Deleuze, Kant, and the Post-Kantian Tradition

Deleuze, Kant, and the Post-Kantian Tradition Daniel W. Smith Purdue University [This paper was presented as a keynote address at the conference “The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze,” organized by Matt Lee and Edward Willatt at the University of Greenwich on July 7, 2007.] 1. Introduction. The last article Deleuze published before his death in November of 1995 (entitled “Immanence: A life…”) opens with the following question: “What is a transcendental field?” Gilles Deleuze, “L’Immanence: une vie....” in Philosophie 47 (5 September 1995), pp. 3-7. English translation: “Immanence: A Life…,” in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade; trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 384-389. In a certain sense, this Kantian problem, which Deleuze here takes up at the end of his career, is the question that has animated his work from the start. Deleuze’s first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), proposed a reading of Hume’s empiricism by making use of post-Kantian questions that, in themselves, were foreign to Hume’s own philosophy, but already pointed to the possibility of what Deleuze would later call a “transcendental empiricism” (that is, a transcendental field freed from the constraints of a transcendental subject). Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 87: whereas Kant’s transcendental philosophy asked, “How can something be given to the subject?” Hume’s empirical philosophy asked, “How can the subject be constituted within the given?” Whereas Kant had asked, “How can the given be given to a subject?” Hume had already asked, “How is the subject (or what he called “human nature”) constituted within the given?” Nietzsche and Philosophy, published nine years later (1962), though on the surface an anti-Hegelian tract, is more profoundly a confrontation with Kant that interprets Nietzsche’s entire philosophy as “a resumption of [Kant’s] critical project on a new basis and with new concepts”; its central chapter is entitled, precisely, “Critique.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 52: “We believe that there is, in Nietzsche, not only a Kantian heritage, but a half-avowed, half-hidden rivalry....Nietzsche seems to have sought (and to have found in the “eternal return” and the “will to power”) a radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts.” The project of Anti-Oedipus (1972), which was, for aa time at least, perhaps Deleuze and Guattari’s most famous work, is defined in explicitly Kantian and transcendental terms: just as Kant set out to discover criteria immanent to the syntheses of consciousness in order to denounce their illegitimate and transcendent employment in metaphysics, so Deleuze and Guattari set out to discover criteria immanent to the syntheses of the unconscious in order to denounce their illegitimate use in Oedipal psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 75: “In what he termed the critical revolution,” they write, “Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to the understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion, we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics--its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution--this time materialist--can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice we shall call schizoanalysis.” And in Deleuze’s own magnum opus, Difference and Repetition (1968), the presence of Kant is almost ubiquitous. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Deleuze’s philosophy, in short, can, I believe, be rightly interpreted as a transcendental philosophy, but one that defines the transcendental field in a completely different manner than does Kant: it is a problematic, differential, and virtual field populated with singularities and events, a condition of real and not merely possible experience. In what follows, rather than trying to describe this transcendental field—which in effect would entail an elucidation of Deleuze’s entire philosophy—I would simply like to make some fairly general observations on how this Kantian concern can serve as a guiding thread for interpreting Deleuze’s oeuvre as whole, which encompasses an immense diversity and scope. 2. The History of Philosophy. Consider first the work Deleuze has done in the history of philosophy. Deleuze wrote eight monographs on figures in the history of philosophy. In addition to his short study on Kant himself, Deleuze wrote books on Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz (pre-Kantians), and on Bergson and Nietzsche (post-Kantians). The question we have to ask is: Why did Deleuze choose to write on these particular thinkers, and not others? The answer, I think, is fairly clear. It is often said that pre-Kantian philosophy found its principle in the notion of God (that is, the analytic identity of an infinite substance), whereas post-Kantianism found its principle in the notion of the Self (that is, the synthetic identity of the finite Self). See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 58. Deleuze points out, however, that these God-Self permutations are of little interest to him—it changes nothing in philosophy to put Man in the place of God—and Deleuze emphasizes the fact that it is in Kant himself, in a “furtive moment” in the Critique of Pure Reason, that he (Deleuze) finds the hint of the possibility of a transcendental field entails not only the death of God, but also the dissolution of the Self (what Foucault would later call the death of Man) as well as the destruction of the world—the Self, the World, and God being the three great terminal points of metaphysics. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 58: “Rather than being concerned with what comes before and after Kant (which amounts to the same thing), we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism. For when Kant puts rational theology in question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium...into the pure self of the ‘I think’... [that is] insurmountable in principle.” Indeed, if these are the three great terminal points of metaphysics, it is because are the three great forms of identity: the identity of the person as a well-founded agent, the identity of the world as its ambient environment, the identity of God as the ultimate foundation—to which Deleuze might add the identity of bodies as the base of the person, and finally the identity of language as the power of denoting everything else. See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, pp. 293, 294: “The order of God includes the following elements: the identity of God as the ultimate foundation; the identity of the world as the ambient environment; the identity of the person as a well-founded agent; the identity of bodies as the base [as Deleuze says elsewhere, the phenomenological concept of the “body image” is one of the final avatars of the old concept of the “soul”]; and finally the identity of language as the power of denoting everything else. . . . The order of the Antichrist is opposed point by point to the divine order. It is characterized by the death of God, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and the shifting function of language, which now only expresses only intensities.” Cf. p. 176: “The divergence of affirmed series form a ‘chaosmos and no longer a world; the aleatory point which traverses them forms a counter-self, and no longer a self; disjunction posed as a synthesis exchanges its theological principle for a diabolical principle. . . . The Grand Canyon of the world, the ‘crack’ of the self, and the dismembering of God.” One can sense two minor battles in these last two characterizations: against the phenomenological notion of the “body image” as the final avatar of the theological concept of the soul, See Anti-Oedipus, p. 23: “The ‘body image’—the final avatar of the sould, a vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism.” and against the analytic preoccupation with the analysis of propositions and the theory of reference, which appears in Kant in the theory of judgment (one of Deleuze’s great themes is “to have done with judgment,” which above all means the form of judgment in propositions, and not merely moral judgment). How then does Deleuze marshal the resources of the history of philosophy to expand on this furtive moment in Kant (i.e., the idea of a transcendental field free from the corrdinates of the Self, the World, and God—that is, from the form of identity)? One of his chief influences here seems to have been the figure of Salomon Maimon, whose Essay on Transcendental Philosophy—which was published in 1790, one year before the appearance of Kant’s third Critique—laid down the basic objections against Kant that would come to preoccupy the post-Kantian philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Maimon’s now-neglected work lies at the root of much post-Kantian philosophy; as Frederick Beiser notes, to study Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel without having read Maimon is like studying Kant without having read Hume; see The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy From Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 286. See also Jules Vuillemin, L’héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne (Paris: PUF, 1954), p. 55: In the criticism of skepticism, “what corresponds to the Kant-Hume relationship is now the Fichte-Maimon relationship.” Kant himself, in his letter to Marcus Herz of 26 May 1789, wrote of the Essay on the Transcendental Philosophy: “But one glance at the work made me realize its excellence and that not only had none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Mr. Maimon does but also very few men possess so much acumen for such deep investigations as he” (Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], p. 151). In a letter to Reinhold, Fichte wrote: “My respect for Maimon’s talent is limitless; I firmly believe, and am willing to prove, that the critical philosophy has been overturned by him” (Fichte, Briefwechsel, III/2, p. 282, as quoted in Beiser, p. 370, note 2). Maimon’s basic objection was this: Kant, he said, had ignored the demands of a genetic method. This criticism means two things. First, Kant relied on what he himself called the “facts” of reason—the “fact” of knowledge and the “fact” of morality—for which he then sought the conditions of their possibility. Maimon, by contrast, argued that the immanent ambitions of Kant’s critical project could be realized only if, rather than simply assuming these “facts” as given, it provided a genetic account of knowledge and morality. (In other words, Kant’s conception of the transcendental entailed a conformism—the value of knowledge and morality are never placed in question.) Second, Maimon argued that this genetic demand could be fulfilled only through an account that described the transcendental conditions of real experience, and not merely those of possible experience. Maimon was the first to argue that whereas identity is the condition of possibility of thought in general, it is difference that constitutes the condition of the real. These two Maimonian themes—the demand for a genetic method and the positing of a principle of difference—reappear as leitmotifs in almost every one of Deleuze’s books through 1969. Indeed, they are the two requirements of what Deleuze sometimes calls his “transcendental empiricism”—that is, a transcendental field without a transcendental subject—or a thing-in-itself, both of which introduce elements of transcendence into the transcendental field (transcendence and transcendental being largely opposed terms). In Deleuze, there are no subjects, although there are processes of subjectivation; there are no objects, but there are processes of objectivation; no ‘pure reason,” but historically variable processes of rationalization, and so on. This is why Deleuze can say that the transcendental field is at once a principle of critique as well as a principle of creation. The Pre-Kantian Tradition: Hume, Leibniz, Spinoza Indeed, it is not merely coincidental that Maimon described his own reformulation of the transcendental philosophy as a “coalition system” that incorporated various elements from the systems of Hume, Leibniz, Spinoza—each of whom Deleuze himself devoted a monograph to. In this sense, Maimon functions as one of the primary philosophical precursors to Deleuze. At one level, Deleuze’s books on Hume, Leibniz, and Spinoza, are simply brilliant monographs in the history of philosophy; but when Deleuze uses these pre-Kantian thinkers in his constructive works such as Difference and Repetition—when he treats them as contemporaries, as it were—he always asks the post-Kantian question: How would their systems function if they were freed from the metaphysical presuppositions of the Self, the World, and God. What would happen if one removed the theological exigency of the pre-established harmony in Leibniz? Or the identity of a single substance in Spinoza? See the letter to Martin Joughin, cited in the “Translator’s Preface,” in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 11: “What interested me most in Spinoza wasn’t his Substance, but the composition of finite modes. I consider this one of the most original aspects of my book. That is: the hope of making substance turn on finite modes, or at least of seeing in substance a plane of immanence in which finite modes operate, already appears in this book. What I needed was both (1) the expressive character of particular individuals, and (2) an immanence of Being. Leibniz, in a way, goes still further than Spinoza on the first point. But on the second, Spinoza stands alone. One finds it only in him. This is why I consider myself a Spinozist, rather than a Leibnizian, though I owe a lot to Leibniz.” This is how Deleuze transforms pre-Kantian thinkers into post-Kantian resources for his own thought, as way of reconfiguring the transcendental field. Leibniz. Consider Leibniz’s philosophy from this post-Kantian viewpoint: 1. God: God would no longer be a Being who compares possible works and the “best” of all possible worlds to pass into existence; rather, would become a pure process that affirms affirms incompossibilities and passes through them. 2. World: The world would no longer a continuous world defined by its pre-established harmony; instead, divergences, bifurcations, and incompossibles must now be seen to belong to one and the same universe, a chaotic universe in which divergent series trace endlessly bifurcating paths, and give rise to violent discords and dissonances that are never resolved into a harmonic tonality: a “chaosmos,” as Deleuze puts it, and no longer a world. Leibniz could only save the “harmony” of this world by relegating discordances and disharmonies to other possible worlds. 3. Self: Individuals, finally, rather than being closed upon the compossible and convergent world they express from within, would now be torn open, and kept open through the divergent series and incompossible ensembles that continually pull them outside themselves. The “monadic” subject, as Deleuze puts it, becomes the “nomadic” subject. “Instead of a certain number of predicates being excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of its concept, each ‘thing’ is open to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, and at the same time it loses its center, that is to say, its identity as a concept and as a self. ”Logic of Sense, p. 174, translation modified. The Leibnizian notion of closure is here replaced by the Deleuzian notion of capture. Spinoza. One could say that Deleuze effects a similar type of conversion in his reading of Spinoza: in Deleuze, there can be neither a single substance nor essences (even singular essences), and thus, strictly speaking, no third kind of knowledge (since there is nothing to know at this level—it is the first kind of knowledge that gives us the most adequate access to Being). Although Deleuze likes to consider himself as Spinozist, that does not mean he accepts everything in Spinoza; far from it. (The same holds for Bergson: even though Deleuze can be considered a Bergsonian, in a sense, Bergson’s first book, Time and Free Will, is a sustained critique of the concept of intensity—a critique which Deleuze explicitly rejects.) The Post-Kantian Tradition: Maimon, Nietzsche, Bergson Deleuze’s strategy with regard to the post-Kantian tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—which constitutes the history of the synthetic identity of the finite Self—is slightly different. Deleuze occasionally appeals to aspects of their thought that escapes this synthetic identity, such as Schelling’s theory of power. See, e.g., Difference and Repetition, pp. 190-191. More importantly, though, Deleuze creates his own “minor” tradition of post-Kantian philosophy which find its shining points in Maimon, Bergson, and Nietzsche, who made no appeal to the synthetic self. In his book Bergsonism, Deleuze examines Bergson’s famous critique of the notion of the possible (which has certain parallels with Maimon’s critique), and shows how he replaces the distinction between the possible and the real with the distinction between the virtual and the actual—a distinction Deleuze himself adopts in Difference and Repetition: every phenomenon is a actualization of virtual elements and relations that are nonetheless themselves real. Deleuze, Bergsonism, pp. 94-103; Difference and Repetition, pp. 208-214. And in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze argues that it is Nietzsche who finally fulfilled Kant’s transcendental project by bringing the critique to bear, not on false claims to knowledge and morality, as in Kant, but on knowledge and morality themselves, on true knowledge and true morality—and on the very notion of truth itself. Deleuze interprets the will to power and eternal return as genetic principles that give a genealogical account of the meaning and value of knowledge and morality. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 51-52, 93-94. Indeed, Deleuze explicitly sets out a certain number of criteria for thinking about the status of the transcendental field. First, the condition must be a condition of real experience, and not merely of possible experience: “it forms an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning” (DR 154). Second, this means that the condition cannot be in the image of the conditioned, that is, the structures of the transcendental field cannot simply be traced off the empirical. Third, to be a condition of real experience, the condition can be no broader than what it conditions; the condition must therefore be determined along with what it conditions, and must change as the conditioned changes (conditions are not universal but singular). Fourth, to remain faithful to these exigencies, “we must have something unconditioned” that would be capable of “determining both the condition and the conditioned” (LS 122-123). This is the crux of Deleuze’s debate with Hegel: Is this unconditioned the “totality” (Hegel) or the “differential” (Deleuze)? Is it external difference (the “not-X” of Hegel) or internal difference (the dx of Deleuze)? Fifth, the nature of the “genesis” in the genetic method must therefore be understood, not as a dynamic genesis—that is, as a historical or developmental genesis—but rather as a static genesis (i.e., a genesis that moves from the virtual to its actualization). Deleuze’s work in the history of philosophy, it seems to me, was organized, in a rather conscious manner, around this aim of rethinking the nature of the transcendental field. When Deleuze claims that the limitations of the Kantian theory can only be overcome through a theory of singularities, it is because singularities (or events) escape the system of the Self, the World, and God: as Deleuze constantly says, they are “impersonal [escaping the form of the Self], preindividual [escaping the form of God], and acosmic [escaping the form of the World].” Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 177. It would not be difficult, I think, to show that Deleuze’s use of prior figures in the history of philosophy—such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Lucretius, Duns Scotus—are also put in the service of this transcendental project, and it is this overriding concern that bestows that particularly “Deleuzian” tone to his monographs. 3. Kant and Deleuze’s Constructive Philosophy. This Kantian theme becomes even more revealing when one turns from Deleuze’s work in the history of philosophy to his elaboration of his own philosophical system. I use the term “system” advisedly. “I feel that I am a very classical philosopher,” Deleuze has written, “I believe in philosophy as a system....[But] for me, the system must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must be a heterogenesis, something which, it seems to be, has never before been attempted.” Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre-préface de Gilles Deleuze,” in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: La Philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Payot, 1993), p. 7. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 9: “Today it is said that systems are bankrupt, but it Heterogenesis: this means, following Maimon, that the system must be a genetic system that accounts for the production of the new, the heterogeneous. My second question here is this: What would Deleuze’s “system” look like if one attempted to describe it in Kantian terms? I would like to briefly take a stab at this here, using five Kantian rubrics that roughly parallel the architectonic of Kant’s own system: Dialectics, Aesthetics, Analytics, Ethics, and Politics. a. Dialectics (theory of the Idea). Consider first Deleuze’s conception of Dialectics—that is, the theory of Ideas. . Deleuze’s philosophy, I believe, is far too quickly identified as an “anti-dialectical” mode of thought. It is true that Deleuze is anti-Hegelian: what he criticizes in the Hegelian dialectic is its reliance on the mechanisms of contradiction and “the labor of the negative.” It is also true that he is anti-Platonic, at least insofar as Plato defined Ideas in terms of their self-identity and their transcendence. But Deleuze develops his own theory of Ideas primarily by reconsidering Kant’s Dialectics. If Kant critiqued the concept of the world, it was because the true object of that Idea is the category of causality, and the causal nexus that extends infinitely in all directions, and can never be unified. When we believe we can unify this causal nexus and assign an object to it—we then call it the World, or the Universe, to totality of what is—we are then in the a transcendent illusion. The true object of that idea, its immanent object, is the category of causality itself, the extension of which we experience as a problem. This is the aspect of Kant that Deleuze takes up: Ideas are objectively problematic structures—which means that Being always presents itself to us under a problematic form (we experience the world, and everything in the world, initially in the form of a problem—something we do not recognize, but rather something that forces us to think). In a way, Deleuze here takes up and develops a theme first proposed in Heidegger’s great book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. For Heidegger, the great problem in Kant was the relation between thought and being—that is, the relation between concepts and intuitions. Kant himself effected a mediation between the two via the operations of synthesis and schematization, which are operations of the productive imagination. But in the third Critique (written after Maimon’s Essay), Kant showed (against Heidegger) that the secret of the Kantian project does not lie in the imagination, but in the theory of Ideas: when synthesis breaks down it produces the experience of the sublime, and when schematizing breaks down, it produces the operation of symbolizing. Now both the sublime and the symbol (along with genius and teleology) are means through which Ideas appear in sensible within Nature itself. This is what it means to say that Deleuze’s theory of Ideas is purely immanent: Ideas are problematic ontological structures that are immanent to experience as such. They do not simply exist in our heads, but are encountered here and there in the constitution of the actual historical world, and history of humanity—as well as the history of nature itself (or rather, its “becoming”)—can be conceived of as a history of problematizations (a notion Foucault would later adopt from Deleuze). But when it comes to fleshing out the exact nature of these problematic structures (or Ideas), Deleuze turns, not to Kant but to Leibniz. All the concepts he uses to characterize the nature of problems are taken from Leibniz: Problematic structures are multiplicities, constituted by singularities (or events), which are themselves defined in terms of the differential relation between indeterminate and purely virtual elements, and so forth. As Deleuze once commented in a seminar: “All the elements to create a genesis as demanded by the post-Kantians—all the elements are there virtually in Leibniz.” Seminar of 20 May 1980. One can already sense here the revolution Deleuze is in the process of introducing into the history of philosophy. If Deleuze can consider himself a metaphysician, and rejects the Heideggerian theme of the end of metaphysics, it is because be believes—naively, as he puts it—that it is possible to construct a new metaphysics that replaces the old one (where the Self, the World, and God were the highest forms of identity): the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, singularities or events replace the notion of essence, and so forth. If the theory of Ideas is a response to the Socratic question “What is….?”, one could say that, for Deleuze, anything that is is a multiplicity (and not a substance), constituted by a convergence of singularities (and not by an essence), which are virtualities (and not possibilities), and so on. The aim of Deleuze’s theory of Ideas, in other words, is to provide us with a means of thinking the nature of being. b. Aesthetics (Space, Time, Sensation). Consider, secondly, the question of Aesthetics. If the question of sensibility plays an important role in Deleuze’s work, it is because in themselves such problematic structures are primarily sensed rather than apprehended: they affect us. This is why Deleuze calls them problematic structures, as opposed to theorematic or axiomatic structures that begin with well-defined axioms. Kant himself had separated the theory of sensation (aesthetics) into two isolated parts. In the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason, aesthetics designated the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience: this was the objective element of sensation as conditioned by the a priori forms of space and time. In the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the Critique of Judgment, which includes the Analytics of the Beautiful and the Sublime, aesthetics designated the theory of art as a reflection upon real experience: this was the subjective element of sensation as incarnated in the feeling of pleasure and pain. For Deleuze, by contrast, space, time, and sensation are themselves differential Ideas. He locates the conditions of sensibility in an intensive conception of space and a non-chronological conception of time, which are actualized in a plurality of extended spaces, and a complex rhythm of actual times (which is the object of Deleuze’s analyses in the “Repetition” chapter of Difference and Repetition). Moreover, since for Deleuze the aim of art is to produce a sensation, these genetic principles of sensation are also the principles of composition of the work of art, and conversely, it is the structure of the work of art that reveals these conditions. Deleuze’s theory of sensation in this way reunites the two halves of aesthetics dissociated by Kant: the theory of forms of experience (as the “being of the sensible”) and the work of art (as a “pure being of sensation”). One of Deleuze’s most important works in this regard is his two-volume study of the cinema. Whatever their importance for film studies, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image are essentially an elaboration of Deleuze’s Transcendental Aesthetic. One of the characteristics of film is that it presented a new type of image: an image that moves, and that moves in time. The philosophical question Deleuze poses in these works is: “What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that the other arts don’t show?” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 58. He presents the work as a classification of the various spaces and times actualized in modern cinema. In his book on Proust, he likewise examines the various structures of time revealed in In Search of Lost Time. If one of the characteristics of modern art was to have renounced the domain of representation and instead to have taken the conditions of representation as its object, Deleuze’s numerous writings on the arts are in effect explorations of this transcendental domain of sensibility: the subtitle of his study of the painter Francis Bacon is “the logic of sensation.” c. Analytic (theory of the concept). Moving quickly, consider the third division of Kant’s first critique, the Analytic of concepts. Deleuze defines philosophy as a discipline that is concerned with the creation of concepts. In Difference and Repetition, however, Deleuze is highly critical of concepts, insofar as they are subordinate to the model of judgment, which consists of subsuming the particular under the general—whether these are the genus and species of Aristotle, or the Kantian categories. “Every philosophy of categories,” writes Deleuze, “takes judgment as its model.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 33.. It was not until What is Philosophy?, published in 1991, that Deleuze put forward his own analytic of concepts. A concept, says Deleuze, is a heterogenesis: Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 20. it actualizes a certain number of singularities and renders them consistent within itself. In this sense, concepts do not have a referent, since their object is created at the same time the concept is created. Deleuze thus distinguishes concepts from the “functions” of science and logic, which are necessarily referential, and are developed in discursive systems. The earliest, and perhaps still the most concrete, example of Deleuze’s approach to concepts can already be found in his 1967 study of Masochism. Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989). It criticizes the Hegelian presumptions (or complementarity, and so on) implied in the notion of “sado-masochism,” and instead presents a differential analysis of the components elements of the concepts “sadism” and “masochism,” showing that each of these concepts define incommensurate objects, separate universes between which there is no communication. [Comment on why there are no categories in Deleuze—the status of Univocity.] d. Ethics. Fourth, what is Deleuze’s relation to the second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. Deleuze often uses the term “morality” to define, in very general terms, any set of “constraining” rules (e.g. a moral code) that consists in judging actions and intentions by relating them to transcendent values (this is good, that is evil...). It is this Kantian model of judgment and the appeal to universals that Deleuze rejects. What he calls “ethics” is, on the contrary, a set of “facultative” rules that evaluate what we do, say, or think according to the immanent mode of existence that it implies. One says or does this, thinks or feels that: what mode of existence does it imply? As both Spinoza and Nietzsche showed, modes of existence are defined intensively as a degree of power, a capacity for affecting or being affected that is necessarily actualized at every moment. As both Spinoza and Nietzsche showed, each in their own way, there are certain things one cannot do or even think except of the condition of being weak, base, or enslaved, unless one harbors a vengeance or ressentiment against life (Nietzsche), unless one remains the slave of passive affections (Spinoza); and there are other things one cannot do or say or feel except on the condition of being strong, noble, or free, unless one affirms life or attains active affections. Moreover, one would have to argue that the concept of desire that lies at the basis of Deleuze’s ethico-political philosophy—notably in Anti-Oedipus—is an explicit attempt to rework the fundamental theses of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Kant presents the second critique as a theory of desire, and he defines desire, somewhat surprisingly, in causal terms: desire is “a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations.” In its lower form, the products of desire are fantasies and superstitions; but in its higher form (the will), the products of desire are acts of freedom under the moral law—actions which are, however, irreducible to mechanistic causality. Deleuze takes up and modifies Kant in two fundamental ways. First, if desire is productive or causal, then its product is itself real (and not illusory or noumenal): the entire socio-political field, Deleuze argues, must be seen as the historically determined product of desire. Second, to maintain this claim, Deleuze appeals to the theory of Ideas outlined above. In Kant, the postulates of practical reason are found in the transcendent Ideas of God, World, and the Soul, which are themselves derived from the types of judgment of relation (categorical, hypothethical, disjunctive). For Deleuze, by contrast, desire is determined by a set of constituting passive syntheses (connective, disjunctive, conjunctive), which in turn appeals to Deleuze’s genetic and differential theory of Ideas. In this sense, what one finds in Deleuze is at once an inversion and well as a completion of Kant’s critical philosophy. d. Politics. Consider, finally—and very briefly—the question of politics, which is developed primarily in the works Deleuze co-authored with Félix Guattari. The link between ethics and politics is, for Deleuze, redefined as the link between desire and power: desire (the difference between active and reactive forces in a given mode of existence) never exists in a spontaneous or natural state, but is always “assembled” [agencé] in variable but determinable manners in concrete social formations, and what assembles desire are relations of power. Deleuze remains “Marxist” in that his social theory is necessary tied to an analysis of capitalism, which he defines by the conjunction or differential relation between the virtual quantities of labor and capital. What he calls “schizophrenia” is an absolute limit that would cause these quantities to travel in a free and unbound state on a desocialized body: this is the “Idea” of society, a limit that is never reached as such, but constitutes the ideal “problematic” to which every social formation constitutes a concrete solution. For Deleuze, the central political question concerns the means by which the singularities and states of difference of the transcendental field are assembled in a given socius. Capitalism and Schizophrenia consequently outlines a typology of four abstract social formations--”primitive” or segmentary societies, States, nomadic “war machines,” and capitalism itself--that aims to provide the conceptual tools for analyzing the diverse dimensions of concrete social structures: How are its mechanisms of power organized? What are the “lines of flight” that escape its integration? What new modes of existence does it make possible? These types of social formations are not to be understood as stages in a progressive evolution or development; rather, they sketch out a topological field in which each type functions as a variable of coexistence that enters into complex relations with the other types. Conclusion. These, to be sure, are only very general schematic characterizations of the structure of Deleuze’s project. The conclusions I would like to draw from them are modest: first, that in both his historical and constructive work, Deleuze was pursuing the elaboration of a philosophical system (one that is open, differential, problematic, and so on); and second, that this system is a transcendental system, one that both completes and inverts Kant’s critical project. Historically, in working out this transcendental project, Deleuze primarily made use of three pre-Kantian thinkers (Hume, Spinoza, and Leibniz) and three post-Kantian thinkers (Maimon, Nietzsche, and Bergson)—all of whom provide Deleuze with the resources to think through a metaphysics stripped of the presuppositions of both God and Man, infinite substance and finite subject. Constructively, I have tried to sketch out the implications of Deleuze’s project in five Kantian domains—dialectics, aesthetics, analytics, ethics, and politics—showing how, in each case, Deleuze introduces into his analyses a consideration of the role of heterogenesis. Finally, I might note that Deleuze himself summarizes his distance from Kant in terms of two fundamental inversions: the repudiation of universals in favor of the singular, and the repudiation of the eternal in favor of the new, that is, the genetic conditions under which something new is produced (heterogenesis). Deleuze frequently makes both these points; see, for instance, the conclusion of “What is a dispositif?” in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 159-168. These, it seems to me, are perhaps the essential theses of one of the most extraordinary, most innovative, and most ambitious philosophical undertakings of the twentieth-century. PAGE 16 PAGE 15