stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

prior to theory altogether. Deleuze criticizes the Cogito. But he does not criticize the Cogito
because the Cogito cannot think what there really is. Instead, Deleuze criticizes the Cogito
simply because it thinks badly. But what does ‘badly’ refer to in the previous sentence if not to
its inability to think what there really is? “When Nietzsche questions the most general
presuppositions of philosophy, he says that these are essentially moral, since Morality alone is
capable of persuading us that thought has a good nature and the thinker a good will, and that only
the good can ground the supposed affinity between thought and the True. Who else, in effect, but
Morality, and this Good which gives thought to the true, and the true to thought?” (DR 132).
Deleuze criticizes the Cogito because its thinking demonstrates an ethical badness. What does it
mean for a way of thinking to be ethically bad?
In what follows I develop Deleuze’s ethics. I argue that his ethics are fundamentally
Nietzschean in nature. For this reason, I begin by discussing Deleuze’s interpretation of
Nietzsche in Nietzsche and Philosophy. I will argue that the ethical difference between good and
bad is the difference between those lives that affirm their own difference and those that deny
their own difference, in other words, the ethical difference between good and bad is the
difference between becoming and being. I hope that this statement conveys something important
to the reader. If the Cogito thinks badly in the sense that he does not affirm his own difference
and is rather than becomes, then the Overman does think well in the sense that he does affirm his
own difference and becomes. This is precisely what it means for knowledge to be apprenticeship
and learning. This insight allows me to make the most important point of this thesis. Deleuze
argues in favour of the Overman and against the Cogito not because the Overman thinks what
there really is whereas the Cogito does not. Instead, it is because the practical activity of the
Overman, namely repetition, is the demonstration of an ethically good life whereas the practical
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