two lines are inverted as they continue onto the following page. The translation corrects this mistake. [Translator's note.]

5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 3.3.1, 377. Hereafter cited as Treatise.

6. Treatise 3.2.2, 315.

7. Loyalism was a political movement at the center of debate in the eighteenth century, which argued that only loyalty to the established monarchy, and the rejection of republicanism, would insure the preserving of individual rights. [Translator's note.]

8. Dual sense of the imagination “having a passion for something,” or that it “excites itself,” but that it “impassions itself,” that is, engenders from itself, out of its own resources, a passion. Imagination, in other words, provides the positive condition for the genesis of the passions. English cannot quite capture the subtlety of this dual sense. [Translator's note.]

9. Treatise 3.3.1, 373.

10. Ibid.

11. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, with Of the Immortality of the Soul, Of Suicide, Of Miracles, ed. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980) 44. Hereafter cited as Dialogues.

12. Dialogues 48.

13. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) 148.

14. Dialogues, “Of Miracles,” Part I, 112 n.

15. Dialogues, “Of Miracles,” Part II, 122.