Abstract

This thesis consists in emphasizing an all too often overlooked Deleuzian redefinition of the concept of ‘hierarchy’. Deleuze re-creates the sense of this old concept in order to break with the traditional representations of verticality, which have predominantly led philosophy back to the transcendence of established powers and the abstractions of opinion. To the order of representation and transcendence, always implicating the ideal of a unity as criterion of judgment and perception, Deleuze opposes a complex order in becoming. From this perspective, hierarchy no longer concerns the ontological separation between being and beings, or between thought and what it thinks. Rather, hierarchy, inasmuch as it is now integrated within the differential order of pure immanence, refers to the unequal perspectives that make up the extreme singularity of individuals as various modes of life. In addition to being an ontological feature of life as self-differing power, hierarchy constitutes a vital problem for thought, for it posits the question of exploring to what extent and by which means beings can actively possess their vitality and fully accomplish their power. It is through the problem of hierarchy, conceived as ethical differentiation of modes of existence and values, that the problem of freedom and of its relative degrees acquires, in Deleuze, a very concrete sense. It becomes one with an art of individual and collective experimentation, by which thought learns how to free itself from enslaving fictions in favour of a more intense existence