This distinction is critical: Deleuze’s ethics of movement versus Levinas ethics of responsibility. Deleuze’s line of flight is a creative escape, a reconfiguration of life, but Levinas adds the weight of the Other - movement must not be purely self-directed; it must provide shelter for the vulnerable.
This suggests that Deleuze was haunted by deterritorialization, by the ways in which power structures confine and limit becoming, while Levinas was haunted by the suffering face of the Other - by the unavoidable, inescapable obligation that halts movement.
In this light, van life carries an ethical paradox:
As Deleuzian flight, it is a refusal of rigid structures, an embrace of open-ended transformation.
As Levinasian responsibility, it cannot simply flow past suffering - it must pause, shelter, respond.
Would you say that the metaphysics of van life needs to balance these two hauntings, or does one take precedence for you?
