abstract | This dissertation is a constructive meditation on Gilles Deleuze's late-in-life observation that "It may be that believing
in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task... we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the world, worse than a
fiancé or a god." What this means is that the link connecting humans to their world has been severed, such that we are no longer affected by the events that
shape us and subsequently fail to act in response to them. My research develops this disconnection and shows that it is, ironically, brought about by the
overabundance of affect and influences that contemporary individuals are constantly inundated with via media technology. A brief example would be the desire
to act in response to social injustices. With an increase in knowledge of every injustice—be it sexism, racism, homo- and transphobia, the refugee crisis,
global warming, etc.—we begin to feel cut off from adequate forms of actions that could address any or all of these injustices in their systemic complexity.
This project contributes to scholarship on Deleuze in two significant ways. Deleuze is most known for his critiques of all forms of transcendence, and ipso
facto religion, which correlates to his constructive concept of "pure immanence." Yet, in his appeal for belief in the world, Deleuze admits that in certain
instances transcendence can "re-charge" immanence. His appeal to belief is thus the only place in his large corpus where Deleuze says anything non-negative about
transcendence and as such has scandalized many orthodox Deleuzians. Where there has been positive attention to Deleuze's call for "belief in the world," the
philosophical robustness of that call remains largely unexplored and unqualified. In most readings, "world" remains simply the opposite of the "otherworldly" and
becomes an occasion to once again pit immanence (world) against transcendence (otherworldly). This, however, occludes the uniqueness of the call for belief in
the world as it relates to the rest of Deleuze's thought. I argue that Deleuze is playing off of the epistemological distinction between belief/faith and knowledge
as found in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Pascal, and that Deleuze's call for belief is an appeal to an immanent conversion of faith that stems from
a decision one makes about life. Through a close reading of his entire corpus, I argue that the epistemological distinction between knowledge and belief was central
to his thought from the beginning and extends to the end of his life.
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