Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event

Deleuze's oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound synonymous with a philosophy of the event. The philosophy of his immediate predecessors in the phenomenological tradition can thus be envisaged as constituting a philosophy of the scar, with phenomenological and embodied intentionality (including the significance given to habit, coping, etc.) resulting in a concomitant refusal to privilege the event as wound. Various consequences hang on this difference, but primarily it results in a very different ethico-political orientation in Deleuze's work in comparison to the tacit ethics of phronesis that can be ascribed to much of the post-Husserlian phenomenological tradition. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuze's texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his phenomenological predecessors.