Deleuze projects a “genetic principle of difference” that
subsists within and below existence or “actuality”. He thus
thinks difference as that which exceeds and helps to propel
novel entities into actuality. Immanence without transcendence.
Moreover, again unlike Derrida, he does not define ethics in the
first instance in terms of obligation, responsibility,
obedience, debt or lack; he binds ethics in the first instance
to a love of the world that flows from the abundance of being
transcendence that speak of a constitutive “debt”, a “lack”
between identity and being, or a law “deferred” into the
indefinite future:
The ethical themes he finds in transcendent philosophies
such as those of Levinas and Derrida--absolute
responsibility for the other that I can never assume, or an
infinite justice that I can never satisfy--are..imperatives
whose effect is to separate me from my capacity to act from
the viewpoint of immanence, in other words transcendence
represents slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest
point: the absolutely impossible is nothing other than the
concept of impotence raised to infinity.
As may already be intimated, I concur in much of what Smith
says about both thinkers. But I also need to probe a few points
further.
Convention