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

to power, with becoming is to escape judgment altogether. “The way to escape judgment is to
make yourself a body without organs, to find your body without organs. This had already been
Nietzsche’s project: to define the body in its becoming, in its intensity, as the power to affect or
to be affected, that is, as Will to Power” (CC 131). Beyond good and evil means beyond both
morality and relativism. This is the ethics of good and bad. Deleuze’s Nietzschean ethics of good
and bad is not about subjectivism. The feeling that creates values is not the feeling of this or that
subject. It is the feeling that belongs to life itself. It is the feeling that constitutes the subject in
the first place. “This is not subjectivism, since to pose the problem in terms of force, and not in
other terms, already surpasses all subjectivity” (CC 135). Thus it is not the point of saying that
different things feel differently for different people. In fact, there is a sense in which the ethics of
good and bad is a universal ethics but in a different way. It is a universal ethics in the sense that
it is an ethics for all life.
Just because the will to power is singular in each case that is just because it is inseparable
from my life and your life does not mean that good and bad are themselves particular in each
case. Affirming one’s own difference is always affected well, in other words, it always feels
good, and negating one’s own difference is always affectedly badly, in other words, it always
feels bad. “This bad is exhausted and degenerating life, all the more terrible, and apt to multiply
itself [contagion]. But the good is outpouring, ascending life, the kind which knows how to
transform itself, to metamorphose itself according to the forces it encounters, and which forms a
constantly larger force with them, always increasing the power to live, always opening the new
‘possibilities’” (NP 141). In this sense, Deleuze argues, Nietzschean ethics is an ethics of all life
even though it does not allow a universal standard by means of which we can judge others. In
fact that is precisely why Nietzschean ethics is an ethics of all life. “Judgment prevents the
245