EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY by Anupa Batra B.S., Bradley University, 1994 M.Ed., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996 M.A., Boston College, 1999 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale August 2010
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EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
by
Anupa Batra
B.S., Bradley University, 1994 M.Ed., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996
M.A., Boston College, 1999
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale
August 2010
UMI Number: 3426647
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DISSERTATION APPROVAL
EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
By
Anupa Batra
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Ph.D.
in the field of Philosophy
Approved by:
Dr. Sara Beardsworth, Chair
Dr. Douglas Anderson
Dr. Ryan Netzley
Dr. Kenneth Stikkers
Dr. Stephen Tyman
Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale
June 8, 2010
i
AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Anupa Batra, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Philosophy, presented on June 8, 2010, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Sara Beardsworth The aim of this thesis is to show that Deleuze develops a new conception of experience. I
do so by showing the roots of this new conception in a transformation of Kant’s
transcendental philosophy. Kant is central to Deleuze’s project because Deleuze finds in
Kant the idea that the justification for truth is internal to the relation of subject and object.
Since the internal relation is vital to Deleuze’s notion of experience, his project is formed
as the problem of transcendental conditioning, as was Kant’s. However, Deleuze argues
that Kant did not take the critique far enough since he was able to examine claims to truth
but not the idea of truth itself. Deleuze’s notion of experience is developed in and
through his attempt to overcome this problem.
I show that Deleuze transforms Kant by rethinking four key notions. First, Deleuze
reconceives the notion of the system of experience. He argues that Kant’s notion of the
system of experience closes off experience so that nothing genuinely new could occur.
For Deleuze, experience does not form a single system but, instead, there are multiple
systems of experience and they arise from within experience. In addition, new systems of
experience can occur for Deleuze. Second, he rethinks the notion of the transcendental
conditions of experience such that they condition experience but arise from within
experience. Experience can always be opened up in a new way. Moreover, since
experience can occur in a genuinely new way, the subject must be able to be transformed
ii
as well. Third, then, he also rethinks the notion of the subject. For Deleuze, we cannot
begin with a subject that is self-identical. He provides an account for the production of
the subject. The transcendental conditions of experience belong to experience itself, not
the subject. The subject and the object of knowledge are produced together when a
system of experience opens up. As a result, the subject and object are necessarily in
relation and, for this reason, the object can always in principle be known by the subject.
Fourth, although Deleuze relies on Kant’s conception of time to explain the subject’s
relation to itself, he transforms both the subject’s self-relation and the conception of time.
In Kant the subject simply cannot know itself as it is, but only as it is given to itself.
Deleuze’s subject, which also cannot know itself, can nonetheless genuinely be
transformed and become different from itself. The transformation of the subject occurs at
the moment that a new field of experience is opened up. In conclusion, Deleuze shows
that new experience can always occur.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... i
VITA ..................................................................................................................... 199
1
INTRODUCTION
This thesis claims that for Deleuze philosophy is the task of overcoming the hindrance to
thought represented by what he calls “the dogmatic image of thought,” in order to free
thought to create new concepts and new kinds of life. I argue for the importance in his
endeavor of Deleuze’s relation to Kant. This project is an interpretation of Difference
and Repetition,1 which is acknowledged as Deleuze’s major work on Kant. It will show
the intelligibility of Deleuze’s concept of thinking by demonstrating its roots in a
transformation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. A further objective is to contribute,
thereby, to making Deleuze’s philosophy accessible to a more general philosophical
audience.
Deleuze argues that the dogmatic image of thought represents a tendency that occurs
in philosophy itself, and for this reason we need a new conception of philosophy that
includes within it the self-critical relation. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had
conceived of the critical philosophy precisely for this purpose.2 Reason examines its own
limits in order to avoid overstepping them. If philosophy is to have a critical relation to
itself it must reflexively ask the question of what philosophy is. Metaphysics in the sense
of a critical self-examination is therefore the most immediate task of philosophy.
However, Deleuze finds that the Kantian critical philosophy, too, falls into the dogmatic
image and therefore represents the hindrance to thought. For Deleuze, we must
understand how thinking has been hindered and how it must now be conceived. I claim
1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994); page 86. Hereafter cited as DR followed by the page number. 2 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A158/B197. Hereafter cited as CPR followed by the page number in the A edition and B editions.
2
that Deleuze’s project is carried through as a critical transformation of Kant’s critical
philosophy and his new conception of thinking is the result. Deleuze reserves the term
“experience” for this new conception since conceptual thought will have to be understood
as occurring in and through experience, not apart from it.
I argue that Kant is central to Deleuze’s project because he finds in Kant the idea that
the justification for truth is internal to the relation of thought and its object. In other
words, thought and its object are understood as being in an essential relationship. Since
this relation is vital to Deleuze’s notion of experience, his project is formed as the
problem of transcendental conditioning, as was Kant’s. However, Deleuze also argues
that Kant did not take the critique far enough since he was able to examine claims to truth
but not the idea of truth itself. For Deleuze, Kant’s dogmatism is represented in his
theory of transcendental Ideas, which express the relation between the transcendental
conditions of experience and empirical experience. In Kant the relation is one of simple
correspondence. Deleuze retains but transforms the Ideas, thereby transforming the idea
of transcendental conditioning. This enables him, in turn, to account for how we can
think what is new.
According to Deleuze, Kant’s shortcoming lies in his method. In seeking the
transcendental conditions of experience, he simply traced back from the end result,
knowledge, to its conditions. As a result, experience can only occur as recognition for
Kant: the subsumption of particulars under given universals. For Deleuze, in contrast,
recognition is itself grounded in a more profound act of thinking. I show that what
allows Deleuze to account for thinking the new is that he draws the transcendental
conditions from the process of learning, not from the end result. Deleuze argues that
3
experience begins from problems, and Kant’s theory of Ideas provides him with a way of
developing his own conception of problems. Ideas, or transcendental problems, pose a
systematic field and thereby open up knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge of empirical
objects or, in other words, empirical inquiry. There is knowledge only insofar as
empirical objects appear as the solution to a transcendental problem. Recognition occurs
at this level of empirical inquiry. But experience, for Deleuze, is the opening up of the
systematic field of empirical inquiry. Problems therefore represent the only
transcendental conditions of experience for Deleuze. Ideas function both
epistemologically and ontologically in Deleuze. They account both for the fact that
objects can be known and for the being of these objects.
I then show how Deleuze accounts for the production of a system of experience once
it has opened up. The objects that belong to a system are produced internally to the
system through a process of individuation. Kant had, of course, used the forms of space
and time to account for the difference between individuals. In contrast, Deleuze argues
that space and time do not serve to explain individual difference but must themselves be
explained. Thus Deleuze gives an account of the production of space and time. The
spatiotemporality of individuals is the result of the process of individuation. In this way,
Deleuze avoids the problem Kant could not seem to resolve: showing how intuition could
come into relation with concepts. The end result of the production of a system of
experience is objects that can be recognized and known conceptually.
Deleuze’s account of experience forces us to reconsider the question of the subject.
Since experience is essentially experience of the new, for Deleuze, the subject is itself
transformed through experience. In other words, a self-identical subject could not
4
withstand experience. Deleuze develops his idea of the subject out of a tension he
discovers in Kant. For Kant, the subject’s relation to itself occurs as the relation between
the transcendental and empirical subject, and time is the form in which this relation
occurs. Deleuze argues that the subject’s relation to itself is static in Kant since the
empirical subject corresponds exactly with the transcendental subject. In Deleuze, in
contrast, the transcendental conditions can never be brought into complete resolution with
the empirical (that is to say, with what is conditioned). The subject’s relation to itself is
therefore always in the process of occurring and is never complete. Since time is the
form of the relation between the transcendental and empirical subject, it is understood by
Deleuze as the form of change itself, and as the condition of the transformation of the
subject. Experience is only possible for Deleuze because it can be temporally
differentiated. The transformation of the subject occurs at the moment that a field of
empirical inquiry opens up. Moreover, the subject can always be transformed anew since
experience can never be complete.
Chapter 1 presents Deleuze’s relation to the Kantian conception of critique. I show
that in a range of texts—from Difference and Repetition to Nietzsche and Philosophy and
selected seminars on Kant and Leibniz—Deleuze is arguing that the question of truth is
not the primary question for philosophy since it depends on sense or meaning.3 The more
fundamental question of sense cannot be asked at the empirical level and requires the
move to the transcendental level. I am therefore claiming that Deleuze is primarily
interested in the Kantian critical philosophy because it is the discovery of the
transcendental. With the notion of the transcendental, Kant is able to conceive of internal
3 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as NP followed by the page number.
5
critique. Internal critique is grounded in the idea that the relationship between knowledge
and the objects of knowledge is internal. As a result, we can understand how truth, the
agreement of knowledge with its object, occurs internally to this relation, in contrast to
the idea that truth is justified by something external to the relation. This makes it
possible to critique claims to truth. Deleuze proposes to advance the idea of internal
critique not only in order to understand truth as internal but also to explain how the
relation by which truth is justified comes to be generated internally. From this, we will
be able to understand how the new arises internally, from within experience. As a result,
we can examine when thought is hindered and falls into dogmatism.
My major argument in chapter 1 is that, according to Deleuze, internal critique in Kant
is made possible by the theory of the transcendental Ideas of reason, discussed by Kant in
the “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic: The Regulative Employment of the Ideas
of Pure Reason” and “Transcendental Doctrine of Method: The Architectonic of Pure
Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason. There are three Ideas that are important here:
God, World, and Self. Their significance lies not in the content of these Ideas but in their
manner of functioning and their role in experience. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze
argues that what is interesting is the regulative functioning of the Ideas, the fact that they
are “problematizing.” The Ideas postulate that what we find empirically forms a
complete system, that it is completely ordered, and that this is due to order imposed
transcendentally. Since the object of the Ideas is the complete system, which is not
empirically given but must be represented, the Ideas serve to draw together empirical
inquiries that would otherwise remain fragmented. In other words, they provide meaning
otherwise lacking to particular empirical cases. Without the Ideas, empirical particulars
6
would remain fragmented and indifferent to one another. Thanks to the Ideas, the object
of knowledge does not occur apart from the concept by which it can be known. The
Ideas thereby open up the field of inquiry and, through them, we can examine the field of
inquiry itself.
I make clear in this chapter that Deleuze’s general criticism of Kant is that he, too,
falls into dogmatism. Deleuze’s reason for this criticism has to do with Kant’s method
for seeking the transcendental conditions of experience. In claiming that Kant simply
traced from the end result, knowledge, back to its conditions (the transcendental concepts
of the understanding), Deleuze is arguing that Kant treats experience as though it were
hypothetical instead of real. The result of his method is that the conditions of experience
are static and unchanging. They are simply conditions of possibility and they remain
external to what they condition. Experience occurs when the transcendental concepts of
the understanding enter into relation with the empirical, yet, because these conditions are
static for Kant, experience can only occur as recognition: knowledge, an empirical case
of cognition, occurs when the manifold of intuition is recognized as a particular case of a
universal concept. Since the Ideas express the way in which the transcendental concepts
of the understanding relate to the empirical, they represent Kant’s dogmatism. The
relation is one of simple correspondence. The Ideas therefore bring the empirical and
these transcendental conditions (the categories of the understanding) into complete
resolution. In other words, in Kant, experience is closed off through the Ideas and must
be understood as forming a totality.
Chapter 2 shows that Deleuze’s own conception of experience arises in and through
his transformation of central notions of Kant’s critical philosophy. For both Kant and
7
Deleuze, the meaning of objects is only possible because experience forms a system. In
Kant all of experience forms a single system, which can be conceived through the Ideas
of reason. Difference and Repetition reconceives the relation between the system and
what lies beyond it, the indeterminate, thereby transforming the notion of system. For
Deleuze, there are multiple systems and they arise from what is indeterminate. This is
because, for him, a system is not the totality of experience. A system is only experience
insofar as it is ordered by one particular Idea. The notion of the Idea is transformed as
well, such that it indicates one aspect of experience that becomes extracted from it, by
which experience is then found to be systematically ordered. Once a system of
experience has opened up, the production of the diversity of individual cases of objects
follows. These cases are meaningful and are distinguished according to the order of that
particular system. In this way, the transcendental conditions of experience themselves
account for the systematization of experience and for the diversity of cases that occur
within it. For Deleuze, experience can never be resolved into a totality, that is to say, into
a single Idea or set of Ideas, because it cannot be determined in advance what new Ideas
can occur.
I go on to show that, since transcendental conditions emerge from experience or, in
other words, objects of experience, these objects are not completely ordered. In Kant
something is an object only insofar as it has exactly one meaning, which is found by
identifying the object in the system within which its meaning arises. Since this is not the
case for Deleuze, he does not refer to objects as empirical but instead claims they are
8
always partly “virtual” and partly “actual.”4 Transcendental conditions, or Ideas, arise
from experience as problems because the meaning of the object can come into question
through tensions within it that are virtual and, in this way, the source of meaning also
becomes a question. The object then becomes reoriented in accordance with its new
meaning, as a solution to the problem that had arisen from it. It is transformed through its
reorientation. The term “actual” reflects the fact that the object has become a solution.
Deleuze continues to use the term empirical only in regard to knowledge of the empirical
object in Kant’s sense. Yet, for Deleuze, knowledge is knowledge of the object insofar as
it is the solution to a problem.
Chapter 3 focuses specifically on how the individuals or empirical cases that comprise
a system are produced once the system has opened up. Deleuze argues that the forms of
space and time cannot be used to explain the difference between empirical cases, as Kant
had done. For Deleuze, empirical cases can only be explained as arising through the
process of individuation. Individuals come to have spatiotemporality through this
process. He uses the term “intensity,” which is taken from physics and biology, to
develop this account. For him, intensity is an internal difference in that it does not occur
between two units that are already distinct but, instead, occurs within a singular thing and
creates a difference within it. The notion of intensity takes us from the Idea to the
production of individuals within a system of experience.
This chapter also explains how experience occurs for a human subject. I show that the
process of learning, and hence experience, begins because the transcendental does not
completely overlap with the empirical. It begins when a sign appears to us as a shock.
4 Deleuze develops the notions of the virtual and actual in Chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition and in the essay, “The Actual and the Virtual” in Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (New York: Columbia University Press), 2002.
9
The sign is emitted in the rupture of a virtual tension of an object. The ambiguous status
of the sign reflects the complex relation between the transcendental and empirical: the
sign is not empirically known but it appears within empirical experience precisely as that
which is outside of ordered experience. I argue that during the shock there is a
disorganization of experience, which entails an undoing of the transcendental order by
which experience had been structured meaningfully up to that point. No particular
meaningful object can be thought since meaning itself has arisen as a question. In other
words, during the shock there is nothing empirical since experience has not yet been
ordered by transcendental conditions. As experience organizes itself, there is a
corresponding activity occurring within the unconscious of the subject. The subject can
only learn insofar as she is willing to engage with a particular external element, such as
water when learning to swim. Once the system has been produced, the subject is able to
use concepts to refer to the stable cases of the system. Concepts occur at the empirical
level of the organization of experience, for Deleuze, as they express the kinds of
empirical cases that occur. At this stage, the subject is able, once again, to recognize
objects or cases around her.
Chapter 4 turns to the question of the subject. On this question Deleuze both
maintains the internal relation of the subject with the object that he finds in Kant and
addresses problems he finds in the Kantian conception of the subject.5 The central
complaint that Deleuze makes of Kant is that he simply attributed the conditions of 5 Deleuze’s criticisms of the Kantian subject are scattered through a number of texts: the second, third, and forth chapters of Difference and Repetition, “Preface: On the Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy,” and several seminars on Kant dated 14 March 1978, 21 March 1978, and 28 March 1978, and the 20 May 1980 seminar on Leibniz. Gilles Deleuze, “Preface: On the Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy” in Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
10
experience to the subject. This, of course, allowed Kant to successfully argue that the
relation of subject and object is an internal one. However, Kant did not show why these
conditions come to belong to the subject. Deleuze solves this problem by arguing that the
subject is produced anew along with a system of experience. Since there is no subject
prior to the objects it knows, the relation between them will be a necessary and internal
one. The chapter shows how the subject is produced in experience for Deleuze. In Kant
every representation of the subject must become part of the inner state of the subject.
Since time is the form of inner intuition, any change in the subject or in the subject’s
experience is given in time. Thus the subject in Kant can only know itself in time.
Deleuze takes his cue from Kant in making time central to understanding the identity of
the subject. However, for Deleuze, time is not merely a subjective condition. It is a
condition of experience itself and, as a result, we can have not only a transformation in
the subject’s representation but a transformation in the subject as well.
I therefore show how Deleuze’s conception of the subject arises from Kant’s. Deleuze
claims that since the transcendental conditions correspond exactly with the empirical for
Kant, the subject’s relation to itself is in fact static and reduced to the instant. His
criticism of Kant on this point is that the subject can never change or be new but always
remains the same. Deleuze agrees with Kant that the subject’s relation to itself is
temporal but, since new transcendental conditions can always arise from experience for
Deleuze, the subject’s relation to itself is always in the process of occurring and is never
complete. In this sense, the subject is always fractured and never identical to itself. For
Deleuze, then, the subject genuinely changes. Time is the form of change because the
subject comes into relation with itself and becomes different from itself through time.
11
Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” provides three syntheses by which experience
occurs: the synthesis of apprehension in an intuition, the synthesis of reproduction in
imagination, and the synthesis of recognition in a concept. These also show how the
subject synthesizes experience in time since, in the first synthesis, the manifold of
sensibility is synthesized in a single moment, in the second the multiplicity of
representations is synthesized across time, and in the third the multiplicity of
representations is synthesized by subordinating them to a concept. Deleuze argues that
Kant simply presumes the form of time, and that an account of time must be given. To
this end, he sets out three passive syntheses of time, which serve to account for the
synthesis of time itself: the synthesis of the living present, the synthesis of the past and
foundation of time, and the groundless form of time. The first synthesis gives us the
continuity of ordinary clock time. The second synthesis gives us the absolute past of
ordinary time, and it explains why ordinary time appears to have no beginning. The third
synthesis gives us the institution of ordinary time. For Deleuze, each system of
experience has its own temporality or its own order of ordinary time. The third synthesis,
I argue, is the key to understanding time as the form of experience in Deleuze and so the
constitution of the subject in experience. The opening up of a new system is only
possible because experience can be temporally differentiated. In other words, experience
only occurs as temporal disruption. The introduction of transcendental differentiation
constitutes a break in experience, and it is only in this break that a new system and its
order of time can occur, as well as the subject of that system. Thus, chapter 4 will show
that Deleuze’s novel conception of time allows him to conceive of the subject as always
open to transformation and to conceive of experience as always able to occur in a new
12
way. Together, the four chapters will show how Deleuze transforms the notion of
transcendental conditioning such that conditions are understood as arising from within
experience. That is to say, Deleuze accounts for the opening up of experience and
transforming of experience internally, from within experience.
The overall objective of the dissertation is to demonstrate that Deleuze’s philosophy
articulates a post-critical metaphysics. I will show that his conception of philosophy
retains the critical relation that philosophy has with itself, following Kant. In addition,
Deleuze retains the idea that the subject and object have an internal relation. Moreover,
his critique of Kant transforms the notion of transcendental conditioning so that it
accounts not only for our knowledge but also for the being or reality of things. As the
dissertation will show, this is not a return to a precritical metaphysics. Rather, as I will
articulate in the conclusion, Deleuze’s metaphysics opens up the “sphere of immanence.”
13
CHAPTER 1
THE CENTRALITY OF THE KANTIAN CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY FOR DELEUZE
INTRODUCTION
My thesis claims that Deleuze develops a new conception of experience. I argue that this
new conception must be understood as developing out of Kant’s critical philosophy. This
chapter examines what Deleuze finds so vitally important in Kant: the idea that the
relation of thought and object is an internal not an external one. With Kant, it is no
longer the case that thought tries to grasp objects that appear according to laws beyond
us, like divine laws we cannot know. Instead, objects appear for thought only because
thought structures experience a priori. The internal relation of thought and object means
that we can grasp the laws by which objects appear to us. I argue that the internal
relation of thought and object is important for Deleuze because it allows him to develop a
conception of thought whose task is not simply to grasp an object correctly, but to grasp
what allows objects to appear. Deleuze’s purpose is to rectify the fact that philosophy
has traditionally conceived of thinking as “representational.” The idea that thought is
representational is grounded in the claim that thought simply represents what is real, and
thinking is equated with making true or correct judgments. Deleuze’s criticism is that the
idea that thought is primarily representational is a narrow conception of thought. Simply
being able to make true statements does not mean there is possession of knowledge in a
genuine sense. I will show that Deleuze’s own conception of experience is intended to be
a richer conception of thinking. According to Deleuze, thinking is not simply the correct
application of concepts. Instead, it is what occurs in the production of concepts. In this
sense, thinking is inherently thinking what is new.
14
In order to develop the idea of the internal relation of thought and object, Deleuze
must turn to the idea of system in Kant. This chapter works out the connection between
the internal relation and system in Kant. In order for an object, a particular case, or a
judgment to be meaningful for thought, whether the judgment is true or false, it must
occur in relation to a system. If knowledge did not form a system and were merely an
aggregate, that is to say, if it were merely a collection of fragments with no unifying
laws, it would mean that the principles of knowledge lay outside of thought. In other
words, if knowledge in Kant did not form a system, the relation of thought and object
could not be internal. The transcendental Ideas of reason are what make the system
possible. Thus in order to develop the idea of the internal relation Deleuze must turn to
Kant’s theory of Ideas. The Ideas allow us to conceive of experience as forming a whole.
For this reason, according to Deleuze, they make it possible for us to examine not only
the truth or falsity of judgments but also meaning, on which truth and falsity depend.
Meaning only arises through the system and, therefore, the Ideas allow us to see how
meaning arises.6
However, Deleuze finds that Kant’s project is not sufficient for philosophy to be truly
critical. The critical philosophy was supposed to free thought from the authority of what
is transcendent to thought and to legitimize what it can know on its own grounds. I will
show that, for Deleuze, Kant’s shortcoming was due to his method. Kant presupposed
what would count as pure knowledge–mathematics and geometry, and then determined
the transcendental conditions by simply tracing back from these. The problem is that
Kant discovers conditions that are merely static and are simply part of the structure of
6 I will therefore return to the question of meaning in section 3 below, after the discussion of the transcendental ideas in section 2.
15
thought. As a result, knowledge can only occur as recognition: correctly subsuming what
is given in intuition under a concept. Deleuze considers this to be dogmatism because
thought can do no more than identify what is given as a particular case of what is already
known in the form of concepts. He argues that thought is still not free with Kant because
it is now subject to the demands of reason. Thought is no longer subject to an authority
beyond itself but it serves only to legitimize what is already known. For Deleuze, we
must have a broader conception of thought that allows us to see how we produce the
concepts by which we know something. Examining Deleuze’s criticism of Kant will
allow us to see the problems Deleuze must overcome in developing his own conception
of experience, which I will turn to in Chapter 2.
1. KANT'S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Kant’s project must be understood in relation to the philosophical atmosphere at that
time, as a response to it. In developing Deleuze’s relation with Kant, Christian Kerslake
provides an excellent interpretation of the motivation behind Kant’s project in his article,
“Kant, Deleuze, and Metacritique.”7 Kerslake argues that Kant perceived that intellectual
intuition is impossible for human thought. For finite rational beings there can be no
immediate, intellectual knowledge of things in themselves since they must appear as
spatial and temporal. Nor do we have divine intuition since we cannot produce the object
that we think in intuition. Our intuition is passive in that an object must be given to us.
Since God must be understood as infinite and since knowledge of the infinite could only
occur directly and immediately, the loss of intellectual intuition amounts to the
speculative death of God. Knowledge of God is impossible for humans. This is 7 Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLII (2004), pp. 481-508.
16
understood as a crisis in thought since the relation between thought and being can no
longer be understood as direct and immediate. A chasm is opened up between thought
and being because of the passivity of our intuition. We do not even know if thought has
any relation to objects. Therefore in order to claim that knowledge is possible, it must
first be shown that a relation between thought and being does, indeed, occur through the
chasm. Kant’s work is aimed at determining what relation human thought has with being
and, thus, what we can legitimately know.
For Kant, the crisis in thought meant that we could not presume the existence of an
independent object causing sensation. Kant’s critical philosophy is distinct from both
rationalism and empiricism in this regard. The latter function under the presumption that
thought comes into relation with an object that is independent of it. The way in which the
Kantian philosophy is situated in relation to rationalism and empiricism is important for
Deleuze. It seems to be his concern in the seminar of 20 May 1980 on Leibniz, which is
devoted to a comparison of Leibniz and Kant on the ideas of the finite and infinite. He
argues that one reason for Kant’s success in rethinking the relation of thought and being
is that he begins from the idea of the finite. In Deleuze’s view, the rationalists began
thinking from the infinite. For this reason, finitude was conceived as occurring only as a
consequence of the limitation of the infinite. According to the Leibnizian view, the
model of finite human knowledge is divine knowledge, of which our knowledge is only
an imperfect version. Divine and human knowledge differ only in degree not in kind.
The accuracy of human knowledge is evaluated in reference to divine knowledge (the
criterion for its truth), that is to say, in how close it comes to the latter. In other words,
human knowledge has legitimacy only in relation to infinite divine knowledge. When
17
human knowledge is understood through its difference from divine knowledge, the
objects of knowledge must be things in themselves, not simply what they are for us. For
the Leibnizian, what appears to the senses can only be considered distorted in comparison
to the objects of divine knowledge, which are essences of things. Deleuze suggests that
before Kant the subject is understood in the history of philosophy as having a
fundamental defect. It is as a result of this defect that things appear as they do to the
subject. The sensible element of finite knowledge is the result of our imperfection and
limitation, of our not being God, and it is sensibility that prevents us from having
knowledge to the same degree as the divine. The sensible is not anything positive and,
for this reason, our concepts of space and time are entirely conceptual even though they
are perceived through the senses. We arrive at these concepts by abstraction, so they are
objective and not a priori. On this view, our sensible cognitions are the same in kind as
our intellectual cognitions, just less clear and distinct. When something appears to us, it
is the occasion to try to know it, to try to get to its essence. Deleuze claims that the
motivation behind Plato’s epistemology, to take one case, is to find a way to overcome
our infirmity, on account of which we experience mere appearance, in order to get to
essence. Although we try to get to what the object is apart from its relation to us, we can
never succeed. This is only possible for the subject whose intuition is not limited by
sensibility.
Deleuze’s aim in characterizing Kant’s project as established in the finite human
condition is to bring our attention to the fact that the critical philosophy does not begin
from the assumption that human knowledge is a flawed and imperfect version of another
kind, divine knowledge. We could only consider human knowledge flawed if there were
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an object it could not get to, an object which was not graspable for it because of its finite
nature. Kant reinterprets sense intuition as a unique kind of intuition rather than as a
flawed and limited version of intellectual intuition. Since our intuition is passive, finite
human knowledge cannot be compared to knowledge that is possible through another
kind of intuition. In other words, Kant examines human knowledge on its own terms, not
in reference to divine knowledge. The contribution of sensible intuition is therefore
considered something positive. In the seminar on Kant dated 14 March 1978 Deleuze
makes the argument that, with Kant, appearance in intuition is not to be interpreted as a
distortion of a true object, but as the appearing of the object itself. In other words, the
subject is no longer understood to be defective and instead is constitutive of the appearing
of objects. The appearance cannot legitimately be contrasted with a so-called true object
or essence. The notion of appearance implies that something can be an object only under
certain conditions –space and time. These are subjective and in us since they are the
conditions under which anything can come into relation with the subject. Space and time
are not conceptual and abstracted from objects but, instead, the forms of sensible
intuition. Whatever falls outside of the limits of these conditions can never be an object
for us. Kant thereby critically restricts theoretical knowledge to possible objects, that is
to say, to appearances only. Since essence, in the Platonic sense, cannot come into
relation with us in principle, it is not a possible object of knowledge. In other words,
with Kant, the object is not something independent of the subject, whose essence the
subject simply grasps correctly or incorrectly.
As I said earlier, the problem Kant feels he must address is how a relation between
thought and being could occur. As Kerslake argues, “thought is cast adrift” in having no
19
direct relation to the object and in having to rely on intuition that is passive.8 However, it
is the passivity of intuition that also makes it possible for Kant to transform the relation
of thought and being. The object is no longer understood as something independent of
thought, but instead there is an object only insofar as something appears in sensible
intuition. In sum, the relation becomes internalized. What is given in intuition is taken
as object. Kerslake argues that it is the Kantian ‘as’ that is central to the Copernican
turn.9 There is no object apart from the fact that the subject organizes sensation into an
object. Empirically, we know objects because what is given in sensation is taken as an
instantiation of a concept and thereby as an object. Thus the categories of the
understanding, which give us the concept of an object in general, must apply to whatever
is given in sensation. It is only because we passively receive something in intuition that
it can be organized. In other words, with Kant, thought does not simply seek to reveal
what is out there. This kind of direct relation is impossible. We can no longer presume
that being is ordered prior to its coming into relation with thought. The ordering of being
occurs when sensation is taken as an object because sensation is taken as a part of the
ordered system. Therefore, while it had previously been understood that the relation of
thought was with what already had order, with Kant the relation of thought is with what
thought itself organizes into an object.
As said, the relation between thought and object must be understood as an internal
one. In other words, the critical restriction of objects of knowledge to appearances allows
us to understand the object and knowledge as fundamentally related. The conditions of
the former are also the conditions of the latter. This relation is given as the axiomatic
8 Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique,” p. 493. 9 Ibid., p. 498.
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claim: “The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions
of the possibility of the objects [Gegenstände] of experience.”10 In Deleuze’s view the
entire Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to establishing this principle and, thereby, to
establishing the internal relation of thought and being. He thinks that the internalization
of the relation is the creative moment of the critical philosophy. Its significance is not
only epistemological but also ontological
Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable or rather the form in
which the undetermined is determinable (by the determination)…It amounts to the
discovery of Difference…no longer in the form of an external difference which
separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes an a priori
relation between thought and being.11
Thought and being are brought about together in Kant because there is nothing, no
being, until there is organization. Just to be clear, for Kant this “nothing” is what is
transcendentally negated. In other words, for Kant we cannot claim anything is, in a
positive sense, without the ordering structure of thought. The internal relation of thought
and being makes the self-reflective moment of the critical philosophy possible. Since we
can interpret what we are able to know as something positive, we can understand human
knowledge on its own terms and for what it actually is, rather than in relation to some
other kind of knowledge. That is to say, we can ask the question, what are the structures
of reason that make possible what we are, in fact, able to know? When we properly
understand the structures of reason, we can determine what kind of object we can know,
10 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A158/B197. Hereafter cited as CPR followed by the page number in the A edition and B edition. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994); page 86. Hereafter cited as DR followed by the page number.
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in principle: the object to which we have the right (the question de jure that Kant is so
concerned with).
As a point of comparison, we can examine what the relation of thought and being is
for empiricism and rationalism. In Kant’s Critical Philosophy Deleuze makes the point
that while empiricism and rationalism are opposed to each other in certain essential
respects, they both require a final harmony of subject with object.12 For the empiricists,
the object of knowledge can be reduced to its sensual aspect, while the claim of
rationalism is that objects are, at bottom, purely conceptual. In both cases, however, the
mind simply conforms to the object in knowing it, and therefore their relationship is
external. The object has an identity independent of the knowledge of it. Knowledge is
simply the agreement of mind with object, and the relation between the order of ideas and
the order of things is simply correspondence. Neither empiricism nor rationalism is able
to explain the agreement of a correct idea with the object. Neither is able to explain truth.
Something external and transcendent must be invoked to legitimate and guarantee the
correspondence, that is to say, God. Since the relation is external and is legitimated by
what is beyond the possibility of human knowledge, the correspondence of idea and
object cannot be understood in principle.
Since the relation is internal for Kant, knowledge and its objects are necessarily
related. It is the necessity that the relation carries that makes Kant revolutionary. As a
result of this necessity, the critical philosophy is able to achieve a kind of certainty that is
impossible for empiricism or rationalism. For Kant, the empirical identity of the object is
not independent of the possible knowledge of it, since the transcendental conditions are
12 Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11-14. Hereafter cited in the text as KCP, followed by the page number.
22
the same for both (empirically, of course, the object could be unknown or incorrectly
known). Deleuze expresses it in this way: Kant “[substitutes] the principle of a necessary
submission of object to subject for the idea of a harmony between subject and object
(final accord)” (KCP 14). The principle by which the object submits to the subject is the
principle of possible experience. The agreement of a correct idea with the object is not
just correspondence and can be understood because their relation is internal. As a result,
truth occurs internally to the relationship of knowledge and the objects proper to it.
Critically restricted theoretical knowledge contains its own validity. We are able to make
necessary and universal judgments about experience, about objects, only because they are
our own representations, because the conditions for objects are subjective. The empirical
laws we discover in experience derive their necessity from the pure laws of the
understanding, without which experience would not be possible. In fact, we discover
such laws only because the understanding prescribes laws a priori to experience. We can
then gather these empirical laws into a science such as physics. These laws hold with
necessity and universality because they apply only to our own representations. We have
the expectation of consistency and of order: that whatever will come will fit in with the
order we have already seen. In fact, we always assume our experience is consistent with
what we already know. Since all empirical laws derive their necessity from the pure laws
of the understanding, theoretical knowledge itself provides the grounds by which to judge
whether a particular judgment is true or false. Theoretical knowledge, as conceived by
Kant, contains its own criterion of truth.
Moreover, the internal relationship of thought and being makes the critical self-
examination of philosophy possible because it allows the critique of claims to truth to
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occur. As we said above, Kant shows that theoretically restricted knowledge has the right
to possible objects of knowledge. It has this right because it has a necessary relation to
its object. Therefore the judgment of true or false can apply only to knowledge of
possible objects. (Whatever is not a possible object is simply off-limits for theoretical
knowledge.) Kant shows that in order for the relation of thought and being to occur,
thought must take what is given in a particular way. We get to the foundation of truth
because, through an examination of our faculties, we can determine how thought must
take what is given. Since truth is nominally defined as the agreement of knowledge with
its object, here the question is to determine if knowledge is in agreement with how
something must be taken as object. A judgment is considered true if that is how,
empirically, an object must appear to us because of the way the understanding necessarily
functions. For Kant, since we can understand the basis on which a judgment is true or
false, we are able to critique any claim to truth. This is revolutionary since, before Kant,
the justification of the truth of a judgment was external, and therefore we could not
possess the criteria by which to distinguish between the true and the false. Kant’s critical
philosophy is self-reflective because of the internal relation of thought and object.
However, the internal relation of thought and being that is proposed by Kant requires
the idea of the totality of experience. By itself, a single judgment is a fragment. It
requires a broader context, or system, since a judgment can only be meaningful through
its relation to other judgments and to the system. When the relation of thought and being
was understood as external, the judgment was presumed to occur in relation to a broader
context that was transcendent. It was understood as transcendent since, of course,
experience as a whole was beyond the scope of finite thought and could not be grasped
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by it. Deleuze is interested in how Kant responds to this issue. He provides a discussion
of it in his seminar on Kant dated 14 March 1978. Kant emphasizes that knowledge
consists of universal and necessary claims, which are universal and necessary only
because they apply to experience as a whole. Therefore we need the idea of the totality
of experience. However, since experience only gives us the particular and contingent, a
posteriori claims will only be particular and contingent. We can never form the idea of
the totality of experience when we consider experience empirically. We are always led to
make another addition because experience is fundamentally fragmented. Empirically we
can never know if the next case will not be the exception: maybe the sun won’t rise
tomorrow. Thus the idea of the totality of experience is only possible a priori, through
the Ideas. Even though we never have experience of the totality of experience, we still
have an idea of it. In this way, the Ideas provide a way of understanding the system of
experience as being internal and, thus, the internal relation of thought and object is
possible only through them.
2. THE THEORY OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant defines the Ideas in general in Book I of the
“Transcendental Dialectic” entitled “The Concepts of Pure Reason.” An Idea is a
concept of an object that transcends possible experience. We can think these objects but
never know them. Although there is an indefinite number of Ideas, Kant focuses on three
in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Ideas of God, Self, and World. The Ideas are derived
from the activity of reason, which takes as its object the judgments of the understanding.
In other words, the understanding takes the manifold of intuition as its object, while
reason takes the concepts of the understanding as its object. The distinction between the
25
categories (the pure concepts of the understanding) and the transcendental Ideas (the pure
concepts of reason) is important: the former relate to possible objects of experience while
the latter relate to the totality of possible experience. Reason seeks the condition that
makes each particular judgment possible, that is to say, the more general condition of
which a particular judgment is a singular case. Reason proceeds by inference from a
conditioned given to its conditions. There are three kinds of syllogistic inference reason
draws, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive. Therefore there are three ways in which
reason seeks to bring particular judgments into relation with other judgments. In this
way, reason situates particular judgments within a broader context. Reason seeks the
condition of particular judgments because in general it is driven to seek systematic unity.
In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method: The Architectonic of Pure Reason” Kant
describes reason as architectonic in nature. Through its systematizing activity, reason
tries to give the manifold knowledge of the understanding an a priori unity (which is
unlike any unity that can be accomplished through the understanding). As said above, for
Kant knowledge cannot occur as a mere aggregate of fragments but must be understood
as an organized unity. Reason seeks the totality of conditions through its systematizing
activity and thereby pursues unconditioned unity, or the Ideas. The transcendental Ideas
of reason are derived from the three kinds of syllogistic inference. We get the indefinite
series of causes through use of the hypothetical syllogism. The Idea of the World is the
totality of this series. We get the Idea of God, which is the total community of excluded
parts, from the disjunctive syllogism. From the categorical syllogism, we get the Idea of
the Self, the subject that can never itself be predicated of anything. Together, these three
Ideas represent the totality of conditions of experience. Reason can never actually reach
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the unity of the Ideas, yet they condition its activity. Since reason is systematizing by
nature, the Ideas represent the endpoint of its systematization or the complete system of
knowledge.
Essentially the entire Critique of Pure Reason is dedicated to explaining how
knowledge forms a system. The demonstration of the principle, “the conditions of
possible objects is also the conditions of possible experience,” is given in the entire
critique. Kant deploys the idea of schematism, the concepts of reflection, and the
transcendental Ideas of reason to this end. Deleuze does not disregard these other ways
of conceiving of system. For example, he provides his own version of schematism in
chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition. However, he places a special emphasis on the
Ideas of reason. What is unique about Deleuze’s reading is that for him the Ideas
represent the relation between possible objects and possible experience in an exemplary
way. Deleuze identifies three crucial aspects of Kant’s Ideas. “Ideas, therefore, present
three moments: undetermined with regard to their object, determinable with regard to
objects of experience, and bearing the idea of an infinite determination with regard to
concepts of the understanding” (DR 169).13 These allow us to see how, for Deleuze, the
Ideas postulate that what we empirically find is completely ordered according to
transcendental conditions, i.e., that there is harmony between the order we find
empirically and the order imposed transcendentally. Although this harmony is brought
about by means of several mechanisms, the important thing for Deleuze is that it can only
be conceived through the Ideas.
The first aspect, that the Ideas are undetermined, reflects the fact that they have an
ambiguous status for Kant. Deleuze generally uses the term ‘problematic’ to refer to this 13 The same discussion is found at KCP 21.
27
ambiguous status. The object of the Ideas, the complete system, would, in a sense, follow
from the total application of the transcendental concepts of the understanding. In fact,
however, it must be presupposed in order for the concepts to apply at all. In other words,
the Ideas must be presupposed in order for knowledge to be possible, but their object, the
complete system, does not exist, nor is it required to exist. Deleuze frequently expresses
this idea by saying that the Ideas are problems to which there is no solution. In Kant the
goal of the complete system (the ideal focus or horizon) is outside the bounds of
experience and, because of this, Kant is careful to say that the concepts of the
understanding do not in reality proceed to that goal. In other words, the goal of the unity
of conceptual knowledge is transcendent to experience. The complete system of
knowledge cannot be given to us in experience. Kant distinguishes the constitutive use of
the Ideas from their regulative use because the object of the Ideas is transcendent. We
are restricted from their constitutive use because when we seek their object in experience,
reason falls into transcendental illusions particular to it: paralogisms, antinomies, and
impossible proofs. In the “Appendix to the Dialectic: The Regulative Employment of the
Ideas of Pure Reason” Kant explains that their proper function is their regulative use. It
is in this way that the Ideas are necessary for experience. In their regulative use the Ideas
guide the concepts of the understanding. Even though we can never know whether the
complete system does, in fact, exist, in order for our judgments to be meaningful we must
presuppose that it does. Deleuze is particularly interested in the regulative use of the
Ideas. Kant sometimes uses the term “problematic” to describe the status of the Ideas
when they are used regulatively, but more often he uses the term “undetermined.”
Deleuze picks up the term “problematic” and uses it almost exclusively. According to
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Deleuze: “Kant never ceased to remind us that Ideas are essentially ‘problematic’.
Conversely, problems are Ideas” (DR 168).
In developing his interpretation of the problematic Ideas Deleuze will go on to draw
some further distinctions that Kant himself would not recognize. We will examine them
later but, for the moment, we can simply say that the fact that the Ideas are problematic
means there can be no “solution” within experience. In other words, the object of the
Ideas cannot be given in experience. In the end, this first aspect of Kant’s ideas, that they
are problematic, is the only one Deleuze will retain in his own conception of
transcendental Ideas.
Deleuze identifies a second and third aspect of the Ideas. Only by means of these two
aspects can the Ideas represent that what we empirically find forms a complete system.
He discusses the second aspect of the Ideas, that they are determinable with regard to
objects of experience, most clearly in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (KCP 20).14 The
second aspect represents the content to which our concepts would apply. In order for
knowledge to be possible, the content of phenomena must correspond to the Ideas. In
other words, the content of phenomena cannot show a radical diversity. If there were no
resemblance at all in the content, we could not detect the slightest similarity. In other
words, the second aspect of the Ideas represents something essential about what we find
empirically, that it can take on order.
The third aspect of the Ideas is that they represent the ideal of the complete application
of the concepts of the understanding. This aspect represents the idea that the concepts
can be applied in such a way that they organize what is given to completion. In the
“Appendix to the Dialectic: The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason” 14 The core of the discussion occurs in DR as well, at p. 169.
29
Kant explains how the Ideas function in regard to the concepts. Concepts are arranged on
lines that converge on an ideal focus outside of experience or within a horizon that
embraces all concepts. The Ideas are these focus points or horizons. The Ideas are not to
be used constitutively, but in their regulative use they order the concepts of the
understanding. In this way, the Ideas direct the activity of the understanding toward a
particular goal. The Ideas serve to give the concepts the greatest possible unity and the
greatest possible extension. In chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues
that without the activity of reason, and hence the Ideas that condition the activity of
reason, the understanding could never by itself constitute knowledge. “The
understanding by itself would remain entangled in its separate and divided procedures, a
prisoner of partial empirical enquiries or researches in regard to this or that object” (DR
168). It would remain lost in its own private activity, yielding only fragments. Deleuze’s
point is that the understanding, by itself, is unable to grasp the significance of its own
activity. Since the understanding cannot organize itself to stage inquiries, it has no
driving force of its own to pursue knowledge. The idea of the complete system
necessarily carries with it the imperative to completely solve or explicate the problem of
the system. In other words, their problematic status provides the Ideas with directing
force (i.e. that the understanding must be directed toward explicating the system). In this
way, Deleuze points out, the concepts of the understanding only find the ground of their
full experimental use in relation to the Ideas. Thanks to the Ideas, the concepts form an
organized unity, not merely an aggregate of fragments. Together, the second and third
aspects of the Ideas express the harmony of the content of phenomena and the form (the
application of the concepts of the understanding). It is only possible for our concepts to
30
apply to what is given if what is empirically given follows the same principles as our
concepts. The Ideas make the internal relation of subject and object possible because
together they represent the harmony of the empirical and transcendental. However, this
harmony can only be postulated since it could occur only as the complete system of
knowledge, which is outside of experience. The Ideas allow us to conceive of the system
of knowledge, and they have a problematic or undetermined status because the complete
system is only postulated. If the order we find in experience were given to experience
transcendently (rather than occurring transcendentally), that is to say, if the relation of
subject and object were external, we could never be sure experience was systematic.
With Kant, everything as it is given empirically is understood as already being within the
system. In other words, everything we empirically find is, in principle, knowable without
exception because the transcendental conditions apply to everything that can be known.
Deleuze finds that the function carried out by transcendental Ideas in Kant is pivotal in
the internal production of the system. He focuses on the Ideas for this reason.
3. THE ISSUE OF MEANING
We return now to the issue of truth in the critical philosophy, an issue I took up above,
prior to the discussion of the transcendental Ideas. Since truth occurs internally to the
relation of the subject and object, the conditions of its validity are also internal to the
relation. In this way, the justification for truth, that is to say, the reason why something is
true can be understood through the relation. As we saw, the justification for truth is not
external to the relation, as with empiricism and rationalism, but internal to that relation.
As a result, the critical philosophy is able to respond to dogmatism by examining claims
to truth. What is novel about Deleuze’s interpretation of Kant is his claim that truth is
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grounded in meaning. Before the determination can be made that a judgment is true or
false, the judgment must be seen as meaningful. For example, the statement that the sky
is purple is false but still meaningful. It is not nonsense. Truth simply expresses the fact
that the subject and object are in agreement. Something is true or false only in relation to
meaning. In fact, we can only say the statement above is false because it is meaningful.
As a result, Deleuze places priority on meaning. We must understand how meaning
arises. Since truth is dependent on meaning, truth can be understood as arising internally
in the relation of subject and object only insofar as meaning is understood as being
internal to the relation as well. In Deleuze’s view, Kant’s account of the internal relation
of subject and object makes it possible for us to understand how meaning arises.
Meaning only arises along with the system of experience. For this reason, we can
adequately address the question of meaning only at this point, after our discussion of the
Ideas, since they make it possible to examine the system of experience.
Particular empirical cases or objects can have meaning only through their relation to
each other: they must not be indifferent to each other. In other words, a particular
empirical case is significant precisely in that it is distinguished from others and that it is
not like the others. Empirical cases can be compared with one another. The significance
of an empirical case lies in the fact that it does not form an indistinguishable mass with
other cases. Cases are distinguished qua empirical cases. In Kant, the categories form
the criteria or the basis on which something is carved out as an empirical case and is
thereby individuated. The relations the cases have with one another are due to the nature
of the categories. In other words, since objects have certain characteristics qua objects,
these characteristics determine how they are related. For example, since cause is one
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criterion, a particular object can be understood as a distinct empirical case because it has
a different cause than other cases. Multiple empirical cases are related as cause and
effect of each other. To be defined as an empirical case at all is to be distinguished
according to these criteria. There are multiple empirical cases, which are distinguishable
because they form different representations or expressions of the categories. In other
words, particular objects are variations on the form of object itself. They are meaningful
precisely because they are distinguished in terms of these criteria. In fact, they can be
known as individuals on the basis of these criteria because their differences occur in
terms of these criteria. An individual is considered distinct from others in the
characteristics that make it an empirical case (although it may also be distinct in other,
inessential ways). In other words, we never know the form of object itself. We only
know particular objects. Therefore the meaning or sense of a particular empirical case is
given as its own particular cause, the unity it has, its coming to be and ceasing to be, etc.
All of these characteristics are derived from the categories and are different from those of
other empirical cases. Thanks to the categories, an empirical case is immediately in
relation to other cases.
Ultimately, however, the relation that empirical cases have with one another is only
made possible by the Ideas. Each empirical case becomes differentiated from others and
individuated into a singular case through the categories. However, with the categories
alone we would only get a collection of individual cases that were not in relation with
each other. We could not know the meaning of an individual case from this. We can
only conceive of the collection of individual cases together as a system through the Ideas
because the object of the Ideas is the whole of possible experience. The relations that
33
individual cases have with one another depend on the complete system. The individual
cases only arise in relation to the complete system and derive their significance from it.
The Ideas allow us to see the categories in relation to the whole of possible experience, as
the distinguishing factors of the whole, by which the whole is divided into empirical
cases. It is by means of these factors that empirical cases are understood as being part of
the organized unity. Empirical cases are meaningful only because they can be situated
within the whole. In this way, the Ideas allow us to conceive of each empirical case in
relation to other cases. Each empirical case has a meaning in relation to the whole of
possible experience from which it arises. We can only conceive of the relation between
the particular judgment and the whole by means of the Ideas because we can never have
an idea of the whole empirically. It is in relation to this point that Deleuze claims that
truth never occurs in isolation and that a true statement never stands alone apart from its
context, except when arbitrarily detached and employed as an example (DR 154). His
point is that meaning only occurs in the relation of a particular case, such as a particular
statement, to its context. For example, a sentence is only meaningful in relation to a
language. Language, taken as a whole, forms a system. Meaning arises from the
relations between sounds and between words. Meaning is not found in the case
considered by itself because it can only occur in a system. A word is meaningful only
because of its relation to the language in which it occurs. For this reason, Deleuze’s
concern is not with the similarity and differences between cases, but with the fact that an
empirical case is a solution to a problem which presents a context.
This brings us back to the self-reflexive nature of the Kantian philosophy. The
Kantian philosophy provides us with a way to understand meaning as arising internally to
34
experience. Each case is meaningful simply by virtue of being an empirical case since it
carries with it its relation to the whole of possible experience, as the latter is represented
by the Ideas. Deleuze in fact takes up the theory of transcendental Ideas because it
allows him to understand how meaning arises internally. His seminar on Kant dated 14
March 1978 argues that the question of transcendental conditioning is really the question
of meaning or sense. We no longer ask ourselves if there is something behind the
appearance. Deleuze argues that now, with Kant, we ask a different question:
“Something appears, tell me what it signifies or, and this amounts to the same thing, tell
me what its condition is.” And later: “Since Kant we spontaneously think in terms of the
relation apparition/conditions of the apparition, or apparition/sense of what appears, and
no longer in terms of essence/appearance.” The question of transcendental conditioning
is the question of how something comes to be object qua object. This is also the question
of how something comes to be meaningful. Deleuze can equate these two, transcendental
conditioning and meaning, because meaning always arises from the totality of
experience, which is given by the totality of conditions. The Ideas make it possible to
conceive of the totality of the conditions of experience. For the relation of subject and
object to be truly internal, the meaning or sense of the object must arise from within the
relation as well. The conditions of the object are the conditions by which it is meaningful
to us, that is to say, the conditions by which it becomes an object at all. It is meaningful
within the framework set by the conditions. In other words, it becomes demarcated as an
object only in relation to the system that would follow from the conditions. The theory of
Ideas allows us to understand how the complete system is postulated with every empirical
cognition that takes place. For this reason, in Kant an object is always a priori
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meaningful. Something can only be an object insofar as it has meaning. We are able to
understand the source of meaning, which is the system or framework, through the
consideration of the Ideas.
For Deleuze, the idea of legislation in Kant can therefore be understood in terms of the
issue of meaning. Kant argues that philosophy, understood in the critical sense, is
legislative. In the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” he makes the point that the idea of
legislation is found in the reason of every human being, which takes on this role when it
prescribes in regard to systematic unity (CPR A839/B867). Reason judges what is true or
not and, in this way, persuades us to seek the truth. In this way, we are not subject to
anything external to reason. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze argues that the
legislative character of the Kantian philosophy is the essence of its Copernican revolution
and, in this way, critique is opposed to dogmatic and theological subjection.15 According
to Deleuze, the legislative character of reason depends on the fact that meaning arises
internally to the relation of subject and object. Reason legislates because it can grasp the
foundation of meaning. Philosophy, in Kant’s sense, is thus the examination of the
system of knowledge and of the foundation of meaning. A distinction is made between
what is included in the system and what is outside of it, between what is considered
meaningful and what is not. In Kant’s terms, we can say that this is the distinction
between what is transcendentally affirmed and what is transcendentally negated. This
distinction serves as the foundation of the system of knowledge. Philosophy is legislative
because it grasps the distinction and, thereby, the foundation of the system.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 92. Hereafter cited as NP followed by the page number.
36
It is important to note that for Deleuze this distinction must be understood as a
distinction of value. He argues that only what is selected and included is valued. It is
considered meaningful and important. Whatever is excluded is irrelevant by definition.
According to Deleuze, then, philosophy is legislative because it is creative of values. In
this way, he reinterprets the idea of legislation in Kant. We are able to say that the
distinction between important and unimportant is created because it arises through
philosophy’s own method. In other words, this creation is not some sort of voluntaristic
act. Rather, philosophy provides the ground for the distinction. The philosopher does
not merely take on the function of legislating in addition to doing philosophy. Instead, the
point is “that the philosopher, as philosopher, is not a sage, that the philosopher, as
philosopher, ceases to obey, that he replaces the old wisdom by command, that he
destroys the old values and creates new ones, that the whole of science is legislative in
this sense” (NP 92). Philosophy’s legislative character is essential to it. Deleuze claims
that with the Kantian philosophy there is a shift in how the distinction between what is
important and unimportant is understood to arise. With Kant, philosophy no longer relies
on something external to provide this distinction, to which it then subordinates itself.
Philosophy is now self-reflective and is able to grasp the source of meaning of
judgments. Since philosophy provides the distinction between what is important and
unimportant, it provides its own ground. As a result, philosophy can critique any claim to
the authority of truth. The legislative character of philosophy in Kant is particularly
important for Deleuze. However, he argues that Kant betrayed his discovery. The
critical philosophy was supposed to make the reasoning human independent of the
dogmatism of external authority, since reason was thought to be self-governing and
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independent of political interests, cultural traditions, and individual desires. However,
Deleuze finds that Kant’s idea of philosophy does not actually give us the autonomy it
promised.
4. KANT'S DOGMATISM
Deleuze’s view is that, in the end, Kant’s conception of thinking is too narrow.
Knowledge for Kant is merely recognition: correctly subsuming intuition under a
concept. According to Deleuze, this is the most mundane conception of thinking. While
it is true that the act of recognition occurs often enough in our daily life, it depends on a
more profound kind of thinking. It is thinking in the latter sense that gives us the
production of concepts. In contrast, the model of recognition cannot account for how we
could know anything new. According to Kant’s account of knowledge, anything new
would simply be beyond the categories and would register as nonsense for the subject.
Deleuze’s criticism is that if we take recognition as the model of thinking in general, we
are unable to grasp those acts of thinking that are not recognition. Using this model
fosters the expectation that we should only be interested in recognition, not in knowing
anything new. These other acts of thinking cannot be considered legitimate under the
model of recognition. The model of recognition perpetuates prejudices about what
thinking is and denies those cases in which someone does not think in same way or is not
able to recognize the truths “everybody” recognizes. As a result, this model does not
even permit a critical stance. In what follows, I show in detail why Deleuze thinks Kant
has a narrow conception of thinking and what is restrictive about Kant’s view.
Deleuze claims that Kant’s dogmatism follows from the method he employed. His
point is that Kant’s method amounts to explaining thought simply by explaining how its
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end-product, knowledge, is possible. He argues that Kant begins from what he claims we
actually know, and he then attempts to explain how this is possible. In other words, he
traces back from the end result, empirical knowledge, to its conditions. This amounts to
tracing the transcendental from the empirical (DR 143). Generally, this is considered by
most commentators to be the exemplary case of the method of transcendental
conditioning and, for this reason, Deleuze stands out in his criticism. Kant’s concern is to
justify the validity of knowledge by showing that thinking can legitimately get to
knowledge. The Critique of Pure Reason is structured in such a way as to answer this
question. Kant begins his project by purifying what he will examine of any particular
claims to truth (that is to say, empirical claims) in order to examine pure knowledge. In
this way, he intends to bring all claims to knowledge under critique. Pure knowledge
consists of synthetic a priori judgments. Kant goes on to claim that mathematics and
geometry qualify as pure knowledge since these fields do, indeed, consist of synthetic a
priori judgments. For Kant, the existence of these fields of knowledge is evidence that
we are capable of having knowledge. The guiding question of the Critique of Pure
Reason is, therefore, how are these judgments possible? Kant finds that synthetic a priori
judgments are only possible by means of certain concepts, which are the transcendental
concepts. With his discovery of the transcendental concepts, he claims to have found the
concepts according to which thinking must occur. Deleuze’s objection is that Kant
presumes this kind of knowledge to be the goal of thinking. We must remember that
Deleuze is not denying the importance of these concepts. We do, indeed, use these
concepts as we go about our ordinary lives. However, his point is that thinking functions
in this way only when we are in the mode of ordinary recognition. Thinking in Kant to
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be defined solely in terms of producing this end-product. Deleuze says that Kant begins
by presupposing thought’s desired end, synthetic a priori judgments, rather than asking
what thinking seeks. In this way, Kant closes the door to acts of thinking that may not be
directed toward recognition.
Deleuze argues that Kant’s approach of tracing transcendental conditions from the
empirical follows a more general pattern of tracing problems from solutions. In chapter 3
of Difference and Repetition he explains how this pattern tends to turn up in the history of
philosophy, including as early as Aristotle (DR 157-158). Deleuze says that philosophers
have often thought of solutions as being expressed by propositions. The problem is then
traced from that proposition and rearranged into a question. In other words, the question
is traced from a giveable or possible response. Deleuze says that the question is a kind of
“neutralized double” of the pre-existing proposition that serves as a response (DR 156).
It merely doubles the proposition that is seen as the solution without adding anything new
to it. The result is that we come to think that questions are asked only under the
condition that the answer is given, in principle. “What time is it? – You who have a
watch or are close to a clock. When was Caesar born? – You who know Roman history”
(DR 157). Deleuze’s point is that such questions are anemic and do not provoke genuine
thinking. In the first example, the question presupposes that everyone schedules her or
his days hour to hour. They do not ask anything new or demand real thought. Deleuze’s
criticism of such tracing of problems (and questions, which express problems) from
solutions is that it leads us to believe that problems are given to us ready-made. Deleuze
likens this condition to that of a student who is only given problems to solve by the
teacher and does not learn to construct problems. An educational system that is set up in
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this way does not yield students who truly think. The difficulty of thinking is reduced to
producing certain solutions. “We are led to believe that the activity of thinking…begins
only with the search for solutions” (DR 158). Deleuze’s point is that this method gives
us only a mundane conception of thinking. In the case of Kant the concern is not simply
with any proposition but specifically with synthetic a priori judgments. In rearranging
this into a question, Kant asks how such judgments are possible. For Kant, then, thinking
is said to take place whenever we make synthetic a priori judgments (or a posteriori
judgments about objects). Deleuze’s objection is that when we are simply looking for a
solution, when we make a judgment, we are not necessarily thinking because there is
already a framework in place in which these are the solutions. This is a framework that
everyone is presumed to recognize. Here, Deleuze would agree with Nietzsche when he
asks, why would we want to make a priori synthetic judgments? Who does it serve?
According to Deleuze, we must critically examine the implications of equating thinking
with recognition. The danger of claiming that the exemplary form of thinking is
recognition is that it supports established values at the most fundamental level of thinking
(DR 136). This comes at the expense of what might be marginalized or might break with
the established values. In any case, Kant does not take up the question of what would
lead to the production of the transcendental concepts in the first place, or what would lead
to experience being structured in this way. Deleuze argues that when we begin our
inquiry by looking at solutions, the emphasis is on showing that what constitutes the
solution cannot not be. As a result, we are prevented from asking why this particular
solution occurs (DR 160). In other words, we are unable to ask the question of its
genesis, which has to do with the problem to which it is the solution. Thus, the more
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important issue is not learning which solutions are true or false, but which problems are
true or false, which are well-constituted or not. Deleuze argues that problems are never
simply given. Thinking, for Deleuze, has essentially to do with the production of
problems, not simply with knowing solutions to problems.
However, in his view Kant did attempt to examine problems themselves, to a certain
degree. “More than anyone, however, Kant wanted to apply the test of truth and
falsehood to problems and questions: he even defined Critique in these terms” (DR 161).
In other words, Deleuze thinks that Kant did, to an extent, conceive of problems as not
simply given but something we have to consider on their own terms. Deleuze is, of
course, referring to the Kantian Ideas as problems since they drive the activity of reason.
Kant distinguishes between false problems, which lead reason into transcendental
illusion, and true problems, which have the positive function of making it possible for
reason to draw judgments together. However, Deleuze says, Kant still defined the truth
of the problem in terms of the possibility of finding a solution, even though for him it was
transcendental possibility (DR 161). In other words, his criticism is that Kant defined the
Ideas in such a way that they determine in advance what will count as knowledge. Insofar
as the faculties function under the guidance of reason in the domain of speculative
knowledge, only judgments that are consistent with the system of knowledge are
possible.
Even if we leave aside the question of whether the presuppositions of Kant’s method
are illegitimate, Deleuze argues that other difficulties occur because of his method. Kant
asks, what kind of thought does empirical knowledge depend on or presuppose? The
answer is the transcendental concepts. For this reason, the form of experience can only
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be static, since knowledge (or judgments) is only the end product of a process. The
transcendental concepts or categories give us the fixed ways in which the understanding
can synthesize intuition, and they cannot change or be transformed. Kant must presume
the categories are simply given since he cannot give an account for how they might arise.
The nature of the categories is independent of intuition and of the process by which they
come into relation with intuition. The categories, taken together, give us an order that is
completely external to, and outside of, what is ordered, outside of time and space. This
order is indifferent to spatial and temporal differences. The post-Kantians, beginning
with Salomon Maimon and including Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, are known
for criticizing Kant for being unable to explain how the categories and intuition come into
relation.16 Deleuze takes up this criticism as well, frequently referring to the issue by
saying that the conditions in Kant are external to what they condition. His point is that
conditions are independent of what they condition and remain unchanged by the process
of conditioning, which gives us experience. Kant attempts to account for how we pass
from the conditions to the end result, in order to justify that the conditions necessarily
take us to empirical knowledge. However, he is considered unsuccessful by Deleuze and
other post-Kantians. Kant is unable to explain why intuition does, indeed, correspond to
the categories such that experience is possible. In fact, since the categories are external
to intuition, we cannot even know if experience is in fact ordered by them.
Deleuze argues in Kant’s Critical Philosophy that, in effect, Kant is still dealing with
the problem of the relation of subject and object. As we said earlier, empiricism and
16 In his book The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Frederick Beiser argues that it was Maimon’s critique of the gap between the understanding and sensibility in Kant, and hence of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, that provoked the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
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rationalism were criticized, according to Deleuze, for relying on something transcendent
to the relation of subject and object in order to justify it. This is the problem the critical
philosophy was supposed to overcome. Yet Kant’s problem of categories and intuition is
just another incarnation of the problem. “In Kant, the problem of the relation of subject
and object tends to be internalized; it becomes the problem of a relation between
subjective faculties which differ in nature (receptive sensibility and active
understanding)” (KCP 14). To show how intuitions and concepts, the faculties of
sensibility and of the understanding, come into relation, Kant appeals to the schematism
of the imagination, which applies a priori to the forms of sensibility in accordance with
concepts. However, this only shifts the problem further along since the imagination and
the understanding differ in nature and their relation must now be explained. In his lecture
on Leibniz, dated 20 May 1980, Deleuze argues that, in the end, Kant can only argue that
the conditioned (empirical knowledge, which is the end result) agrees with the conditions
(the categories) because of the harmony of our faculties. However, Kant is unable to
account for why the faculties are in harmony and must simply presuppose it. In other
words, he can only postulate their agreement and, like the rationalists and empiricists he
wants to surpass, he too turns to the idea of a transcendent and benevolent God to
guarantee the agreement. In the end, Deleuze argues, he can no more account for the
relation of the subject and object than could empiricism or rationalism. Although he goes
a certain extent toward giving an internal account of the relation of subject and object,
Kant ultimately fails.
Deleuze gives us another criticism of Kant’s method. The conditions of experience
are merely conditions of possibility because they are static. Deleuze claims it is as
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though these possibilities already exist, ready-made and prior to experience. What is real,
that is to say, experience, then simply occurs as the selection of one of the possibilities.
The possibilities are interchangeable in the sense that none has priority over the other. In
other words, there is no essential difference between possibilities such that one of them
would tend toward experience. There is nothing internal to any possibility itself that
would lead to experience. The realization of one of the possibilities occurs only through
the limitation or negation of the other possibilities. In this way, the difference between
possibilities is given externally to them, only through their realization. For this reason,
Deleuze argues that difference is understood to be outside of but indifferent to the
concept, where the concept is understood as giving us the essence of something. What
does not exist is understood as already possible. The only difference between the
possible and the real is one of brute existence (DR 211). To account for the occurrence
of the real, Kant can only argue that all of the possibilities are already there for whatever
might occur. However, the problem of the relation of subject to object is simply pushed
back, so that we must account for how the conditions of experience arise. Kant’s account
is not an account of experience as it actually occurs since he is unable to solve this
problem.
Experience can only have a restricted sense for Kant because the conditions of
experience are static and external to what is conditioned, to intuition. Experience or
empirical knowledge is explained as occurring through the synthesis of the diversity of
intuition according to certain kinds of unity, found in the transcendental concepts of the
understanding. An intuition is taken as a particular case of a universal concept because
intuition must conform to the categories. The categories taken together give us the form
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of the object, which is the general kind or form of experience we can have. Therefore,
when we actually have experience, it is always simply a particular case of this general
form. Transcendentally, we possess all possibilities, and experience occurs as the
selection of one. This is why, for Kant, experience can only occur as recognition.
Knowledge consists of correctly matching intuition with the concept, that is to say, of
merely identifying which possibility was actualized in experience. The transcendental
conditions that Kant discovers only make possible what we already know. Whatever we
can experience has already been accounted for transcendentally. There can be no
experience outside of this. In other words, the transcendental form of experience restricts
experience so that only what agrees with that form can be known in experience. Deleuze
criticizes this idea of form. “Form will never inspire anything but conformities” (DR
134). In principle, form precludes whatever does not agree with the form. With form,
that is to say, with static conditions, it is impossible to know anything that does not agree
with the form. Experience occurs in the application of the form. For Kant, it is as though
the content of phenomena is simply given to be informed, and knowledge occurs when
we correctly match the form to the content. The only obstacle to thinking is the incorrect
application of the transcendental concepts, which leads to incorrect judgments. For this
reason, Deleuze claims that Kant is only concerned about the most banal kind of error. In
contrast, Deleuze thinks there are more profound difficulties that confront thought. I will
discuss these difficulties further, in section 4 of chapter 3, after developing Deleuze’s
conception of thinking.
Kant sets out to show that the ordered nature of experience does not come simply from
experience being given as ordered but from its coming to be ordered. However, in so
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doing, he claims to have discovered the way in which finite thought must organize what
is given to it. In other words, Deleuze objects that Kant ascribes natural properties to
thought rather than asking what occurs in the process of thinking. For Kant, experience
only comes to be ordered as it does because the nature of thought requires that what is
given in sense intuition must be taken as a spatiotemporal object. To this end, Kant
examines the faculties and shows that the understanding, imagination, memory, and
reason must play specific roles. Together these form the structure of thought, which is to
say, the transcendental subject. However, Kant does not answer the question, what
causes thought to be structured in this way, so that it takes what is given as
spatiotemporal object? Iain Mackenzie examines this problem in terms of the
presumptions with which Kant begins the critical philosophy.17 For him, Kant’s
dogmatism is due to the fact that the critical philosophy fails to bring everything under
critique. He argues that in the end, “reason remains, at least partially, beyond the reach
of criticism.”18 In other words, Kant brings all particular claims to truth under critique
but since he ascribed natural qualities to reason he does not bring reason, which serves as
the ground of truth, under critique. Kant presumes thought has a given nature but does
not show how it arises. As the result of this presumption, thought is subject to “truth”
just as it is for empiricism and rationalism. Kant simply offers a different account of this.
Rather than thought aligning itself with experience in a truthful way (as empiricism and
rationalism must claim), thought must experience objects as it does because of its nature.
Along with the nature of thought, truth is given as well for Kant, in the way that thought
must experience objects. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze argues that, for Kant,
17 Iain Mackenzie, The Idea of Pure Critique (New York: Continuum Press, 2004). 18 Ibid., p. 17.
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thought formally possesses the true as a priori concepts. It needs only to apply these
concepts correctly in order to possess the true in reality. Thought is simply presumed to
function in this way. Thus, what Kant discovers is the order to which thought is subject.
Deleuze’s critique of truth must be understood as directed at truth in this sense. He
says that Kant has essentially defined the nature of thought in terms of its alignment with
truth. “We are told that the thinker as thinker wants and loves truth…that it is therefore
sufficient to think “truly” or “really” in order to think with truth (sincere nature of the
truth, universally shared good sense)” (NP 103). However, it is not love of truth that
leads to thinking, Deleuze will argue, but difficulty and uneasiness because thought must
be awakened from its natural stupor (DR 139). The issue of truth is really the issue of the
nature of thought and its relation to being. Earlier we said that Kant’s project in the
critical philosophy is his response to the crisis in thought resulting from the loss of the
possibility of intellectual intuition. Kerslake argues that Deleuze’s criticism of Kant is
that he did not fully appreciate the magnitude of the crisis.19 Kant saw that a gap had
opened up between thought and being but he moved too quickly to close the gap. In
other words, Kant continues to maintain that the relation of thought and being is one of
affinity, that is to say, a relation of truth in the sense outlined above. In tracing the
conditions of experience from the end result, Kant presumes that thought naturally
reaches truth and that it is in its nature to form true judgments. Kant argues that
experience can only occur on the condition that what is given is taken by thought and
ordered in a certain way as an object that is part of the system of knowledge. However,
the problem is that Kant simply ascribes this to the nature of thought. Instead of
examining the fact that the ordered nature of experience can no longer be understood as 19 Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique, ” p. 493.
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simply given but must be the result of a process, Kant avoids the problem by showing
that experience can only occur if it is ordered in this particular way. As a result, in
principle there can be nothing knowable outside of the parameters given by the system.
Although Deleuze does not use the term “totalizing,” this term captures his concerns
because his criticism is that Kant’s system of knowledge presumes that everything that
can be experienced must fall under this organization. In addition, Deleuze argues that the
effects of this account of knowledge might not be significant when considering it as a
speculative model, since it means only that the way in which knowledge is acquired has
been understood correctly or incorrectly. Yet it has serious consequences when we
consider the practical applications of this theory because it can be used to demand
conformity to established values. Since we all have reason, that is to say, because we all
have the transcendental concepts, we can demand that everyone recognize the same truths
(DR 135-136).
5. THE IDEAS AS REPRESENTATIVE OF KANT'S DOGMATISM
I have just said that Kant’s notion of experience is a narrow one. Deleuze describes it
as dogmatic because knowledge is merely recognition, that is to say, the application of
categories one already possesses. We have also seen why Deleuze finds the theory of
transcendental Ideas important in Kant’s account of experience. Experience can only
occur in the relation of transcendental and empirical, and the Ideas represent this relation.
For Deleuze the Ideas represent the system of knowledge in an exemplary way. As a
result, we can also examine how Kant’s dogmatism is exhibited in his theory of Ideas.
There is the question of the status of the Ideas themselves. Earlier, I described their three
aspects. First, the Ideas are problematic since their object cannot be given in experience.
49
As I said earlier, it is the problematic aspect of the Ideas that Deleuze finds so promising
and, in fact, this is the only aspect of the Ideas he will retain. Second, the Ideas express
that the content of phenomena tend toward complete unity. This is the empirical
component. Third, the Ideas express the complete application of the concepts of the
understanding: the transcendental component. Deleuze argues that the second and thirds
aspects must be abandoned.
Daniel W. Smith has argued that Deleuze’s theory of Ideas, which occurs in
Difference and Repetition, is primarily developed in relation to Kant’s theory of
transcendental Ideas, and he has shown why Deleuze is critical of Kant’s Ideas.20 Smith
argues that Deleuze’s main criticism is that although the Ideas have a problematic
objective unity, the second and third moments remain extrinsic to each other. On the one
hand, the Ideas can legislate directly over the concepts of the understanding since they
are our own representations. On the other hand, according to Deleuze, the fact that the
content of phenomena corresponds to the Ideas of reason means that the relation is not a
necessary subjection but can only be postulated (KCP 20). Since the concepts of the
understanding and the content of phenomena are extrinsic to each other, they could not
come into relation by themselves without the Ideas bringing them into relation. There is
nothing internal to each that refers to the other. For that reason, in Smith’s reading,
Deleuze believed Kant had failed to provide an immanent conception of Ideas (KCP 48).
In order to bring them into relation, the complete system that the Ideas represent must be
presumed. Experience can only be accounted for by relying on something outside of
20Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality,” Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), p. 29-56.
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experience. Kant thereby undermines his entire project of providing an internal relation
of subject and object since the relation is conditioned by something transcendent.
Besides the criticism that the Ideas are not truly immanent to experience, Deleuze
argues that there is a problem with the fact of presumption. In drawing inferences,
reason, which is the faculty of Ideas, says “everything happens as if….” In other words,
Kant treats experience as though it were hypothetical: only if we presume the objects of
experience tend toward the unity of nature are our empirical cognitions are meaningful.
We can only have knowledge under the condition that we act as if the complete system
could be given. In Kant the Ideas can only serve as problems, that is to say, supply the
directing force to explicate the problem of the system of knowledge, if their object is
presupposed. This is because the two moments of the Ideas, which represent the concepts
of the understanding and the content of phenomena, are external to each other. The result
is that experience becomes entirely hypothetical in Kant and is not real. We never know
for sure if, indeed, our empirical cognitions are meaningful. Deleuze argues that this
procedure of beginning from the hypothetical betrays the real movement of thought (DR
197). The hypothetical character of experience is reflected in Kant’s theory of Ideas.
The fact that the Ideas are problematic means there can be no “solution” within
experience or, in other words, their object cannot be given in experience: the system of
experience cannot be given in experience. Yet, in Kant the Ideas are problematic only
because they cannot be given in experience. According to Deleuze, they are not truly
problematic in themselves because they still represent an existing unity—it is now merely
transcendent to experience. There is a solution to the Ideas in Kant but it is one that
cannot occur within experience. Thus, Deleuze says that their problematic character is
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not real for Kant. For Deleuze, it will have to be the case that there is no solution at all to
the Ideas: there will have to be no existing unity, either in or outside of experience, only a
kind of difference. In this way, Deleuze will argue that unity is not foundational for
experience, but difference, as this occurs in problems. Therefore, even though Deleuze
retains the problematic aspect of the Ideas, he rethinks the notion of the problem. For
Deleuze, the Ideas must be immanent to experience in order to be truly problematic. In
this way, their problematic character will be something real within experience.
In addition to the concerns outlined above, there is the question of what the relation of
the transcendental and empirical is like. The transcendental (the categories of the
understanding) and the empirical are external to each other. As a result, their relation can
only occur as simple correspondence. It can only occur as the complete overlapping of
the transcendental concepts and the empirical. The complete correspondence forms the
system of knowledge in Kant. In postulating a complete system, which is their object, the
Ideas postulate that there can be nothing outside of it. In this way, the Ideas guide the
application of the categories to what is given empirically. Under their guidance, the
categories of the understanding impose a specific set of relations on what is given
empirically. As a result experience can only be understood as being ordered according to
a set of principles. The Ideas represent the complete relation of the categories of the
understanding and of what is given in intuition. They determine a priori what kind of
relations can occur in the empirical and, thereby, formally limit what can be known.
Only certain relations within the empirical are considered meaningful and significant:
relations that determine what can be considered an empirical case. As a result, what is
given is simply “located” within the system. According to the Ideas, the system is
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understood as already having a place for every possible object. Rather than explaining
how something becomes an empirical object for us, the Ideas close off what can be an
object for us. They provide the parameters within which something must fall in order to
become an object for experience. Whatever is outside of these parameters can never be
an object of knowledge and can only be considered meaningless. In this way, knowledge
is simply the filling in of the system. In sum, the Ideas allow us to see that experience
can only occur as recognition.
Kant’s account of experience therefore presumes the kind of relation thought can have
with its object. This is because, while he succeeds in bringing all truth claims under
critique, he cannot bring the idea of truth itself under critique. Thought finds the same
order and the same meaning everywhere: the meaning that is founded on the categories.
Kant presumes that meaning can only occur in this way, that only meaning in this sense is
possible. It would be more accurate to say, therefore, that with Kant thought is presumed
to have an affinity for truth understood only in this sense.
Smith has argued that a criticism that Deleuze levels at Kant is that he cannot examine
the idea of truth because he does not ask the question of the genesis of the system of
categories, which is the foundation of truth in his philosophy.21 In other words, Kant’s
idea of truth is dogmatic because it presumes meaning that it occurs by means of the
categories as its foundation. This foundation itself is beyond examination. Thought only
recognizes objects as particular cases of what is “already known,” i.e. what it possesses
as categories. It therefore finds only confirmation of what is already known. Everything
encountered in space and time is understood only in its relation to the system. The
particularity (the time and space) of the case is irrelevant precisely because it is the same 21Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality.”
53
organization that occurs everywhere and every time. Kant’s account of the system is
totalizing because nothing can occur empirically (that is to say, be an object) that does
not “fit” into the system (and therefore into this system). Central to the idea of system in
Kant is therefore the claim that it accounts for everything. Since it is the Ideas of reason
that make possible the system of knowledge on which meaning depends, we can locate
the totalizing character of the system in the theory of Ideas.
CONCLUSION
We can now comprehend, in relation to his treatment of Kant, Deleuze’s intention of
articulating a conception of experience that does not simply account for the relation of
subject and object but includes within itself the opening up of a field of experience for the
subject such that something new can be thought. For Deleuze, philosophy must be
reconceived to include within it the self-critical relation. I have shown that he thinks that
the question of how something new can be thought can only be answered in terms of the
internal relation of subject and object. It is for this reason that Deleuze turned to Kant’s
critical philosophy. With Kant we see that the fact the relation is internal implies
something is knowable only insofar as it appears for, or comes into relation with, the
subject rather than having an identity apart from or external to the subject. This makes it
possible to determine the conditions under which something is knowable or can be an
object of experience. Kant explained the internal relation by saying that the subject is
constitutive in the appearing of the object. In other words, what Kant claims to have
discovered is that philosophy can understand the principle by which objects must
conform to the subject, that is to say, the principle by which they are objects in the first
place.
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We have equally seen that Deleuze criticizes this explanation because by attributing
the conditions of experience to the transcendental subject, Kant simply pushes the
question back to another level. Deleuze will therefore retain the internal relation of
subject and object but will find another way to account for it. The importance of the
internal relation, according to Deleuze, is that meaning can be explained through it.
Deleuze finds in Kant that the object arises for the subject only insofar as it is
meaningful—there is no object apart from the meaning it has. In other words, meaning
occurs along with the object. However, Kant simply accounted for meaning by claiming
that reason is structured such that thinking occurs by concepts, that is to say, that thought
is conceptual. Again, the problem for Deleuze is that Kant’s account presumes the nature
of the subject. In Deleuze’s view, we must instead understand conceptual thought as
arising within experience, not simply begin with the presumption that it is a capacity we
possess. The internal relation of subject and object is therefore vital to Deleuze’s notion
of experience, and he must find a way to account for it such that both subject and object
arise in experience.
I have shown that Deleuze argues that the internal relation of thought and object in
Kant is made possible by the idea that experience forms a system. The notion of system
that Kant develops is that it is given to the subject as an Idea only, since the complete
system of knowledge cannot be given in experience. However, Deleuze thinks there are
certain problems with Kant’s conception of the system: Deleuze criticizes the method by
which Kant uses to explain knowledge and, hence, the method by which he arrives as his
notion of the system of experience. In addition, Kant cannot explain how concepts and
intuition come into relation or, in other words, the conditions of experience are external
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to what they condition. Also, Deleuze finds that the system of knowledge is static, and
that Kant does not give an account of its genesis. However, the major problem is that the
system is a closed one. Even though the complete system of experience can never be
given in experience, there is a unity of the system. Even though we can learn new things
in an empirical sense, their significance is only possible because of the system of
knowledge. New things can occur only insofar as they conform to the principles of the
Kantian system: Deleuze’s objection is that these are not new in a genuine sense. In
other words, Kant’s notion of the system accounts for how meaning occurs internally to
the relation of subject and object, but meaning does not arise, strictly speaking, because
the system does not itself arise. Insofar as something is an object, it simply is meaningful
already, so to speak. While Kant’s account of the conditions of possible experience does,
indeed, explain why objects are already meaningful, it prevents the possibility, a priori,
for anything to occur that might be grounded in principles other than those derived from
the categories of the understanding. In this sense, Kant’s notion of system is totalizing.
Nothing can occur that is unexpected. Deleuze himself takes the notion of system from
Kant in order to account for the internal relation of subject and object. He wants to retain
the fact that it accounts for the relation between objects and the relation between
judgments such that they are not just fragments. However, the notion of system will have
to be transformed in Deleuze so that it is not totalizing.
In developing his own notion of system Deleuze will retain the theory of
transcendental Ideas but transform them. For Deleuze, they are essentially problems and,
as in Kant, they express the relation of thought and the object. Deleuze will, however,
use the notion of the Ideas to show how the relation is generated and a domain of
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knowledge is opened up. According to him, there can be an internal relation of thought
and object only insofar as the subject and object are generated together. Smith has
argued that Deleuze’s primary question is that of the genesis of experience and I will be
following him in this.22 Kant was able to give an account of experience that is internal to
the relation of subject and object only by presuming that thought has a natural structure.
As a result of this presumption, Kant remains with the question of the conditioning of
experience and, in Deleuze’s words, is unable to pose the question of its genesis. In the
end, although Kant is able to show that truth and meaning can be understood as occurring
internally to the relation of subject and object, he cannot show how truth is produced.
That is to say, Kant was unable to critically examine the a priori concepts as the
foundation of truth. By answering the question of the genesis of experience Deleuze will
be able to account for the production of meaning and, thereby, the foundation of truth.
According to Deleuze, in presupposing the nature of thought Kant presupposed that
thought had a natural inclination or affinity for knowledge. Deleuze will argue that, rather
than a relation of affinity with being, thought’s relation with being is one of malevolence.
In other words, the opening up of a system of knowledge occurs only as a violent event.
In chapter 2, I will show how Deleuze reconceives the notion of system, while chapter 3
will show why the opening up of a system is violent.
22 ”Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality.”
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CHAPTER 2
THE NOTION OF SYSTEM
INTRODUCTION
This chapter will show how Deleuze’s notion of system is developed out of Kant’s. We
have seen in chapter 1 that Deleuze wants to develop an account of experience in which
the subject and object are related to each other in an internal way. In such a relation the
object does not occur independently of the possible knowledge of it, but, rather, thought
and object are essentially related. The task of thinking, then, is not simply to grasp an
object correctly but to grasp the conditions by which it occurs, thereby grasping the
object in relation to what makes it meaningful. For this reason, Deleuze must examine
experience at the transcendental level, by discovering its transcendental conditions.
Moreover, since the internal relation of thought and object can be achieved only if
experience occurs as a system, the notion of system is crucial to Deleuze’s account of
experience. In fact, for him, experience can only be opened up as a system. - It is only
insofar as a system is opened up that there can be objects that can be known and concepts
by which to know them. For Deleuze, this is not merely of logical importance. It is not
just that knowledge is opened up as a system so that we can know objects but that objects
in their reality are opened up through a system. By reality, then, we do not mean an
objective reality that occurs independently of the subject. There is no “objective reality”
in this sense for either Kant or Deleuze.
Deleuze finds certain problems with Kant’s notion of system. The central issue is that
he believes the Kantian system is closed off, since it delineates in advance what can be a
possible object of experience. The notions of the determinable and the indeterminate and
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their relation are crucial here since they tell us about the limit or boundary of the system.
For Kant, the system of knowledge includes within itself whatever can be a possible
object of experience, which can be given as the idea of the determinable. Kant does not
only claim to account for every possible object of experience. Whatever falls outside of
certain limits simply can never be an object at all. The determinable and, therefore, the
system of knowledge, are simply demarcated from what is indeterminate, which simply
cannot be known. This gives us a static notion of system. In contrast, for Deleuze, a
single system cannot account for all of knowledge. For this reason, he must transform the
relation of the determinable and the indeterminate, so that it is not fixed and
unchanging. In tracing these notions from Kant through their development in Deleuze, I
will be able to show how Deleuze resolves the problem of the system that he sees in Kant
and thereby develops his own notion of the system.
Deleuze uses the term “transcendental difference” (also referred to as “internal
difference”) to indicate the difference or relation between the determinable and the
indeterminate. Transcendental difference is a transcendental event. Deleuze is perhaps
best known for being a philosopher of difference, in the sense of transcendental
difference, and we will see how it comes into play here in his notion of the systems of
experience. He uses the theory of Ideas to articulate the notion of transcendental
difference. Thus, in Deleuze, the Idea no longer has the sense it does for Kant. I must
therefore show how the Ideas function in Kant, and then in Deleuze. We will then be
able to see how the Ideas are important for Deleuze’s notion of system in a way that
parallels yet greatly differs from Kant. Deleuze maintains the problematizing aspect of
the Ideas. However, for him, Ideas arise from within experience. This would, of course,
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make no sense in the Kantian framework since Ideas are transcendent to experience. In
that framework we can conceive of an Idea but its unity lies outside of experience.
Deleuze disconnects the Ideas from the subject. They are not merely problems for reason
but problems within experience itself. The Ideas will now function ontologically. Kant
could do no more than circumscribe the system of experience, that is to say, draw the
boundary of the system of knowledge. We will see, in contrast, that Deleuze argues that
the drawing of the limit of a system is the event by which the system arises. This event is
the occurrence of transcendental difference or of an Idea.
I will also need to develop the idea of “external difference” in Deleuze, also referred
to as “diversity.” That is to say, the objects of a system can be described as different
from one another in an external way. The central issue is that in Kant space and time are
the forms of diversity and are subjective. Since Deleuze’s account of experience is not
grounded in the transcendental subject, he argues that external difference (that is to say,
diversity) is dependent on and arises from transcendental difference.
Deleuze must transform a number of Kant’s concepts in order to accommodate the
changes in the notion of the systems of experience and the metaphysics. For Deleuze,
there are transcendental structures of experience but they do not belong to the subject.
Instead, they occur within experience itself. In addition, transcendental structures are
static for Kant but are not for Deleuze. Deleuze must include this dynamic character
within his account. He sometimes uses the term “transcendental” to make it clear that his
concern is with conditions of experience. To a certain extent, his conditions can be said
to be a priori in Kant’s sense. They are prior to organized experience but they are not
independent of experience as Kant’s conditions are. Deleuze introduces the terms
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“virtual” and “actual” to account for these conditions. The relation of the virtual and
actual is analogous, in some ways, to that of the transcendental and empirical in Kant.
However, virtual conditions occur within experience whereas Kant’s transcendental
conditions are prior to experience. The language of the virtual and actual will allow
Deleuze to give an account of how new systems arise within experience. I begin by
examining the notions of the determinable and the indeterminate in Kant, showing
precisely what Deleuze criticizes here. In this way, we will see how the system is related
to and demarcated from the indeterminate in Deleuze.
1. NOUMENA AND THE LIMIT OF KNOWLEDGE IN KANT
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant seeks to examine what we can legitimately know.
To this end, he examines the transcendental conditions of knowledge. He argues that we
cannot simply concern ourselves with whatever can possibly exist, apart from how it
must necessarily come into being in space and time. Accordingly, he restricts knowledge
to what can be a possible object of experience. This is expressed through the terms
transcendental negation and transcendental affirmation in Kant.
A transcendental negation…signifies not-being in itself, and is opposed to
transcendental affirmation, which is something the very concept of which in itself
expresses a being. Transcendental affirmation is therefore entitled reality,
because through it alone, and so far only as it reaches, are objects something
(things). (CPR A574/B602)
Transcendental affirmation gives us reality or being. It means that we take what
appears to us in sensible intuition as something positive, as actually existing, and not as
the distortion of an essence. Since the sensible is not a limitation of our knowledge, but,
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rather an element of it, our relation to things is not merely rational or logical.
Transcendental affirmation means that we can only know an object in relation to its
conditions of appearing, and so to the forms of intuition, not in relation to what it would
be for an infinite intellect. Nothing can be an object for us independently of its relation to
us. According to Kant, when we distinguish the mode in which we intuit objects as
appearances (phenomena) from their nature as it belongs to them in themselves apart
from how they appear, we imply the idea of noumena (CPR B306-307). Since we can
conceive of the conditions of the appearing of objects, we can conceive of phenomena as
forming a whole or a system. Since reason legislates that knowledge must form a system,
the limits of possible knowledge are determined a priori (CPR A833/B861). The fact
that the system of knowledge has a limit means there can be arbitrary additions. If
knowledge merely formed an aggregate, not a system, there would be no limits. What is
important here is the notion of limit. The keystone of the critical philosophy is that we
can know the limit of knowledge.
As a result of reason’s critical activity, we can divide objects into noumena and
phenomena. Whatever occur within the limit of possible experience are phenomena and
can be objects of knowledge. The field of phenomena necessarily implies a space of
indeterminacy beyond its limit. Whatever falls outside that limit is transcendentally
negated. Transcendental negation signifies what is not real or what is indeterminate.
However, we can form a concept of what is transcendentally negated. Noumena are
thought as objects merely through the understanding not as they are given to sense. In
other words, for Kant we form concepts of noumena when we conceive of the idea of
things as they are in themselves apart from how they appear. Concepts of noumena are
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indeterminate and, therefore, noumena cannot be said to be in a positive sense. “If the
objective reality of a concept cannot be in any way known, while yet the concept contains
no contradiction and also at the same time is connected with other modes of knowledge
that involve given concepts which it serves to limit, I entitle that concept problematic”
(CPR B310). Kant uses the terms “problematic” and “indeterminate” to mean simply that
knowledge of the object is not possible. In other words, reason determines the limit of
possible objects of experience, and whatever is beyond that limit is described by Kant as
indeterminate or problematic. We cannot presume there is nothing outside the limit of
experience, nor can we say anything determinate about it. Noumena cannot be subject to
a priori laws, which only apply to possible experience. For this reason, our knowledge
cannot extend to them. As said earlier, the relation of thought and object is internal here
because all phenomena are subject to a priori laws, which we can grasp. However,
noumena have no assignable positive meaning (CPR A287/B343). Since the
understanding can extend farther than sensibility, intuition is tempted to claim to have an
object to which the understanding can apply. However, the understanding must restrict
intuition from claiming to have an object in these cases. Concepts of noumena can only
be used negatively. They can only legitimately be understood as indeterminate, concepts
to which we can give no content, and not as a determinate concept that can actually be
known in a purely intelligible manner. They serve to remind us to not extend our
presumption to knowledge beyond the limits of possible knowledge. In other words,
noumena indicate only that our sensibility is limited.
With Kant, there can only be an idea of the indeterminate and unknowable, in
distinction from what is determinable, because knowledge is restricted to objects that
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appear to us and does not extend to what they are in themselves. This makes it possible
to determine the transcendental conditions of experience and, thereby, to know the limit
of possible experience. What is interesting for Deleuze is the idea that in knowing the
limit of possible experience, we are led to form a concept of what is outside the limit,
what is indeterminate. For Deleuze, what is indeterminate does not appear and therefore
cannot be known. So far he is in agreement with Kant. However, for Deleuze, it makes
no sense to speak of objects in themselves apart from their appearing. The indeterminate
is not something in itself, as it is for Kant. The difference between them can be
understood in terms of how they understand the limit of the field of phenomena and,
hence, how they understand the relation of this field to the indeterminate space beyond its
limit. For Kant there is a space of indeterminacy because we know nothing about
intuition other than our sensible kind. “The concept of the noumenon is, therefore, not
the concept of an object, but is a problem unavoidably bound up with the limitation of
our sensibility—the problem, namely, as to whether there may not be objects entirely
disengaged from any such kind of intuition” (CPR A287/B344). In other words, for Kant
the field of phenomena has this necessary relation to a space of indeterminacy for the
subject. Only by taking into account how something must come into being in space and
time, by considering how it appears, can we think of something that is determinable,
something that can be a possible object of experience. What appears in space and time
comes into relation with us. What is important to Kant is that it must come into relation
with the subject in order to be determinable, in order to be an object. For Kant, we can
imagine another kind of subject for which knowledge would not depend on the appearing
of the object. In contrast, for Deleuze, experience simply is the occurrence of the relation
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of the subject to what appears. His account is ontological rather than subjective
(transcendentally subjective). Outside of the field in which a particular kind of object is
given, an object has no coherence or unity. In other words, the appearing of the object is
precisely what makes it an object. We could also say that there is an object for Deleuze
only insofar as something comes into relation with the subject. However, this is not the
case for Kant. There is no interaction between the field of phenomena and the
indeterminate space beyond its limit. Phenomena are simply demarcated from what is
indeterminate. We have the idea of indeterminate existence because we can think,
logically, of what can possibly exist. However, we cannot know indeterminate existence,
what does not appear in space and time.
For Deleuze, however, there must be more of a relation between the field of
phenomena and the indeterminate since the determinable occurs through its distinction
from undetermined existence. Kant’s notion of the undetermined becomes, for Deleuze,
the two notions: undetermined existence and the problematic. Deleuze is much more
interested in the latter. In Deleuze the problematic occurs as that which distinguishes
itself from the indeterminate or, in other words, as the boundary of the determinable in
relation to indeterminate existence. In Kant these notions are not distinct and refer to the
same thing: the noumenon is indeterminate existence. This is because the spheres of
phenomena (the determinable) and noumena do not change. In other words, since the
determinable is delimited by the range of the concept for Kant, undetermined existence is
simply outside the boundary of what is determinable. The boundary statically marks the
distinction. For Deleuze, on the other hand, what is determinable arises from the
indeterminate, so the boundary functions in a different way. The formation of the
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boundary is the formation of the determinable as a system. The problematic is bound up
in its own way with the limitation of what is knowable. It is the problem of how to
conceive of the limitation of the knowable or what is outside it. For both Kant and
Deleuze, concepts can only be applied to what is determinable, to objects of knowledge.
For Deleuze, it is certainly true that it is not possible to have a concept of the
problematic, since concepts arise only secondarily to what is problematic. However, this
is not the defining characteristic of the problematic for Deleuze. Instead, what defines
the problematic is that it becomes determinable. As long as we are considering what is
outside the limit of the determinable, no concept can apply. Deleuze differs from Kant in
the way he defines the undetermined: the undetermined is that which has not yet ceased
being indifferent. The undetermined is what we can say nothing about, neither that it is
knowable nor that it is unknowable.
2. THE SYSTEMATIZING ACTIVITY OF REASON AND THE IDEAS IN KANT
The transcendental Ideas of reason are unlike other noumena. Similar to concepts of
other noumena, we can never have knowledge of them. However, the Ideas are the only
noumena that are not simply situated outside the limit of knowledge. Instead, they are
necessary for producing the limit of the system of knowledge and, in this way, for the
production of the system of knowledge. In other words, the Ideas are necessary in
helping us acquire knowledge. For this reason, Deleuze considers them truly
problematic. For Deleuze, a problem is not just what has indeterminate status, as for
Kant, but what causes the delimitation of what is determinate from what is outside that
limit. What is problematic overcomes indeterminacy and produces a system. Deleuze
develops this thought from Kantian reason, which is systematizing by nature. For Kant,
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reason systematizes knowledge by means of the Ideas of God, Soul, and World. Thus,
Deleuze’s notion of the problem is modeled on Kant’s Ideas of reason. In what follows, I
will show how Deleuze can interpret Kant’s Ideas as functioning between the
indeterminate and the determinable understood as the system of knowledge.
As the condition of reason’s systematizing activity, the Ideas represent the activity of
reason in general. Therefore we must examine the systematizing activity of reason to
understand the function of the Ideas. In the Transcendental Dialectic, when Kant is
explaining the function of reason, he argues that we could derive a particular proposition
from experience by means of the understanding alone (CPR A322/B378). For example,
the proposition “Caius is mortal” could be derived simply through experience of the
person named Caius. However, the understanding alone can only give us what is
particular and contingent, never anything universal and necessary about experience. We
only get a description of experience, so to speak. The proposition would not be
considered knowledge in the proper sense because it would not have the weight of the
universal and necessary, which can only be provided by appeal to a principle. A
proposition can never be raised to the level of knowledge because the understanding
cannot bring it into relation with the totality of possible experience. Through the
understanding alone we can know that a proposition is true but not why it is true. The
understanding cannot view concepts as being in relation (beyond the most immediate
inference) and, therefore, cannot constitute knowledge on its own.
Knowledge is only possible through the activity of reason because reason projects
systematic unity. Reason seeks to bring concepts into relation through inference. It tries
to find a second concept that conditions the attribution of the first concept to an object.
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Through inference reason tries to find the conditions under which the proposition occurs
according to a universal rule. Deleuze characterizes this activity as the posing of
problems and describes reason as the faculty of posing problems. Reason asks, by what
other concept is the first concept known, or by appeal to what principle is it maintained?
Reason poses a problem when it asks what makes that proposition true. It tries to bring
the proposition or case into relation with the universal so that it does not remain merely
partial. By itself, the proposition is never universal, only partial, because by itself
experience gives us only what is contingent and partial. The problem orients the
proposition in terms of something universal and necessary. When it has received
orientation in this way, it is a solution, according to Deleuze. Only through reason can
we say something universal and necessary because reason brings the proposition in
relation with the whole of possible experience, which has the status of a problem.
Deleuze describes the Idea or problem as universal: “Only the Idea or problem is
universal. It is not the solution which lends its generality to the problem, but the problem
which lends its universality to the solution” (DR 162). The point is that it is through its
relation to the Idea that a proposition is no longer merely particular and contingent.23 The
proposition receives universality in the form of an appeal to a principle and therefore
from its relation to the system. As a result, the proposition is understood as a particular
case of a universal rule. In our example, since all men are mortal and Caius is a man,
Caius must necessarily be mortal. It is only because the proposition is seen as part of a
systematic unity that it can appeal to a universal and necessary principle. Only this is
23 Deleuze points to this as one source of transcendental illusion. Once we know how a proposition appeals to the universality of the problem by means of a principle, that is to say, how it is a solution, it becomes possible to “forget” the actual source and to think that it is the proposition that primarily possesses universality.
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knowledge in the proper sense because it allows us to assert the proposition through its
appeal to the necessity of a principle. For Deleuze, the proposition is considered
knowledge insofar as it can be understood how it forms a solution, which is to say, how it
is ordered or oriented by the problem. The proposition is understood as a solution
because it contributes to the completion of the system of knowledge. The proposition
tells us something universal and necessary about experience. Only through reason, not
merely through the understanding, can we say something happens necessarily, since the
idea of necessity cannot be given in experience.
By examining the activity of reason, we can characterize Ideas or problems in general.
The Ideas represent the positive, systematizing activity of reason, rather than its critical
or negative function. Unlike other noumena, the Ideas are truly problematic, in Deleuze’s
view, because they condition the systematizing activity of reason and thereby provide
order to experience. Kantian Ideas are problems since their object, the complete system
of knowledge, is not given. The object of the Ideas is a problem in the sense that it
represents a process. It demands that this process be undertaken, and the result of the
process is the organization of empirical cases. The system of knowledge is a problem
because it demands solutions: it demands that empirical cases be ordered in such a way
that they contribute to the completion of the system of knowledge. Reason is driven to
draw propositions into relation in such a way that they contribute to the completion of the
system. It is driven to orient propositions in this way. “These concepts of reason are not
derived from nature; on the contrary, we interrogate nature in accordance with these
ideas” (CPR A645/B673). By means of Ideas, reason can demand answers or solutions
of experience. This drives reason to seek the principles by which propositions can be
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understood as universal and necessary. The defining characteristic of problems is
therefore that they carry force and demand something of experience. They demand
solutions.
Let us return briefly to the issue of the indeterminate and the determinable. Deleuze
claims that through the Kantian Ideas we can conceive, in general, of the difference
between the determinable and what is indeterminate. For Deleuze, the idea of the
determinable is the idea of a field or system. It is the entire domain of objects to which a
set of determinations can apply. Hence it is the domain that is systematically
determinable in that particular way. This is a distinction that is made within experience.
We only have the idea of the determinable insofar as we can conceive of a system.
Therefore the Ideas, which make the delimitation of a system possible, also allow us to
conceive of the determinable in its distinction from what is indeterminate. Deleuze
argues that this must be understood as an internal difference, which opens up the system
of knowledge. There must be a limit drawn around the system. A system is understood
as that which is delimited from what is indeterminate.
3. DELEUZE’S THEORY OF IDEAS: TRANSCENDENTAL DIFFERENCE
Kant’s theory of Ideas allows Deleuze to develop his own notion of the problem. We
have seen that the defining characteristic of the Idea is that it is a problem that forces
experience to become ordered. It forces a process to occur. The Ideas lead to viewing
empirical propositions in a certain way. For Kant, when reason posits the Ideas, reason is
driven to do something. However, for Kant, these are problems for reason. In other
words, they only have a logical function. On the other hand, since problems exist for
experience itself for Deleuze, they function ontologically.
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For Deleuze, the Idea is an instability: elements are extracted from experience and
brought into a new relation. This relation is unstable for empirical experience but arises
from what is given within experience. Deleuze also uses the term “differential”,
symbolized in mathematics as dx/dy, to refer to the Idea. This symbol is taken from the
differential calculus and represents the slope of a line, where y=mx + b. “dx” indicates
an infinitely small change in x, and “dy” indicates an infinitely small change in y. Thus
Deleuze uses the differential symbol to mean that the relation between x and y are prior
to and, in fact, constitutive of the elements x and y. The key is that the Deleuzian Idea
must result in ordered experience. “If the differentials [or problem] disappear in the
result [or solution], this is to the extent that the problem-instance differs in kind from the
solution-instance; it is the movement by which the solutions necessarily come to conceal
the problem” (DR 177-178). The empirical cases arise from the Idea because they
stabilize or solve the instability, and their order and meaning arise in and through their
stabilization of the problem. For this reason, the instability as such never occurs in
experience. It is covered over or stabilized immediately. For Deleuze, a problem forces
experience to become ordered. Order can never simply be found in empirical experience
nor is it imposed on experience by the subject, as it is in Kant. For Deleuze, the order of
experience is the result of the problem. The last quote also indicates that we are able to
conceive of a problem only by extracting pure, ideal elements occurring in experience,
around which empirical cases have come to be arranged. In other words, even though the
problem is unstable for experience, it can still be an object of thought. (The distinction
between knowledge, which concerns experience, and thought is important here, and
parallels Kant’s distinction between knowledge and the critical activity of reason.) Ideas
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occur in experience but they can never themselves be experienced. Since we can only
experience their results or products, Ideas or problems must be characterized as
transcendental.
What we have brought into view is that although, for both Kant and Deleuze,
experience is drawn together by means of an organizing or ordering principle, an Idea,
they disagree on how the organization occurs. Deleuze argues that organization arises
from within experience, or is immanent to experience, rather than being imposed from
without, as in Kant. For Kant, the object of the Ideas is a completely organized system
and empirical cases are meaningful and ordered because they are presumed to fit into that
system. The objects of the Ideas are transcendent to experience, but when used
regulatively the Ideas function immanently. Thus, we are prohibited from their
transcendent use: from seeking their object. The Kantian Ideas can only direct
knowledge and act as a horizon and focus for concepts insofar as they form a unity
outside of experience. In other words, since their transcendence is still vital for
experience, they do not provide us with an account of experience that is fully immanent.
Since the Ideas order experience in a transcendent way, the resulting organization is only
hypothetical. For Kant, a solution has the force of a principle only if the complete system
is presumed to exist. If the complete system exists, it would explain in a necessary way
why these empirical cases occur as they do. The Idea of unity only serves the method of
knowledge and is not constitutive of its content. What is given is understood as merely
the content that takes on the order provided by the Idea of the complete system.
However, we can never know if the complete system actually exists and, therefore, if the
order we find in nature is real. Yet empirical cases do, in fact, exist and the Kantian
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Ideas cannot account for this. Deleuze argues that this problem can only be addressed if
Ideas are understood as occurring within experience.
The answer, for him, is that Ideas must be fully immanent to experience. Although he
describes the Ideas as both transcendent and immanent (DR 163), they are never
transcendent in Kant’s sense. They are transcendent because their objects are pure or
universal elements that are extracted from experience, which always occurs as an impure
mixture. In this sense, the elements and their relations can also be described as ideal
(although not ideal in the sense that they are only objects of thought.) For Deleuze, the
elements and their relations can be described as immanent because they are incarnated in
the actual relations of solutions. The Ideas are to be found nowhere but in experience
itself (DR 163). The Deleuzian Ideas never form a unity outside of experience, as do the
objects of Kant’s Ideas. Even though it does not form a unity, the Deleuzian problem is
able to act on experience because it is extracted from experience itself. For Deleuze,
Ideas are problems in themselves. They are not problems merely from the viewpoint of
empirical knowledge. To be sure, Ideas are not determinable in the same way as an
empirical proposition is. Deleuze is concerned to show that the Ideas have their own
consistency, not merely the consistency of what is transcendent to experience. However,
they certainly do not function in merely a hypothetical way, as they do in Kant, but
actually open up an ordered system from within experience.
Since the Ideas are involved in delimiting the domain of experience for both Kant and
Deleuze, the difference between them is a question of the role the Ideas play. For Kant,
the Ideas are static conditions of experience. They are indeterminate because their object
is transcendent to experience. The limit of possible experience merely marks the system
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off from what is outside of it. Deleuze argues that, for Kant, Ideas can only be
considered indeterminate from the viewpoint of empirical knowledge, and by its
standards. In other words, for Kant it is only from the viewpoint of empirical knowledge
that they are problems at all. In themselves the Ideas form a unity. It is we who cannot
know this. Christian Kerslake points out that, for Deleuze, Ideas are not indeterminate,
but fully determined as problems.24
In Deleuze an Idea is a movement or becoming since it is the arising of the distinction
of what is determinable, or what is in relation, from what is indeterminate or indifferent.
In other words, the Deleuzian Idea occurs as a movement from what is indeterminate.
This difference between the determinable and the indeterminate is transcendental. Hence
Deleuze also refers to the Idea as transcendental difference and sometimes as internal
difference. The Idea is the limit of experience and is productive of a system of
experience.
Deleuze begins his first chapter of Difference and Repetition with a brief discussion of
the indeterminate ground from which determination arises:
Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness,
the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved – but also the white
nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected
determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a
shoulder, eyes without brows. The indeterminate is completely indifferent, but
such floating determinations are no less indifferent to each other. Is difference
intermediate between these two extremes? Or is it not rather the only extreme,
24 Christian Kerslake, “The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence” in Radical Philosophy, vol. 113, May-Jun 2002, pp. 10-23.
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the only moment of presence and precision? Difference is the state in which one
can speak of determination as such (DR 28).
His characterization of indeterminacy is ontological. As we said earlier, what is
indeterminate for Deleuze is not simply what cannot appear to us and, therefore, a
characterization of what the object is apart from its appearing. The appearing of the
object is the object. Indeterminacy is that state in which objects cannot occur. His notion
of transcendental difference (simply referred to as ‘difference’ above) allows him to give
an account of the appearing of objects. The Idea is a movement or event in the sense that
it is the coming into relation of elements that were indifferent to each other and not in
relation. In this way, the Idea is purely a relation. By coming into relation, these
elements become extracted from the flux of the indeterminate. In other words, they can
be understood as discrete elements only because they have come into relation. The
relation occurs as a problem that produces or opens up a system. Since elements are now
in relation, they can be understood as different from rather than indifferent to each other.
In other words, elements are in relation with each other because of their difference from
each other. The articulation of an Idea, that is to say, the event by which its constitutive
elements are distinguished and, thereby, brought into relation, is what Deleuze calls
“differentiation.” (This is spelled with a “t”. Later, I will discuss the process of
differenciation, spelled with a “c.”) To be clear, transcendental difference acts on what is
indeterminate. In other words, the movement from the indeterminate to the determinate
is transcendental difference itself.
Deleuze describes two aspects of indifference in the quote above, but both are
abstractions since, properly speaking, there could be neither finite, distinct determinations
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nor absence of such determinations. These determinations would not be able to maintain
their distinction so that, in fact, there could be no determinations. There would only be a
fluid movement. (Later, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze will describe this movement as
occurring at infinite speeds.)25 However, for the sake of trying to understand how
difference emerges from the state of indifference or indeterminacy, if we consider the
second aspect of indifference that Deleuze describes, the white nothingness, we can see
that transcendental difference overcomes the indifference of the unconnected, floating
determinations. Transcendental difference must be understood as the establishment of
the connection or relation of determinations. In this sense transcendental difference is
also a synthesis. Deleuze argues that the difference “between” two things is empirical
and the resulting determinations are extrinsic. This empirical or external difference
requires as its transcendental condition the difference by which they can be considered
two different things. In other words, transcendental difference does not occur between
two things. “However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine
something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does
not distinguish itself from it” (DR 28). Since transcendental difference establishes the
relation between elements, so that they are no longer indifferent to one another, it
distinguishes itself from its ground of indifference. In this sense, difference must occur
as unilateral distinction. It is distinguished from its ground as partial and incomplete.
Something of the ground arises to distinguish itself from the ground. Transcendental
difference forms the reason (or cause) for why certain elements stand out, as their
principle of selection. In this way transcendental difference is the difference between
25 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Hereafter cited as WP followed by the page number.
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what stands out and what cannot be differentiated. Selection is partial in principle since
what is selected is only a portion. Transcendental difference forms the reason why this
aspect emerges and does not blend into the nothingness of indeterminacy. The act of
emerging from the undifferentiated and indeterminate ground makes “determinations” no
longer indifferent to each other. (Obviously they can only be considered
“determinations” once they are no longer indifferent to each other. Thus, there could
never be unconnected determinations.)26 It is in this regard that Deleuze can agree with
Heidegger’s description of the ontological difference, which he quotes in Difference and
Repetition, even though they disagree in a number of other ways: “Difference must be
articulation and connection in itself” (DR 117).
4. A SYSTEM AND ITS RELATION TO OTHER SYSTEMS
On the ground of the difference between what stands out and what goes unnoticed,
what stands out can be considered on its own, as a system or field. To be clear, this
difference is transcendental since it opens up an empirical field of experience but cannot
itself be experienced. Once the field is opened up, its relations can be determined and
explored. There can only be an ordered field on the ground that ‘determinations’ relevant
to it are first of all not indifferent to each other. The determinable defines what is given
for thought, in respect of which thought can predicate determinations. Transcendental
difference can also be described as a filter by which something stands out from the
undifferentiated ground from which it arises. As a result, other particular determinations
(if they could be considered as such) can continue to remain indifferent to one another
26 We must keep in mind that for Deleuze, we can only think of determinations as unconnected, and this only in retrospect, since there can be no unconnected determinations in experience. Again, the distinction between thought and experience is important here.
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and effectively be “ignored” or “forgotten” in this way. Transcendental difference is a
filter in the sense that it selects certain determinations. It forms the means of their
selection by bringing them into relation. A system is opened up on the basis of the
selection established by the relation. In other words, the basis of the system is formed by
a principle or set of principles that can be given to the way in which the elements are in
relation. Based on how the Idea, and thereby the system, arises for Deleuze, an Idea only
synthesizes a portion rather than some kind of whole. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze
also uses the term “sieve” to describe the relation of a system to that from which it arises.
A particular system acts as a sieve because it is a selecting. Therefore experience by its
very nature is incomplete, prejudiced, and partial rather than complete and impartial. The
condition of a system of experience is the event of becoming partial: difference or
selection. For this reason, no Idea or set of Ideas can exhaust experience for Deleuze.
Since no system occurs as a completed system in Kant’s sense, there is no single
system that incorporates and thereby accounts for everything. Deleuze later calls them
planes, which better reflects the fact that they are not closed off as a system might be.
There are many systems and Ideas. When he articulates what Ideas arise from, he
characterizes the latter only as the unground or groundless. To articulate this unground
would require grasping the whole, which consists of the indifference from which
difference arises. There can be no articulation of the whole. In fact there is no whole. It
would be incorrect to say that the indeterminate exists as a whole, precisely because it is
not. However, if we were to describe it as existing, we would say it exists only as self-
differing. Because of this Deleuze refers to it as the “unground” or the “groundless” (DR
67). It can only be understood as that from which determination arises and which
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dissolves all determination. Therefore we are not justified in speaking of everything that
can be extracted, since all possible determinations do not pre-exist their selection. They
only become determinations through their selection. In Difference and Repetition
Deleuze does not develop the notion of the unground very much, reserving his emphasis
for the transcendental difference that arises from it. In Difference and Repetition
transcendental difference is being, a point I will develop in the next section. However,
the notion of unground continues to be important and is developed further in Deleuze’s
work. Later it becomes the notion of chaosmos, which is mentioned in Difference and
Repetition but occurs in greater frequency in What is Philosophy? (DR 199). The totality
of the systems and that from which they arise is “thus a formless ungrounded chaos” (DR
69).
In Deleuze’s view the development of a particular science or other field of study
occurs on the basis of an initial discovery of a system. The development is the
exploitation of all of the possibilities opened up by that discovery. In What is
Philosophy? Deleuze argues that the philosophies of Plato, Kant, and Descartes all form
different systems or planes that are based on initial discoveries that were exploited and
developed (WP 29-32). The concepts within each of the systems are only meaningful in
the context of their respective systems. Thus the Cartesian cogito cannot be directly
compared with the Kantian cogito without bringing in other concepts. In this sense the
concepts of different planes are not comparable. “The fact that Kant ‘criticizes’
Descartes means only that he sets up a plane and constructs a problem that could not be
occupied or completed by the Cartesian cogito” (WP 32). In other words, “criticism” is
not an accurate characterization of what Kant did. It would be better to say that he
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opened up a new plane or system. A new system can only be opened up by examining
the objects (or concepts) of an already existing system and by seeing a new problem that
can be drawn out of what is presupposed, out of tendencies within that system. All of the
objects of a system fit together, often like a puzzle, and together they enact the tendencies
of the system. The new system will come from seeing something about a previously
existing system, as a whole, qua system. However, since the Kantian cogito can be
compared to the Cartesian in a certain way, the two planes do, indeed, have a
relationship. There are many systems of experience, and they interact, but each applies to
experience completely. “But the domains are distributive and cannot be added” (DR 241).
All of the systems together will not give us a totality because experience can never be
exhausted. However, all of the various systems intersect with each other at certain points
and thereby interact as well. We can also say that every system or plane implies every
other one: in order to properly understand the meaning of the Kantian cogito, we are
taken to the Cartesian cogito and, hence, the plane formed by Descartes’ philosophy.
These planes imply each other because they can interact: We can, for example, bring the
Kantian cogito in relation to the Cartesian cogito, and compare them. In this way, the
objects or concepts of a particular system refer to objects and concepts of all other planes.
5. TRANSCENDENTAL DIFFERENCE AND BEING
It is helpful to understand Deleuze’s notion of transcendental difference in relation to
discussions of being. Deleuze provides us with a way to understand the fact that
empirical cases or entities are or have being. The question is: what does it mean to say
that something has being? As I said in the discussion on transcendental affirmation
above, Kant’s critical restriction of knowledge also had the effect of restricting the
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concept of being. Only what is affirmed transcendentally can be said to be. Kant’s
philosophy is important to Deleuze not only epistemologically but also metaphysically. In
Deleuze there is a new conception of being, too. As for Kant, the indeterminate cannot
be said to be in the positive sense. Indeterminacy is a kind of nothingness, the
nothingness of indifference or incoherence. Deleuze also refers to it as chaos. In
contrast, transcendental difference must be understood as being.
Daniel W. Smith has argued that in Difference and Repetition Deleuze must be
understood to be participating in the debate about being as it is revived by Heidegger and
to be offering his own solution to the problem of ontological difference.27 Heidegger
argues that throughout the history of Western thought we have failed to think the
difference between being and beings (or entities). We have only conceived of being in
terms of beings, as simply the highest being. We should note that Deleuze believes that
Heidegger was unsuccessful in developing his conception of being: “But does he
[Heidegger] effectuate the conversion after which univocal Being belongs only to
difference and, in this sense, revolves around being?…It would seem not…” (DR 66).
According to Smith, the reason is that Heidegger was unwilling or unable to push the
ontological difference to its conclusion.28 Thus Deleuze sees himself as truly developing
this conception.
Smith argues that Deleuze returns to the Scholastics and retrieves the concept of
“univocity” with which to develop his conception of being. In the Scholastics’ debate
concerning the nature of being, three terms designated the ways of solving the problem:
equivocity, univocity, and analogy. Smith’s discussion centers on the point that Deleuze
27 Daniel W. Smith, “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence,” in Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 167-183. 28 Ibid., p. 169.
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argues for an ontology that is immanent and univocal rather than equivocal or analogical.
If being were equivocal, it would mean that being is said of beings in several senses and
there is no common measure. Two beings, such as God and human are in two different
manners and so cannot be compared. Smith’s point is that being as equivocity was
rejected by the Scholastics because it denied order in the cosmos. If being were
analogical, it would mean that beings can be compared in their being. God and humans
are in analogical ways. However, both analogy and equivocity allow for a hierarchy
among beings, according to the way in which they are (that is to say, the way in which
they possess being). Deleuze claims to be following in the footsteps of Spinoza in
arguing that there is no order or hierarchy among beings and that there is only a kind of
anarchy of beings. “In an immanent ontology, Being necessarily becomes univocal: not
only is Being equal in itself, it is equally and immediately present in all beings, without
mediation or intermediary.”29 The relation between univocity and immanence is
important in understanding Deleuze’s conception of being.
Deleuze is arguing for a conception of being that is common to all entities or beings.
In a sense, being is common in Aristotle, for example. Being is the highest concept in
Aristotle, while the categories are the different senses in which being is said of beings.
The problem with this, Smith points out, is that being comes to have only the sense of an
empty universal and, in addition, cannot account for what constitutes the individuality of
beings. To say being is an “empty universal” means that being is the most general or
universal concept in that it is predicated of every single entity. “We have no difficulty in
understanding that Being, even if it is absolutely common, is nevertheless not a genus”
(DR 35). For Deleuze, being is not abstract but concrete. He often characterizes the Idea 29 Ibid., p. 174.
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as a concrete universal to make this point. In other words, being is not simply the
broadest class under which all entities fall. Being is common to all beings in the sense
that everything is in the same way.
Smith claims that with his notion of univocal being, Deleuze is able to account for the
difference between individual beings while maintaining that being is present in the same
way in all individual beings. On the other hand, Aristotle can only attribute the principle
of individuation to some element of fully constituted individual entities. “An equivocal
or analogical concept of Being, in other words, can only grasp that which is univocal in
beings”.30 What is univocal about individual beings can be given as the categories. In
other words, only what is universal about an individual can be grasped, while that which
individualizes the individual cannot. For Aristotle, being is related to the categories (the
most general concepts and the highest genera) equivocally, while the categories are
related univocally to the species that fall under it. However, for a univocal ontology like
Deleuze’s, Smith points out, there can be no categories. The difference between
individuals cannot be qualitative (or difference in essence) but only quantitative, the
degree to which they realize being.
In Deleuze being must be understood as transcendental difference. Insofar as every
Idea-problem in Deleuze is transcendental difference, it is being. What is interesting for
us here, however, is that if being is understood as the opening up of a system, we can see
both how being is not merely an empty universal and how the individuality of beings or
empirical entities can be accounted for. All empirical objects equally have as their basis
the relation to system in which they arise and to which they belong. The individuality of
each empirical case is constituted as offering a different solution to the problem of the 30 Ibid., p. 177.
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system in relation to which it arises, and individuals differ in the degree to which they
express or solve the problem. In this way, being is not understood as an abstract
universal under which empirical cases fall as particulars through resemblance. Rather,
every empirical case is equally a solution and thereby equally is (or equally has being).
There is only one kind of being for all empirical beings. Another difference among
empirical objects is the different systems to which they are in relation. From an empirical
perspective, being is nothing (that is to say, no-thing) or, alternatively, (non)-being or ?-
being (DR 64, 202, 205). Being is not in the way that we say that an empirical entity is.
As Smith argues, being must be understood as having the reality of the problematic for
Deleuze.31
6. EXTERNAL DIFFERENCE OR DIVERSITY
Thus far we have been examining Deleuze notion of transcendental or internal
difference. However, he also offers the notion of external difference, which is
interchangeable with the term “diversity” or “manifold.” External difference is the
difference between empirical entities. We can also say that a “diversity” of entities are
given within a system. His account of diversity is meant to address a problem he sees in
Kant’s account of diversity. We can think of Kant as beginning from the point that
experience does, indeed, consist of diversity. The question is: how can we account for
this diversity? For Kant, it is owed to the fact that the forms of intuition, space and time,
are themselves pure a priori diversity. Since the forms of intuition are diversity,
whatever presents itself to us within those forms will also be diversity. For him, the
diversity of space and time cannot be reduced to the conceptual. In contrast, the
31 Ibid., p. 179.
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rationalists do, indeed, claim that spatiotemporal determinations are reducible to
conceptual ones. Spatiotemporal determinations only seem to be distinct from conceptual
ones because of our limitations. However, for Kant, spatiotemporal determinations
provide us with distinct information about objects and they can be grasped only through
intuition. Thus there can be multiple cases that occur in various points in space and time
but fall under a single concept. The idea that spatiotemporal difference is different in
kind from conceptual difference is important in Kant. Deleuze wants to retain the idea
that spatiotemporal determinations provide us with unique information but also to
overcome the problem of having two completely different kinds of determinations.32
We can understand Deleuze as offering two criticisms of Kant. One is that Kant
simply attributes the forms of diversity to the subject. He deduces the forms of external
difference (difference between two empirical things) as the forms of intuition (space and
time) and attributes them to the subject. According to Deleuze, Kant was right in seeing
that space and time do not belong to objects apart from the relation to the subject, but
argues that neither do they belong to the subject, as Kant claims. For Kant, we can only
grasp an object through sensible intuition. It comes into relation with us if it appears in
space and time: this is the significance of space and time. In other words, for him, the
transcendental subject is the condition for experience. For Deleuze, too, sensible
intuition is the faculty by which we grasp something external to us. However, space and
time do not belong to subjectivity but are produced instead when a system of experience
is opened up. The transcendental conditions of experience are to be found in experience
itself, not in the subject. Thus space and time belong to objects of experience (not to
32 Smith argues that Deleuze follows in the path of Salomon Maimon in solving the problem of the difference between spatiotemporal determinations and conceptual determinations. Essentially Maimon takes the route of the rationalists.
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objects apart from their ability to be known by a subject). In addition, space and time are
not forms of diversity for Deleuze. For him, we must consider external difference
independently from the question of space and time.
The second criticism is that Kant cannot account for how the forms of intuition and
the understanding, or spatiotemporal determinations and conceptual determinations, come
into relation. Concept and intuition have separate sources and knowledge occurs when
conceptual determinations come to be synthesized with spatiotemporal determinations.
This is how the empirical comes to be in relation with the transcendental and tells us
about the relation of diversity to the system: how it is organized in it. According to
Deleuze, the problem of two different kinds of determinations is actually just a symptom
of the real problem: that Kant provided a principle of experience that was merely
conditioning not genetic. Kant took for granted the sphere of the determinable, which is
the ground of meaning, in that he presumed its existence and did not show how it arises.
From there, he only gave conditions of the system, which are the categories of the
understanding. Since the system as a whole makes meaning possible, the source of
meaning is simply given with the sphere of the determinable that Kant presumes. He
only needs then to account for the diversity of empirical cases which take on meaning. In
this way, he treats form (concept) as occurring separately from content (intuition) that
takes on form. In other words, he accounts for empirical cases and the system separately
and then tries to bring them together. However, he fails to provide a convincing account
for how intuition and concepts come together. The significance of this problem, in regard
to the issue of meaning, is that Kant cannot truly explain why these particulars express
this meaning. In contrast, Deleuze will demonstrate that individuals arise only insofar as
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they express a certain meaning—in other words, how a meaningful individual arises. He
will argue that an individual arises out of necessity, in order to express a certain meaning.
For both Kant and Deleuze, the diversity of empirical cases (external differences)
must be understood as being in relation with transcendental difference or internal
difference (the latter being the determinable insofar as it is bounded off from the
indeterminate, to use Kant’s language). Deleuze’s point is that external difference cannot
stand on its own—yet, this is precisely what Kant tries to claim. In other words, for
Deleuze, there can be no form of external difference. In attributing the forms of intuition
to the subject, Kant only shows that the subject is capable of distinguishing between
empirical objects, but not how the distinction among objects actually occurs. In other
words, Kant only shows that the diversity of intuition corresponds with categories, that is
to say, with the system of experience. He does not show the grounds by which this
diversity is produced in the system. Deleuze explains why Kant has been criticized by
Maimon, Fichte, and others for this: “With regard to such a principle of internal
difference or determination they [Kant’s critics] demanded grounds not only for the
synthesis but for the reproduction of diversity in the synthesis as such” (NP 52). Kant is
not justified in treating the forms of intuition separately from the categories (i.e. from the
conditions of the system).
Empirical cases must embody meaning. This is as much true for Deleuze as for Kant.
However, for Kant an object embodies exactly one meaning. Since his account of
empirical diversity is given independently of his account of internal difference, by which
the system is opened up, the consequence is that the object must be fully expressive of
meaning, that is to say, of its conditions, with nothing in reserve. The transcendental and
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empirical, or concept and intuition, must correspond exactly. In this way the object of
experience reflects the fact that experience occurs as the complete expression of the
determinable. In the synthesis of intuition according to the categories, the empirical
object comes to be meaningful by locating it within the system, by determining what
place it has in the system. The object is understood as occupying a place in the system.
Experience can only be ordered in one way, and for this reason objects have only a single
meaning. In fact, for Kant, something is an object insofar as it is the embodiment of a
single meaning.
According to Deleuze, overcoming the problems requires a genetic principle to
account for the production of the system. The account of the diversity of empirical
objects must be given through the account of internal difference from which it arises.
Unlike Kant, Deleuze thinks that diversity cannot be accounted for separately from the
genesis of the system. Thus space and time cannot be forms of diversity. He claims that
the external difference between empirical cases (that is to say, different empirical cases)
arises from the opening of the field itself. In other words, he seeks to show that empirical
diversity arises from the internal difference of the system. The key is that Deleuze takes
the selecting activity of transcendental difference, which gives us the sphere of the
determinable, as the ground of experience. In contrast, Kant took the result of this
activity as forming a unity and as grounding experience. Since a system of experience,
for Deleuze, is partial by definition, it does not capture all of experience. Thus, meaning
is also necessarily partial. There can be no diversity, or difference between things, unless
the criterion by which they can be individual things is first selected as the defining
criterion. Therefore empirical diversity can only be produced as a result of the selecting
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activity that results from the production of the determinable. Before that, there are no
criteria by which to mark an individual as individual. This is why the particular cases of
any system refer endlessly to each other, and not to anything outside the system, that is to
say, not to a totality beyond that. The external differences are specific to the system,
since they arise from it, and therefore cannot be understood apart from it. In other words,
it is only known as diversity in light of the system in which those differences are
meaningful. Deleuze begins chapter 5 with the following statement: “Difference is not
diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by
which the given is given as diverse” (DR 222). There are different sets of external
differences for different systems. Thus we can only know the diversity of empirical cases
in light of the transcendental difference by which the system is opened up. It is for this
reason that Deleuze emphasizes the act of individuation over the types of individuals (or
species) that are produced. In Deleuze a system is driven to create individuals. The
production of individuals must be understood as a tendency of the system itself.
Therefore the process of individuation plays an important role in the production of the
system for Deleuze, something I will examine below in the first section of chapter 3.
When Kant considers external difference on its own, as the forms of intuition, he does
so only by abstraction. The external differences are meaningless if considered on their
own. By themselves, they are without their proper context. They would give us only
partial inquiries but not the field that orientates them. Deleuze does not disagree that
empirical cases are spatiotemporal. Rather, his point is that space and time are not forms
that belong to the subject and that condition diversity. Insofar as we understand them as
forms internal to the subject, they have already been given or conditioned by the
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determinable. Space and time do not account for diversity since they themselves must be
accounted for. Cases do not simply occur in space and time that is already there. The
production of the determinable is the opening up of a field, a theater of spatiotemporal
diversity. Empirical cases themselves measure out the distances between each other.
These distances, which together comprise space that can be considered abstractly, are
created as a result of each case individuating itself. Therefore space and time can only be
considered on their own once they have been measured out by empirical cases occupying
the field. I will develop Deleuze’s account of the construction of space in section 2 of
chapter 3. What is important to see is that for Deleuze space does not condition empirical
diversity. Empirical cases are indeed externally different from one another, that is to say,
different in space and time. However, their difference from each other is made possible
by their relation to the field to which they belong.
The relation of empirical cases to meaning is therefore more complex in Deleuze than
in Kant. Like Kant, he must also show that empirical particulars come to embody
meaning. For both, the meaning of an object reflects the fact that the object is ordered
according to the principles of the system. Thus, for Kant, as we have shown, the
diversity given in intuition is not meaningful until it is synthesized according to the
categories. However, for Deleuze it is not so much that empirical cases come to embody
meaning. Prior to the opening of the system, there are no individuals, properly speaking.
Therefore he does not need to account for why individuals are meaningful: the fact that
they come to be individualized implies that they are, in principle, meaningful.
Individuals occur for the system. The process of individuation has its own importance, in
contrast to Kant, where they are simply the realization of possibilities. The process of
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individuation is independent of the process by which a system is opened up, and has its
own logic.
In a sense, one can say that empirical cases do not have exactly one meaning. Since
each case occurs in light of a system that is opened up by selection and since selection
implies something that is not selected, each case carries with it other “determinations”
that were not selected. These are precisely not known, or can be characterized as
inessential. These “determinations” have not come into relation with anything else, so
they continue to move at infinite speeds. In other words, they are not determinations,
properly speaking, since they have not been differentiated from the chaos. Since no
system of experience captures all of experience, an empirical object can never be simply
the materialization of a single meaning. Now, the object does, indeed, completely
express the meaning derived from that particular system. However, as we discussed
earlier, each system of experience refers to or implies every other system. This
relationship of implication is carried on to every object of every system. Thus, while an
object expresses meaning it also complicates the transcendental in a new way, retaining
something in reserve. In this reserve an object implicates other “determinations” that
have not yet ceased being indifferent to one another but could come into tension and,
thereby, be selected. In this way, the empirical object has a certain relationship to the
system in which it occurs and, equally, has a relationship to all other systems of
experience. Thus, in a sense, the object is not completely ordered for Deleuze.
We must be clear that for him objects of experience can change in an empirical sense
just as they can for Kant. It is more accurate to say that for Deleuze we can understand
change in an empirical way by noting static extrinsic changes and calculating the changes
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according to the extrinsic measurements of space and time. In contrast to Kant, Deleuze
argues that the object is like the stable state reached by a process. What we recognize as
objects are objects only because they are at a stable point, or at equilibrium. He would
argue that, for Kant, knowledge of an object is limited to only its static features. The
Deleuzian object can be seen to resemble the Kantian object if we consider only its static,
geometric properties. However, to understand the changes in these properties in a more
profound way, we would need to understand the constituting processes of the object,
since these give rise to its static properties. These processes are transcendental since they
are not themselves experienced but are, instead, the condition of experience. To be clear,
we cannot know these constituting processes since there can only be knowledge of the
result of the process: the stable and discrete object. We can only model the processes
using tools like calculus. Therefore the object is understood to occur as it does because
of its own tendencies, the tendencies of its constituting processes. An object is not
primarily something with a unity that exists in a space that serves as container for it.
Instead, its unity occurs alongside and as an effect of its parts, which are the constituting
processes. In other words, the external characteristics tell us less about an object for
Deleuze than do the features of its constituting processes.
Since Deleuze speaks of objects that change in a way that is not merely empirical, he
must transform Kant’s language of the transcendental and empirical into that of the
virtual and the actual, as we will now show.
7. THE VIRTUAL AND THE ACTUAL
Insofar as it is stable and can be described with static properties, the object is actual.
Insofar as we consider its constituting processes, the object is virtual. Constitutive
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processes are virtual because they are not themselves experienced but are, instead, the
conditions for the objects that are experienced. For Deleuze, every object of experience
is always both partially virtual and partially actual. “Indeed, the virtual must be defined
as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the
virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension” (DR 209). In
contrast, for Kant, every object as object is fully empirical. In Deleuze, since the virtual
is part of experience and is fully real, it is not real in the same way as the actual.
The virtual can be understood as the creative processes that is part of every object. All
constitutive processes occur as instability or disequilibrium and tend to move toward a
stable state. These processes occur by the bringing together of elements into unstable
relations or tensions. Deleuze uses the term differential to express the virtual. The
differential gives the pure relationship between two processes and in this way expresses
the point of change or transformation. The relation is objectively unstable because it
cannot maintain itself. The actual object can be understood as an external form that is
generated spontaneously by these processes. The constituting process produces the actual
around it to contain it, to stabilize it. In this way, an actual object tends to cover over the
creative activity that produces it. The actual is a sort of flattening of the instability of the
virtual, a flattening which is possible only on the surface and, in this way, the actual is
polarized on a single plane. In other words, the actual is created as a dimension or as
space. “For difference, to be explicated is to be cancelled or to dispel the inequality
which constitutes it” (DR 228). On that plane, and only on it, the actual cancels out the
instability of the virtual that is its condition. However, the creative activity continues to
exist. In its virtual part an object implicates the system of which it is a part. This is the
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reason that, even though the actual object covers over the virtual instability that produces
it, the system continues to exist as the virtual part of the object. Even while the virtual
inequality cancels itself in actual objects, it remains implicated in the object and in itself.
It is for this reason that an object’s equilibrium or stability can be disrupted. This only
occurs when the object comes into relation with another object. It is important to note
that, for Deleuze, it is precisely the change itself, expressed in the differential, that we
cannot experience. Instead we only experience the result of it, which is the actual.
Since all objects, for Deleuze, are partly virtual, we can examine the virtual on its own
to determine its nature. It is for this reason that he claims that the virtual always exists on
its own plane. We can study the virtual features of an object, using mathematical
modeling, for example. A science like that only allows us to theorize about virtual
features. But in ordinary experience the virtual features become apparent or become
known only by paying attention to how the object changes. In other words, we need to
examine how the virtual comes into play in ordinary experience. For Deleuze, the virtual
must be understood as part of experience itself, not simply a condition of it. It is for this
reason that he describes lived experience as absolutely abstract. For example, an expert
woodcrafter will have developed this kind of experiential knowledge. He or she will not
know the biochemistry of wood and why it has the texture it does. The virtual features
only become apparent when the object approaches a critical point. In other words, when
examining experience, virtual features only become apparent at the point of destruction
or transformation, especially if we examine the different ways in which something can be
transformed. At these critical points the object is no longer in a stable state, no longer at
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equilibrium. The virtual features of the wood only become apparent, are forced to
become apparent, in the interaction with the woodworker.
However, let us return to Deleuze’s use of mathematics to describe the virtual. The
purpose is to understand the tendencies of processes that compose the object, and it is
interesting to note that Deleuze’s notion of the virtual allows us to examine these
processes on their own. One notion Deleuze focuses on from mathematics is
“singularity.” For Deleuze, singularities are properties of the constituting processes.
They are the points of transformation that define a certain kind of process. For example,
every person has a point at which she breaks down in tears, boils over in anger, or
dissolves into giggles. To take another example, a physical object has a freezing point
when it becomes a solid, and a melting point when it becomes a liquid. These features
can seem abstract and universal but they occur generally for a certain kind of object
because of the processes that constitute it. The features are particular to their respective
processes. However, they do not guide the processes in a transcendent way, only
marking the critical points of the processes and of their interrelations. Since we can
examine the virtual on its own, Deleuze describes features like singularities as having
their own life. Whether they become actualized or not, they continue to exist because
they always remain features of that object’s constituting processes.
It is important to note that we can never experience or empirically know the
constitutive processes that comprise the virtual. They can only be given as an Idea to
thought. The virtual is completely real, but not in the way the actual is real. As we have
seen, Deleuze describes Ideas as problematic, taking this up from Kant and, in fact, this is
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the only component of the latter’s transcendental Ideas that he retains.33 In Kant the
Ideas are necessary for empirical experience but cannot themselves be experienced. The
proper “object” of the Idea is the problem, which transcends experience, not an object of
experience. Although only an object of experience can actually have unity, for Kant the
Ideas still have a kind of unity since they posit the unity of our empirical knowledge.
Kerslake points out that what is important for Deleuze is that it is only from the
perspective of empirical experience that the object of the Idea appears as unity. In other
words, the projection of unity onto the Ideas only occurs from the perspective of
empirical knowledge.34 Kerslake argues, then, that Deleuze can be seen as radicalizing
Kant’s notion of Ideas by conceiving them not from the perspective of empirical
knowledge but in themselves the “object” of the Idea is not unity but difference, and it
has its own consistency. “Problems are always dialectical: the dialectic has no other
sense, nor do problems have any other sense. What is mathematical (or physical,
biological, psychical or sociological) are the solutions” (DR 179). Ideas can only be
understood as bringing (elements) into relation. Since Ideas in themselves are
problematic, they are not transcendent to experience in Deleuze. We have said that, for
him, the virtual can be understood as the constituting processes of objects. These
processes can be described as problematic because they do not have the unity of the
actual. In experience the virtual occurs as lines of tension or instability. They indicate
that the object can be taken in a different way. The key is that its parts relate in a way
that is not possible for the actual, a way that cannot be reconciled into a unity. We can
only grasp the virtual through thought, as an Idea, by conceiving the pure relation.
33 Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas” in Deleuze and Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 43-61. 34 Christian Kerslake, “The Vertigo of Philosophy,” p.18.
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However, what is thought is not a totality or unity, as in Kant, but difference. What
Kant’s and Deleuze’s conceptions of Ideas have in common is that, for both, the Ideas
pose something that cannot come together as a unity in experience. More importantly,
however, for both the Ideas are regulative. For Kant, the Ideas direct us to seek the next
cause in the series, thereby extending our knowledge. For Deleuze, the Ideas produce
empirical cases, as solutions, and produce concepts by which knowledge occurs.
An important criticism of Deleuze has recently emerged in Peter Hallward’s Out of
this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.35 Hallward’s central criticism is
that Deleuze must be understood as devaluing actual existence in favor of an other-
worldly dimension (the virtual). The key to understanding Hallward’s criticism is the
relation of the virtual and actual. Hallward characterizes the relation as one of the
activity of creating (the virtual) and the creatural confinement of that activity (the actual).
Self-identical creatures or objects are therefore treated as though they are merely
containers for that activity. Hallward describes the actual object as an “unavoidable
obstacle” to the creative movement.36 He does make clear that he understands that the
virtual and actual cannot be understood separately, interpreting Deleuze’s project as an
attempt to free the creating spark within us. “The destiny of the creature…is simply to
invent the means of emptying or dissolving itself so as to impose the least possible
limitation upon the creating that sustains it.”37 John Protevi has recently claimed that
Hallward is guilty of interpreting Deleuze’s virtual and actual as a simple duality, even
35 Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Continuum Press: New York, 2006). 36 Ibid., p. 30. 37 Ibid., p. 29.
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though Hallward takes pains to avoid this.38 The actual cannot be considered passive in
relation to the virtual that creates it because the actual is a dimension of that creating
activity, the virtual. In the introduction of Difference and Repetition Deleuze
characterizes identity (or solidity) as a mere optical effect (DR xix). His point is that the
solidity of the identity of the creature (or any object) is misleading. The actual cannot be
understood as an obstacle to creative activity because the idea that the actual is an
encasing is the illusion. This is both an ontological and epistemological issue. The
ontological issue is that there is no solidity to destroy or anything from which to free the
creative spark. However, the actual appears to be something separate from the virtual.
The surface (the actual) is completely part of the object: it is simply the inside (the
virtual, constitutive processes) limiting itself.
It is at least clear that the relation of the virtual and actual is complex. Since, for
Deleuze, transcendental conditions (the virtual conditions) do not belong to the subject
(given that there is no transcendental subject) but to experience as such, the opening up of
a new field will occur in experience itself. It will be opened up within the objects of
experience. To be clear, the new field will not come from the object in itself, as it would
for the empiricist, but from the object of experience. However, these conditions arise
from the virtual portion of the object not the actual. Deleuze does not develop this part of
his theory in much detail in Difference and Repetition but it is implied in the theory of
experience he builds up there. He also provides hints of how new conditions arise, mostly
in chapter 5, “Assymetrical Synthesis of the Sensible.” It is absolutely vital for Deleuze
that new conditions arise from experience since, without this, his theory is reduced to
38 John Protevi, “Review of Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu (2007).
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Kant’s theory of transcendental conditioning. Deleuze’s virtual would be no different
than Kant’s possible (i.e. the concept in Kant). It is useful to consider Deleuze’s
statement that the conditions of experience are no broader than what they condition (DR
285). In a sense the process of actualization occurs as the complete expenditure of virtual
conditions. For example, the virtual conditions of water, which includes the virtual
relations therein, cause water to boil when it comes into relation to heat, when the water
reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit. At the point at which the water starts boiling, those
particular virtual conditions have, in a sense, expended themselves in creating the actual
state of boiling water. In this way, virtual conditions are no broader than what they
condition. However, in another sense, virtual conditions continue to exist. “The virtual
intensity is only cancelled outside itself, in extensity, but remains implicated within
itself” (DR 240). Virtual conditions continue to exist in the way that the boiling point of
water continues to remain the point at which water boils even when a particular pot of
water reaches the boiling point. In this way, virtual conditions can connect and come into
relation with other virtual relations and be transformed. It is important to keep in mind
that the actual does not result from the limitation of pre-existing possibility. However, in
order to understand how the conditions of experience arise, we must always look to what
was previously experienced. We would have to understand the object itself, that is to say,
its constitutive processes, in order to determine what would result in change in that
object. These processes determine how the object is able to interact with other objects,
how it will affect and be affected by them. Therefore new conditions do not arise from
the actual, or the static features of the object.
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Deleuze proposes the virtual/actual couple in order to replace the possible/real
relation. For this reason, he takes great pains to argue that the virtual is not like the
possible. The most explicit discussion of the virtual occurs in Chapter 4, where he
compares the virtual/actual relation to the possible/real (DR 208-214). In Deleuze’s
reading of Kant, the possible and the real have equal status but the real simply occurs as
the selection of one of the possibilities that falls under a concept. (This is the process of
‘realization.’) However, there is no conceptual difference between the possibilities that
would account for why a particular one is selected. “What difference can there be
between the existent and the non-existent if the non-existent is already possible, already
included in the concept and having all the characteristics that the concept confers upon it
as possibility? Existence is the same as but outside the concept” (DR 211). In Kant, all
of the possibilities can equally be selected. The real or empirical object is recognized
simply as embodying one of the possibilities and, because of this the real simply
resembles the possible, according to Deleuze. The existence of something can only be
explained as brute eruption. Existence is supposed to occur in space and time.
Spatiotemporality indicates which of the possibilities was selected, but since space and
time are simply given, they do not help to explain why that particular possibility was
selected: that is to say, spatiotemporality does not help explain why that one was selected.
Therefore we know that the one that will be selected to exist will occur as spatiotemporal
but we do not know the reason why that particular one will, in fact, be selected. In other
words, understanding the space and time of an object is not connected to its reason for
selection. It is for this reason that Deleuze claims that space and time are indifferent to
the production of an object (DR 211). The point is that the possible/real relation in Kant
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cannot account for real existence. For Kant, the conditions of experience determine
beforehand what is possible in experience. Even though we genuinely discover the
empirical laws of nature, they derive their necessity from a priori conditions because the
goal of the complete system of knowledge is already given. Empirical laws are not given
beforehand, yet only what is consistent with the transcendental logic of Kant’s
conditions, and therefore with the totality of Nature, will be an empirical law. In this
way, in Kant’s system, every single possibility is accounted for. As a result, realization
of possibility is not the creation of anything new. For Deleuze, possibility cannot be
calculated as it can for Kant. The calculation of possibility could never explain why only
certain ones, in fact, occur. The virtual/actual couple is meant to replace the possible/real
couple in such a way as to explain the existence of each thing. An object comes into
existence through the process of actualization. “In this sense, actualization or
differenciation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of a
pre-existing possibility” (DR 212).39 Actualization is genuine creation because the actual
does not resemble the virtual for Deleuze as the real resembles the possible in Kant.
CONCLUSION
In developing an account of experience that allows for something genuinely new to
occur, Deleuze has to reconceive the notion of the system. The problem he finds in
respect of the system of experience in Kant is that in his attempt to account for the
system, Kant limits what can be an object of experience. Kant uses the idea of possible
objects of experience to delineate the boundary of the system. Kant is criticized for being
interested only in showing what the limit of experience is, in drawing the boundary of
39 The process of differenciation will be discussed in section 4 of chapter 3.
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possible experience, without showing how the limit arises. Deleuze locates this problem
in Kant’s conception of the system of experience. I have shown in this chapter that
Deleuze offers a new conception of the system. The key is that Deleuze reconceives the
limit of the system. He argues that the boundary of a system of experience arises in and
through the formation of a system. Thus his concern is with the genesis of systems of
experience.
This chapter has argued for the importance of Deleuze’s reconfiguration of the relation
of what is indeterminate to the determinable, that is to say, to the sphere of a system of
experience. The limit of a system is at issue here. In Kant the determinable (the entirety
of possible objects) is simply marked off from what is indeterminate. In other words, all
that can be said with Kant is that the determinable is distinguishable from the
indeterminate. In this way Kant does, indeed, establish the sphere of possible experience.
However, he only succeeds in marking off what can be known from what cannot. In
contrast, for Deleuze, the relation between the determinable and indeterminate is a
genetic one. What is determinable arises from the indeterminate. Deleuze takes the
transcendental Ideas from Kant but now they are the foundation of what is determinable.
As in Kant an Idea can be thought but never known because it is the condition for
experience. In Kant the indeterminate is simply what cannot be a possible object of
experience for us. It might be knowable for a subject with a different kind of intuition.
In contrast, for Deleuze, the indeterminate has no unity or consistency for any subject. It
simply cannot be an object. In order for anything determinable to arise from the
indeterminate, it must first acquire consistency. The Deleuzian Idea allows us to
understand how a framework of relations can arise, and thereby a framework in which
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consistency can occur. Objects can then occur within that framework. Thus, for
Deleuze, a determinable field or system can only arise from what is indeterminate. The
emphasis must be placed on the differentiating movement by which the determinable
field arises. By rethinking the notions of the indeterminate and the determinable and of
their relation, Deleuze is able to show the genesis of a determinable field. In other words,
something new can arise as a determinable field.
Another important consequence of Deleuze’s account is that there is no single system
that encompasses all of experience for the finite human subject. A system applies fully to
a certain cross-section of experience and, thus, it fully organizes experience in a
particular way. However, it does not preclude the organization of experience in other,
non-overlapping ways. In Deleuze’s account, no system occurs as a closed system. The
relation of a system to what is outside of it differs from Kant. It is always possible for a
new Idea to occur because new elements and relations can always arise. Hence, it is
always possible for a new field of experience to occur. Ideas serve as transcendental
conditions for Deleuze, yet he has to transform Kant’s language. The notions of
transcendental and empirical become the virtual and the actual. In developing their
relation, he also shows how the relation of a system and what is beyond it is transformed.
The indeterminate for Deleuze is like a bottomless reservoir that cannot be exhausted and
offers the possibility of endless creativity. When a new system opens up it in no way
diminishes the indeterminate. Thus creativity is purely a positive movement in Deleuze,
with no negativity: it is a movement that occurs out of excess.
Once we account for the opening up of a system of experience, we can then
consider the objects that populate the system. It is important to note that transcendental
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or internal difference is primary, for Deleuze. For Kant, spatiotemporal difference was
simply a different kind of difference than conceptual difference. Deleuze disagrees with
him on this point. Spatiotemporal difference becomes incorporated into individual
difference. In other words, the difference between individuals is not that one thing has a
different spatiotemporal determination than another. All external difference is really
individual difference, which is dependent on and arises from transcendental difference.
The crucial point is that the opening up of a system, which occurs through transcendental
difference, must be explained before external difference is explained. What is necessary
at this point is an account of individual difference. This was not something Kant required
since his account of the forms of space and time made individual objects possible. If we
examine how individual difference occurs in Deleuze, and its relation to space and time,
we will have an account not only of the opening up of a system of experience but also of
the production of the individuals that constitute that system. Individuation will be the
subject of chapter 3.
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CHAPTER 3
THE PRODUCTION OF A SYSTEM OF EXPERIENCE
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 2 has shown how Deleuze has transformed the notion of system taken from Kant.
Deleuze provides an account, lacking in Kant, of how a new system of experience is
generated. A system arises from the indeterminate, a movement we can conceive of by
means of an Idea. In addition, there are multiple systems for Deleuze, all of which
interact with each other but do not thereby form a whole when taken together.
It is now necessary to show how the individual empirical cases or objects occur in a
system. I will show that Deleuze can account for the production of individuals such that
they are produced internally to the system that is opened up. In other words, it must be
the case that the occurrence of the Idea or the opening up of the system itself gives rise to
individuals that compose the system. If this cannot be shown, Deleuze has not truly
given an account in which the conditions by which experience is ordered arise from
within experience itself. The production of the system occurs as the production of
spatiotemporal individuals, which is equally the production of knowable objects. Once
again, for Deleuze the relation between subject and object is an internal one. In other
words, the objects produced are also the objects that can be known to the subject. Kant’s
explanation for this was, of course, that the conditions for possible objects belonged to
the transcendental subject. In contrast, in Deleuze’s account, the conditions are found in
experience itself, giving rise to objects that can, in principle, be fully known.
In Deleuze the problem of empirical cases is the problem of individuation. As shown in
chapter 2, unlike Kant Deleuze cannot rely on the forms of space and time to explain the
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differences between empirical cases. Instead, individuals arise through a process whose
nature will be shown in this chapter. The spatiotemporality of individuals is a result of
this process. The notion of “intensity” is central to Deleuze’s account. For him, it is
intensity that takes us from the relations and elements of the Idea to the production of
individuals. In other words, an Idea gives rise to intensity such that a progressive
movement of development occurs. Thus intensity is more fundamental than
spatiotemporality for Deleuze and in fact gives rise to the latter. Intensity is
individualizing. Individuals are produced insofar as they have spatiotemporality. This
chapter will therefore show the relation of intensity to the Idea and how intensity gives us
the individuals of a system. In addition, it will show how space and time are opened up
and how they occur within the process of individuation. In section 4 I will examine a
system of experience from the perspective of the subject. That is to say, once I have
considered the notion of intensity in its role in the production of a system, I will examine
intensity in the way it is experienced by the subject and in its significance for the subject.
I will show how a system is opened up for a subject.
In order to accomplish this I must first introduce the terms “differentiation” (spelled
with a “t”) and “differenciation” (spelled with a “c”), which are important for Deleuze in
that they allow him to account for the progressive development of a system of
experience. This language is important because it provides Deleuze with the means to
show how an Idea arises within experience—something Kant could not do and did not
have the language to do. The term “differentiation” indicates the development of an Idea:
the elements and their relations that, together, constitute an Idea. Once there is an Idea
the system can be produced for the subject. Deleuze uses the term “differenciation” to
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indicate the movement by which distinct objects are produced in the system. As I have
said above, for Deleuze there is no subject prior to the opening up of experience. In other
words, there is no transcendental subject as there is in Kant. I will show that certain
developments in the subject correspond to the opening up of experience. A full account
of the subject is essential to Deleuze’s account of experience and will be given in chapter
4. Here my concern is simply to discuss what is necessary for demonstrating how the
opening up and production of a system occur for the subject.
1. PRODUCTION OF A SYSTEM: THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION
The most extensive interpretation of the account of individuation in Deleuze has been
given by Manuel DeLanda in his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.40 DeLanda is
primarily concerned to show how recent research in mathematics and the natural sciences
can account for the processes that would be required for individuation to occur as
Deleuze conceives of it. More recently, Alberto Toscano has taken up the question of
individuation in The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant
and Deleuze.41 While Toscano also turns to the sciences to some extent, his aim is to
bring Deleuze into relation with the history of philosophy on the question of
individuation. He argues that certain philosophical notions, such as cause and essence to
take just two examples, are transformed as a result of Deleuze’s theory of individuation.
In what follows I try to show how the systematic field of experience is produced in and
through the production of individuals, bringing in the works of DeLanda and Toscano
insofar as they help in developing this account.
40 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum Press: New York, 2002). 41 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2006).
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We have said that Ideas are the opening up of a systematic field. However, the
production of the field only occurs as the actualization of the Idea. The Idea continues to
exist but not in the same way as what is actual. Its existence has the character of
virtuality. To explain how actualization occurs, Deleuze introduces the concept of
intensity. He uses the terms intensity and intensive difference interchangeably because,
for him, intensity is a kind of difference. We have said that Ideas are composed of virtual
elements and their differential relations. Insofar as they are in the Idea, these elements
coexist. Elements coexist in the Idea because they are reciprocally related and because
they have no existence apart from their relations. The differential is the symbol for the
reciprocal relation. However, the elements can come into other relations in which they
do not coexist. These relations occur as intensities. In other words, an intensity is this
new kind of relation between elements. “Intensities are implicated multiplicities,
‘implexes’, made up of relations between asymmetrical elements which direct the course
of the actualization of Ideas and determine the cases of solution for problems” (DR 244).
Intensity brings the elements into asymmetrical relations, whereas in Ideas the elements
are in reciprocal relations. In a sense, intensity expresses the Idea in a new way since it
brings its composing elements into a new relation. “The aesthetic of intensities thus
develops each of its moments in correspondence with the dialectic of Ideas: the power of
intensity (depth) is grounded in the potentiality of the Idea” (DR 244). Intensity follows
directly from the Idea. We should note that Deleuze often characterizes Ideas and
intensive differences in similar ways. For example, he uses “power” to describe both.
The reason for this is their close connection. Ideas are virtual, while it is intensity that
takes from the virtual to the actual. In other words, intensity occurs during actualization
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but is not itself actual. Intensity arises from the Idea as a new kind of relation between
elements that compose the Idea.
Deleuze relies heavily on the concept of intensity to give an account of the production
of the system and thereby the production of individuals. This account occurs for the most
part in chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition, in which this concept figures heavily. The
concept of intensity occurs in the context of discussions of physics and biology, which
make up a large part of that chapter. It is helpful to remember that Deleuze is attempting
to give a philosophical account of reality as we experience it. Since physics and biology
study that same reality, Deleuze utilizes the discoveries made in these fields to
conceptualize the problem of experience. The concept of intensity is taken from physics,
primarily thermodynamics, which is the study of the movement of energy and matter in
systems. DeLanda provides an excellent introductory discussion of the concept,
indicating the crucial difference between intensive and extensive properties of a system.
Intensive properties are those that are continuous and do not change if the quantity of
matter changes. Examples include temperature, pressure, and density. In other words,
intensive properties cannot simply be added together. On the other hand, extensive
properties can be divided and added in a simple way and do, indeed, change according to
the quantity of matter. Mass and total volume are examples of extensive properties.
However, DeLanda points out that there is a more important way of understanding the
difference since qualities like color would be considered intensive properties according to
this explanation. Rather than varying according to the quantity of matter, intensive
properties like temperature average when brought together. For example, when two
bodies of different temperatures come into contact, the final temperature will be the
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average of the two. “Differences in thermodynamic intensities are capable of driving a
process of equilibration in a population of molecules, a process in which these differences
will tend to average themselves.”42 The key is that intensive properties are differences
that spontaneously drive movements of matter or energy. In this way, intensive
differences act as a driving force of change. The direction of change is always toward
equilibrium, which cancels the difference. In this way, systems always tend toward
stabilization. Deleuze is interested in the concept of intensity because it describes a
particular kind of difference that produces change. “Difference is the sufficient reason of
change only to the extent that the change tends to negate difference” (DR 223). In
addition, intensity tends to cancel itself through the change it produces. For Deleuze,
intensity is a transcendental condition and cannot be empirically known. What we know,
or experience, is the change that it produces. By and large, what we know as actual
objects are at equilibrium, which means that the intensive differences that produced them
have been cancelled. Deleuze argues that this gives rise to a kind of transcendental
physical illusion (DR 228). Since intensity disappears under the extensive properties it
produces, we fall under the illusion that extensive properties are the cause rather than
merely the product. In this way, we mistakenly give extensive properties a greater
importance than they really have. We tend to think that the existence of an object or
system can be explained by its extensive properties rather than its intensive ones.
Deleuze argues that it is a physical illusion because it is not merely due to the structure of
knowledge, but, rather, reality organizes itself in this way. Toscano claims that Deleuze
must be understood as rethinking the notion of cause. According to Toscano, the
traditional idea of cause implies that the cause is an extensive or actual object just as is 42 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 60.
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the effect. However, in Deleuze’s account, where the production of a system follows
from an Idea, or production occurs as the passage from virtual to actual, a different
conception of cause is at work. Deleuze himself generally tends to use the term
“sufficient reason” rather than cause.
For him, intensity can be considered a system by itself since each intensive difference
drives a process and, thereby, sets up the poles between which the movement of matter or
energy occurs. Intensity is also the means by which individuation occurs, since
individuals are produced in and through the system that unfolds from the Idea. Beyond
the discussions of physics and biology, Chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition also relies
on the work of Gilbert Simondon to develop the account of individuation. A brief review
of Simondon’s L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information
(Individuation Through the Notions of Form and Information), published as “On Gilbert
Simondon” in Desert Islands, is somewhat more explicit on how the use of Simondon fits
into Deleuze’s project.43 For Deleuze, there are individuals only through a process of
becoming individual. What is prior to individuals must be more than individual, or a
surplus of reality. For Deleuze, being is not the individual but what exists prior to the
individual. “However, on this view, individuation is no longer coextensive with being; it
must represent a moment, which is neither all of being nor its first moment.”44 Deleuze
generally refers to this state before there are individuals as the “field of individuation.” It
is in accounting for the system at this point that Deleuze turns to Simondon. Toscano,
devotes a chapter of his book to developing the relation between Simondon and Deleuze.
He argues that what is important here is to understand what exists before there are
43 Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974), translated by Mike Taormina and edited by David Lapoujade (Semiotext(e): Cambridge, MA, 3003). 44 Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” p. 86.
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individuals. He shows how Deleuze and others (Simondon, and Whitehead and Pierce to
a lesser extent) attempt to develop an account of individuation that does not begin with
individuals and simply extrapolate from them to their constituting processes. “With
regard to the processes of individuation themselves, the concepts designed to express
them must be operational or relational concepts that do not rest on the predetermined
properties of constituted individuals.”45 This point is important for us here in
understanding the relation of the individual to what it arises from.
Deleuze uses Simondon’s concept of the “metastable” to explain what the field of
individuation is like. This state of being consists of different levels or dimensions of
reality that are not integrated together and do not form a whole. These dimensions
coexist and do not interact in this state. If they were to interact, they could not exist
together because they are incompatible with each other. Deleuze also takes the term
“disparate” from Simondon, which indicates the incompatibility of these levels or
dimensions. The key feature of the metastable system for Deleuze is that it is a state of
difference or dissymmetry such that this difference exists in it as potential energy.
Deleuze sees himself as generalizing Simondon’s concept of the metastable system since,
for Deleuze, each intensity can be described as a system of dissymmetry or difference
that has potential energy. In other words, for Deleuze, “intensity” simply connotes this
state of potential energy. It is helpful to note that in the Idea the dimensions or levels are
not yet in a state of dissymmetry. It is in intensity that they are brought into this tension.
“Like the metastable system, an intensive quantum is the structure (not yet the synthesis)
of heterogeneity.”46 The synthesis is the cancellation of intensity. In other words, what
45 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production, p. 14. 46 Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” p. 87.
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Deleuze refers to as intensity is the state before the movement by which it will be
cancelled has been produced. Deleuze also uses the term “singularity,” which he says
corresponds to each potential. Singularities simply occur as features of preindividual
systems. Individuation arises from this condition only by resolving this incompatibility
or difference of dimensions. It begins by establishing communication between these
realities. (“Internal resonance,” another term from Simondon, is a primitive mode of
communication.) Communication is the beginning of the movement by which the
difference is cancelled or resolved. The movement by which it is cancelled is also the
synthesizing of intensity. Ultimately individuation solves the problem of the
incompatibility of dimensions of reality “by organizing a new dimension in which they
form a unique whole at a higher level (analogous to the perception of depth that emerges
from retinal images).”47 In the end the actual or complete individuals, whether they are
physical objects, biological organisms, or human subjects, are characterized by these new
dimensions which have resolved their constituting intensities.
To highlight the fact that this process of individuation occurs as a movement of
production, not of limitation, Deleuze describes each reconciliation or solution that
occurs as an affirmation and says that it only appears limited or suffering from lack when
cut off from its movement of actualization (DR 207). In other words, the synthesis of
intensity only occurs in and through the creation of a new dimension, which is positive
because it occurs not by reduction of pregiven possibilities but as the creation of
something new. The new dimensions are created by actualizing or synthesizing the
potential energies. It will be by means of these new dimensions that we will be able to
grasp determined and actual objects. This new dimension is like a surface created by 47 Ibid., p. 87-88.
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intensive difference. “Difference pursues its subterranean life while its image reflected
by the surface is scattered. Moreover, it is in the nature of that image, but only that
image, to be scattered, just as it is in the nature of the surface to cancel difference, but
only on the surface” (DR 240). It is on this new dimension created by intensity, the
surface, and only on it, that intensity is cancelled. In itself, intensive difference is not
cancelled but continues to exist.
In addition to the fact that intensity cannot be divided as extensive properties can,
Deleuze also explains that intensity is not indivisible in the way that quality is (DR 237).
Intensity cannot be divided without changing its nature as a quality can. Neither is it a
homogenous quantity (DR 237). He uses the example of temperature again. Since
temperature is not a homogenous quantity it is not made up of other temperatures added
together. Temperature is already a difference and is not made up of differences of the
same order (that is to say, other temperatures) but implies, instead, series of
heterogeneous terms (DR 237). Intensive difference is always made up of, or implies,
differences of different orders, while extensive difference is made up of differences of the
same order, which is why it does not change in nature when divided. In this way,
intensive difference brings the coexisting elements and relations of the Idea into a new
relation: they are made to occur in orders that are made up of each other. “Every
intensity is E-E’, where E itself refers to an e-e’, and e to ε-ε’ etc.: each intensity is
already a coupling (in which each element of the couple refers in turn to couples of
elements of another order), thereby revealing the properly qualitative content of quantity”
(DR 222). The reason for this is that each division of intensity is a change in kind. In
other words, intensity can, indeed, be divided, but only by producing a new intensity.
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Toscano explains that what is interesting here is that every division of intensity occurs as
a new event of individuation and leads to a new system. In a sense, different orders are
imbedded in one other. Deleuze uses the term “implication” to describe this state of
intensity. In other words, these orders are brought together in a particular kind of relation
through intensity. Even if an intensity is not divided according to each order, these
orders continue to exist by virtue of their implication by the intensity. Deleuze also says
that intensity implicates other intensities. Intensities are related to one another in this
way. What makes them different is the portion they express clearly.
It is important to note, then, that intensity is an internal kind of difference. It does not
serve to distinguish two things, which would presuppose that each has an identity prior to
their distinction. Intensity differentiates itself from itself.
Individuation is a complex event and occurs by means of many intensities that are
related to one another. However, it is helpful to understand how a single intensity, taken
by itself, is synthesized to produce the organizing and individuating dimension. As we
recall, the Idea can be described as a differential of the type dy/dx. Daniel W. Smith
argues that Deleuze develops the concept of the differential from Leibniz and Maimon.48
The idea is taken from the differential calculus. Deleuze uses the differential because the
Idea occurs as the reciprocal relation between elements and it is only through their
relation to each other that these elements can be said to exist. The operation of
differentiation gives us this relation. Now, the synthesis of intensity can be described
using the integration of the differential relation, like the operation in calculus. In calculus
the process of finding the value of an integral is called integration. Through integration
48 Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze on Leibniz: Difference, Continuity, and the Calculus” in Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, edited by Stephen Daniel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 127-147.
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we get the value for an area or a volume of a complex figure. In this sense integration
gives us the figure as a whole. The important point is that in calculus differentiation and
integration are inverse operations since differentiation gives us the boundary of the figure
by giving us the relation between variables. These operations have the same relationship
in Deleuze. Each integration or synthesis produces something new. “The differential
relation signifies nothing concrete in relation to what it is derived from, that is, in relation
to x or y, but it signifies something else concrete, names a z, which is something new, and
this is how it assures the passage to limits.”49 In this way, what is produced, z, does not
resemble its conditions, dx and dy. This is the operation of integration in the sense used
in calculus. As Smith explains, differential analysis allows us to understand how
infinitely small relations can occur. When the differential relation is integrated it
produces infinitely small changes. In this way intensity can be synthesized along a
continuum, thereby producing individuals that differ externally from each other by
infinitely small amounts or, in other words, which form a continuum of external
difference. Intensive difference simply occurs when the relation occurs. However, it is
the synthesis of intensity that is the performance of that relation, producing each case of
z. In this way, intensity is individuating because it gives us each individual case of z. Z
is the new dimension that is produced through intensity. DeLanda says that the new
dimension created can be understood as an equilibrium structure.50 In fact all extensive
properties of an actual individual are produced during the synthesis of intensity as
additional and stabilizing dimensions. Insofar as the individual is defined by these
stabilizing dimensions, it is a solution to a problem.
49 Ibid., p. 140. 50 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 60.
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We can examine more closely what occurs during the process of individuation for
Deleuze. Toscano argues that for Simondon the individual must be understood not
merely as the result of the process of individuation but equally as the site or theater of
individuation.51 Deleuze maintains this same conception of the individual. The
individual is not the agent but the theater of individuation. The individual is produced as
the differences of intensity play themselves out and resolve themselves. As a result of
this, during its formation, the individual undergoes the most extreme movements and
torsions. Deleuze turns to embryology to understand the field of the individuation.
“There are ‘things’ that only an embryo can do, movements that it alone can undertake or
even withstand (for example, the anterior member of the tortoise undergoes a relative
displacement of 180 degrees, while the neck involves the forward slippage of a variable
number of proto-vertebrae). The destiny and achievement of the embryo is to live the
unlivable, to sustain forced movements of a scope that would break any skeleton or tear
ligaments” (DR 215). Deleuze also calls this the larval subject since it is not yet an actual
individual. These movements are produced as the syntheses of intensities. They are
experiences of intensity since there is a subject (that is to say, a larval subject) who
undergoes these experiences as it is progressively generated and becomes a fully
complete individual. It is not just animals or humans that occur as larval subjects but
whatever undergoes a synthesis of this kind. “There is a self wherever a furtive
contemplation has been established, whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing
a difference from repetition functions somewhere” (DR 78). Wherever there is synthesis
or contraction, there is a larval subject undergoing the contraction. We should note that
since the subject is produced through the synthesis of intensity, the subject carries with it 51 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production, p. 149-150.
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all of the orders implicated in that intensity. This part of the individual or subject can
continue to participate in the Idea from which the intensity arises.
2. THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND TIME
To return to the movements that are the syntheses of intensity, it is important to note
that Deleuze also calls these movements spatiotemporal dynamisms because they carve
out a characteristic space and time as they occur. This space and time cannot be
distinguished from the space and time it takes for these movements to occur. In other
words, there is no space before a space is opened up. The time is how long it takes for
the intensive difference to be nullified, to be completely synthesized. An egg (or other
site of individuation) forms a space in the sense that there are linkages or connections
between points or intensities. The connections and movements are not relations that can
be explained using Euclidean geometry. For this reason, Deleuze utilizes concepts from
Riemannian geometry and topological space. DeLanda attempts to develop arguments
for these points, which remain rather cryptic in Deleuze. The relations between intensive
processes are not rigid Euclidean relations of distance and length, etc. but topological
connections.52 De Landa argues that these relations or linkages between intensities
become progressively more fixed as the individual becomes an actual entity so that
distances between them are unchanging and can be measured metrically.53 It is only in
the end, when intensive differences have been discharged and have reached equilibrium,
that the site has spatial and temporal characteristics that can be described using Euclidean
relations. DeLanda argues that individuals as actual entities cannot be understood as put
together in an assembly-line procedure, but only as produced in a more fluid way. As a 52 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 56. 53Ibid., p. 52.
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result, the completed individual is less adaptable and more rigid than its embryonic
counterpart. We get completed individuals insofar as the systematic field comes to be
progressively developed.
For Deleuze, then, we cannot begin with space and time as a priori forms, as Kant
does, for whom the form of space is characterized by its geometrical extension. In the
“Anticipations of Perception” Kant had argued that intensity is the matter that fills
extended space. However, according to Smith, Deleuze follows Hermann Cohen and
Salomon Maimon on the following point: Space must first be produced through intensive
difference.54 The reason is that space as pure intuition is a continuum and extensive
difference could never account for a continuum. No matter how much an extensive
quantity is divided, there are always discrete individuals. In other words, extensive
difference presupposes individuals. Only intensity can produce a continuous difference.
Kant defines intensity as the degree or amount of a quality or condition beginning from
zero.55 For Deleuze, intensity is also individuating because each magnitude is
apprehended as a unity and cannot be taken and added as parts of a whole. It is
something only insofar as it is a difference from zero. Deleuze considers this an
important point. Intensity begins from zero, not from unity. In other words, unity does
not have to be presupposed. Each difference from zero can form a unity, or individual.
We get a continuum because what is important is the magnitude in relation to zero, and
that each is apprehended or synthesized as a unity. Since intensity gives us a continuum
of difference, it gives us differences of degree and of kind.
54 Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” p. 36. 55 CPR B208.
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Deleuze says that intensive difference gives a rule of production and serves to replace
the notion of schema in Kant. In Kant knowledge is only possible if we can subsume the
object, or the appearance, under the concept. However, appearances are spatiotemporal
while concepts are universals. The question is how two very different kinds of things can
have any relation. Kant lays out the schematism in order to respond to the problem of
how the spatiotemporal diversity of intuition can correspond to the concept. “The
schema of sensible concepts, such as of figures in space, is a product and, as it were, a
monogram, of pure a priori imagination, through which, and in accordance with which,
images themselves first become possible” (CPR A142/B181). In Kant the faculty of the
imagination bridges the gap between intuition and concept. Deleuze says that Kant’s
schema is like a Euclidean notion and simply occurs ‘between’ the concept and intuition,
both of which must be presupposed (DR 174). His notion of the spatiotemporal
dynamism attempts to replace the notion of schema. Deleuze uses the example of the
straight line: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. “In this sense, the
mathematician Houël remarked that the shortest distance is not a Euclidean notion at all,
but an Archimedean one, more physical than mathematical; that it was inseparable from a
method of exhaustion, and that it served less to determine the straight line than to
determine the length of a curve by means of the straight line – ‘integral calculus
performed unknowingly’” (DR 174). What Deleuze means in referring to the method of
exhaustion is that the rule of production provides a step-by-step process. The synthesis
of intensity induces a movement through infinitely small increments and gives direction
to them. The rule of production does not give the object by reference to an already-
constituted space, but, instead, a whole set of mechanisms unfolds from the synthesis of
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intensities by which the object is incrementally produced. “It is intensity which
dramatizes. It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatio-temporal
dynamisms” (DR 245). In other words, intensity is expressed in the movements by which
a space and time is incrementally carved out. It is the larval subject that experiences
these spatiotemporal dynamisms.
3. FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ON THE INDIVIDUAL
The embryonic or larval subject proceeds to the completed individual. The intensities
composing the larval subject reach stable states such that we can say that it is individual,
since, prior to that, there is only an event or a movement occurring. In other words, the
completed individual is both actual and virtual, whereas the larval subject occurs only in
the passage from the virtual to the actual. The individual comes about through the
stabilization of the larval subject, and it is the individual in this sense that can be the
subject of perception and for whom experience can occur anew. The subject will be the
topic of consideration in chapter 4. However, we must first examine what it means to say
that the individual is both actual and virtual, since it is through the relation of these
aspects that experience can occur for the subject.
Each individual, in the process of its constitution, occurs as the imbedding of a virtual
“half” and an actual “half” (DR 280). Insofar as it is a solution to a problem, an
individual is the actualization of the problem in one, particular way. However, this one
solution does not exhaust the problem or completely express it. The individual, as a
solution, virtually implicates the entire system to which it is a solution. Thus, the
individual continues to have a relation to the entire Idea. “What is complete is only the
ideal [or virtual] part of the object, which participates with other parts of objects in the
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Idea (other relations, other singular points), but never constitutes an integral whole” (DR
209). Even though certain relations or singularities are not actualized in the object or
individual, these relations and singularities still exist for the object or individual, but
virtually. By means of its relation to the Idea, the individual has a virtual relation to all
other individuals that occur from the Idea or in that system.
In addition to the relation to the Idea from which it follows, the individual also has a
relation to other Ideas. In order to see this, we must examine the relation that any
particular Idea has to other Ideas. Every Idea “interacts” with other Ideas. Insofar as an
Idea is the marking off what is determinable from the indeterminate, the Idea continues to
have a relation with what is indeterminate, by its exclusion. As a result, any particular
Idea has a relation to other Ideas, which is to say, to other ways of marking off and,
thereby, making something determinable. “In a certain sense all Ideas coexist, but they
do so at points, on the edges, and under glimmerings which never have the uniformity of
a natural light. On each occasion, obscurities and zones of shadow correspond to their
distinction” (DR 187). An Idea, by definition, occurs by bringing something to the
forefront in making it determinable. Each Idea orders all of experience, but in its own
way. Ideas cannot exist together on the same plane, since each Idea institutes its own
plane. In a reference to Descartes, Deleuze says Ideas do not coexist in the sense of the
uniformity of a natural light because they do not all occur together equally. Therefore we
do not say Ideas are actually in relation, yet, they do have a certain kind of relation.
Deleuze describes their relation as “perplication”. Since the Idea occurs in relation to
other Ideas, the virtual half of the individual consists not only of the Idea in relation to
which it is a solution, but also of other Ideas that are perplicated by the first Idea. These
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will appear at the edge of the individual’s experience, so to speak, because at the center
of its experience are the Ideas by which it occurs as an individual, to which it is a
solution. Of course the Ideas are not all perplicated in an equal way but, rather, in an
order according to how far removed they are from the Ideas to which the individual is a
solution or to what degree they are perplicated. Deleuze describes an individual’s virtual
half as its “zone” or “fringe” of indetermination (DR 257-258). Thus the virtual half of
an individual is composed of the virtual existence of all Ideas, in their particular state of
existence, the state of perplication. However, from another perspective, the virtual half
of an individual can be described in terms of singularities and other virtual events.
Deleuze also says that the fringe of indetermination is the fluid character of individuality
itself. It is this aspect that allows the individual to be open to and to genuinely interact
with what is around it. The individual is more open to coming into relation with
something the nearer the Idea of that relation is in perplication within the individual’s
virtual half.
Deleuze also uses the concept of perspective to explain the relation of the virtual and
actual. This is a notion he takes from Leibniz, transforming it for his own purposes (DR
47-48). In Leibniz monads express the entire world but are distinguished from each other
in that each expresses a different portion clearly and the rest obscurely. Their perspective
is determined by the portion they express clearly. In turning to Leibniz on this point,
Deleuze also reacts to Descartes and his criteria of the clear and distinct (DR 213 and
146). According to Deleuze, the Cartesian model presupposes the mind’s affinity with
the true, which is represented by the idea of innateness, and we only need a method to
insure knowledge. If an idea appears clear and distinct, it is true. Knowledge occurs in
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direct proportion to the Idea: the clearer the Idea, the clearer the knowledge. The
Cartesian model of knowledge has sameness or identity at its foundation. Deleuze
suggests that the “clear” must be split from the “distinct.” The result is the concept of
perspective. For Deleuze, individuals or real entities are characterized by their
perspective. The Idea, taken by itself, can be described as obscure and distinct, while the
individual that occurs as its solution is clear and confused. Insofar as a portion is
expressed clearly, the rest must be expressed confusedly. The actual half of the
individual is its “clear zone” in relation to its virtual half, which remains obscure. In
other words, the individual occurs in inverse proportion to the Idea, rather than in direct
proportion as in the Cartesian model. The individual does not occur as a reflection or
faithful representation of the problem or Idea, which would make its relation to the Idea
one of direct proportion. Instead, the individual occurs in and through its perspective on
the Idea. This reflects the fact that, for Deleuze, an individual only occurs in and through
the fact that it is a response, so to speak, to an Idea-problem.
In the production of the system from the Idea perspective is produced during the
synthesis of each intensity. As we said earlier, each intensity is composed of different
orders, which are implicated within the intensity. These orders of differences become
actual only if intensity is divided along that particular line. Otherwise, these orders
continue to exist virtually. In other words, the intensity expresses the entire system, or
Idea, but obscurely. The perspective of an individual occurs as the part of it that is actual
in contrast to what is virtual. However, it is important to remember that there can be no
clear zone or actual half without its relation to what is confused or virtual. “This would
be again to neglect the indissolubility of the clear and the confused. It would be to forget
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that the clear is confused by itself, in so far as it is clear” (DR 254). Something is actual
only insofar as it carries the Idea with it and carries its relation to the Idea with it. What
is actualized is what is clearly expressed by the individual, while the virtual is expressed
confusedly. The production of perspective occurs through intensity in that it expresses
clearly the order of difference along which it is actually divided, while expressing the
implicated orders of differences confusedly. The virtual half of the individual, or what it
expresses confusedly, is what Deleuze also calls the unconscious of an individual
(although, of course, this term is only used in relation to one kind of individual, the
human). The individual expresses clearly only the portion that is synthesized. In other
words, the individual does not represent the Idea in an impartial or unbiased way (i.e.
apart from a particular perspective). In fact, for Deleuze, there can be an actual
individual only insofar it is perspectival.56
For Leibniz, there is no world apart from the monads that express the world. In the
concept of perspective Deleuze follows Leibniz on this point to a certain extent, claiming
that there is no system of experience outside of the individuals that occur as solutions to
the problem (DR 163). However, while for Leibniz monads express the same world, for
Deleuze, in contrast, individuals express divergent worlds. “Each series tells a story: not
different points of view on the same story, like the different points of view on the town
we find in Leibniz, but completely distinct stories which unfold simultaneously. The
basic series are divergent: not relatively, in the sense that one could retrace one’s path
and find a point of convergence, but absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or
horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos” (DR
56 Daniel W. Smith expresses this point succinctly: “Subjectivity is (rather than simply has) an incomplete, prejudiced, and partial perception” in “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” p. 38.
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123). For Leibniz, there are different points of view or perspectives but one single world.
However, for Deleuze, perspectives cannot be reconciled to form a single story or world.
These stories or series do, indeed, refer to each other, and they even intersect in places,
but they do not form one unified story. The chaos Deleuze describes is due to the relation
of the Ideas to each other, and that they cannot be brought together additively and do not
form a unifying plane. To compare, in Kant there is a point on which experience
converges, even though it transcends possible experience and can only be given as the
Idea of Nature.
We have examined the relations that Deleuze uses to account for the production of
each system. “The trinity complication-explication-implication accounts for the totality
of the system – in other words, the chaos which contains all, the divergent series which
lead out and back in, and the differentiator which relates them one to another. Each
series explicates or develops itself, but in its difference from the other series which it
implicates and which implicate it, which it envelops and which envelop it; in this chaos
which complicates everything” (DR 123-124). These complex relations, complication,
implication, and explication, give us different series and make it possible for each system
to be in relation to others without forming a unity. They account for the different
perspectives of individuals and for the relation they have to each other. The totality, or
chaos, referred to above must be understood as excess. The diverging worlds exceed the
unity of a single world in which the stories of individuals might converge. Ideas and
intensities coexist, but this coexistence must be understood as a kind of excess. We could
examine each system opened up by an Idea and see that it operates or functions only
through its excess (DR 115). For example, if we take the system of language, it is clear
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that this system cannot be exhausted by all of the books ever written. It will always be
possible to write something genuinely new. In other words, an individual case of the
system is not produced by depleting the system. The individual we get by means of an
intensity can implicate and be in relation with many different systems. Even though all
intensities implicate each other, they do not therefore express the same world. In other
words, we could not “add” together all of the possible systems into a single whole. There
is no totality from which they draw or which they form when added together. In other
words, experience comes to be organized in genuinely different ways that cannot be
reconciled.
I have tried to show that, for Deleuze, the individual is structured in such a way that it
is capable of being transformed. As a result of this, experience can occur for it. No
individual is “solid” or closed off because it has a fringe of indetermination. The
individual is not a seamless unit. It is from the individual’s fringe of indetermination or
virtual half that a new Idea can occur and a new system can be opened up. However, it is
important to note that experience will occur only when it is forced to occur. In other
words, things will continue to make sense in an ordinary way, according to our ordinary
empirical judgments so long as nothing happens that disturbs this. An individual’s
ordinary experience will be disrupted when it is confronted by something unrecognizable.
The distortion of the individual’s empirical experience will necessarily be sensible, and it
will appear as a sign. A sign is intensive difference, but from the perspective of the
sensibility of the subject. The sign will appear precisely as something unrecognizable, as
something that is not meaningful according to any system of meaning available to the
subject. Sensibility tries to grasp it but cannot because the sign appears purely as a
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difference or movement. In other words, the sign occurs as the transcendental condition
of sensibility for the subject because it cannot be grasped through the empirical exercise
of sensibility.
It is important to note that what is given as a sign is another individual. In this way,
experience begins only when the individual, the subject, comes into relation with another
individual, whether the second individual is an object, a piece of music, or another
person. This other individual can only be sensed. When the two individuals come into
relation, the intensities that comprise their virtual halves can lead to the formation of new
relations, and thus a new Idea. In other words, when sensation tries to grasp the sign, it
forces thought to occur and to pose a problem or Idea. This is the process of learning,
and Deleuze contrasts learning with the possession of knowledge. “Learning to swim or
learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or
one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also
propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems” (DR 192). In
other words, learning can only occur through the encounter between two individuals. In a
sense, the other individual is the one we confront. However, Deleuze also says there is
an a priori Other (DR 260). The relation with another individual is only possible
because, first of all, each individual has a virtual half that allows it to be transformed. “In
every psychic system there is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our possibles
are always Others” (DR 260). Each system can be transformed because it implicates
other intensities. Each possible transformation is an Other, which expresses a world. In
other words, the Other is part of the structure of the individual. “That the Other should
not, properly speaking, be anyone, neither you nor I, signifies that it is a structure which
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is implemented only by variable terms in a different perceptual world – me for you in
yours, you for me in mine” (DR 281). Since the encounter with the other depends on
chance, Deleuze says there is only involuntary thought. Deleuze criticizes what he calls
hypothetical truths because the new Idea that is opened up does not simply exist as a
possibility prior to the encounter. We only think when an encounter with another forces
us to think (DR 139).
The new Idea that is opened up transforms both individuals but to different degrees.
This is only possible because both individuals have a virtual half. Experience can occur
for the subject in that a new system of meaning can open up for it, which can appear as a
new kind of engagement with things or as a new set of practices. Insofar as a new system
opens up, the subject undergoes the experience. In other words, the subject is passive, or
a larval subject, and not the agent in relation to the opening up of experience. However,
since the subject occurs in relation to many Ideas, not all of which are directly related to
the Idea which has opened up, the subject retains its identity in terms of these other Ideas.
As we said above, experience begins with the Idea. However, since there is not yet an
individual until there are syntheses of intensities, and since an Idea can only be grasped in
thought by the individual, any relation of the individual to the Idea can only occur “after”
the system is already produced. In other words, the individual can only think the Idea
retrospectively. This is why Deleuze says thought must follow the path of experience in
reverse (DR 282). In What is Philosophy?, too, Deleuze says that thought works
backwards, in contrast to science, which works in a forward direction.
Thus far, I have been showing how a system is produced for Deleuze. As my concern
here is the question of experience, it is important to show, too, how the production of a
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system is experienced by the subject. From our discussions up to this point, it is clear
that the issue of the subject is a complex one. As I have said, I will be developing
Deleuze’s notion of the subject in greater depth in chapter 4, but raising this issue earlier
is unavoidable. The main reason is that for Deleuze the subject is produced in
experience, in the opening up of a system. I have briefly discussed the larval subject,
which is not a fully-formed subject or, rather, it is not the subject that we mean when
using the term in its everyday sense. In what follows, I will be showing what the
production of the system is like for a fully formed subject.
4. THE EXPERIENCE OF THE OPENING UP AND PRODUCTION OF A SYSTEM
It is important for us to see here how a system of experience is opened up for a
subject. Ordinarily, for Deleuze, our relationship to objects is simply one of recognition.
It is the sphere of established knowledge. However, this relationship can be disrupted.
Deleuze argues that experience always begins with sensibility. “It is true that on the path
which leads to that which is to be thought, all begins with sensibility” (DR 144).
Something appears to sensibility that is disturbingly unfamiliar and unexpected. We
know it does not make sense in the way we had thought. It is not recognizable and
therefore not an object but a “sign.” “The contingently imperceptible, that which is too
small or too far for the empirical exercise of our senses, stands opposed to an essentially
imperceptible which is indistinguishable from that which can be sensed only from the
point of view of a transcendental exercise” (DR 140-1). A sign is unrecognizable in
principle and not merely misrecognized empirically. We can only recognize what it
conditions, a stable object, not the event of becoming itself, which is the condition. A
sign is precisely not meaningful because it occurs outside of any previously known
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system of meaning. However, signs are given off by an object of experience when they
become distorted and reveal a virtual characteristic that was not apparent because of the
previous conditions. Since the sign is something that exceeds empirical experience, we
can say that in Deleuze the transcendental does not completely overlap with the empirical
but, instead, exceeds it. We can also use Deleuze’s language of virtual and actual,
recalling that every object is partly virtual and partly actual. Thus conditions arise from
within experience but they appear as what exceeds any particular system of experience.
Smith has argued that the sign in Deleuze must be understood as intensity.57 Distortions
of the object must occur as intensive change, not change in spatiotemporal relations,
since the change is sensible but not recognizable. Only a recognizable object could have
spatiotemporal determinations. Deleuze expresses an interest in sensory distortions
achieved in pharmacodynamic experiences and physical experiences like vertigo because
they are experiences of signs (DR 237). The distortion of the object is not due to the
problem to which the object is an object, that is, the field to which it belongs as object.
In a sense the virtual tension is “alongside” the object. Signs are the hints we get in
empirical experience of the constituting processes of the object and, thus, of the system to
which it belongs and of the other systems which are in its periphery.
Signs are always encountered unexpectedly and often as a shock. For example, if it is
my first time swimming, obviously I expect to be in the water. But the signs I encounter
are still unexpected—the visual aspects, the sounds, the physical sensations, etc. The
appearing of the sign, of an intensity, means something has come into relation with us. In
this example the relation is between myself and the water. The opening up of a system
cannot begin from the subject alone since there is no subject with regard to the new 57 Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” p. 36.
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system of experience that has yet to open up. It can occur only when the subject comes
into relation with something else. This relation can only be given to the subject as
something sensible. Signs, too, are given off when two (or more) individuals come into
relation. A sign is precisely something sensible, not something given to thought, since
intensities are never given to thought. Again, experience can only begin anew from
something sensible, not from a concept, for example, since concepts belong to the subject
alone.
We can understand how things proceed for the subject in terms of the other faculties.
Deleuze offers his own theory of faculties, not so much to establish such a doctrine, but
to show what its requirements would be. He is arguing against Kant on this point, for
whom the faculties function in harmony around a recognizable object. For Deleuze, in
contrast, the faculties could only be connected through a kind of discord. “Rather than all
the faculties converging and contributing to a common project of recognizing an object,
we see divergent projects in which, with regard to what concerns it essentially, each
faculty is in the presence of that which is its ‘own’” (DR 141). Each faculty is forced to
grasp that which it cannot empirically grasp but which belongs uniquely to it. Thus each
faculty is taken to its limit, in the transcendental sense, and this is what Deleuze calls the
transcendental form of the faculty. He claims that the transcendental form of each faculty
is both the dissolution of the faculty in the empirical sense and what gives rise to the
faculty. In this way, each faculty must be forced into existence. An example is the
faculty of memory. Transcendental memory “grasps that which from the outset can only
be recalled, even the first time: not a contingent past, but the being of the past as such and
the past of every time” (DR 140). Each faculty is brought into existence when it strives
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to grasp what only it can grasp: the transcendental object of the faculty. As I said above,
experience begins with sensibility. When intensive difference is given to sensibility,
sensibility is taken to its transcendental limit.58 It is not the common object that is
communicated between the faculties, as it is for Kant, but, rather, the violence when each
faculty undergoes its dissolution. This violence is communicated to and awakes another
faculty. In each case, it is a form of difference unique to the faculty that awakens it. For
sensibility, it is intensive difference; for imagination, it is disparity in the phantasm; for
thought, it is the differential, and so on (DR 145). These forms of difference are given
off by an Idea. “[We] reserve the name of Ideas not for pure cogitanda but rather for
those instances which go from sensibility to thought and from thought to sensibility,
capable of engendering in each case, according to their own order, the limit- or
transcendent-object of each faculty” (DR 146). Ideas, then, belong to no one faculty, but
to all faculties.
For my purpose here, which is to show why Deleuze is critical of Kant’s theory of
faculties, we do not need to develop Deleuze’s own theory of the faculties in detail. It is
important only to underline that experience necessarily begins with sensibility, and then
leads to thought. There can be systems of sensibility, like the system of color or a system
of music. However, in order to understand a system, it must be grasped by thought. This
is the reason for my focus on the faculty of thought.
Deleuze himself privileges thought over the other faculties. As with the other
faculties, thought only occurs when it is forced to occur, by a violence done to it. “There
is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more
58 Thus, intensity is not the anticipation of perception as it is for Kant, but the transcendental object of sensibility (DR 237).
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absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world.
Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes
philosophy: everything begins with misosophy” (DR 139). In fact, Deleuze says that by
itself thought would only remain within possibility. We are only forced to think because
thought is taken to its transcendental limit at which it is unable to think, unable to
recognize and understand what occurred. Deleuze also says that the transcendental limit
of thought is a kind of stupidity, and for this reason he describes stupidity as a
transcendental problem (DR 151). The transcendental limit is also the condition for the
faculty. Deleuze emphasizes this point by saying that difficulty is not a de facto state of
affairs but a de jure structure of thought, and here we can think of stupidity and difficulty
together (DR 147). Stupidity is not merely making an error since error is merely
empirical. We recall from chapter 1, above, that Deleuze criticizes philosophers such as
Plato, Descartes, and Kant who, he claims, presume that the nature of thought is to think
or that we (we who possess the capacity for thought) tend naturally to think. In contrast,
Deleuze argues that the natural state is not thinking, which is why thought only occurs
when it is forced to occur. The real problem facing thought is how to engender thought,
how to bring it into existence, and stupidity has to do with this. We note here that all
experience begins contingently, for Deleuze, not because of the nature of the subject.
The relation of thought and the subject with what is external to it is what is important.
Thought cannot remain closed off within itself. Although its disturbance is violent it is
only this disturbance that can lead to thinking.
It becomes important to inquire with Deleuze: who is it that thinks? It cannot be the
one who is satisfied and has good will. This person is merely complacent. Only the one
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filled with ill will and who is unable to recognize what everyone else recognizes will
think. Since thought does not occur naturally, it is not moved of its own accord. The
problem is to induce thought. Deleuze uses an example from Proust to answer the
question of who thinks. It is the jealous man under the pressure of his lover’s lies who is
forced to search for truth. This person searches for truth because he is forced to search.
There is a dissatisfaction or uneasiness that accompanies all thinking.
Deleuze uses the term “learning” to indicate what goes on for the subject when a new
system of experience is opened up. “Learning is the appropriate name for the subjective
acts carried out when one is confronted with the objecticity [sic] of a problem (Idea),
whereas knowledge designates only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a
rule enabling solutions” (DR 164). Deleuze uses the term “objecticity” indicate that
problem is not subjective, but not simply objective either because it does not occur
independently of a subject. He argues that there can no be method for learning (that is to
say, no method in the Cartesian sense of determining, a priori, how reason should be
used in order to achieve knowledge. We cannot predict what encounters will lead
someone to learn. The only training is a kind of violent training, for which Deleuze
reserves the term “culture.” He also frequently says that the real model for learning is
apprenticeship. “An apprentice is someone who constitutes and occupies practical or
speculative problems as such” (DR 164). If we return to the example of swimming,
Deleuze says that we only learn by bringing together the distinctive points of our body
with that of the water to form a problematic field. Thus learning is not merely a cognitive
act but requires an engagement with the elements of something else. Deleuze also says
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that the apprenticeship is really to signs.59 For example, someone who wants to become a
craftsman of wood must become sensitive to the signs given off by the wood: how it
responds when cut with the grain or against it; the difference in sound when healthy
wood is cut as opposed to unhealthy wood, etc. However, we can examine the period of
time during which the constitution of a system takes place. This is a strange period of
time. Deleuze describes a paradoxical point that can occur during this period of time in
which the constitution of the system is taking place. As an example, Deleuze uses a well-
known test in psychology involving a monkey who is supposed to find food in boxes of
one color amidst boxes of various colors. “There comes a paradoxical period during
which the number of ‘errors’ diminishes even though the monkey does not yet possess
‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ of a solution in each case” (DR 164). In the example above,
which is simplistic to be sure, the organizing principle is that there is a connection
between the color of the boxes and food. The monkey does not at first grasp that color is
a meaningful and relevant factor. During the constitution of a system, there are not yet
individual, empirical cases—in this example, the empirical cases are individual boxes
defined by their color and whether there is food or not. The organizing principle
determines the distinct possibilities that can occur in the system. In a sense the subject
can only experience fleeting sensations during the period in which the system is being
constituted.
In Proust & Signs, Deleuze takes up the phenomenon of wasted time. “We never
know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is by the intermediary of signs, by
wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content” (PS 22). When one
59 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, translated by Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Hereafter cited as PS followed by the page number.
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is learning something, like differential calculus or a language or philosophy, she may
have a period of time in which nothing appears to be occurring. It may seem that
learning is, in fact, not taking place. Deleuze’s interpretation is that this period of time is,
in fact, extremely important. This is the period of time before the system has opened up.
We can imagine that during this period the subject is struggling and things are not
“making sense.” The subject does not yet grasp the Idea-problem that provides the
context for any fact she has “learned.” This is a critical time since the Idea might not be
synthesized at all. Moreover, the length of this period of time cannot be predicted and
will vary from person to person. Deleuze describes the experience of teachers and how
the more serious problem with which students struggle is not making false or erroneous
judgments or statements but making nonsensical statements, mistaking banalities for
profundities, and posing problems badly. They are unable to distinguish the important
from the unimportant. These important points are the virtual events of a particular field,
for example the boiling point of a liquid (as opposed to the other ordinary points of
increasing temperature) or the point at which y approaches infinity (as opposed to the
ordinary points where x and y are mostly in a linear relation). The students have not yet
synthesized the Idea-problem and the system has not yet opened up. This can be
characterized as wasted time because it seems there is no movement forward. It appears
to be a time in which nothing is happening, that is to say, nothing productive. The new
system of experience can only open up through the engagement of the subject with an
other. Signs will be given off in this engagement but it cannot be predicted when and
which sign will lead to the synthesis of an Idea and, thereby, the opening up of the
system.
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In a sense the subject is not present when a new system of experience is opened up.
“‘Learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the
bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind” (DR 165). We can think of the
unconscious for Deleuze as the space where subjectivity will occur. We can also think of
the unconscious as the space in which the new system of experience opens up. (We must
be careful with the use of the word “space,” however, since a system opens up a space
that the empirical cases mark out, as we said earlier.) For this reason, a new system
cannot be opened up simply by learning some objective content, which can only be done
consciously. We could think here of someone who is an expert woodworker or an expert
swimmer. These two people might characterize their work as occurring “instinctively”
and without conscious decision on their part. For Deleuze, this is evidence that learning
truly occurs through the unconscious and that even knowledge is not abstract and
disconnected but occurs only within the engagement of the subject and the constituted
field. Knowledge only appears to be disconnected from the engagement because it is the
result. The subject cannot use the concepts it already possesses to learn this new system
since these concepts are not relevant. No concept it possesses could truly be applicable in
a field that is new. A system of experience can only open up insofar as the subject is
opened up as well. If we consider the monkey again, its paradoxical period must be an
unconscious one. We can associate the usage of concepts and recognition by means of
concepts with the conscious and, in a parallel way, associate what goes on prior to the
production of concepts with the unconscious. Thus, the subject, insofar as it is conscious,
will experience objects as always already ordered within the system. In other words, the
subject cannot point to some kind of progressive development of the system. The
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conscious subject arrives “late” on the scene, so to speak. It is clear that the subject
cannot simply make the choice to synthesize an Idea and open up a new system of
experience if, by choice, we mean conscious choice. Hence, for Deleuze encounters can
only occur by chance.
To be clear, a new system of experience may or may not open up upon the appearance
of a sign. If it does it occurs as the transcendental reorganization of experience. This
takes place through transcendental differentiation, spelled with a “t,” along the line of the
tension that was brought to the forefront by the sign. Transcendental differentiation
occurs in two manners. The first is a single disruption of the field of experience, which
does not happen gradually but all at once like a flash of lightning. To give an illustration,
the Idea of color introduces a single difference: that between what is colored and what is
indifferent to color. The second aspect of transcendental differentiation is the plurality
implied by the first, and is the differentiation of the elements relevant to that plurality.
Moreover, through their articulation, the elements are also brought into relation. For
Deleuze, color is not a concept as it is for Kant, since red, blue, and green cannot be
understood as types of colors but only as dimensions of color itself, or the way in which
color is a pluralization. The difference between what is colored and what is not remains,
and the pluralization of color occurs only within what is colored. By means of
transcendental differentiation, experience will become organized according to the
differences that erupt within it. The transcendental Idea includes the elements of the
difference and their relation. The elements of an Idea can also come into relation such
that intensive differences are formed. Transcendental differentiation, then, is the
development or occurrence of the Idea. Neither an Idea nor the intensive differences that
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may arise from it occurs empirically but instead opens up the systematic field of
empirical inquiry. In other words, the Idea leads to the production of a system consisting
of empirical cases. Thus transcendental differentiation cannot be known.
Deleuze places a premium on the activity of thinking since thinking is truly creative.
The question now is, what is thinking for him? It is not simply an application of a
concept that one already possesses. I have already said that that is merely recognition.
Nor is it the “assimilation of some objective content” (PS 22). Earlier I said that the
distinction between truth and meaning is important for Deleuze. We can say here that
thinking for Deleuze is not simply grasping truth, but, rather grasping the principle on
which meaning depends. To think is to grasp a problem or Idea, that is to say, to
synthesize a transcendental difference into a problem, and to grasp the meaning that
arises from the problem-Idea. The great thinkers are those who are sensitive enough to
see a difference that others do not, and who are able to synthesize it into a system.
Deleuze also associates thinking with posing questions because there is a connection
between problems and questions, he claims. There are certain questions that express the
Idea-problem but, in contrast to Plato, for example, these are never questions of essence.
In fact he claims that they are questions of the inessential. These questions can be asked
only by tracing back from cases to the pattern that accounts for their differences. The
questions would make it possible to grasp what brings certain empirical cases together.
Thus, to think is to be able to pose questions and to be able to distinguish the important
and interesting questions from those which are not. “More than anyone, however, Kant
wanted to apply the test of truth and falsehood to problems and questions” (DR 161). We
see that Deleuze believes that the ability to examine and judge problems, and not merely
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propositions, must be made the distinguishing feature of philosophy—something he
claims Kant attempted but was unable to do. We have seen that Deleuze contrasts error
with stupidity. For him, stupidity is a transcendental problem in that it is inherent to the
structure of thought itself. On the other hand, error occurs merely at the level of
recognition. Stupidity is the inability to see a relevant difference. It does not entail
making errors, but, rather, mistakes uninteresting problems for interesting or important
ones. It is to receive a sign and to be unable to grasp its significance and, thus, to be
unable to open up a system of experience. However, since stupidity is a structure of
thought, it has a positive sense too. When thought is taken to its transcendental limit, one
is unable to think, to see things meaningfully according to the concepts of the given
framework. Only at this point can something new be thought. Thus stupidity is a
necessary point—the point at which thinking can really begin. It therefore occupies an
ambivalent position for Deleuze.
If we return to the explanation of how experience occurs for the subject, we have said
that a new system of experience opens up through transcendental differentiation. Once
the system has opened up, the system itself is produced through the actualization or
explication of the Idea. Deleuze refers to this process as differenciation, spelled with a
“c.” Both logically and ontologically, transcendental differentiation (with a “t”) must
occur prior to differenciation (with a “c”). However, in regard to the order in which they
are experienced, they may seem practically indistinguishable. The Idea introduces an
inequality, which allows a system to be opened up. The creation of the system is like the
creation of a surface on which the inequality is stabilized or dispelled, while continuing
to exist underneath. The systematic field is experience as it is empirically found to be
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ordered according to the aspect brought to the forefront as the Idea. The transcendental
Idea forms a system of meaning and the empirical field expends itself through the
articulation of empirical differences, which are the incarnation of meaning. Therefore
empirical differences are different in kind from the transcendental difference and
articulate it on a new level. To return to our example of the Idea of color, we see objects
everywhere, each having one definite color, but nowhere do we see the event of
indifferent white separating itself out into the plurality of colors. In other words, we see
objects as already having color because our empirical experience is already
systematically ordered according to color. Empirical cases are only constituted as such
because of their relation to the system that provides them with meaning, and are united
through their relation to the Idea. Even though empirical cases express meaning, they can
never fully consume or exhaust it. In other words, the Idea qua meaning and source of
meaning remains distinct from what incarnates meaning. In fact it is essential that the
inequality of the Idea continues to exist since it is must continue to provide the force or
compulsion for each empirical case. A different example would be straight and curly
hair. We can note their virtual characteristics. These would be the result of the physico-
chemical composition, such as various proteins. The empirical characteristic of curly hair
is the result of particular chemical bonds that occur. That particular chemical bond is
always present as a possibility when those particular physico-chemical compounds occur.
In addition, the empirical characteristic of curly hair does not consume the virtual
characteristic. In fact that particular chemical bond must continue to be present—
otherwise the hair would become straight. The Idea continues to exist underneath, even
while empirical cases populate the surface.
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Once the system has been produced it can be developed and explored. Concepts occur
at this empirical level of the organization of experience, for they express the kinds of
empirical cases that occur and indicate their relation to the systematic field. Empirical
objects can be investigated and known on the basis of concepts.60 As with Kant, here,
too, empirical cases are the objects of recognition. Once there is a system there can occur
individuals that have a kind of coherence even if they are not fully understood. A system
allows for certain distinctions to occur, which demarcate individuals. For example, a
socio-political system can open up the space for certain political positions, even if they
have yet to be understood. Positions like x and y and the alliance between the
Evangelical Christians and the neo-conservatives are only possible within the system of
liberal democracy as it occurs in the United States in the twenty-first century, and are
meaningless outside of that system. In addition, the subjects of the system can interact
with the system. Those who are working within the system are not simply producing the
empirical cases that belong to the system, nor are these cases producing themselves. For
example, once the system of Newtonian space and time was opened up, it was developed
to its limit. Scientists work within that system, developing all of its implications. In a
way, this can appear to be the most productive stage since the principles of the system are
just carried forth and taken as far as they can be taken. However, it is really the opening
up of a system that is the creative moment for Deleuze.
The subject can, again, return to the mode of recognition. However, even though we
can speak of a system of experience that has already been developed, it does not mean the
60 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze famously describes philosophy as the creation of concepts, and this might seem incongruous with what I have said above. However, insofar as a new concept is created, it occurs within a new plane or system. Thus, a concept can be a point at which a new plane intersects with a previous. Creation, then, must still be understood primarily as the occurrence of a new plane or system.
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subject cannot still interrogate the problem-Idea and, in this way, revitalize the creative
moment. “Hence that form of writing which is nothing but the question ‘what is
writing?’, or that sensibility which is nothing but the question what is it to sense?’, or that
thought which asks ‘what does it mean to think?’. These give rise to the greatest
monotonies and the greatest weaknesses or a new-found common sense in the absence of
the genius of the Idea, but also to the most powerful ‘repetitions’, the most prodigious
inventions in the para-sense when the Idea emerges in all its violence” (DR 195). Thus
the true literary geniuses, for example, continue to ask the question ‘what is writing?’ in
creative ways, repeating in a creative way. There is no answer, that is to say, empirical
response or solution, that can complete the question once and for all, since the problem
always continues to rumble underneath. In contrast to the geniuses, the banal writers are
always stuck in the mode of recognition, only able to see things in the framework that is
already given. We can, again, relate this to the problem of stupidity. It is a kind of
stupidity to only see things in the mode of recognition and to fail to repeat the problem in
a profound way. However, we are prone to stupidity and to continue in the mode of
recognition out of a kind of inertia.
CONCLUSION
I have shown in his chapter how Deleuze accounts for the production of a system of
experience. Kant’s account of the possibility of empirical or individual cases was no
longer adequate after the limit of a system of experience had been transformed by
Deleuze. He argued that it was necessary to show how a system arises, which required
showing how the individual cases arise as well. The key is that there is a progressive
development of a system and the individual cases that belong to it. We saw in chapter 1
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that Deleuze criticizes Kant because he cannot show how intuition could come into
relation with the categories of the understanding. Since intuition makes possible the
spatiotemporality of objects and, hence, their individuality, this is essentially the problem
of whether the empirical cases can be said to belong necessarily to the system of
experience. In other words, Kant could not explain why the conditioned (the empirical
cases) agrees with the conditions for knowledge (the categories). However, Deleuze
avoids this problem by showing that empirical or individual cases are progressively
produced as the system develops. The opening up of a system occurs only as part of a
movement that leads to fully developed individuals. It is no longer a matter of
accounting for how we can know a set of empirical cases since there are no empirical
cases apart from the system to which they belong.
As we have seen, Deleuze uses the notion of intensity to explain how we go from the
Idea to the production of individuals. For Deleuze, intensity is a kind of difference in that
it is a kind of relation. With this notion, then, he furthers develop his idea that all identity
is secondary and arises from difference. Identity does not occur as a mediator in any
way. Not only does a system open up through difference (that is to say, transcendental
difference), but its development also occurs through a system of differences. The
individual has a kind of stability or identity, yet is still open to engagement with other
systems and, thus, to transformation. For Deleuze, only where there is difference can
creation and transformation occur, while identity denotes what is essentially settled,
predictable, and established. Thus anything with self-identity only occurs as the result of
the movement of difference. In a sense, then, identity is dead. However, the
transformative power of difference continues to exist within things. As a result, every
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individual is open to and can interact with everything else. Thus Deleuze’s world is one
in which a creative and transformative power exists within everything, underneath the
surface and, thus, creativity can occur within any situation and from any individual.
Hitherto I have been developing Deleuze’s metaphysical account of the opening up of
a system and the production of individuals within that system. However, all of this
occurs for a subject. It is essential to return to this perspective, for only the subject is
capable of thinking and doing philosophy. The subject cannot experience the opening up
of a system and the organization of experience that leads to discrete individuals or objects
and to the concepts by which they are known. Instead, it undergoes experiences of
distortion as a system is opened up and becomes organized. The subject can only
experience and know what has stability and an identity. It can only think and, hence,
grasp an Idea in retrospect. Thinking for Deleuze is a movement backward. Once the
system has been produced, experience occurs in essentially the same way as it does for
Kant: experience occurs as recognition. For Kant, of course, recognition is the exemplary
kind of experience, in regard to speculative knowledge. On the other hand, for Deleuze
the experience of recognition is the least interesting, being simply the end result of a
creative process. Indeed, the speculative areas of human experience, such as science,
must be regarded as creative processes in Deleuze, akin to art in many ways and not
merely the discovery of truth.
As I have said, the subject for Deleuze occurs within the opening up and production of
a system. Thus it does not initiate this creative process but takes part in it. We need to
examine what it means to say that there is no subject prior to the opening of a system. In
addition, the opening up of a system is a harrowing experience for the subject, and we
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need to see why this is the case. I said above that the subject cannot simply choose to
open up a new system. For Deleuze, free choice occurs secondarily, a point that will
need to be developed further in the next chapter. In sum, we have yet to understand the
way in which the subject participates in the opening and production of a system of
experience. This is the subject of chapter 4.
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CHAPTER 4
THE SUBJECT AND TIME
INTRODUCTION
In chapters 2 and 3 I have shown what experience is for Deleuze: experience occurs only
insofar as a new system of experience opens up. As long as there is no new system of
experience, the subject merely continues to recognize objects according to the framework
already known to it. For Kant, in contrast, anything new in experience must already be
accounted for within the subject’s framework. As I have said above, Deleuze claims that
real novelty is therefore not possible for Kant. A system can only be new if the subject is
transformed in and through the institution of the new system. Thus Deleuze’s account of
experience requires a subject that is open rather than closed off. In other words, his
account of experience cannot simply begin with the identity of the subject since the self-
identical subject, on which Kant’s account of experience was grounded, could not
withstand experience. In this chapter I will show how the subject is constituted (or
transformed) in the opening up of the system of experience, for Deleuze. In addition, the
subject must have some sort of identity, even if it is open, and this identity must be
shown to arise secondarily to its transformation or becoming.
We have already briefly examined the openness of the subject in Deleuze. In chapter
3, I said that for Deleuze, no subject can be completely closed off since every subject has
a zone of indetermination. It is from within this zone that new conditions of experience
can arise. In Kant, essentially, the subject is closed off because while it can come into
relation with objects (or individuals) that are external to it, this relation can only occur so
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long as it is consistent with the framework the subject possesses. In this chapter I will
show how the subject is opened up when a new system of experience arises.
Our development of Deleuze’s conception of the subject requires an explanation of the
relation between the subject and the object or, in other words, how the subject can know
objects. The Copernican-like revolution of the critical philosophy, that is to say, the
internal relation of subject and object, was possible for Kant only because he conceived
of the subject as passively receiving what is given to it in intuition. In other words, Kant
accounts for the internal relation by focusing entirely on the subject. For Deleuze, too, the
relation of subject and object is a necessary one. However, he argues for it in a different
way. He argues that the subject is produced along with the objects that it can know. He
sees himself as radicalizing the passivity of the subject that he finds in Kant. This
chapter will show the way in which the subject is passive for Deleuze, and how this
allows him to argue that the relation of the subject and object is necessary and internal. I
introduce the terms “capacity” and “interest” into Deleuze’s account of the subject.61 I
use the notion of “interest” to explain how the subject can be predisposed to the opening
up of a new system of experience, while I use “capacity” to explain how the subject
becomes capable of receiving objects that are given to it and, thus, to come into relation
with these objects. In going into further detail on Deleuze’s conception of the subject, we
will show the subject’s relation to its world and how this interaction is no longer what it
is in Kant.
61 I am giving an emphasis to the term “capacity” that is not found in Deleuze. Deleuze seems to use “capacity” in a negative sense only. I remain true to the way in which Deleuze uses the term, but I extend its use because it allows me to describe a particular aspect of the subject. The term “interest” is one Deleuze does not use, but that I am introducing. It seems to me Deleuze’s account requires an explanation of how a subject is predisposed to new encounters with other individuals, and thus to the opening of a new system of experience. I am using the term “interest” in order to do provide such an explanation.
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The notion of time is significant for Kant’s subject. In this chapter I will also show
how Deleuze criticizes Kant’s conception of time, and how his own conception develops
as a result of this criticism. In brief, for Kant experience is possible because it always is
the subject’s experience. Every representation of the subject must become part of the
inner state of the subject. Any change in the subject or in the experience of the subject is
brought about by conditions internal to the subject. This condition is time. As a result,
the subject can only know itself in time, and its identity is continually being forged in
time. Deleuze takes his cue from Kant and the discussion of time is as important for
understanding the identity of the subject in Deleuze as it is in Kant. However, the
subject’s relation to itself becomes transformed, just as the conception of time does. This
chapter will therefore show how the subject’s relation to itself is negotiated by Deleuze.
In addition, he must be understood as providing an account of the constitution of time,
whose existence Kant simply presumes. In Deleuze’s view, time and its passage are
produced spontaneously and passively by means of three syntheses, described in the
second chapter of Difference and Repetition, which is titled “Repetition for Itself.” The
first synthesis is the synthesis of the living present. The second is the synthesis of
memory or pure past. The third is the synthesis of the pure or empty form of time.
Deleuze places the greatest emphasis on the third synthesis. In the first and second
syntheses the ordinary subject maintains its identity. It is in the third synthesis that we
get the transformation of the subject. I will show how the subject undergoes this
transformation and why this transformation is essentially a temporal event for Deleuze.
Furthermore, for Deleuze the opening up of experience is also temporal. In other words,
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the third synthesis of time also gives us the opening up of a new system of experience.
Thus time comes to be independent of the subject in Deleuze.
1. DELEUZE'S CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN SUBJECT
Deleuze argues, once again, that there are philosophical problems with Kant’s
conception of the subject. Kant’s account of experience rests on his notion of the
transcendental subject. The pure forms of intuition and the categories are mapped onto
the transcendental subject. The transcendental subject, then, is the condition of
experience and, of course, also the condition of empirical subjectivity. The
transcendental subject belongs to no one in particular and, instead, conditions every
empirical subject. In the end the ultimate condition of experience is the unity of
apperception, which makes synthesis possible. The subject’s experience occurs as
synthesis insofar as every judgment made by the subject’s faculty of understanding is a
synthesis. Deleuze’s criticism is that Kant simply presupposed the unity of the
transcendental subject as the condition of experience, without giving an account of it.
This gives us another way in which Kant had not taken the critical philosophy far enough
in Deleuze’s view. Kant did not bring the unity of the subject into question. Thus
Deleuze views himself as rectifying this problem and taking the project of the critical
philosophy to its logical conclusion in regard to the subject. In addition, since Kant
simply presupposes the unity of the subject, the subject never truly changes. In contrast,
because the subject in Deleuze does not function as the ultimate condition of experience,
as the transcendental unity of apperception does in Kant, its relation to experience differs.
The subject genuinely changes and is transformed.
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In addition, Deleuze attends to the necessity of new experiences being integrated with
the subject, such that experience always occurs as my experience. This, too, is made
possible by the transcendental unity of apperception in Kant. The integration of the
subject occurs continually through inner intuition in that the subject is given to itself in
the form of time. Kant points to a paradox that arises from this: I cannot experience
myself as I am, only as I appear to myself. Insofar as the subject synthesizes experience,
it is active. However, insofar as the subject must receive something in intuition, it is
passive. The subject is both active and passive, and there is a question as to how these
come together. The subject cannot know itself insofar as it is active but only insofar as it
is given passively to itself in time. Deleuze focuses on this paradox, developing and
interpreting it in a novel way for his own project. His account of the integration of new
experience with the subject will differ markedly from Kant’s. Deleuze nonetheless
thought that Kant’s account of the subject was an innovation over that of Descartes. The
relation of Kant to Descartes is useful for highlighting the evolution of the conception of
the subject in going from rationalism to the critical philosophy. I will therefore begin
with Deleuze’s interpretation of Descartes.
2. THE CARTESIAN SUBJECT
Descartes provides a certain conception of the subject in order to explain experience.
Every act of thought (that is to say, every act of perception, imagination, doubt, etc.) must
be accompanied by self-consciousness. For him, self-consciousness always occurs along
with consciousness. Thus self-consciousness holds our experience together because it
occurs in every moment of experience. In each act of thinking I am also aware that I am
the one thinking. In fact, according to the Meditations, self-consciousness is the most
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certain thing we can know and thereby grounds the certainty of the rest of our knowledge.
For Descartes, self-consciousness occurs as an act, just like the act of perception, for
example. This is important in several ways.
First, there is no element of passivity in the subject for Descartes. We must actively
seek meaning because objects are not meaningful for us (in contrast to Kant, for whom
objects, simply insofar as they are objects, are meaningful). Second, change, or the
experience of something new, is brought about by what is external to the subject and to
experience (rather than in terms of conditions internal to experience, as for Kant). With
Descartes, change is registered as what is different in relation to or by comparison with
what is out there: or the essence of the thing apart from the subject. It does not first have
to be synthesized by the subject, which is to say, although it must be brought together
with what was the case previously, this only occurs secondarily. This takes us to the third
point: there is a gap between the subject and what is external to it. This idea of a gap will
be important in comparison to Kant, and equally takes us into a consideration of time.
Time in Descartes is understood as occurring or flowing externally to the subject.
Experience occurs from moment to moment. The subject occurs in time like an object.
Time is the measure of movement. As we have said, for Descartes, in thinking something
the subject also thereby thinks itself. We can conclude from this that the subject’s
relation to itself is one of immediacy and is not temporal. In other words, for Descartes, I
am fully present to myself. The formula ‘I think, therefore I am’ means that in the act of
being conscious of myself I know myself as I truly am. There is no aspect of myself to
which I do not have access. I fully enact what I am. In this sense, the gap is not within
the subject, but, rather, between the subject and what is external to it. The subject is a
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substance like any other (although, of course, it is thinking substance, not extended
substance).
For Descartes, then, I have an experience of the I with every thought I have, since the
I accompanies every thought. According to Kant, Descartes treated self-consciousness (or
the I) as an object of experience because it occurs within experience like any other object.
Descartes claimed he was describing what kind of object the subject is (it is a thinking
thing), whereas Kant says that we can only know that I am, not what I am. As a result,
Kant considered Descartes’ notion of self-consciousness to be merely empirical self-
consciousness.
3. THE KANTIAN SUBJECT
In Kant experience only occurs in the way it does because of the structure of the
subject. Anything that occurs in experience can be understood in terms of its conditions,
which belong to the transcendental structure of the subject. Thus, with Kant, the notion
of the subject is transformed. The subject is not a substance but the form of experience.
It is not a thing like other objects in experience but the condition of experience. Deleuze
finds it significant that there is an element of passivity in the subject in Kant. Experience
occurs in such a way that whatever appears in space and time is given to the empirical
subject as already meaningful. The term “already” is important here because it indicates
that the empirical subject is passive in relation to the structuring of experience. Whatever
the empirical subject encounters, it is as though the structuring of experience has already
occurred for it. Things are meaningful for us. In other words, it is not that there is a
meaningful world, simply in an objective sense, but that there is a meaningful world for
the subject as subject. The subject is divided between activity and passivity. The
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empirical subject can only passively receive what is given in space and time. In order to
know anything, there must be some content given in the form of space and time. Insofar
as experience is already organized for it, the subject is the empirical subject.
For Kant, time and space do not belong to objects but are, instead, forms of experience
and transcendentally subjective. Space is the form in which we intuit what is in external
relation to us, while time is the form in which we intuit what is given internally, that is to
say, the form in which our own representations are given to us. However, time is actually
the more universal form of intuition. “But since all representations, whether they have
for their objects outer things or not, belong, in themselves, as determinations of the mind,
to our inner state; and since this inner state stands under the formal condition of inner
intuition, and so belongs to time, time is an a priori condition of all appearances
whatsoever” (CPR A34/B50). In other words, in order for an object to be known to us,
its representation must become part of our inner state. In this way, every representation
will occur for the subject as a modification in the inner state, and can only be given in
time. The issue of time necessarily arises here because the subject can only represent
itself to itself in time. Kant lays out three syntheses of time to explain how
representations are brought into temporal relation. In the first, apprehension, a perception
is grasped in an instant. The second, reproduction, recreates former perceptions so that
they occur as a succession. Finally, in recognition, all of those perceptions are gathered
into a single representation. For Kant, each of these syntheses occurs in different
faculties: intuition, the imagination, and the understanding. These syntheses are used to
explain how we can have temporal representations. In other words, we can see how
something extended in space becomes a temporal representation for the subject. All
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representations necessarily appear in time and stand in time-relations. As a result of this,
the subject can itself be determined in time.
The subject is also active because it unifies or synthesizes what is given to it by means
of the categories of the understanding. The source of this activity is the transcendental
unity of apperception or transcendental self-consciousness. Kant talks about self-
consciousness in two ways. We have moments in which we experience the act of self-
reflection. Kant calls this empirical self-consciousness since it occurs in experience (that
is to say, in time). However, what is more significant is transcendental self-
consciousness. In the Transcendental Deduction (B) Kant lays out the argument that there
must be a transcendental unity of apperception or pure self-consciousness that is the
ground of the unity of the subject. This pure apperception generates the representation ‘I
think,’ which is capable of accompanying all other representations. Apperception is an
act of pure spontaneity. All representations can be seen as belonging to a single self-
consciousness because they are accompanied by the representation ‘I think.’ Experience
is only possible if it is continually unified and taken as belonging to a unified self.
Transcendental self-consciousness binds our experience together and unites it. Thus
transcendental apperception must be atemporal and pure unity since time occurs as
diversity. It is a condition of experience, and therefore cannot be an object of experience.
Kant argues that Descartes only considered self-consciousness in the empirical sense and
used this notion to unify our experience.
Because the subject is both active and passive in Kant we speak of it in two ways, as
transcendental and empirical subject, or as I and self. Deleuze’s discussions of Kant
frequently use the French Je and moi in this way, to connote the active and passive
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aspects of the subject. He argues that the subject in Kant is divided within itself. Kant
himself notes that its self-relation is a paradoxical one in §24 of Transcendental
Deduction (B): “This is a suitable place for explaining the paradox which must have been
obvious to everyone in our exposition of the form of inner sense (§6): namely, that this
sense represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves,
not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected, and
this would seem to be contradictory, since we should then have to be in a passive relation
[of active affection] to ourselves” (CPR B153). The empirical subject cannot know itself
as active and atemporal, that is to say, as transcendental subject, because this activity
cannot be given to it in time. The subject can only know itself as phenomenon or
appearance. On this point Deleuze says that the passive, empirical subject can only
represent the activity of the transcendental subject rather than enact it, and that it lives it
like an other within itself (DR 87). The subject appears to itself as passive. The point is
that the subject’s relation to itself cannot be one of immediacy as it is in Descartes. In
other words, in Descartes, this relation is instantaneous, so to speak, or, more precisely,
outside of time. On the other hand, in Kant, the subject is divided from itself in time.
The two aspects of the subject do, indeed, come into relation to form a single subject
through the synthesizing activity of the I and because the changing inner state of the
empirical subject is the content of that synthesis. However, in Kant this relation is
delayed or is temporal. Kant has Descartes in mind when he says that we can only know
that we are, not what we are (CPR B157). In other words, we can form a concept of
ourselves but no content can be given to us through intuition. We cannot be fully present
to ourselves.
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This point is critical for Deleuze: that the subject in Kant is divided from itself but is
yet one subject. “Time signifies a fault or fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and
the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of
the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution” (DR 86). Since the
subject must passively intuit what is given, the subject’s experience becomes
circumscribed by its own activity. The correlation between the subject’s passivity and
activity ensures its necessary relation with its objects of knowledge. It gives the subject’s
knowledge necessity. The world as it appears passively to the empirical subject will
necessarily be organized. Deleuze also speaks of this correlation as a kind of identity,
more specifically as a synthetic identity rather than an analytic identity. “Specifically,
what founds the identity of things that are though is the identity of the thinking
subject…Thus the first principle is not that A is A, but that ego equals ego…It is a
synthetic identity because ego equals ego marks the identity of the ego that thinks itself
as the condition of all that appears in space and time, and the ego that appears in space
and time itself” (Seminar on Leibniz, 20/05/1980, 12). Deleuze claims that it is Kant’s
conception of the subject’s relation to itself, the fact that it is not immediate but occurs as
a gap, that allows Kant to argue that the object must submit to the subject, that the faculty
of knowledge in the subject is legislative. In this way, the relation of subject and object
is a necessary one. In Deleuze, too, the relation is a necessary one, but he accounts for it
in another way.
We have said that in Descartes there is a gap between the subject and what is external
to it. In Kant the gap becomes interiorized within the subject because any change that the
subject experiences will not be in relation to some kind of essence of the object (to the
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thing-in-itself), but, rather, in relation to the categories by which the subject organizes
experience. In Kant change can only occur by way of the subject’s relation to itself.
Change is brought about by conditions internal to the subject because something must be
given to the subject in the forms of space and time. Since these forms belong to the
subject, a new experience is really a change in the subject. Any change or any new
experience occurs as the subject’s relation to itself because the conditions by which
something is given is internal to the subject (the receptivity of the subject) and the
condition by which it is synthesized and experienced (the activity of the I) is also internal.
We could equally say that the gap is between what is unsynthesized and what is
synthesized: the subject insofar as it is constituting what is given as something new, the
transcendental subject, and the one seeing it as change, the empirical subject. Something
must simply be given to the subject before it can be synthesized by the subject. The two
moments are both internal to the subject. Since change can only occur as the subject’s
relation to itself, in the subject knowing itself there is a gap or delay in the subject.
Deleuze therefore says that, with Kant, time becomes internal to the subject. The
subject experiences things as always already organized and, therefore, the ordering of
experience occurs outside of time. In other words, the unity of transcendental self-
consciousness and the categories occur outside of time. However, since these are
transcendental conditions, it is not some time in the past that experience was organized.
In fact, we can distinguish between past, present, and future only because experience is
already organized according to those categories. Deleuze says that our experience occurs
in splitting into past, present, and future, but the I is constantly carrying out a synthesis of
time. “‘Form of interiority’ means not only that time is internal to us, but that our
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interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which
never runs its course, since time has no end” (KCP ix). However, since the
transcendental conditions in Kant are a priori, that is to say, are prior to experience, they
remain “before” experience in an absolute way. For Deleuze, this will become more
ambiguous. Therefore, even though Deleuze expresses his appreciation in Kant’s
Critical Philosophy for the notion that time is internal to the subject, he does not think
Kant goes far enough.
As we have seen, in Kant change can only occur as the subject’s relation to itself and,
for this reason, there is a gap or delay in the subject. However, in the end Deleuze will
argue that in fact there can be no genuine change or new experience for Kant since
nothing that is beyond the parameters of the categories can be given to the subject. For
this reason, the gap in the Kantian subject cannot be a true gap. To be sure, the
transcendental I of apperception and the empirical subject occur as separate moments.
However, since transcendental conditions correspond exactly with the empirical for Kant,
the subject’s relation to itself or, in other words, the identity of the subject always
remains the same. Whenever experience occurs what is given simply aligns itself with or
merely falls under these conditions since these conditions are simply presupposed as the
structure of the subject. Kant limits in advance what can be given to the subject. There is
no possibility for anything to be given that falls outside of the parameters of those
conditions. The subject, insofar as it is the subject, is self-identical and organizes the
world in only one particular way.
Deleuze finds the discovery of passivity important but will take it further. In Kant, of
course, we are organizing our own experience–it is simply that we cannot know ourselves
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insofar as we are organizing it. It appears to the subject that something else is the source
of the organization. In other words, it is only the empirical subject that is passive, not the
transcendental subject. Deleuze will argue, in contrast, that the subject is not organizing
experience at all. In other words, he criticizes Kant for making the synthetic activity of
the unity of apperception the ground of experience. Deleuze’s point is that this unity
must be presupposed in order for Kant’s account of experience to function. His own
account explains how unity and activity arise from an original passivity. For him, there is
no need for an original unity in order for synthesis to occur.
4. THE SUBJECT IN DELEUZE
Deleuze’s project, like Kant’s, is concerned with the idea of transcendental
conditioning. As I showed in chapter 3, Deleuze transforms the notion of the
transcendental into the virtual. The reason for this is that the conditions of experience,
for Deleuze, are a priori but not outside of experience. They cannot be experienced
because they always occur in the state of being covered over. He argues for
transcendental or virtual events that belong to no one subject or object in particular. In
this way, his transcendental events parallel Kant’s transcendental subject, which belongs
to no particular empirical subject. Like Kant’s transcendental subject, the virtual events
are outside of time. However, Deleuze argues that the conditions of experience do not
belong to the subject either, as they do in Kant. Thus there is no transcendental subject in
Deleuze. Instead, the conditions of experience give rise to both the object and the
subject. (In Kant the conditions of experience give rise to the object only.) This leads
Deleuze to the interesting conclusion that the conditions have a kind of independent
existence. Only in this way can Deleuze avoid attributing the conditions to the subject.
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For Deleuze, the unity of the subject occurs secondarily in that it arises from a more
fundamental movement. This can be illustrated by comparison with the boiling point of
water. The boiling point is a virtual event or condition for all individual things that are
physical. It is fully real and is always a defining characteristic whether a particular pot of
water is taken to its boiling point or not. This virtual event becomes actualized when the
pot of water is heated to the appropriate degree. A virtual condition or event only
becomes actual insofar as a particular individual undergoes that event. These virtual
events, then, occur prior to any actual individual: they are prior in the same way that
transcendental conditions are prior to the empirical, in Kant. To return to the human
subject, for Deleuze, the point at which one breaks down in tears, the point at which one
is surprised, the point at which one feels unsure of herself, and so on are virtual events
that are prior to any actual human individual, and they are fully real even when they have
not been actualized.
In chapter 3 we said that the opening up of experience begins only with the sign. The
sign can only be sensed, so it occurs within empirical experience for the subject. The
sign is only properly grasped insofar as it is not recognized. The fact that the subject
cannot recognize the sign, that is to say, cannot subsume what it senses under already
existing concepts, indicates that the transcendental and empirical are not in
correspondence. At this point, new conditions of experience arise. There is no subject in
regard to those particular conditions. In other words, the subject is ruptured or opened up
at the point where the new conditions arise. A subject is constituted only where there is
an organization of experience, where experience occurs, and, in this way, the subject
occurs only in its relation to a particular system of experience. What we consider to be
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the human subject in the ordinary sense occurs in relation to a number of systems or
planes of experience. Therefore its experience can be transformed in a number of ways.
Regardless of the direction in which experience occurs, the subject is genuinely
transformed. To be clear, the subject is not transformed in relation to the systems that are
unaffected (or minimally affected) by the new conditions.
As we said earlier, the subject is not genuinely transformed in Kant, so the subject
maintains its identity. Kant explains that the subject’s relation to itself occurs through
time. Since the subject is transformed in Deleuze, the subject’s relation to itself becomes
more complex. This relation must constantly be negotiated since transcendental
conditions do not always correspond to the empirical. The subject’s relation to itself is
always in the process of occurring and is never complete. Since the subject is never
identical to itself, Deleuze says the subject is always fractured. Transcendental
conditions are outside of time, yet a subject’s experience is always temporal. The
subject’s relation to itself is vitally important because the subject must be able to have
new experiences that can then be said to belong to the subject. I will discuss Deleuze’s
conception of time and its relation to the subject in section 6 below. Since he criticizes
Kant for explaining the subject’s relation to itself by the transcendental unity of
apperception, he must account for it in another way. In the end all unity for Deleuze
arises passively. In what follows, I discuss the passivity of Deleuze’s subject and how
unity is secondary to a more fundamental difference that it arises from.
5. THE PASSIVITY OF THE DELEUZIAN SUBJECT
Deleuze is interested in the idea of passivity in Kant’s notion of the empirical subject.
Unlike Kant, for him it is not simply that the subject does not know itself insofar as it
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organizes experience, but that it does not in fact organize experience at all. The reason is
that the conditions of experience do not belong to the subject. As a result, Deleuze sees
himself as taking the idea of passivity beyond that in Kant. The subject can only be active
in relation to a field of experience once the latter has been opened up for it, so the subject
as agent is grounded in passivity. Deleuze therefore attempts to account for how the
subject is passively constituted in the opening up of experience. For him, the subject is
not divided between passivity and activity. In other words, the play between passivity
and activity does not occur within the subject as it does in Kant. Instead, this play occurs
between the subject and what is external to it. The subject is opened up in and through
that play.
To understand Deleuze’s view on the passivity of the subject it is important to note
that he distinguishes between passivity and receptivity. In fact Deleuze criticizes Kant
for defining the empirical subject or passive subject by its receptivity. “On the contrary,
we have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for experiencing affections, was
only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a
synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation-contraction). The possibility of receiving
sensations or impressions follows from this” (DR 87).62 “Contemplation” and
“contraction” are used synonymously with “synthesis” here. Deleuze’s point is that we
must explain what makes receptivity possible, which Kant did not do, and that it cannot
simply be presumed. Deleuze argues that it is passive synthesis that makes receptivity
possible. The problem with Kant’s account, he says, is that Kant interpreted passivity as
62 Deleuze uses “capacity” in a negative sense only, in order to say that we cannot begin by presuming the subject has a capacity for receiving sensation, for example, but must first explain how that capacity arises. Thus, I extend the use of the term. Since the subject must be able to receive the objects that belong to any particular system, there must a new capacity in the subject that is opened up when a new system is opened up for the subject.
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mere receptivity without synthesis (DR 87). In other words, Deleuze is arguing that
receptivity presupposes synthesis. To receive what is given in space and time, for
example, Deleuze argues that there must first be a synthesis of time and of space.
However, Kant argued that all synthesis occurred actively, while only receptivity could
be passive. Deleuze’s point is that synthesis occurs passively first of all. Passive
syntheses are transcendental, to use Kantian language, or, in other words, are sub-
representative (DR 84). They are the conditions of representation. If we consider space
and time, only once these have been synthesized for the subject can something be given
in space and time—an object occupying a certain amount of space and occurring at a
particular time. There are also active syntheses for Deleuze, for which the subject is the
agent. For example, we might actively remember something from our past. However,
these active syntheses are always grounded in passive ones and occur only at the
empirical level or the level of representation. We can actively recall something only
because the past and memory has already been passively synthesized for us.
When passive synthesis occurs, a field of experience is opened up in the subject. This
is a new “capacity” of the subject. A capacity can therefore be understood as that which
corresponds in the subject to a system or plane of experience. This is not a term Deleuze
uses often, but it seems important to me for articulating this issue. “The passive self is
not defined simply by receptivity – that is, by means of the capacity to experience
sensations – but by virtue of the contractile contemplation which constitutes the organism
itself before it constitutes the sensations” (DR 78). Although Deleuze is using the term
capacity in a critical sense, we can see that the capacity must be produced first, before
any sensations belonging to that capacity can be received. The self or subject is the
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capacity or synthesis or contraction. As we said above, the subject is constituted
passively. In other words, the subject of a particular system of experience is constituted
by the opening up of the system, and it is the subject in terms of a particular capacity.
Deleuze uses the example of sight. The eye deals with the problem of light. Through the
eye the entire system of sight occurs as a capacity for a larger subject, like an animal or
human. Only after the capacity for sight has been constituted can we receive sensations
within it or, in other words, only then can we see things.
We can develop this notion of capacity by examining Kant in a positive way. To
recall, we said that Deleuze takes the notion of passivity from Kant, so we may examine
what Deleuze thought Kant accomplished with the notion. Kant argued that we cannot
know anything in itself but only how it affects us. The subject is necessarily passive
insofar as an object affects it. Deleuze retains the idea that we can only know how
something affects us. (In Descartes, since there is no distinction between what something
is in itself and how it affects or appears to the subject, there is no element of passivity.)
We can be active and can know something only insofar as something is given that is
knowable–we must consider how it appears for us or, in other words, the conditions
under which the object appears. These conditions delimit an area or field. However, this
area or field only occurs in relation to the passivity of the subject. Deleuze’s point is that
the subject can only be active in relation to this field that was first constituted passively.
In other words, the determinations we actively make about objects have relevance in this
field only insofar as a sphere has been circumscribed. Outside of their framework
determinations are meaningless (and, for this reason, cannot occur outside of their
framework). Therefore a capacity occurs only in relation to the passivity of the subject.
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The way in which the subject is passive indicates the field in which it has a capacity. It
also indicates the kind of object that arises in the field.
In the end, Kant grounds knowledge in the synthetic activity of transcendental
apperception, which unifies the system or capacity, to use Deleuze’s term. Being able to
actively make determinations about objects is therefore grounded in transcendental
apperception. For Kant, unity must precede any synthesis, for synthesis is not possible
without prior unity. As we have said, Deleuze rethinks the notion of synthesis so that it
occurs passively first of all, rather than actively, as in Kant. No prior unity is needed for
synthesis since synthesis occurs spontaneously. It is a kind of self-gathering. For
Deleuze, then, the activity of the subject is grounded in passivity in that it is a
consequence of a more fundamental passive synthesis. This allows Deleuze to argue that
unity is not the ultimate condition of experience and of the subject, but, rather, unity
arises from difference or, in other words, from the movement of synthesizing. I have
shown how a capacity arises passively for Deleuze, without unity as its condition. As we
said above, the constitution of a capacity is the constitution of a subject. In addition,
Deleuze extends this so that there are multiple capacities and systems of experience. The
reason he prefers the term “plane” to “system” is precisely because they are open in the
sense that they intersect and can therefore interact with each other. In contrast, the
system in Kant is closed. This means, of course, that for Deleuze there are subjects
occurring within subjects. In fact, Deleuze says that wherever there is a contraction there
is a subject, albeit a larval subject. He would say that the human being consists of many
subjects even though there is mostly a single one that overarches these.
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What really defines an individual (whether it is an animal, an inanimate object, or a
human) is the way in which it can be affected, or what it can be sensitive to, and what its
capacities are. Without a particular capacity, it remains indifferent to things in that
particular regard. Therefore a new capacity is a new way of responding or interacting
with things external to it, of interacting with the world. A new kind of difference
becomes important and the capacity is the ability to synthesize it and to exploit it, to use
the difference for oneself (or synthesize it with oneself, which, in any case, is always
implied by the idea of synthesis). Only if the difference is synthesized can it be opened
up as a system. In other words, the difference has to become important for a subject, who
is compelled to respond because its previous responses were inadequate. Things come to
a critical point for the subject such that the difference needs to be synthesized. In this
sense, this particular system or world belongs to the subject or, more accurately, its
synthesis as a world is the subject. “The self does not undergo modification, it is itself a
modification – this term designating precisely the difference drawn” (DR 79). The
object, which forcibly encounters the subject, is the occasion for the new kind of
difference of the world to present itself. This encounter forces the subject to become
sensitive to external things in its world in a new way. An object, which is by definition at
a stable point, hides its virtual characteristics or differences around which it is organized.
When the object is destabilized its virtual characteristics come to the forefront. However,
it can only be destabilized when it comes into relation with something else. The object
gives off signs which arise from the virtual differences that are part of it, and these signs
force us to respond. We can even learn about the virtual differences through our
confrontation with an object. In any case, a transformation results from the
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confrontation. The transformation is always relational, occurring between two poles or
elements: first, the capacity that is opened up for the subject and, second, the difference
that comes to be synthesized into a system. For example, a human is not affected by the
same range of sound as a dog is. Since humans are incapable of responding to that
particular range of sound, that range is unimportant, in a certain sense, for humans. In
other words, humans do not “inhabit” the same world as dogs in regard to sound. In
addition, subjects produce organs of particular modifications or capacities: ears, eyes,
nose. A self is the drawing of many differences. A new system is opened up when a new
way of being sensitive or a new capacity is produced. The subject inhabits that world by
developing a complex range of responses. For example, visual art is a way of inhabiting
the world of sight, for the human subject, while music is a way of inhabiting the world of
sound. However, human speech is another way of inhabiting the world of sound.
I have said in earlier chapters that for Deleuze we only think when we are forced to
think, that is to say, when we encounter another individual, whether that individual is a
person or an inanimate object, which forces us to think. However, we must be able to
explain what makes it possible for the subject to even be open to such an encounter.
Such an explanation is not given by Deleuze, but the one I offer here is consistent with
Deleuze’s theory of experience. Obviously the subject must be able to be sensitive in
certain ways, otherwise it would not even register the encounter with the other. A
capacity and a system of experience are only opened up in relation to an interest of the
subject. “Interest” is not a term Deleuze uses, but it seems to me to express this issue
well. The interest provides the means by which an Idea is selected. We only go into a
situation or an encounter with another out of a need or interest (not out of disinterested
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inquiry or a pure love of knowledge). In other words, the subject must have something at
stake or something to gain from the encounter. This interest, of course, arises from a
system of experience that is already in place for the subject. To be clear, an interest does
not occur consciously. The subject’s interest arises through virtual points within an
already existing system. The term “interest” reflects the fact that every individual is able
to encounter another via openings or fractures within an already existing system that is
part of that individual’s constitution. (We must recall that a new system can only be
opened up when two or more elements come into relation.) We can consider the example
of swimming. We only learn to swim, Deleuze says, when we are forced to engage with
the water (DR 23, 165). We do not learn by watching the movements of the instructor
while standing on the sand without getting in the water. The system of swimming is only
possible because a human being has certain physical characteristics or virtual points (a
certain mass to area ratio which allows for buoyancy, spatial arrangement of arms and
legs, etc.) that make it possible for a person to engage with water. These characteristics
are insignificant until the occasion arises in which we must come into relation with
something with which we can become engaged. In addition, we only come to know
which characteristics are relevant retrospectively, when they come into relation with the
virtual points of the other element (water, in our example). We must recall that an Idea
for Deleuze is a problem around which a system of experience becomes organized. The
Idea of swimming, therefore, includes the relevant virtual characteristics of water and of
what is necessary for a particular individual to be a swimmer. Interest, then, simply
refers to the virtual characteristics that are available to come into play when one entity
encounters another. Even though the new system can only arise in relation to previously
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existing systems, it occurs as something genuinely new. We cannot know in advance
which characteristics or virtual points will become important. In fact we cannot even
recognize something as a virtual point until the individual to which it belongs comes into
relation with another individual.
We can now note how the notions of interest and capacity relate to the notion of
perspective discussed above in chapter 3. An individual arises only insofar as it has a
perspective on a particular system. Perspective indicates the way in which the world is
available to the subject. In other words, there is a world only in relation to an interest or
perspective, and there is no world that simply exists independently of that. The interest
or point of view arises only by selection, which is partial in principle. What is important
to note here is that a subject’s perspective arises passively.
Since a capacity occurs only in relation to the way in which the subject is passive, a
plane of experience or an organized system only occurs in relation to a subject’s
constitution and the way in which it is structured. Its particular capacity (or capacities)
allows the subject to know a particular kind of object. It is the subject’s passivity that
ensures that the relation between it and the object is a necessary one. A particular kind of
object can be known in a particular way because only that kind of object can appear
within that particular framework. This parallels Kant’s idea of the necessary submission
of object to subject. For Kant, we can only know objects of possible experience. There
is only a single framework, which forms all of possible experience. On the other hand,
Deleuze extends this idea so that the relation of the objects of a particular plane of
experience with the subject of that plane is a necessary one. This holds true of each plane
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or system of experience. As we said before, the relation between the planes is not an
additive one.
I said in chapter 1 that Deleuze admired the Kantian critical philosophy for its
legislative quality. Since Deleuze claims that he is retaining this quality in his own work,
we must see how philosophy is legislative for Deleuze. In fact, his conception of
philosophy must be able to overcome the problem that the critical philosophy faced: that
of falling under the sway of a totalizing force, which was reason in this case. Deleuze
might argue that we can only know what we are capable of knowing. If, indeed, we are
capable of knowing something (a particular object, for example), the system of
experience to which that object belongs will have already opened up for us. If the system
to which the object belongs has not opened up, we are not capable of knowing that object.
However, within each particular sphere or plane, the subject is the legislator in that the
subject gives the laws by which things can be known. Of course we are not legislators in
that we consciously issue laws, but neither are we subject to laws beyond ourselves, like
that of Nature or of God. In other words, there is no abstract God’s-eye point of view
from which to judge which objects can be known. In fact, there is no view that does not
occur from within a particular system. Here again, we should recall that every subject is
a perspective, for Deleuze. It is our ability to grasp the capacity and system within which
we know objects that allows us to critically evaluate the capacity itself, and not merely
the object. It is in this sense that we can understand not only truth (whether we grasp the
objects correctly) but meaning as well, which is the ground of truth (the capacity or
system itself). Provided that it can grasp the conditions or structure of the system of
which it is the subject, the subject is master of the system in which it occurs. To be sure,
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the subject is not master in the sense that it determines what objects can occur. However,
it is the subject’s constitution or structure that legislates. As a result, the subject can then
also know what makes its determinations meaningful rather than resorting to the idea of
an all-powerful being to justify or guarantee its determinations.
6. THE DELEUZIAN SUBJECT AND TIME
There is an essential relation between the subject and time. We have said that Kant
claims that the subject comes into relation with itself only in the form of time. Thus the
issue of time arises because it allows Kant to account for the self-identity of the subject.
However, the key is that for Kant the unity of the I is the ground of the subject’s identity,
whereas Deleuze argues that we can only begin with the multiplicity of experience.
Deleuze must then show how the subject (the I) arises from this. For Kant, it is a
condition of experience that the experience belongs to the subject or, in other words, is
mine. In contrast, for Deleuze, experience occurs first and then afterward it becomes
mine. There is a temporal aspect to Deleuze’s account in regard to what occurs first and
what occurs afterward. Just as Kant explained the subject’s relation to itself (its identity)
in terms of time, Deleuze too believes this can only be explained in terms of time.
However, time is not subjective for Deleuze. He explains this by saying that experience
itself occurs in the form of time. When the subject comes into relation with itself or, in
other words, becomes identical with itself, it means that a particular system of experience
has been produced and that the subject of that system has been produced. As a result, the
discussion of time is relevant both to the discussion of a system of experience and to the
discussion of the subject of that system.
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For Deleuze, new conditions of experience arise only when the subject comes into
relation with something external to it. Change cannot come from within the subject
alone. This is in contrast with Kant, for whom the conditions of experience belong to the
transcendental subject. Thus change could only arise from within the subject. In
addition, there could be no new conditions of experience for Kant. For Deleuze, in the
event of the opening up of a system of experience, the new conditions of experience
produce both the system and the subject of that system. In this sense, then, the conditions
are also internal to the new subject that has been produced. A new system can only open
up because there is a fracture or gap in the subject. This gap is constituted between the
time when the subject grasps the sign that exceeds its empirical experience—at this point,
the subject is ruptured—and the time when the new system of experience has been
produced and the subject can recognize discrete objects with this system. The subject
must come into relation with itself, and this can only occur in the form of time—the
relation of what went on before the new conditions arose and after the new system was
produced. The subject is in relation with itself precisely at the point at which the new
system of experience has been completely produced. In this way, the subject is the
drawing of a difference, the difference between the way in which experience was ordered
before and how it is ordered after.
We can now examine how Deleuze gives his account of time in terms of three
syntheses. In order to understand the first synthesis, we must see that each system of
experience has its own order of empirical time. The objects or cases that belong to that
system occur in that empirical order of time. In other words, objects can only be said to
be past, present, or future in relation to one another within the context of a particular
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system of experience. The subject that belongs to that system and that thinks empirically
also functions according to that empirical order of time. The present moment of
empirical time for a system and for the subject of that system is the same and is
constituted in the first synthesis of time.
The second synthesis of time explains why empirical time might appear to have no
beginning. Once a system of experience has been produced, it appears to have always
already been in place. This temporal characteristic, “always already”, is due to the
second synthesis of time. For example, once the system of color has been produced, it
appears that objects have always already been distinguishable by color. The second
synthesis of time provides the pure or absolute past. The system of color does not have a
beginning in the sense that an empirical event like a battle has a beginning. Instead, it
has a beginning in the sense that it is the institution of an empirical order of time in which
there is a passage of empirical time.
However, the empirical order of any system of experience has a beginning, according
to Deleuze. The empirical order of time is instituted through transcendental time. It is
this transcendental time that Deleuze explains as the third synthesis of time. The third
synthesis gives us the difference between the time before a particular system of
experience opened up and the time after it has opened up. The new system has its own
empirical flow of time. As I have said previously, Deleuze argues that genuine change
only occurs in the opening up of a new system of experience. When we examine this in
terms of time, we can see that change only occurs in the form of time. Thus the third
synthesis of time gives us the form in which a new system opens up. In other words, it
accounts for the production of the subject of a new order of experience and hence a new
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order of empirical time. I will now give a more developed account of each of the three
syntheses of time.
Deleuze says that the account of time must begin with the synthesis of the present
because it is the foundation of time. “It is not that the present is a dimension of time: the
present alone exists” (DR 76). Deleuze’s first synthesis of time is essentially taken from
Hume’s argument that the connection of elements in space and time is due to the
association of ideas. I rely on Keith Faulkner’s explanation of the first and second
synthesis.63 According to Deleuze: “A succession of instants does not constitute time any
more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of
birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition
of instants” (DR 71). Deleuze’s point here is that we have learned from Hume that the
relation between instants or elements is not internal and necessary to the elements
themselves, but only emerges afterwards from their association by the mind. Therefore
the passage of instants does not by itself give us the passage of time. The first instant
must be retained and the second instant must occur in relation to the first, thereby
producing a change in relation to the first. Insofar as the first instant is retained, there
must be a mind or subject in which the change is produced, or which draws a difference.
Deleuze also calls this first synthesis the synthesis of “habit” because it gives rise to the
expectation that what is to come, the future, will be like what we have already
63 In his book Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2006) Keith Faulkner argues that Deleuze’s account of the three syntheses must be understood first of all as an attempt to rethink Kant’s three syntheses, apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Kant uses these syntheses to show how we can have temporal representations. In Kant these syntheses occur as the activity of two faculties, the imagination and understanding. Faulkner argues that Deleuze offers his alternative of syntheses that occur passively. Faulkner proposes that we must understand Deleuze’s account primarily through the use he makes of Freud and, therefore, gives a reading of Deleuze’s account of time by working through the concepts Deleuze takes from Freud and the ways in which he makes use of them.
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experienced. In other words, this synthesis explains what, essentially, habit, on which we
rely so much in ordinary life, is. We can also think of the close connection between
recognition and habit. Objects must simply be recognized as the “same” in order to have
a habitual relation with them. According to Faulkner, when we contract a habit, we go
beyond the given.64 When we see something happen over and over–for example, the
rising of the sun, we transcend what is given by expecting the future occurrence. We
expect the sun to rise tomorrow. It is the anticipation as such that is the futural
dimension, and what is anticipated is that this case, or contraction, will continue (DR 72).
In addition, the mind can postulate a continuous pattern of risings through time. As
Faulkner explains, this must be considered a second order impression, which goes beyond
sensation. The duration of time we experience is because of these second order
impressions.65 Therefore not only is the living present constituted by the first synthesis,
but the past and future are also constituted as two asymmetrical dimensions of that
present. “To it [the present] belong both the past and the future: the past in so far as the
preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is
anticipated in this same contraction” (DR 70-71). It is here, in the empirical present, that
we find the empirical subject, the subject of recognition. In Kantian language we can say
that the first synthesis gives us the present moment in the empirical sense, or the
connection of actual cases. It gives us the continuity of the actual or empirical. Deleuze
goes on to argue that the first synthesis cannot stand alone and requires something else to
ground it.
64 Ibid., p. 10. 65 Ibid., p. 10.
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He turns to Bergson for his account of the second synthesis of time, which he also
calls the synthesis of the pure past or of memory. Bergson’s criticism of Hume was that
the association of ideas is unable to account for memory. Our experience does not occur
only as present but also as the relation of past and present. (It must be kept in mind that
when Deleuze uses the term “past” in relation to the second synthesis, he means it in a
transcendental sense. He sometimes uses the term “pure past” to emphasize that he is not
using the term “past” in the ordinary sense.) A need in the present calls forth memory.
Faulkner emphasizes Bergson’s statement that “it is from the present that the appeal to
which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensory-motor elements of present
action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.”66 We always evaluate our
present experience in light of our memory. According to Faulkner, the encounter with
the sign, with the sensation that we do not recognize, makes the second synthesis of time
conspicuous. In such an encounter, something present is unrecognizable because it fails
to resemble the past. The encounter forces us to do something, to think and act, and
thereby results in the modification of both the past and the present. Not only can the
present be modified based on the past, or memory, but memory can be modified or
reinterpreted based on the present as well. The past must have a flexible nature since it
changes. Memories must be able to be created and recreated. Therefore the encounter
with the sign is possible only because the past as a whole must coexist with the present.
“Whereas the passive synthesis of habit constitutes the living present in time and makes
the past and the future two asymmetrical elements of that present, the passive synthesis of
memory constitutes the pure past in time, and makes the former and the present present
(thus the present in reproduction and the future in reflection) two asymmetrical elements 66 Ibid., p. 11.
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of this past as such” (DR 81). By former present Deleuze means the past, of course, or
the present moment that is no longer present, while the present present is the present
moment that is still the present (and has not yet become past). Deleuze’s point is that the
second synthesis occurs as the negotiation of the past and present. “The transcendental
passive synthesis bears upon this pure past from the triple point of view of
contemporaneity, coexistence and pre-existence” (DR 82). Briefly, Deleuze’s argument
is that each present moment must be contemporaneous with the past it was. In addition,
all of the past must coexist with the new present. Finally, the pure element of the past in
general must pre-exist the passing present (DR 81-2). In his account of the second
synthesis of time, Deleuze is concerned to develop in some detail exactly how the
relation between past and present occurs. However, I am only concerned here with the
general point that the second synthesis gives us not only the pure past but also the
conjoining of elements from different dimensions, past and present.
We recall that the synthesis of the present is grounded in the second synthesis. The
reason is that every habitual response or action must have once been an encounter with
something unrecognizable. However, in ordinary, everyday experience we do recognize
sensations and our present does resemble the past. Therefore it can seem as though
experience only occurs in the present, with no relation to the past. It is for this reason
that the living present seems to stand on its own in Deleuze’s analysis of the first
synthesis. Considered from the perspective of the second synthesis, however, Deleuze
says that the present occurs as a result of the contraction of the pure past at a certain level
(DR 83). Thus the first synthesis, the constitution of the present, becomes reinterpreted
through the second synthesis. From this perspective, the synthesis of the present occurs
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as the surface effect of the second synthesis. “The criminal and saint play out the same
past but at different levels” (DR 83). In this quote the criminal and saint are figures of
the living present. The point is that each plays out the same Idea-problem, or system of
experience, in different ways. We could take the example of the economic Idea-problem
of capitalism, in which there are many figures, such as the capitalist mogul and the
person who deliberately chooses to not be materialistic. They may appear to be very
different types but they can only arise from and inhabit the same economic situation with
its constituent elements and relations. Their difference lies in the level at which the
system in which they occur is contracted. The Idea-problems serves as the pure past, and
each figure of the living present continues the whole life, but at a different level. They
play out the same story, the story of capitalism. The Idea-problem of capitalism, or
system of capitalism, is contemporaneous with, coexists, and preexists each type of figure
that occurs in capitalism.
The second synthesis can, in a sense, be understood as giving us the relationship
between the transcendental and empirical, which occurs as the temporalizing relation
between pure past and living present. The transcendental conditions, or Idea-problem,
occurs as the pure past in relation to the present. It is helpful here to use the term virtual
instead of transcendental because what we have seen from the analysis above on the pure
past is that there is a relation between the virtual and actual that is not there between
empirical and transcendental. The actual and virtual have a continuous and ongoing
relation, whereas the empirical and transcendental do not. In other words, each actual
instance (living present) always has a virtual dimension (pure past), which is its
condition. Another way to understand this is that the first synthesis gives us the actual or
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empirical reality, which has its own sense of continuity, the second gives us the relation
of the actual and virtual, and the third gives us the virtual itself.
The third synthesis of time, which gives us the pure and empty form of time, shows
Deleuze’s view that Bergson’s account requires something more. With his account of the
third synthesis, Deleuze must be understood as surpassing Bergson. His point is that the
second synthesis requires a further grounding and the third synthesis serves to provide
this. It can be understood as giving us the virtual itself, what Deleuze sometimes calls the
“first.” The third synthesis is the key to understanding time as the form of experience
because it is the ultimate ground of the first and second syntheses. The third synthesis
occurs as the caesura, or the break, and the two unequal halves are the “before” and
“after.” This is a synthesis precisely because they are not brought together into a
seamless whole, but, rather, are held together as distinct from each other. The break or
caesura is the form in which all experience occurs. In other words, the break gives rise to
experience. The living present (the first synthesis of time) and pure past (the second
synthesis) are reinterpreted through the third synthesis of time.
This means that the arising of the sign and of new conditions occurs within empirical
experience as a disruption of it. Time is the form in which experience occurs. The
disruption or break that occurs in empirical experience is a temporal disruption, and
Deleuze calls it the “caesura.” In Kant, we said, the transcendental conditions occur
outside of time or are atemporal. They are not themselves past, but rather past, present,
and future are opened up only in relation to them. In Deleuze this becomes more
complex. For him, transcendental conditions are outside of time in relation to the field of
experience that they open up. They exist on their own plane, which is atemporal, yet they
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exist within experience. This is a key difference from Kant, for whom transcendental
conditions are atemporal in the sense that they do not exist within experience. This,
among other reasons, is why Deleuze replaces the idea of transcendental with that of
virtual. If we return to examples used earlier, conditions like the boiling and freezing
points of a physical material are fully real, but so long as the material is not taken to those
points such that they are actualized, these virtual conditions continue to exist in a way
that is atemporal. However, new conditions can arise within experience and within the
empirical flow of time. At the moment they occur they disrupt the flow of ordinary,
empirical time and disrupt the subject. In other words, since they enter into ordinary
empirical experience, conditions for Deleuze are more than simply atemporal in the sense
that they are for Kant. Time itself is opened up anew. In regard to the new system that
the conditions open up, the empirical flow of time can only occur insofar as time is
opened up, that is to say, only in terms of a particular system of experience. In other
words, empirical time must always be constituted in relation to a particular system of
experience. While it is true that for Kant past, present, and future only occur in relation
to the subject, they occur once and for all. For Kant, time is simply given as the form of
intuition. Faulkner points out that Kant does not explain how time opens up or is
constituted, but that Deleuze must be understood to be addressing this lack.67 The
consequence of this difference between them is that while, in Kant, time moves into the
subject (time becomes subjective, albeit transcendentally subjective), in Deleuze, in
contrast, time itself becomes the subject. The pure form of time, or the caesura, produces
both a system of experience and the subject of that system.
67 Ibid., p. 3.
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Deleuze must be therefore understood as providing a new formulation of time. He
argues that traditionally time has been understood as simply the measure of movement.
“Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding
within it. It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time” (DR 88).
His point is that traditionally philosophy only considered time in the empirical sense.
Empirical time is indeed cardinal in that it simply measures change or movement.
Empirical time serves merely to measure some content, in the sense that we say, for
example, that events occur in time. In contrast, however, when experience is opened up
as temporal disruption, then time is ordinal. This is a more fundamental notion of time
and, in this sense, time is the form of change itself. In its more fundamental sense, time
does not merely mark the change or coming-into-being of other things. (Fundamentally,
all change is coming-into-existence.) Instead, time is the form by which all change
occurs. Deleuze says the caesura is the static form of time. It must be static since “the
form of change does not change” (DR 89). Since the caesura is a disruption or a break, it
can be described as having two unequal sides, alternatively called past and future and
“before” and “after”. However, these are not to be understood as empirical
determinations, since only an object can occur empirically before or after something else
in a system of experience that has already been constituted. The caesura brings about the
division of the “before” and the “after” and, in doing so, it draws them together. The
caesura can also be described as an “event”, because the opening up of experience is an
event. Again, “event” is to be understood in a transcendental sense rather than an
empirical one. The caesura occurs only as the institution of a fundamental inequality or
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when things come out of balance. The selecting of virtual conditions, or an Idea, can
only occur as difference or inequality.
If we consider the subject in relation to the opening up of experience, it is helpful to
note that Deleuze describes this event of disruption as “a unique and tremendous event,”
which he says is like the exploding of the sun, throwing oneself in a volcano, or killing
God or the father (DR 89). The transcendental event opens up a new world such that
things are not meaningful in the way that they were. We can examine the three
components of the caesura, the “before,” the moment of the caesura or, in other words,
the present, and the “after.” The first component, the “before” can be understood as the
moment before transcendental conditioning occurs. “In effect, there is always a time at
which the imagined act is supposed ‘too big for me’” (DR 89). It precedes the event. In
one sense, the “before” is the agent of the event because new conditions can only arise
from appropriate circumstances. Deleuze uses the figures of Oedipus and Hamlet to
characterize the agent. Thus, in the “before,” Deleuze says that Oedipus and Hamlet
experience the act they are about to carry out as too big for them. At the point of the
caesura (and really, there is no “before” until there is a caesura since these are part of the
caesura and do not occur according to empirical time), which Deleuze also calls the
metamorphosis, there is a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the self.
In contrast to what we said above, in another sense, the “before” is not the agent of the
event, and the true agent only arises as the “present” or the moment of the caesura. The
“present” is the one who kills God or the father. The agent in this sense only occurs as a
double because the agent occurs as a sort of alignment. There was no agent “before”
because the subject was unequal to the act (or, rather, it was the subject of the previous
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system of experience from which these new conditions arose). In other words, the seeds
of the opening up of experience are not contained in what comes before because it is
genuinely new. The “present” only happens as an abrupt shift in experience or a
realignment of experience. There is an abrupt reorganization of experience. In pointing
to a doubling Deleuze is attempting to capture that point at which the shift occurs. From
an empirical perspective, from the perspective of empirical knowledge, we can only say
that what is there before the shift is not what is there after. At the moment of the present,
however, the subject becomes equal to the event. There is a kind of doubling because the
subject of the “before” is the empirical subject and is not constitutive of the new system
of experience. The subject of the new system will itself be constituted. The “after” or
the future is the other side that occurs in relation to the caesura. “As for the third time in
which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret
coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has
become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were
carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth” (DR
89-90). The one who is destroyed is the agent of the act. “What the self has become
equal to is the unequal itself” (DR 91). The one that leads up to the opening up of
experience cannot retain its identity. In this way, the self is transformed by the event and
is no longer the same subject. This is why Deleuze says that it is as though an other acts
through me.
Deleuze describes the subject that is left in the end as the “plebian” or “the man
without a name” (DR 90, 91). The reason is that when the subject is transformed it is
necessarily transformed out of its identification with the group of subjects for whom the
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world was structured in the way that it was up to that point. In principle the transformed
subject is nameless in relation to what had become the ordinary way of thinking or of
organizing the world. The transformed subject falls outside of any category that had
organized the world. The subject is outside of that world and the group of subjects who
belong to that world. It has no place in it and no role to play in it. It should be
emphasized that at the moment the caesura occurs there is no subject of experience since
the agent of experience is not a subject. The subject only passively undergoes
experience. Therefore the subject can never grasp the opening up of experience. Instead,
it can only grasp the conditions of experience, and even this retrospectively, not during
their occurrence. However, as a result of the transcendental event, a new field of inquiry
is established.
With the production of the new system of experience, the temporality of that system is
also instituted. Thus each system has its own empirical or ordinary time. In chapter 3, I
showed how a system of experience is produced through individuation. In a sense the
individuals that belong to any particular system of experience have their own temporality,
as each system has its own temporality. Thus the individuals of the system have a time
characteristic to them. For example, the time of an insect is different from the time of an
oak tree. This includes how quickly each develops, what is old age for each, etc. Thus in
this last stage we have once again a subject who thinks empirically and recognizes
objects, but now in accordance with the new order of experience and according to the
temporality of this system. What also returns in this stage is the promise that there will
be temporal disruption again and that experience will thereby occur once again.
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CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have shown how Deleuze accounts for the subject. Since the notion
of experience is transformed in going from Kant to Deleuze, the notion of the subject is
necessarily transformed as well. I have shown that experience for Deleuze occurs in the
opening up of a systematic field. In Kant the subject is perfectly aligned with the system
of knowledge in that the conditions of this system belong to the subject. In Kant the
system of knowledge is absolutely comprehensive and totalizing of what can be
experienced, as is the Kantian subject. The result is that the Kantian subject cannot
withstand experience in Deleuze’s sense. No new system of experience could open up
for the Kantian subject. The key difference is that the subject in Deleuze is open and can
be transformed, while the Kantian subject is grounded in unity. The Deleuzian subject
can, indeed, register it when something beyond a particular system comes into relation
with it. In this way, the subject in Deleuze is able to experience something genuinely
new.
Although Deleuze maintains certain aspects of the Kantian subject, he is forced to
reinterpret them. It continues to be true for Deleuze that experience can only occur for a
subject. In other words, experience only occurs insofar as there is a subject of experience
or, in other words, a subject that belongs to that system of experience. However, while
for Kant the transcendental subject is the condition of experience, so that experience is
possible only for a subject, for Deleuze there is no transcendental subject. In a sense,
then, there is only an empirical subject. The subject is produced along with a system of
experience, and so belongs to that particular system of experience. In this way, Deleuze
is able to account for the production of the subject, an account he found lacking in Kant.
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As shown in chapter 1, Deleuze finds the idea of the internal relation of subject and
object to be the great discovery of the critical philosophy. This relation remains central
to his own account even while it is transformed. The internal relation of subject and
object occurs because both the subject and the objects that belong to a particular system
of experience are produced together.
This chapter has also shown how Deleuze’s account of the subject requires a thinking
of time. Deleuze’s conception of time is equally developed in response to Kant’s notion
of time. Since experience can only occur insofar as it is my experience, the self-identity
of the subject is essential to the account of experience. For Kant, the subject’s self-
identity is possible only in time since the subject can only be given to itself in time.
Deleuze believes Kant’s notion of time is revolutionary in that time becomes internal to
the subject. However, Deleuze further revolutionizes the notion of time insofar as time
comes to be the true agent of experience. Deleuze argues that there are two kinds of time:
ordinary, empirical time, which is the time we measure with a clock and a more
fundamental sort of time. The ordinary kind of time marks change within a particular
system of experience and must be produced, just as the system itself must be produced.
In fact the opening up of a system is only possible because experience can be temporally
differentiated. For Deleuze, the human subject and every other kind of subject merely
undergoes experience. A new system of experience is opened up for a subject only
because the subject becomes aligned with the temporal disruption that occurs in
experience. These temporal relations have a necessary relation to the subject. Thus these
temporal relations do not have an existence independent of the subject (as the empiricist
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might argue). However, they are not subjective, in the sense that an idealist would argue.
Instead, they are produced along with the subject.
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CONCLUSION
The central significance of Deleuze’s philosophy lies in his articulation of a post-critical
metaphysics. This dissertation has clarified his project for a wider audience than Deleuze
currently has by situating this metaphysics in relation to his conception of experience and
showing that the latter is developed in and through a criticism and transformation of
Kant’s notion of experience. I have shown that Deleuze’s critical relation to Kant does
not simply make an epistemological claim regarding the possibility of objects of
experience. It makes a metaphysical claim regarding the conditions for the reality of
objects: the transcendental structures of experience as such. Deleuze’s philosophy aims
to show why things are what they are. His treatment of this question presents a post-
critical metaphysics that he calls the “sphere of immanence.” Thus Deleuze’s
metaphysics is not simply a return to metaphysics as it was conceived prior to Kant.
Since I have argued at length how Deleuze transforms Kant’s transcendental philosophy,
I will conclude with a review of the outcome of this transformation: the import of
Deleuze’s philosophy itself.
I have drawn out the sphere of immanence by articulating Deleuze’s alteration of
Kant’s notion of the transcendental. Deleuze takes up the project of transcendental
conditioning because his project is to find the conditions for the real things. Unlike Kant,
Deleuze is not inquiring after the conditions for possible objects. In addition to this
difference from Kant, since the conditions arise from and occur within experience for
Deleuze, they cannot properly be said to be transcendental in the way that Kant uses the
term. To capture these differences from Kant’s notion of transcendental, Deleuze devises
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the notion of the virtual. The transcendental, or virtual, structures of experience are the
structures for the being or reality of objects.
In articulating this sphere of immanence, Deleuze also surpasses the distinction
between the phenomenal and the noumenal in Kant. When Kant claims that there are no
objects independent of the subject, this refers only to objects of knowledge. There are
also noumena, for Kant, which cannot be known but must be presumed to exist. In
contrast, for Deleuze, there are no existing objects that are independent of their relation to
the subject. In other words, when something achieves the coherence that would make it
an object, it can in principle be known and is thus in relation with a subject. Thus there
can be no noumena for Deleuze. The phenomenal is now all-encompassing. Everything
belongs to the sphere of immanence.
In addition, Deleuze transforms Kant’s notion of the transcendent. For Kant, God,
soul, and world cannot be objects of knowledge since they cannot come into relation with
the subject. However, the term transcendent comes to have only an epistemological
sense for Deleuze, not a metaphysical sense. There is nothing transcendent, in the
metaphysical sense, for Deleuze, for there is nothing outside the sphere of immanence.
“Transcendent” then refers to concepts that Deleuze argues are illegitimate. Thus, God,
soul and world are all illegitimate concepts, in this sense, for Deleuze because they would
occur outside the sphere of immanence. Deleuze also excludes as transcendent the
subject and object, in the way that these terms are traditionally used, because these
concepts imply an identity that precedes change. Ordinarily, they refer to the elements
that form the foundation of experience: Experience is said to occur in the relation of
subject and object. According to this view, if subject and object do change, this change is
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considered secondary to the identity they possess. Deleuze considers this kind of identity
to be a fiction. He does use the terms subject and object, but for him subject and object
arise from more primary elements, and cannot be the foundational elements of
experience. As a result, the subject and object can never be closed off to change: in other
words, change or becoming is primary, while stability and identity arise secondarily.
Experience does not occur in the relation of subject and object but in the relation between
transcendental or virtual events. Virtual events are thus the foundation of experience.
The sphere of immanence is entirely a sphere of becoming and change. Only what is
immanent is real and only what is immanent can be known. What is transcendent must
be relegated to the realm of fiction, according to Deleuze.
We have found, therefore, that the subject of metaphysics is virtual events. For
Deleuze, metaphysics is the study of these events and of the way in which they give rise
to all things—to the objects we encounter in our everyday experience, and to human
persons. I will return briefly to the relation of virtual events to the human person below.
As regards the subject of metaphysics, it is virtual events that make up the transcendental
structure of experience. This dissertation has shown virtual events to be the critical
events that characterize a particular object in regard to the ways in which it can change
and be transformed. These events serve to explain in the most adequate way what
something is and why it is what it is. To be clear, Deleuze considers virtual events to be
real. Virtual events do not exist in time and space but, instead, they serve to account for
objects that occur in space and time. We can conceive of but cannot know or experience
virtual events, given that they are the condition of what we know.
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As we have said, Deleuze’s post-critical metaphysics, the sphere of immanence, is a
sphere of becoming. This is because it is grounded in a conception of difference.
Difference is the foundation of all that is real, not a notion that grounds becoming apart
from it. It must be understood primarily as becoming. To use Kantian language, this is
transcendental difference not empirical difference. It is not the difference between two
entities whose identities are prior to their relation, but, rather, it is the movement of
becoming other. In addition, difference in this sense cannot be experienced since it is the
condition of what we experience. Transcendental difference takes the form of virtual
events, which are not entities but “slices” of becoming. In this way, even something
stable has becoming as its foundation in the form of virtual events. In Deleuze’s
conception the thing is always, in principle, open to change and transformation. His
metaphysics is therefore a dynamic one in which movement and becoming are the
conditions of everything that is seemingly static and unchanging. For these reasons, we
may call his post-critical metaphysics a metaphysics of difference.
An important implication of a conception of metaphysics in which difference is more
fundamental than identity is that it is consistent with pluralities of human identity. To
understand what it means to be human requires us to understand the structure of
becoming that forms the foundation of the human. A person comes to have a particular
identity only when a system of experience has opened up for her. Therefore her identity
occurs only in relation to a particular system. In addition, every person can be
transformed so that they can take up and inhabit new identities. Thus the identity of a
person is not something fixed and static. This does not mean, however, that someone can
take up a new identity within the same system—for example, become a black woman
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when she was a Hispanic woman within the system of racial identity. Instead, she can
find that she plays a role or takes on a new identity in a new system, which would occur
for her alongside the role of a black woman. The identity of being a black woman would
remain unchanged for this woman, so long as the system of racial identity continues to
subsist. For Deleuze, what is fundamental to every person is the power to be
transformed. Although this dissertation has not concerned itself with the question of
personal identity, it is Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference that has significant
implications in the ethical and political sphere.
The overall aim of this dissertation has been to show that Deleuze offers a new
conception of thinking. He adopts from Kant the idea that philosophy has a critical task.
When Deleuze finds that Kant fails to conceive of philosophy as truly critical, he rectifies
the problem. In Deleuze thinking is not something we naturally do. Rather, it is our
inertia that is natural. In other words, most of the time, people are not thinking,
according to Deleuze, but just recognizing what is around them. When our relationship
to objects, institutions, people, etc. is to simply recognize them, we only understand them
according to the framework of meaning that is already in place. With this kind of mental
cognition we merely register how things happen to be. Thus, the act of recognition occurs
out of inertia, and thinking occurs only when we are forced to come out of our inertia.
Deleuze’s view is that the act of thinking is profoundly creative and not merely the
continuation, clarification, or support of the framework by which we make sense of the
world. In this way he re-conceives what it is to do philosophy. The philosopher does not
think in accordance with the framework by which the world is organized, but, rather,
against established presuppositions. In this sense, philosophy, as Deleuze says, serves no
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established power.68 Some person or institution maintains its influence and power so
long as the current arrangement of people, wealth, resources, etc. remains as it is. For
Deleuze, the work of philosophy is always to think against the time in which one lives, to
think against the prejudices that have become established in that time. Thus philosophy’s
task is to be sensitive to new systems of experience that can be opened up. In addition,
philosophy is creative because it creates new concepts or, in other words, tries to think
that which falls outside of established values by means of concepts.
To conclude, this study of Deleuze’s transformation of Kant has not only shown the
relation of one twentieth-century philosopher to the major European philosopher crossing
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has shown how Deleuze raises questions on
the reality of objects, on what relation our thought has with these objects, and on the
question of the role of philosophy, which are relevant to every time period. It has been
my purpose to show that Deleuze has revitalized these questions and opened up new
directions in our inquiry into them.
68 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 106.
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VITA
Graduate School Southern Illinois University
Anupa Batra Date of Birth: February 24, 1973 1215 Seneca St., Apt. 201, Seattle, Washington 98101 [email protected] Bradley University Bachelor of Science, Biology-Premed, May 1994 University of Massachusetts, Amherst Master of Education, Eduction, July 1996 Boston College Master of Arts, Philosophy, May 1999 Special Honors and Awards: Pass with Distinction, Master’s Comprehensive Exam, Boston College, 1998 Morris Doctoral Fellowship, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 1999-2002 Graduate Assistantship, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2002-2004 Dissertation Title:
Experience, Time, and the Subject: Deleuze’s Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy