Deleuze and Kant's Critical Philosophy.

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DELEUZE AND KANTSCRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

M. J. McMahonThesis submitted for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

Department of Philosophy

School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

Faculty of Arts

The University of Sydney 2004


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i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Synopsis iii

Acknowledgements iv

Prefatory notes on sources and references v

Abbreviations for key texts vi

IntroductionDeleuze, Kant and KantianismThe critical problems: foundation, coherence, orientation

1

PART I: BEGINNINGS: SURVEYING THE TERRAINChapter 1: Deleuzes reading of Kant

Hume: empirical critiqueNietzsche: genealogical critique

Kantian critiqueThe critique of Kant

25

Chapter 2: Kant and the orientation of thoughtThe critical attitudeOrientation and disorientation: the division of reasonTruth and method

43

Chapter 3: Deleuze and the image of thoughtThe search for the planeThe dogmatic image of thoughtThe (non-) sense of the dogmatic image

58

PART II: MIDDLES: PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER

Chapter 1: The sense of the problemThe problem in geometry and philosophyLogic and existence: the problematic orientation of critique

74

Chapter 2: The problem and the problematic in KantSchematismSynthesisModalityIdeality

88

Chapter 3: The problem and the problematic in DeleuzeIdeal determinationSubjective determination

Temporal determination

98

PART III: EXTREMITIES: GROUND ZERO

Chapter 1: TheCritique of Judgement and the image of nature (1) 118Introduction to the problemCritique and the scientific revolutionCritique and teleology

Chapter 2: TheCritique of Judgement and the image of nature (2) 132The feeling of lifeLife and teleologyNoematic fields and the field of the noematic


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Chapter 3: The transcendental aesthetic 147

Judgement and accordGenetic structure: the sublimeThe aesthetic idea and genesis in the beautiful

Chapter 4: A transcendental aesthetic 161

The aesthetic image of thoughtThe aesthetic community of thinkersLife and thought on the plane

Conclusion 175

Primary Bibliography 180

Secondary Bibliography 185

Appendices

1. Gilles DeleuzeThe Method of Dramatisation2. mile BrhierThe Notion of the Problem in Philosophy3. Gilles DeleuzeIntroduction to Instincts and Institutions


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SYNOPSIS

This thesis considers the status of Deleuze as a Kantian, and as such

committed both to the critical destiny of philosophy, and the contestation of

the sense of this destiny. The focus of Deleuzes reading of Kant is an active

conception of thought: the fundamental elements of thought are will and value

rather than being or the concept. In the development of this idea we can note a

progressive tapering of the foundational instance of thought, in three stages:

from the speculative field of being to the practical field of reason; from the

intellectual category of the concept to the problematic category of the Idea;

from the teleological notion of the organism to the aesthetic notion of thesingular. Within each stage we can perceive a polemic between the two terms:

it is in each case a question of the sufficient reason of thought, its conditions

of the actuality beyond its possibility. The highest expression of our reason, for

Kant, is neither theoretical nor utilitarian, but moral: the realisation of our

lawful freedom. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the ultimate secret of our

freedom and thus all of our thought is to be found rather in the realm of the

aesthetic.


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iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people who were indispensable to the successful completion of

this thesis, and who I am pleased to acknowledge.

Paul Patton, who, as well as supervising the formative stages of thisthesis, was an invaluable teacher and model during the formative stages of myphilosophical studies as an undergraduate. Paul Redding, who supervised thisthesis in its final stages, and who has demonstrated a faith and interest in mythinking at crucial points in its development. Antonia Soulez and Alain Badiou,who respectively served as informal and formal supervisors during my study inFrance, and whose philosophical largesse was both instructive and inspiring.

Laleen Jayamanne, for her Socratic ability to teach by placing herself inthe position of the student, and George Markus, for his magisterial inspirationand intellectual generosity.

Dr Jan Orman, who held my hand during the inevitable crises of faith.

My workmates and director, Rowanne Couch, Liz Wilson, Tim Raynerand Margaret Harris, who went out of their way in considering my successtheir personal problem and duty, and actively collaborated in order for it to berealised, shouldering the burden and cheering me from the sidelines.

My philosophical friends: The Deleuzean Desperadoes (Stephen

OConnell, Graham Jones, Heather Barton & Tim Matheson), Ben Horsfall,Jeremy Moss, Adrian Mackenzie, Simon Lumsden, Linnell Secomb, AmirAhmadi, Garrett Barden, Didier Debaise, Pierre Nadaud, Adrian Miles, LindaDaley, Nicolas Pradines, Lisa Trahair, Dawn Mischiewski.

For their personal support and professional recognition: GarryGenosko, Charles Stivale, Brian Massumi, Steven Shaviro, Max Deutscher,Penny Deutscher, John Mullarkey, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

And my parents, Barrie and Dorothy, whose questioning spirit I have

inherited, but who never questioned my choice of career, and have alwayssupported me through the dramas and impoverishment it has frequentlyentailed.


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PREFATORY NOTES ON SOURCES ANDREFERENCES

This thesis is based on my own research, and incorporates no works

published by myself elsewhere or submitted towards another degree. Use ofothers work is referenced in the footnotes and listed in the bibliography.

The bibliography is divided into two sections: a primary bibliographywith sourced works by Deleuze and Kant, and a secondary bibliography withall other sources. A list of abbreviations for frequently cited works by Kant andDeleuze follows these notes. The standard scholarly pagination is used forKants three Critiquesand hisAnthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Apart from printed works, I have also made reference to some ofDeleuzes seminars at the Universit de Vincennes in the 70s and 80s,

transcribed and made available online by Richard Pinhas, whose translation isbeing overseen by Timothy Murphy. In these cases I have provided the subjectand date of the seminar, and the paragraph number. The URL for the site isprovided in the bibliography.

In researching this thesis, I have mostly worked from the originalFrench texts by Deleuze and the other French authors used, and Englishtranslations of Kantian sources. In references to the French texts, I have givenboth the French (F) and English (E) pagination, where both were available. Ihave often made modifications of the published English translation, mostly

expressing relatively minor stylistic preferences of wording, stress and syntax,and often in order to bring out a Kantian resonance in the French that is lessapparent in the English rendition (for example, rendering sorienter dans lapense as to orient oneself in thought rather than to find ones bearingswithin thought). Where modifications are made, this is indicated in the notes.Where there is a significant semantic divergence between my own and thestandard translation, I have clarified the grounds and substance of thedifference in the notes, along with the original French text. Translations ofpassages from untranslated French sources are my own.

I have included as appendices translations of three untranslated Frenchtexts to which extensive references are made: Deleuzes address to the FrenchSociety of Philosophy in 1968, La Mthode de dramatisation, Emile Brhiersarticle on La notion de problme en philosophie from the Swedish journal ofphilosophy Theoria in 1948, and Deleuzes introduction to Instincts andInstitutions from 1953. The original pagination of these works has beenretained in their reproduction here.


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ABBREVIATIONS FOR KEY TEXTSBY DELEUZE AND KANT

DELEUZE:

CC Critique et Clinique(1993)/Essays critical and clinical(1997)

DR Diffrence et rptition(1968)/Difference and repetition(1994)

ES Empirisme et subjectivit: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume(1953)/Empiricism and subjectivity: an essay on Hume's theory of human nature(1991)

NP Nietzsche et la philosophie(1962)/Nietzsche and philosophy(1983)

MD La Methode de dramatisation (1968). Translated as Appendix 1.

PCK La philosophie critique de Kant: Doctrine des facults (1963)/Kant's criticalphilosophy: the doctrine of the faculties(1984)

QP? Quest-ce que la philosophie? (1991)/What is Philosophy? (Deleuze andGuattari 1994)

KANT:

AP Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a pragmaticpoint of view(1798)

CJ Kritik der Urtheilskraft/Critique of Judgement(1790)

CPR Kritik der reinen Vernunft/Critique of Pure Reason(1781 & 1787)

OT Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?/What is orientation in

thinking? (1786)

QE Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklrung?/An Answer to theQuestion: What is Enlightenment? (1784)


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INTRODUCTION

Deleuze, Kant and Kantianism

In the discussion following a presentation on Kant to the French Society of

Philosophy in 1968, French philosopher Ferdinand Alqui is reported to have

said:

Why does Kant have the sad privilege of being, among all philosophers,the one who everyone wants to prolong in one direction or another?...The most diverse interpretations come from thinkers who allnevertheless agree in saying that Kant, whether through timidness orinability, did not fulfil his own thought. It seems to me, on the contrary,

that Kant perfectly well fulfilled and expressed his thought, whichdoesnt prevent me from recognising that there may be other thoughtsone might prefer to his.1

We can recognise the phenomenon that Alqui is lamenting as Kantianism: a

specific form of response to Kants philosophy which, distinct from Kantian

scholarship or influence, treats Kants thought as something which both falls

short of and exceeds itself in such a way that its identity can be pursued in

thoughts other to it. Jules Vuillemins book, Lheritage kantien et la rvolution

copernicienne, is dedicated to examining the mechanism of and dialectic betweenthree successive waves of Kantianism, through their key representatives

post-Kantianism (Fichte), neo-Kantianism (Cohen) and existentialism

(Heidegger). He describes the Kantian approach in the following manner:

The interest of these interpretations is not at all historical: it is not amatter of reconstituting Kantian thought with all its elements and, ifthere is the occasion, with all its contradictions; rather one must detachthe kernel and the husk, the interior and the exterior, trusting that healthis in the former, all sickness and rot only coming from the latter.2

In this way, Kantianism is a selective and untimely kind of reading where, in

Steven Galt Cromwells terms, Kant refers to a semantic field rather than

an historical figure.3

If Kant has been the special object of such attention, it is because he

successfully conveyed his thought as revolutionary: the famous Copernican

revolution in philosophy to match that in the sciences, as well as an expression

of broader cultural changes attendant to the Enlightenment era. While the

notion of critique is a signature concept of Kants, as the sign of a revolution,

and thus in some respects a call to arms, it already implies an origin and a


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destiny beyond an individual thought. Already during his lifetime, debates

concerning Kants work were addressed to the spirit of the revolution rather

than its letter, and the history of Kantianism assumes traits typical of

revolutionary fallout in any field: dramas of fidelity and betrayal, carrying on

the banner, denunciation and counter-revolutions. If Kantianism came into

being through persuasion of the revolutionary nature of Kants work, it is

perpetually renewed by divisions concerning its sense. The second character

follows from the first to the extent that part of the notion of a revolution is a

certain indeterminacy concerning its ultimate causes and significance, or at

least an openness in principle to constant re-evaluation.

The character of Kants oeuvre itself contributes to the disparity of the

traditions that claim to be heir to Kant. There is, for example, its literal

ambiguity, whose symbol is perhaps the discrepancy between the first and

second editions of the first critique. There is also the multiplicity of its

dimensions, as Kants vision proceeds through the progressive revelations of

the first, second and third critiques, each of which themselves contain striking

subdivisions, as so many possible perspectives from which to view the whole.

Vuillemin identifies for example in the successive waves of Kantianism a

respective focus on the Dialectic, the Analytic and the Aesthetic of the firstcritique, each seeking the privileged element of the system assumed to be

essential by the interpretation, [leaving] to the side all that, not agreeing with

it, risks contradiction.4

It is the status of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a Kantian,

rather than as a scholar of Kant or a philosopher influenced by Kant, which is

the particular object of this thesis. In his 1980 book surveying the

contemporary philosophical scene in France influenced by the local

interpretation of German idealism, Vincent Descombes opens his section on

Gilles Deleuze with the statement: Gilles Deleuze is above all a post-

Kantian.5

In Deleuzes work, we find at once the affirmation of the

revolutionary potential of Kants project, the accompanying reservations

concerning its realisation, and the subsequent commitment to its reinvention.

The theme of the critical destiny of philosophy runs throughout Deleuzes

philosophy, from his first book on Hume in 1953, to his last collection of essays

in 1993, entitled Critique et clinique. At the same time, Deleuze frequently


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expresses a great ambivalence towards Kant, almost as if the greatest enemy of

the critical project were Kant himself. Kant is perhaps the most canonical of

the philosophers to whom Deleuze devotes a book, and at one point he

distinguishes it from the others as a book about an enemy, where I try to

expose how he functions, what his mechanisms are.6 When Deleuze opposes

Nietzsche, for example, or Hume, to Kant as the true avatar of critique,

however, it is on the grounds of principles that are recognisably Kantian.

In many ways, Kant occupies a similar place in Deleuzes work to that

of Plato: a great philosophical sign with a double edge, one by which it

expresses the productive dissymmetry, the other by which it tends to annul

it.7 It is part of Deleuzes conception of philosophy that it has a duplicitous

nature, comprising a disparity between the competing perspectives of

difference and identity, production and product. At one point, Deleuze writes

that in taking up Nietzsches project of the reversal of Platonism, it is not

only inevitable, but desirable that this reversal conserve many aspects of

Plato.8 It is in the same way that we can understand Deleuzes relationship to

Kant, as not only a challenge to Kant that also retains many aspects of his

philosophy, but a challenge to Kant in order to preserve what he sees as

valuable in critique.The relationship between Kant and Deleuze is one that is relatively

underdeveloped in the secondary literature on Deleuze (and certainly in that

on Kant). The breakthrough work of Deleuzes in both the French- and

English-speaking world was his manifesto-style volume with Flix Guattari,

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume I, published in 1972 and

written in the wake of the political and intellectual upheavals of May 68.9 The

English translation appeared five years later, in 1977, and in the same year

there appeared several translations of chapters from Deleuze and Guattaris

follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume II,

published in 1980 and completely translated into English in 1987. It is fair I

think to say, in the first place, that the secondary literature on Deleuze as a

whole is dominated by threads drawn from these two major works, over

Deleuzes relationship with any other thinker, or even on his own. Difference

and Repetition, published in 1968, and probably the work which most integrates


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Deleuzes own philosophy and his debt to Kant, appeared in English only in

1994.

There is thus the simple facticity of timing in the impact and reception

of an authors work when considering the prominence of this area in

interpretations of Deleuze. There is also the related fact, which Hugh

Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam draw attention to in their introduction to

Deleuzes book on Kant, namely that it is difficult to think of two philosophers

more apparently opposite than old Immanuel Kant, the great Chinaman of

Knigsberg, and Gilles Deleuze, the Parisian artist of nomadic intensities.10

This disparity in image, or perhaps in readership, between two philosophers,

is less marked in the case of the other major figures that feature in Deleuzes

work, such as Nietzsche, Bergson and even Spinoza and Leibniz. It is a

disparity Deleuze himself remarks upon, as in the reference given above to

Kant as an enemy, and in comments in his lectures about the suffocating

fog of Kants work, so unlike Deleuzes own mercurial lightness.11

Presenting Deleuze as a Kantian, however, is one way of re-evaluating

this disparity, so that it is not a simple antipathy, or an intriguing localised

deviation, but rather an organising principle for understanding Deleuzes

philosophy: it is entirely natural for a Kantian to entertain a certain rivalrywith Kant; it is part of what makes a Kantian a Kantian. Deleuze is a singularly

eclectic philosopher, and it is not necessary to claim any priority for this

perspective over the many others that can be employed to elucidate Deleuzes

work. Following Deleuzes own tendency to make over the objects of his

studies in the light of a governing problem, the intention here is to produce a

Kant and a Deleuze whose resemblance to each other or to the original is

less important than an internally coherent development of the issue in

question: in this case, the project of a critical philosophy. Through a Kantian

Deleuze, which both highlights and reflects a Deleuzean Kant, we arrive at a

perspective on both which no doubt goes beyond the position of either one

alone.

As suggested above, Kantianism as much implies a polemical

engagement with previous Kantianisms as one with Kant himself. While this

thesis will focus primarily on the direct links between Kant and Deleuze, and

the themes arising from these links, it is worthwhile here to briefly situate


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Deleuze in relation to other Kantian traditions. In the first place, Deleuze

manifests an affiliation with the group of German philosophers contemporary

with and immediately following Kant, commonly called post-Kantian,

including Fichte, Maimon, Schelling, Novalis and Hlderlin.12 Maimon and

Hlderlin, in particular, are foregrounded in Deleuzes reflections on Kant.

Maimon, who greatly influenced all of the post-Kantians, as well as Hegel,

carried out a sceptical critique of Kants philosophy, whose vulnerabilities he

claimed to solve through the reintroduction of a Leibnizian-inspired

metaphysics. To Kants analysis of the structures of our understanding based

on the question of rightquid juris?he repeatedly opposed the question of

factquid facti?and argued for the necessity of a genetic method which

would account for the production of our realexperience rather than remaining

at the external and hypothetical conditions ofpossible experience. Maimon

posits an infinite understanding within our finite understanding in the form of

a differential unconscious: an ideal field beneath representation of what might

be understood as micro-schematisms, whose laws of combination generate

both the form and content of our understanding, and overcome the Kantian

duality of concept and intuition.

At a relatively early point in his writings on critique, Deleuze embracesthe necessity of positing genetic principles for thought, which account for

real experience beyond its conditions of possibility.13 In his earliest work on

critical philosophy, howeverhis book on HumeDeleuze explicitly

repudiates the question of genesis as a valid concern.14 There, he considers

this notion to refer either to matters of psychologywhich he excludes from

the purview of philosophyor to metaphysical questions of origin, which do

not enter into his critical reading of empiricism: empiricism does not raise the

problem of the origin of the mind but rather the problem of the constitution of

the subject.15. As this distaste for psychology and questions of origin is

maintained by Deleuze throughout his work, we can anticipate some of the

modifications that the notion of genesis undergoes in order to become

integrated into Deleuzes perspective on critique. In the first place, genesis

becomes essentially what comes abouta genesis in the sense of an

epigenesis16instead of being an innate principle of generation: the external

relationship forged in an encounter between an interiority and exteriority thatare properly transcendental rather than psychological or metaphysical. In the


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second place, Maimon finished his Versuch ber die Transcendentalphilosophie

(Essay on Transcendental Philosophy) a year before Kant published the Critique of

Judgement. Kant himself, on Deleuzes account, goes some way in this work to

address the problem of genesis in his own terms, also going beyond the

thetic or hypothetical model of judgement objected to by Maimon in order

to develop a dialectical conception of reflective judgements.17

In fact, we can appreciate some of the most important aspects of

Deleuzes position in relation to Maimon through his estimation of Hlderlin

as a reader of Kant. Deleuze introduces Hlderlin into his discussion of Kant

around the issue of the role of time in thought. Hlderlins analysis of tragedy

is based around the notion of a caesura that splits the subject and the

dramatic action into two unequal and irreconcilable halves. It is, on Deleuzes

reading, the pure and empty form of time itself, the form of the indeterminate

or image of the future, that constitutes this unbridgeable fracture.18 This

tragic form lies at the heart of Kantian thought in the form of the paradox of

inner sense, whereby I am unable to reconcile the thought of my action as a

spontaneous I and my passive experience of myself as an object of sense.19

Between the two comes precisely the form of time as the condition of

determinability, which both introduces an outside into thought at the same time as being its condition. In the first place we can note here a divergence

from Maimon. Maimons infinite understanding, whether constitutive or

regulative in nature, is a form of intellectual intuition which ultimately

reduces all spatio-temporal determinations to conceptual analysis, and renders

the subject transparent to itself in principle if not in fact. The autonomy of

space and time and the heterogeneity of sensibility and the understanding

remain important Kantian tenets for Deleuze, even if he reinterprets their

nature and relationship. On the other hand, it is precisely within the fracture

that Deleuze locates the swarming of Ideas which constitute the differential

unconscious.20Between Maimon and Deleuze, there is the influence of Bergson,

who identifies time with subjectivity itself, beyond the personal ego. In his

last work, Deleuze posits the transcendental field as precisely an unconscious

and supra-personal plane of qualitative duration.21 Unlike the Maimonian

unconscious, this sub-representative domain is one that is accessible to us: we

can reach right to the roots of spatio-temporal dynamisms, to the Ideas whichare actualised within them.22 It is an open and undetermined field, rather than


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being tethered by the unifying principle of the divine. As Dan Smith has

suggested, Deleuze frequently renews classical philosophers by reconfiguring

their thought as if it were based on the absence rather than the presence of

God: in this case, time itself takes the place of God, as productive

indeterminacy rather than an ultimate ground of determination.23

It is this maintenance of an outside to thought that marks one of

Deleuzes main divergences from the post-Kantians: the refusal to posit the

unity of thought and being in the form of an organising concept. In this and

other respects there are points of affinity between Deleuze and the neo-

Kantians: the group of the Marburg School formed around the turn of the 20th

century, which included such figures as Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer.

One ofthe main platforms of the neo-Kantians against the post-Kantians is the

resurrection of the question ofrightas the sole terrain on which questions of

morality and knowledge can be posed. A transcendental philosophy cannot

take either being or experience as its point of departure, as morality and

knowledge are constituted not as matters of fact (whether empirical or

metaphysical), but through their lawfulness, which is an agent rather of the

transformation of fact. The Kantian project, in Cassirers words, does not

concern things, but judgements on things.24

The neo-Kantians thus focus onthe epistemological significance of the transcendental apparatus, understood as

the methodological conditions of a universally valid science, rather than a

quasi-psychological metaphysics of the innate conditions of subjective

experience. The Kantian subject is science itself: the I of transcendental

apperception is neither a psychological nor metaphysical subject but the quasi-

grammatical persona or subject of enunciation, who authorises the

judgement and ensures the coherence of the system of knowledge. The

indeterminacy of experience outside of this process of legitimation is implicit in

this position, as is the susceptibility of the edifice of knowledge to constant re-

evaluation.

Despite the scientistic focus of the neo-Kantians, and the associated

reclamation of possible experience as the proper object of thought (which is to

say, the natural world as constituted through science), there are many

elements which the neo-Kantian perspective shares with Deleuzes

understanding of Kant, and indeed of thought in general. First among these,


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already suggested by Deleuzes position on genesis, is the anti-innateism

and anti-representationalism of the neo-Kantians, opposed to a psychology of

the structures of experience or a metaphysics which simply reproduces

psychological experience on a more refined plane.25 Deleuze has a special

understanding of empiricism, which will be examined at a later point, but its

negative sense is invariably identified with the field of the representation of

objects by a subject. It is not this field that Deleuze identifies with real

experience, and in this respect he repudiates its philosophical value as much as

the neo-Kantians. Beyond experience, in this sense, for Deleuze, are the ideal

transcendental conditions which serve as its foundation, but this is also the

indeterminate or determinable field from which ideas emerge, as described

above. There is again a Bergsonian inflection to Deleuzes position here: that of

Bergsons project of going beyond the turn below which our habits organise

our field of experience, in order to analyse both the real elements of

experience and their laws of combination.26 Deleuze also shares with the neo-

Kantians the notion of thought as a legislative and transformative instance,

rather than being subordinated to an existing state of affairs. This fiat is not

for Deleuze restricted to the scientific domain: it belongs to the creative

character of all thought, more artistic than scientific. Similarly, a

methodological apparatus is for Deleuze simply one case of the broader

category of the dramatological nature of thought, organising a

transcendental field of right as its scenario and assigning conceptual

personae, neither of which can be assimilated to empirical states of affairs or

persons.

Following Vuillemins classification of the Kantianisms, something

should be said of Deleuzes relationship to the phenomenological school and

Heidegger. Here, Deleuze keeps a certain distance. In the first issue of

Magazine littrairededicated to Deleuze, appearing in 1988, there appears a set

of biographical coordinates for Deleuze, most likely written by himself.27

Among the list of distinguishing characteristics is included: has never been

either a phenomenologist or a Heideggerian. In Deleuzes lectures on Kant, he

notes the transformation that the notion of appearance undergoes in Kants

philosophy, such that it refers not to an essence but to its sense, this

transformation representing both a starting point for the subsequentphenomenological tradition and an important aspect of Deleuzes own reading


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of Kant.28 As Michel Foucault notes, however, Deleuzes own philosophy of

sense could not be more alien to a work such as Merleau-Pontys

Phenomenology of Perception, in which the body-organism is linked to the world

through a network of primal significations, which arise from the perception of

things.29 It is indeed the normative and pre-determined aspect of notions such

as the primal and primordial that Deleuze typically criticises when he

addresses phenomenological thinkers in his work. Thus, for example, in

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze cites Heideggers notion of the pre-

ontological comprehension of Being as a form of the myth of common sense,

whereby the fundamental elements of thought are shared by all in a subjective

and pre-conceptual form.30 Similarly, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze reproaches

Husserl for maintaining the form of consciousness in the transcendental

domain and positing a fundamental matrix of sense as non-modalized root-

form or Urdoxa.31

Deleuzes reservations with regard to the phenomenological school are

not unrelated to his explicit and violent hostility towards Hegel. Although

there is no shortage of material in Deleuzes work from which we can gather

the main points of this antipathythe critique of the negative, the

intellectualism of understanding difference as contradictionit remains achallenge to precisely locate the problem which defines their difference. This is

partly because, as is also the case with the phenomenologists, there seem also

to be many concerns that they share: the question of the unity of thought and

being in difference, for example, or the struggle against abstraction and the

critique of a conventional understanding of the concept. Mostly, however, it is

because while Deleuze often finds aspects of major thinkers objectionable, he

tends nevertheless to find ways of adapting their thought to his own purposes,

or identify more productive undercurrents: Hegel alone is singled out as a

kind of plague on thought with no redeeming features. Deleuze has been

accused of (wilfully) misreading Hegel, which is undoubtedly the case, but this

simply begs the question of his motivation for doing so. Whether Deleuze is

really so different from Hegel or not, it is clearly the case that from Deleuzes

point of view, his entire philosophy could be understood as a corrective of

sorts to Hegel, and as such this is an important structuring theme that should

not be overlooked.


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It is not the object of this thesis to directly examine in any detail the

relationship between Deleuze and Hegel. However, given Hegels own

denunciation of critical philosophy, by pursuing the idea of Deleuze as above

all a critical thinker we provide one context within which their disparity can

indirectly be understood. If we confront Kant and Hegel rather than Hegel and

Deleuze, the dividing issue that immediately raises its head is the speculative

relationship to the Absolute: the signature of transcendental illusion for the

one, the only true ground of philosophy for the other. With this in mind, what

a critical reading of Deleuze in turn highlights regarding his relationship to

Hegel is not the question of negation or differenceper se, but precisely Hegels

affirmationof the Absolute as the highest object and subject of thoughtits

highest being, and the unity of thought and being within the concept. In

Deleuzes book on Nietzsche, Deleuze describes this affirmation as the yes

(ja) of the ass: the thought that wants to take onwhat ultimately is, to assume

its weight and truth, and is opposed to the thought animated by the powers of

the false which seeks to create new possibilities for existence:

Nietzsche is engaged in a critique of all conceptions of affirmation

which see it as a simple function, a function of being or of what is. This

applies however this being is conceived: as true or as real, as noumenon

or phenomenon, and however this function is conceived: whether as

development, exposition, unveiling, revelation, consciousness-raising

or knowledge. Philosophy since Hegel appears as a bizarre mixture of

ontology and anthropology, metaphysics and humanism, theology and

atheism, theology of bad conscience and atheism ofressentiment.32

What, for Hegel, is the reciprocal and meaning-generating embrace of the

Whole, is, for Deleuze, a stifling totalitarianism of the concept which allows

of no escape or outside to thought, and thus no allowance for freedom, change,or the absolutely new. Conversely, what is simply an external and abstract

position of reflection for Hegel, is for Deleuze the evaluative position of the

Master (in the Nietzschean sense), the spirit of levity who discharges and

transforms being rather than taking it on.

Some of these anti-Hegelian aspects of Deleuze have already been

indicated under the auspices of Deleuzes neo-Kantianism. A more telling

reference point, however, which encompasses both Deleuzes affinities and

divergences with this group, as well as the particular character of his anti-


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Hegelianism, would be to speak of Deleuzes pragmatic orientation: his self-

proclaimed radical empiricism, of the sort contemporary with the neo-

Kantians themselves (thus James, Peirce and Bergson himself). Like the neo-

Kantians, the early pragmatists were partly inspired by a scientific

methodology that attended to localised problems, provisional results and

experimentation rather than a totalising speculative system. Unlike the neo-

Kantians, however, the pragmatists, and James and Bergson in particular, with

Deleuze, are anti-intellectualist in orientation: pluralist, suspicious of the

concept and focused on immediate phenomena of novelty and change. In his

piece in Dialogues, On the superiority of Anglo-American literature (which

also addresses certain Anglo-American schools of philosophy), it is precisely a

kind of levity that elicits Deleuzes admiration: the absence of the weight of

being as a problem, the pursuit of external relations outside of everything

which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole.33

It is the sense in which Deleuze develops the critical project in this

direction, and the issues it raises concerning the theoretical and practical

orientation of thought, which will form the particular focus of this thesis, as

the substance of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism. The difference in

nature between the theoretical and practical interests of reason is of course atheme of defining importance in Kants critique, and the illusions which are

created when our speculative drive holds sway is one of the central motivations

of Kants project. We also know, however, that this division is not self-

explanatory: practical, for Kant, does not mean instrumental in the sense

that a narrow understanding of pragmatism would suggest, and theory itself is

for Kant based in a model of thought as a kind of action. The highest

expression of our reason, for Kant, is neither theoretical nor utilitarian, but

moral: the realisation of our lawful freedom. For Deleuze, on the other hand,

the ultimate secret of our freedom and thus all of our thought is to be found

rather in the realm of the aesthetic. In developing this problematic between the

two authors, the hope is not only to provide insights into an important aspect

of Deleuzes philosophy, but to revitalise certain problems in Kant, in the way

all new Kantianisms do, and also to provide material for reflection on some

questions regarding orientation in thinking on its own account.


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The critical problems: foundation, coherence, orientation

The trajectory of this thesis develops the problem of the foundation and

orientation of thought in Kants work, as addressed by Deleuze. In broadterms, this development is marked by a progressive tapering of the

conception of the foundational instance of thought, in three stages: from the

speculative field of being to the practical field of reason; from the intellectual

category of the concept to the problematic category of the Idea; from the

teleological notion of the organismto the aesthetic notion of the singular. This

progression can also be noted within each of these separate stages, as a polemic

between two terms: it is in each case a question of the sufficient reason of

thought, the conditions of the actuality of thought beyond its possibility.

There is thus a relative autonomy to each of the sections as they broach this

issue from different standpoints. The first section addresses the ground of

thought in terms of its model or image, the second section addresses the

determination of thought in terms of its problem or schema, and the third

section addresses the genesis of thought in terms of its event.

The problem of foundation in Kants philosophy can first be raised in a

global or metaphysical sense. At the same time as the revolutionary impact

of Kants philosophy is recognised by both its supporters and its detractors, it

presents a disconcerting image of the status of man in the world. Kantianism

would never have existed if the stakes involved in identifying its essential core

were not perceived to be so high. If these stakes could be adequately

summarised in a phrase, it would be something like the modern human

condition, or: what is man? It is not a matter here of repeating eternal

questions, but of locating the genesis and nature of a field of enquiry. It isagain a matter of Kant being the name or marker of an event: questions

concerning the human condition, or man, now incorporate a difference

between a before and an after, which is perhaps another way of saying that

modernity itself becomes a philosophical object.

By asserting that finite reason is the ultimate author and authority for

our knowledge and morality, Kants critical philosophy seems, on the one

hand, to greatly magnify the dignity of the human subject. On the other hand,

however, this enlarged figure is now alone on the worldly stage. Indeed, the


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sense of the human milieu being a worldas existing for usis in fact

greatly reduced, as what it contained of order and meaning is shown to be

perhaps wholly given to it by ourselves. The source of the anxiety lies in the

basic critical principle that we can have no knowledge of things in themselves.

Kants work of course consists just as fundamentally in the attempt to show

that we also have no needto know things as they are in themselves in order to

have a science, a metaphysics and a morality, and that these are in fact

impossiblebased on such an assumption, as well as a diagnosis ofwhywe think

we need such knowledge. These compensations, however, cannot ultimately

eradicate the conviction of reason that it is entitled to entertain the absolute

as this for Kant is not simply an error but a transcendental illusion, inscribed

within the tendency of reason itself to surpass experience.

If this anxiety concerning foundations in an existential sense can be

put aside, there remain similar problems on the more formal or specific level of

our cognitive apparatus. Kant rejects a purely rationalist basis for philosophy

on the grounds that our cognitive judgements could not be just conceptual, but

must be synthesised with the material of sensibility. Concepts and sense

impressions are different in source and in nature, but must be combined in

order to form valid judgements. The nature of this connection, along with thestatus of the thing in itself, is probably the most controversial area of Kantian

scholarship: their interpretation differentiates mutually antagonistic schools of

Kantianism. Kants Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason,

which deals with the problem of the necessary connection between our a priori

concepts and sensibility, is the most changed between the first and second

editions of this work, and manifests ambiguities that touch on Kants work as a

whole. Appearing at worst like Descartes introduction of the pineal gland to

overcome the mind/body dualism, having created a clear separation between

the concept and sensibility, Kant creates a mediating third term in the form of

the schematism in order to render homogenous these separate elements.

The schematism is by Kants own admission a secret art, whose full

clarification is beyond the scope of his treatise.

The nature of this problem itself depends on ones interpretation of

Kants critique. The language of the faculties and conditions of experience

easily gives Kants critique at times the appearance of a psychological study or


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even a physiology of coherent perception, despite the fact that Kant

energetically distances himself from empirical approaches to philosophy, and

differentiates perception from his notion of experience. At the other extreme,

the radical nature of Kants claims against metaphysics form a fertile ground

for the construction of a kind of metaphysical anti-metaphysics: the post-

critical meditations on our finite being. Either interpretation is particularly

sensitive to the presence of gaps in the system. It is in this respect that

readings of the more scientistic kind are on stronger ground, considering the

critique as essentially a formulation of methodological rules. The schema is a

vital tool here, as simply the rule of construction for our concepts. The

central notion of critique on this reading is the judgement: it is our judgements

which combine our concepts with the data from intuition and it is our

judgement which sees fit to do so. These are of course informed by the

methodological apparatus, which is open to revision, and the experimental

possibilities of the schema. Given inevitable contingencies, however, the gap

is straddled by judgement, whose nature is to be adaptable, provisional and to

make leaps. The psychology or metaphysics of such an operation is not a

pertinent question on this model.

The notions of method, schema, and judgement are guiding andinterrelated themes in the development here of Deleuzes interpretation of

Kant. They are not raised as solutions to the problems raised by Kants

critique, but, in the first place, as suggesting a way of posing them. To connect

the mystery of the schematism to the more familiar impenetrability of the art

of judgement is not to dismiss both as beyond discussion, but rather to open an

avenue of enquiry that may shed light on both. At the same time, to shed light

on these notions does not mean that the gaps in their explanation can be filled

in, but is just as liable to reveal how such gaps form a necessary part of their

operation. For a thought that wishes to remain critical, the challenge posed by

Kants uprooting of knowledge and morality from a transcendent ground is

not how to re-establish this connection, but how to make this disconnection or

ungrounding viablehow it is workable, and how it can be lived with.

Descombes account of the Kantian character of Deleuzes philosophy

immediately raises the issues contained in the problems of the critical

worldview and the internal coherence of critique as outlined above. In the


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first place, Descombes sees Deleuzes thought as an affirmation of the criticism

Kant undertakes in the Transcendental Dialectic of the ideas of the soul, the

world, and of God: No experience can justify us in affirming a single

substantial self, a totality of things and a first cause of this totality.34 On the

contrary, for Deleuze, it is the postulation of a transcendent first principle that

prejudices and enslaves. In the second place, Descombes identifies the

character of Deleuzes philosophy of difference in Kantian terms, its focus

being not the difference between two concepts or identities, but that between

the conceptual and the non-conceptual:

the one which obliges thought to introduce difference into its identities,particularity into its general representations and precision into itsconcepts. The real difference is that which exists between concept and

intuition, between the intelligible and the sensible, between the logicaland the aesthetic.35

Descombes also indicates the framework that Deleuze utilises to approach

these issues, itself based on an understanding of Kant. This is the reading of

critique as above all the substitution of a practical ideal of thought for a

speculative one:

Liberation of the willis the significance of the critical idea Deleuze givesthe name philosophy of being to the old, pre-Kantian metaphysics, andphilosophy of will to the metaphysics born of the accomplished

critique.36

The affirmation of critique as a philosophy of the will is evident from

Deleuzes first monograph on the philosophy of Hume. Deleuze gives a

critical reading of Hume, minimising its naturalist or psychological aspects

to portray it instead as a study of the principles by which we surpass

experience in order to constitute a subject of knowledge and morality. The

greatest obstacle to his critical reading however is Humes notion of the

intentional finality of nature which is postulated as a ground of the validity of

our associations. After dedicating his final chapter to the question of finality,

Deleuze concludes with a tranquil dismissal of the necessity of this postulate:

This accord can only be thought; and no doubt it is the most empty andimpoverished thought. Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of whatwe do, not as the theory of what is. What we do has its principles, and Beingcan never be grasped except as the object of a synthetic relation with thevery principles of what we do.37

A synthetic conception of knowledge is by its very nature active, for Deleuze.

In one of his seminars at the University of Vincennes, Deleuze contrasts Kants


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position with Leibnizs claim that all knowledge claims are in principle

analytic.38

Such a claim needs to be understood, according to Deleuze, as

reflecting a certain idea of knowledge, that is, that to know is to discover what

is included in the concept. More specifically,

I would say of knowledge in this case that it is modelled on a particularmodel which is that of passion or perception. To know is in the end toperceive something; to know is to apprehend, it is a passive model ofknowledge, even if many activities depend upon it.38

In the case of Kant, however, the postulation of the synthetic a priori

judgement as the basic element of knowledge translates into a conception of

knowledge whose nature it is to go beyond the concept to affirm something

else it is a model of knowledge as act. 39

In his book on Kant, Deleuze understands the distance of critique from

both rationalism and empiricism to be based in its postulation of the self-

determination of the will. If philosophy is the science of the relation of all

knowledge to the essential ends of human reason,40 it is in the first place

distinguished from empiricism, which subordinates reason to the ends of

Nature, and in the second place from rationalism, which takes a Being, a Good

or a Value as its ultimate goal.41 In both cases, it is an external object that

determines the will and compromises its autonomy:

In so far as the representation is of something external to the will, ithardly matters whether it is sensible or purely rational; in any case itdetermines the act of willing only through the satisfaction linked to theobject which it represents.42

The elaboration of the internal ends of human reason according to its interests

is the object of both the critique of pure and practical reason. The practical

nature of the philosophy of the will, as Deleuze conceives it, is thus not

connected to any utilitarian or instrumental conception of thought, but rather

a legislative one. The critical purity of both the theoretical and practicalinterests of reason concerns the immanence of its principles and independence

from external determinations. It is on the contrary the most speculative

philosophies that reveal themselves to be animated by the pursuit of an object,

however idealised, and thus representative of a lower (non-transcendental)

expression of the will.

There is thus little sense in Deleuzes reading of Kant as the

philosopher of finitude, in the negative sense: the one who bars our path tothe absolute and confines thought to all-too-human limits. In the first place,


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this is because, in Deleuzes view, Kant has transformed the terrain of thought

such that the sense of these notions has radically changed. It is also because

the absence of a transcendent foundation for thought is the object of a more

direct affirmation in Deleuzes work. It is the presence, rather than the

absence, of a transcendent absolute, that signifies limits for Deleuze. Deleuze

describes the Kantian milieu in the absence of God as a desert terrain, and

such a terrain is a space of freedom rather than constraint, prefiguring a new

persona and quest of the thinker: the Romantic wanderer in search of a

foundation.43 In his later work with Guattari, Deleuze presents the desert as

the symbol for the nomadic milieu of thought.44 Deleuze more specifically

affirms the modern character of Kants thinking because it breaks with a

cosmic vision of a holistic order of things to focus rather on the universal laws

that regulate local events. This reading of Kant within the context of cultural

modernity is one reason why the Critique of Judgementis a pivotal text for the

relationship between Deleuze and Kant. Deleuze reads aesthetic judgements as

symbols of discord, or a discordant accord rather than as the symbol of a

return to a cosmic ideal under the auspices of a teleological, organised nature.45

It is this aspect of Deleuzes work that makes him, along with Foucault,

a rather atypical heir of the tradition of the Enlightenment. Although Deleuzeconsiders Kant to have fallen short of the more radical potential of critique, he

affirms the critical understanding of the Enlightenment project as an exercise

in demystification, a challenge to traditional authorities, an agent of liberation,

and as promoting the ideal of thinking for oneself, or saying simple things in

ones own name46:

Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise allmystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions

without which reactive forces would not prevail? Exposing as amystification the mixture of baseness and stupidity that creates theastonishing complicity of both victims and perpetrators. Finally, turningthought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating freemen, which is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with thebenefit of the State, morality or religion.47

It is to the extent to which Kant still upholds orthodox ideals of truth and

morality, and the form of the orthodoxy in the structure of cognition that he

comes under attack by Deleuze. It is nevertheless in the name of the critical

ideals and formulae laid out by Kant that he leads this attack, and pursues its

possibilities in his own and others thought.


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18

If Deleuze denounces or dismisses any loss of connection to an

essential or supreme being that ensues from the critical worldview (or lack

thereof), there is on the other hand his preoccupation with the necessity for

thought to attain what is singular and concretepure difference. This latter

aim can appear to contradict the former critical commitment, as in his essay on

the conception of difference in Bergson, where he claims that the aim of a

philosophy of difference is to return to things themselves, to account for

them without reducing them to something other than themselves, to grasp

them in their being.48 He readily cites to this end the Bergsonian ideal of

philosophy as a special form of empiricism, which tailors for the object a

concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely be say is still

a concept, since it applies only to that one thing.49

A first step towards reconciling this apparent disparity in Deleuzes

work is to understand it in the context of his criticism of the concept of

identity as the basic element of thought. The function of the concept of identity

in philosophy, on Deleuzes account, is effectively to manage difference. On

the one hand, the concept subordinates differences by picking out qualities as

the same or identical across different cases. On the other hand, differences are

inscribed within the concept as a mode of its division, for example on theAristotelian model of genera and species, where a concept is divided according

to the difference of contrasting attributes, or on the Hegelian model where the

concept is divided according to the difference of contradiction. In either case,

the explicit or implicit argument is that whatever differences may exist outside

of the concept, these cannot be thought without being referred to a concept or

category of identity. A pertinent example in this context is Hegels critique of

the alleged richness of sense-certainty at the beginning of his

Phenomenology.50 The immediate data of consciousness appears to be the truest

and most concrete form of knowledge, but when it comes to formulating this

knowledge it reveals itself to be the most abstract and impoverished: simply an

I, this, here, now, which could apply to any experience and precisely

says nothing of this one. The problem is one of both analysis and synthesis:

what are the terms of a division that follows the true differences in nature,

and how do we integrate the dispersal of the given in such a way that it can be

thought?


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Deleuzes response to these problems continues his emphasis on a

model of thought grounded in action. Hegels example, for Deleuze,

presupposes the centrality of the general concept as reference point for the

thinking of particulars, according to a speculative model of thought as

representation. Deleuze posits instead the Kantian notion of the Idea as the

animus of thought, which integrates singularities in function of a fundamental

problem, according to a model of thought which he calls dramatisation:

Hegel substitutes the abstract relation of the particular to the concept ingeneral for the true relation of the singular and the universal in the Idea.He thus remains in the reflected element of representation, withinsimple generality. He represents concepts, instead of dramatizingIdeas51

The significance of the singularthis, here, nowis only grasped within

the context of a problem, a drama of thought that gives it sense, in the

absence of which it is effectively impoverished. The state of being thought

here is not one of representation or comprehension through a concept, but

being aligned along the coordinates of an action or event. Deleuze contrasts

the convergingof the data of the faculties in representation, where an identity is

formed at the overlap of what I perceive, remember and conceive, to the open

relayof information, transmitted across each faculty in turn, without a common

measure.

There is thus no identity posited as underlying the passage from the

unthought to the thought: thought is an addition, it creates something new.

Rather than an act of representation, Deleuze conceives thought as an act of

unilateral determination: unilateral because there is ultimately no reciprocity

or common measure between thought and its outside. The difference of

interest to Deleuze is thus not the conceptual difference represented by its

division, nor in effect the sea of differences too large or small to be inscribedwithin a concept, but the difference that thought makes in its act of

determination:

Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such[LA determination]. The difference between two things is only empirical,and the corresponding determinations are only extrinsic Difference isthis state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction.We must therefore say of difference that it is made, or makes itself, as inthe expression make the difference.52

Deleuze credits Kant with this discovery of a transcendental Difference

between the Determination as such [LA determination] and what it


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determines.53 This non-identity of the unthought and thought, this

unthinkable difference, is precisely the highest object of thought for Deleuze:

How could thought avoid going that far, how could it avoid thinking thatwhich is most opposed to thought? With the identical, we think with all

our force, but without producing the least thought: with the different, bycontrast, do we not have the highest thought, but also that which cannotbe thought?54

The conditions of thought making a difference follow from Deleuzes

anti-cosmic reading of critique. It presupposes the existing state of affairs as

indeterminate by default, rather than there being an essential nature of things

which it is the task of thought to represent. The relationship between the

intellectual and the sensible is presented as a conjunction of orders that differ

in kind, where truth is an effectof this meeting point rather than its cause. It is

this meeting point that Deleuze has in mind when he enjoins philosophy in his

essay on Bergson to return to the true articulations of the real, his

interpretation of Platos injunction to carve nature at its joints. This

conjunction, however, presents itself ultimately as more of a disjunction, on

Deleuzes interpretation, in virtue of the irreducible disparity between the two

sides of thought, and the dissymmetry between thought and the unthought. In

another of his seminars, Deleuze describes Kants critical subject as one who

limps:

Finally man becomes deformed [deformed], deformed in the etymologicalsense of the world, which is to say dyes-formed [dys-forme], he limps ontwo heterogenous and non-symmetrical forms: the receptivity of intuitionand the spontaneity of the I think.55

Thus, rather than representing a return to the thing-in-itself, in the pre-

critical sense, Deleuzes insistence on the relevance of the singular in thought

is based rather on recasting thought in an active mould, as a response to

problems, and on a position of principle concerning the open-ended nature ofthought.

It is perhaps the notion of thought as problematic which forms the

thematic centre of Deleuzes relationship with Kants philosophy, as well as

forming the literal centre of this thesis. It is thought considered as a

responsiveness to problems which both distances its character from a

speculative ideal, but equally, in virtue of the element of indeterminacy that a

problem carries at its heart, from a simple resolution of a technical difficulty.

The competing viewpoints concerning the nature and goal of thought


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themselves form the terms of a problem that is the starting point of the critical

project, in turn expressed in a dialectic of true and false problems rather than

truth and falsityper se. The problem, by its nature, engages and transforms the

subject of thought, and complicates its object by entwining the simplicity of

the concept with its spatio-temporal coordinates and the horizon of an Idea. It

is, finally, the imperative of a problem that challenges our habits or

presuppositions and obliges us to be creative in our thinking, to think per se,

under the compelling force of what is most singular in experience.


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Endnotes for the Introduction

1 Discussion following Alexis Philonenkos Hegel Critique de Kant, Bulletin de la Socitfranaise de Philosophie, vol. LXII (1967).2 Jules Vuillemin, Lheritage kantien et la rvolution copernicienne, p. 12.3 Steven Galt Cromwell, Neo-Kantianism, in (eds) Simon Critchley & William Schroeder,A

Companion to Continental Philosophy, p. 186.4 Vuillemin, Lheritage kantien, p. 12.5 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 152. Descombes uses post-Kantian here in thebroad sense of following from Kant, rather than related to the specific group of thinkersimmediately subsequent to Kant.6Negotiations, F14-15/E6, translation modified.7 DR, F31/E20, translation modified.8 DR, F82/E59.9 By breakthrough work, I mean both the work that brought Deleuze to the attention of abroad public within France (when Deleuze died, in 1995, he was still recalled in French newsreports as the co-author ofAnti-Oedipus) and the one which (almost) marked his debut in theEnglish-speaking academic world (beforeAnti-Oedipus, only Deleuzes Proust and Signshadbeen translated into English, in 1972).10

PCK, Exv.11 First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 1.12 See, for example, Deleuzes response to Philonenko in the discussion following hispresentation on dramatisation, MD, p. 116.13 In his 1962 work on Nietzsche, for example.14 See ES, F15/E31, F122/108.15 ES, F15/E31.16 Epigenesis is a term from biology, the theory according to which an embryo developsthrough the successive differentiation of new parts (Petit Robert), and is opposed to the theoryof preformation. Deleuzes interest in embryology is pervasive in his work, and can be seenfor example, in his Method of Dramatisation, Appendix 1.17 Deleuze, The Idea of Genesis in Kants Aesthetics, p. 62: The post-Kantians, notablyMaimon and Fichte, addressed a fundamental objection against Kant: Kant had ignored thedemands of a genetic method If we consider that Maimons Essay on TranscendentalPhilosophyappeared in 1790, we must recognize that Kant, in part, foresaw the objection of hisdisciples.18 DR, F117/F8719 CPR, B158.20 DR, F220/E169.21 Gilles Deleuze, Limmanence: une vie, Philosophie, p. 3.22 MD, p. 117.23 Dan Smith, The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuzes Ontology of Immanence, in MaryBryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, p. 175 and endnote 21, p.181.24 Cited in Philonenko, Mtaphysique et politique chez Kant et Fichte, p. 154.25 Vuillemin, Lheritage kantien, p. 135.26 Bergson, Matter and Memory, F321 (original pagination 205, E184, 185), cited in DeleuzesBergsonism, F17-18/E27. Bergson himself goes on to refer to the calculus of differentials

following this passage: To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is farfrom easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, whenwe have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn[le tournant] of experience, when wehave profited from the faint light which, illuminating the passage from the immediateto theuseful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, withthe infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itselfstretching out into the darkness behind them.27Magazine littraire, no. 257, September 1988, p. 19.28 First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 15, and Deleuzes reading of critique in NP.29 From Michel Foucaults review of Deleuzes Difference and Repetitionand The Logic of Sense,Theatrum Philosophicum, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, p. 170.30 DR, F169/E129.31The Logic of Sense, F123-124/E101-102.32

NP, F210/E183, translation modified, Deleuzes italics.33Dialogues, F71/E57.34 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 152.


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35 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 153.36 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 156.37 ES, F152/E133, translation modified, my emphasis.38 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20th May 1980.39 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20th May 1980, para. 6.

40 PCK, F5/E1, quoting CPR (A839/B867).41 PCK, F6/E2.42 PCK, F7/E2.43 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20th May 1980, para. 49.44 For example, 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:The War Machine inA Thousand Plateaus.45 See discussion in Part III, Chapter 3.46 Letter to a severe critic, Negotiations, F15/E6, translation modified.47 NP, F121/E106.48 Bergsons Conception of Difference, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes, F79/E42.49 Bergsons Conception of Difference, F80-81/E43, citing Bergsons La pense et le mouvant,in Oeuvres, p. 1408, English translation The Creative Mind: an Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 175.50 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Section A, I: Sense-certainty: or the this and meaning.51 DR, F18/E10.52 DR, F43/E28.53 DR, F116/E86.54 DR, F292/E226.55 Seminar on Kant and Foucault, c. 1982-3, para 3. Nb. Deleuzes etymologysubstitutingthe Greek dys [=bad] for the Latin di/de [=un] in order to make a connection with theGreek/Latin duas/dy [=two]is, characteristically, highly dubious if not entirelyfabricated, but not essential to the point, which is no doubt inspired by Hlderlin.


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PART I.

BEGINNINGS:

SURVEYING THE TERRAIN


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CHAPTER 1.

DELEUZES READING OF CRITIQUE

What it means to do the history of philosophy is a question that recurs

throughout Deleuzes many works in this field, and it is continuous with

Deleuzes understanding of what it means to do philosophy per se. Deleuzes

reconstruction of the thought of other thinkers, and his use of their concepts in

his own work, is frequently combined with a polemic regarding the true nature

of relationship between philosophers and the oppressive effect of the historyof philosophy in its institutional forms. Deleuzes reading of Kants

Copernican revolution reflects his understanding of thought, and its history,

as itself revolutionary. Deleuze often invokes Nietzsche when speaking of the

relationship between philosophy and history, and his approach resembles the

suprahistorical perspective diagnosed in Nietzsches essay on the uses and

disadvantages of history for life.1 In this piece, Nietzsche contrasts the

forgetfulness or unhistorical sense, required for action and happiness, to the

mire of reflection or rumination, in which those over-endowed with a

historical sense can become trapped. Against both, however, he sets the

suprahistorical vantage point, from which one could scent out and

retrospectively breathe this unhistorical atmosphere within which every great

historical event has taken place.2 Insofar as great actions are accomplished

against their time, with a view to creating the future, they have an oracular

quality. History itself acquires nobility and strength when it understands this

quality and uses it in turn to serve as an architect of the future: only he whoconstructsthe future has a right to judge the past.3It is in this untimely way

that Deleuze reads the work of other philosophers: as both revolutionary in

themselves and by nature, and as participating in a contemporary philosophical

gesture with its own revolutionary interests.

This creative or motivated approach to interpretation is also

expressed in the affirmative character of Deleuzes reading of philosophy,

again itself a part of a philosophy of affirmation. Deleuze frequently stressesthat where we see an apparent negation or negative element in philosophy, we


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must try to find the positive element of which it is a by-product: every time

we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we

should ask what such a situation presupposes.4 Negation is never primary in

philosophy for Deleuze, which is to say that it cannot be the basis of a

philosophical position.5 Thus when it comes to critique, we cannot define

critical philosophy through the notion of the inaccessibility of the thing-in-

itself, but must rather look to see what it is that makes access to the thing-in-

itself redundant, or more specifically, a false problem. After sketching Kants

position on knowledge as applying to phenomena rather than things in

themselves, for example, Deleuze writes:

It should not be thought that Kant has need of any long demonstrations

to arrive at this result: it is a point of departure for Critique, the realproblem of the Critique of Pure Reason begins beyond this point.6

Philosophy proceeds by the succession of problems, which displace rather than

contradict previous ones. We do not gauge the value of a philosophy by

examining points of agreement or disagreement with other philosophies or

with experience, which is to say, on a propositional level, but by looking to

what new possibilities it creates and what new problem it poses: what it does

rather than what itsays.

Deleuzes expression of what he considers to be the central principles of

a critical philosophy is largely consistent across his work. His casting of the

figure of Kant, however, varies according to the polemic in which he is

engaged. In his works on philosophers from history, and most explicitly in his

books on Hume and Nietzsche, he casts his subject in the role of a rival to Kant

for the achievement of the critical project, thus performing a sort of

philosophical ventriloquism, where the work of others is made to express his

own critical aspirations and reservations. The aim of his discussions of Kantand critique is nevertheless the clarification of what he considers to be

important in the critical project, and not an attack on Kant for its own sake.

Thus, his own book on Kant only marginally raises the criticisms of Kants

position which he has previously expressed, instead building a positive and

coherent account of the architectonic of Kants three critiques in just over a

hundred pages. In this context, moreover, he does not hesitate to recast Hume,

for example, as a pre-critical thinker. Similarly, in Deleuzes lectures in the

70s and 80s, Kants importance and originality is presented using many of the


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same terms with which Deleuze had previously characterised Nietzsches

importance as a critical philosopher, at Kants expense. When Deleuze is

writing philosophy in his own name rather than through the philosophy of

others, he adopts the customary ambivalence of the Kantian: on the one hand

applauding Kants insights while on the other supplementing his perceived

deficiencies.

The motif that both dominates Deleuzes understanding of critique and

characterises his affinity with Kant is his conception of thought as active. In

the first place, this means that the problems and ends of philosophy must be

approached from the perspective of the thinker as actor rather than spectator.

As an actor or agent, the thinker is a point of transformation or

transmutation of forces and values. The key to the active status of the

thinker is that she does not simply follow what is given, but combines and

distils the given into the principle of an action. By contrast, the figure of the

spectator is less that of one who does notact than one whose actions are not

assumed as such, and are thus turned against themselves in what Deleuze calls,

after Nietzsche, the mode of the reactive. The thinker as actor also has a

dramatic sense, implying a typology of attitudes and corresponding

configurations of the scenario of thought, according to the stakes of the action.These stakes, at the centre of the act of thought, beyond its subject or object,

are the question and the problem: the imperative of the question and the

dialectic of the problem, which fuel and govern the ongoing process of

thought.

Hume: empirical critique

The critical exclusion of the thing-in-itself as a theoretical object is bound up

with this active conception of thought. Their connection forms the topic of

Deleuzes first reference to the notion of critique: his reading of Humes

empiricism, which is the topic of his first book, Empiricism and subjectivity: an

essay on Hume's theory of human nature. Having presented philosophy in

general as the search for a plane of analysis, from which a critique of

experience can be undertaken, Deleuze presents Humes empiricism as a


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variant that, beginning with the immanent field of passions and impressions,

poses the question of how a subject capable of knowledge and morality is

constituted.7 Empiricism, for Deleuze, is not above all an epistemological

tendency regarding the source of our knowledge, but a practical theory

regarding the constitution of the subject of knowledge and morality. Both

require that we go beyond the partiality of the given to make universal claims,

and it is through our adherence to a set of principles through our beliefs and

moral commitments that we constitute ourselves as subjects endowed with a

human nature beyond the vagaries of spirit. In his way, the problem of

empiricism emerges as the following: how, in the given, can a subject be

constituted such that it goes beyond the given?8 He contrasts this

fundamental question of empirical critique to what he here calls

transcendental critique, which begins with a methodologically reduced plane

that provides an essential certainty and poses instead the question: how can

there be a given, how can something be given to a subject, how can the subject

give something to itself?9 In either case, however, we are to understand that

the critique of experience is ultimately the critique of a philosophy of

Nature10the renunciation of speculation as to the real operations of things

as they exist in themselves:The two critiques, in fact, merge to the point where they become one.Why? Because the question of a determinable relation with Nature has itsown conditions: it is not self-evident, it is not given, it can only be posedby a subject, a subject questioning the value of the system of hisjudgements, that is, the legitimacy of the transformation to which hesubjects the given undergo or of the organisation which he confers uponit.11

It is only as an effectof the negotiation or agon between what is given

and the principles we bring to bear on it that we can address the notion of aNature of things, including even any physiological nature that we may want to

admit as the minimal presupposition of an act of thought:

It will be said that the given, at least, is given to the senses, that itpresupposes the organs or even a brain. No doubt, but what must beavoided again and always, is to grant in the first place to the organism anorganisation which comes to it only when the subject itself comes to thespirit, which is to say an organisation which depends on the sameprinciples as the subject itself.12

It bears noting here that in Deleuzes book on Kant, he makes an identical

point regarding critiquethat the given obeys the same principles as our


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subjectivity: that which presents itself to us in such a way as to form a Nature

must necessarily obey principles of the same kind (or rather, the same

principles) as those which govern the course of our representations.13 In this

context, however, he makes the point against Hume, who is presented as aphilosopher who derives principles from a (psychological) human nature,

rather than one who constitutes a human nature through principles, and it is

Kant instead who transforms the problem. This tendency of Deleuze to

switch roles or change names has already been mentioned. What is

important, however, in so far as it bears upon the understanding of Deleuzes

relationship with Kant, is that the point remains the same and is thus what is

most essential, and that it is a recognisably Kantian point, even if applied andattributed to a pre-Kantian philosopher.

Because the theoretical content of a philosophy is the product not of a

reflection on Nature, but of a dialectic between the given and a set of

principles, its value is secondary in relation to this central process which forms

the proper object of a critical philosophy and critical practice. Deleuzes second

discussion of critique in Empiricism and subjectivity extends this principle to

the context of the reading of philosophers in history. Most criticisms of great

philosophers, Deleuze argues, fall short of being truly philosophical because

they remain at the level of the theoretical proposition, and locate the

conditions of the theory outside of philosophy in empirical circumstances

rather than at its heart:

They consist in criticising a theory without considering the nature of theproblem to which it responds, and in which it finds its foundation and itsstructure. Thus, Hume is reproached with the atomisation of the given,and it is considered sufficient to denounce an entire system by showing at

it base a decision of Hume the person, a particular taste of Humes or thespirit of his time.14

Instead, Deleuze contends that a philosophical theory, and the vision of

nature it yields, is necessary only in virtue of a driving question: a

philosophical theory is a developed question, and nothing else It shows us

what things are, what indeed things must necessarily be, on the condition that

the question is good and rigorous.15 Deleuze presents critique as a putting

into question, where this process is understood not as a contemplative

distance or suspense, but a positive imperative that generates a nature: To


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put something in question means to subordinate, to submit things to the

question in such a way that in this constrained and forced submission they

reveal to us an essence, a nature.16 It is, on the contrary, those who read

theory as a simple representation of how things are who trivialise the

difficulty of thought, as if it were born from itself and for the fun of it. 17 This

understanding of the imperative character of the question recalls that of Kant

in his Preface to the first critique, where reason approaches nature in the

manner of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions

that he himself has formulated.18 The critic or reader of philosophy continues

this process of developing the implications of the question, showing in what

sense it is rigorous or not, in other words, how things would not be what they

are were the question different from the one formulated.19 The criticaloperation is thus presented in the same terms across the different levels of the

production of thought: the constitution of the knowing and moral subject in

Humes critique; the development of a philosophy and philosophical

interpretation.

Nietzsche: genealogical critique

From the first pages of Deleuzes book on Nietzsche, Nietzsches philosophy is

presented as a specifically critical philosophy, one of whose principal motives

is to redress the errors of Kant.20 Critical philosophy is identified with a

philosophy of value, which has two primary senses here. In the first place,

value plays a role analogous to that of the principle in Deleuzes reading of

Hume: that to which the given is referredvalues appear or are given as

principles: an evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomenaare appraised.21 In the second place, and on a more profound level, the

philosophy of value addresses not just different values, but the multiple points

of view from which values are generated: The problem of critique is that of

the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the

problem of their creation.22 As phenomena are referred to values for their

sense, so values are themselves referred to a centre of evaluation or mode of

existence as their own principle of significance. This double sense of thephilosophy of value underlies the genealogical method in philosophy. It is


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opposed both to the notion of established or given values, and to the

attempt to derive value from the authority of fact, which either

misunderstands the specificity of value or the question of its genesis. In so

doing, they reduce the essential pluralism of a philosophy of value, by

subjecting their variety to the unitary character of a subjective nature or

objective datum:

pluralism is but one with philosophy itself. Pluralism is the properlyphilosophical way of thinking, invented by philosophy; the onlyguarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violentatheism.23

The genealogical method serves both to distinguish the opposed

orientations of the high and the low, or the active and the reactive, and

is itself an expression of an active science, as it approaches phenomena from

the perspective of the actor who bestows their value and sense. The persona of

the philosopher in Nietzsche is analysed by Deleuze into three figures that

represent different aspects of the genealogical method: the philosopher-doctor

who interprets the phenomenon as symptom of a force; the philosopher-artist

who establishes a typology and the philosopher-legislator who assigns rank or

lineage.24 This portrait of thought a

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Deleuze and Kant's Critical Philosophy.

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