First: “Natural right” is a problematic term, in a Deleuzian frame of reference. Rights are expressly disclaimed in more than one place in his work (as I noted: useless representations). The natural, moreover, is a suspicious category for Deleuze because of his poststructuralist milieu. Of course, on the other hand, DeLanda and Protevi et al. claim that Deleuze is a naturalist. What rectifies this apparent paradox is that the natural is understood differently in those two statements. The natural that does not exist is effectively the pragmatic natural, if I may invent a category; by that term, I mean the illusory effect of the status quo, the appearance that the-way-things-are is also the-way-things-must-be. Essentially, this is naturality as necessity. Deleuze abhors this idea. On the other hand, things are natural insofar as they undergo a process of genesis, have a developmental history, and so on. This would be the natural as evolutionary; everything is evolutionary, hence Deleuze is a naturalist in this sense. What this means for “natural right,” then, is that whatever “right” might be, it is natural insofar as it develops across times and spaces. So far, so good. A “right” in this conception would be a power – Deleuze, in the lecture I’ve quoted in the original post, effectively revamps this notion explicitly. Power in the sense of capacity is central to Deleuze’s ethics (I’ll detail this below). The books on Spinoza might as well have, “we do not even know what a body can do!” as a refrain, a ritornello. “What can a body do?” is the fundamental question of Deleuzian ethics. A body is an assemblage of perceptive and affective forces, as we know, which enter into various relations of composition and decomposition with one another. This is the criteria for the categorization of “good” and “bad” or “noble” and “base” that Deleuze uses in his book on Nietzsche, and elsewhere. What we have, then, is an underdeveloped legal theory such that “rights” are conceived as capacities for composition or decomposition that develop and change over time and change with their spaces of insertion. It is relativistic, in a sense (perhaps this would be a point of contention for some to take up?), and it would take some work to formulate the methods of application of the categories Deleuze suggests (and we might want to lose the aristocratic Nietzschean terms, like noble/base), and to adapt the theory to specific problems. But I’m merely suggesting, too allusively, in this post, that there is a possibility for a Deleuzian legal theory beyond the contemporary, lame attempts at using traditional legal analysis in the guise of fancy words like “deterritorializing-machines.” See the issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law dedicated to appropriating Deleuze for legal theory for examples.

Second: I have to take issue with your claim that runs, “In Deleuze we do not find a formula for ethical or legal grounds…” There is assuredly a rigorous conception of ethics developed across many of Deleuze’s works, notably Nietzsche & Philosophy. Daniel W. Smith has an excellent article in an old edition of Parrhesia that meticulously reconstructs this framework – “Deleuze & the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics”. This ethical theory – which is in a sense the very kernel of Deleuze’s entire work – conceives of, shall we say, “rights” in terms of quantitative distribution (power, as he claims in the lecture I cited), but this is something Smith does not develop in this piece. The crux of the ethics deployed throughout his work lies hidden in the frequently reiterated claim that “we always have the desires we deserve,” “we always have the X we deserve.” Desert is conceived not as a feudalistic station in life, a place in the Great Chain of Being that forbids mobility, etc. Rather, it is conceived as the posing of a problem. The way I pose my problem(s) determines the solution(s) I receive; in turn, I can pose my problem(s) within the limits prescribed by the given material conditions in a given situation. This holds for Deleuze’s notion of morphogenesis (what he calls “indi-different/ciation,” a nightmare of a term, in Difference & Repetition) in general. For Deleuze, moreover, a given situation always immanently generates the conditions for its own dissolution – we can thus say that for Deleuze every situation is dissipative in at least one sense. This is crucial for a productive appropriation of the Deleuzian schematic. Note that (I think) Badiou only covers over his indebtedness to Deleuze in his book bearing the latter’s name; it’s important to be critical of the positions he takes with regard to someone who was obviously so important for his own development.

Stay tuned for when I develop this theme. You can probably help me along.