Deleuze and Kant's Critical Philosophy.

DELEUZE AND KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY M. J. McMahon Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). Department of Philosophy School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry Faculty of Arts The University of Sydney 2004

TABLE OF CONTENTS Synopsis

iii

Acknowledgements

iv

Prefatory notes on sources and references

v

Abbreviations for key texts

vi

Introduction Deleuze, Kant and ‘Kantianism’ The critical problems: foundation, coherence, orientation

1

PART I: BEGINNINGS: SURVEYING THE TERRAIN Chapter 1: Deleuze’s reading of Kant Hume: empirical critique Nietzsche: genealogical critique Kantian critique The critique of Kant Chapter 2: Kant and the orientation of thought The critical attitude Orientation and disorientation: the division of reason Truth and method Chapter 3: Deleuze and the “image of thought” The search for “the plane” The dogmatic image of thought The (non-) sense of the dogmatic image PART II: MIDDLES: PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER Chapter 1: The sense of the problem The problem in geometry and philosophy Logic and existence: the problematic orientation of critique Chapter 2: The problem and the problematic in Kant Schematism Synthesis Modality Ideality Chapter 3: The problem and the problematic in Deleuze Ideal determination Subjective determination Temporal determination PART III: EXTREMITIES: GROUND ZERO Chapter 1: The Critique of Judgement and the image of nature (1) Introduction to the problem Critique and the scientific revolution Critique and teleology Chapter 2: The Critique of Judgement and the image of nature (2) The feeling of life Life and teleology Noematic fields and the field of the noematic

25

43

58

74 88

98

118

132

i

Chapter 3: The transcendental aesthetic Judgement and accord Genetic structure: the sublime The aesthetic idea and genesis in the beautiful Chapter 4: ‘A’ transcendental aesthetic The aesthetic image of thought The aesthetic community of thinkers Life and thought on the plane

147

Conclusion

175

Primary Bibliography

180

Secondary Bibliography

185

161

Appendices 1. Gilles Deleuze—“The Method of Dramatisation” 2. Émile Bréhier—“The Notion of the Problem in Philosophy” 3. Gilles Deleuze—“Introduction” to Instincts and Institutions

ii

SYNOPSIS

This thesis considers the status of Deleuze as a Kantian, and as such committed both to the critical destiny of philosophy, and the contestation of the sense of this destiny. The focus of Deleuze’s reading of Kant is an active conception of thought: the fundamental elements of thought are will and value rather than being or the concept. In the development of this idea we can note a progressive ‘tapering’ of the foundational instance of thought, in three stages: from the speculative field of being to the practical field of reason; from the intellectual category of the concept to the problematic category of the Idea; from the teleological notion of the organism to the aesthetic notion of the singular. Within each stage we can perceive a polemic between the two terms: it is in each case a question of the ‘sufficient reason’ of thought, its conditions of the actuality beyond its possibility. The highest expression of our reason, for Kant, is neither theoretical nor utilitarian, but moral: the realisation of our lawful freedom. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the ultimate secret of our freedom and thus all of our thought is to be found rather in the realm of the aesthetic.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people who were indispensable to the successful completion of this thesis, and who I am pleased to acknowledge. Paul Patton, who, as well as supervising the formative stages of this thesis, was an invaluable teacher and model during the formative stages of my philosophical studies as an undergraduate. Paul Redding, who supervised this thesis in its final stages, and who has demonstrated a faith and interest in my thinking at crucial points in its development. Antonia Soulez and Alain Badiou, who respectively served as informal and formal supervisors during my study in France, and whose philosophical largesse was both instructive and inspiring. Laleen Jayamanne, for her Socratic ability to teach by placing herself in the position of the student, and George Markus, for his magisterial inspiration and intellectual generosity. Dr Jan Orman, who ‘held my hand’ during the inevitable crises of faith. My workmates and director, Rowanne Couch, Liz Wilson, Tim Rayner and Margaret Harris, who went out of their way in considering my success their personal problem and duty, and actively collaborated in order for it to be realised, shouldering the burden and cheering me from the sidelines. My philosophical friends: The “Deleuzean Desperadoes” (Stephen O’Connell, Graham Jones, Heather Barton & Tim Matheson), Ben Horsfall, Jeremy Moss, Adrian Mackenzie, Simon Lumsden, Linnell Secomb, Amir Ahmadi, Garrett Barden, Didier Debaise, Pierre Nadaud, Adrian Miles, Linda Daley, Nicolas Pradines, Lisa Trahair, Dawn Mischiewski. For their personal support and professional recognition: Garry Genosko, Charles Stivale, Brian Massumi, Steven Shaviro, Max Deutscher, Penny Deutscher, John Mullarkey, Keith Ansell-Pearson. And my parents, Barrie and Dorothy, whose questioning spirit I have inherited, but who never questioned my choice of career, and have always supported me through the dramas and impoverishment it has frequently entailed.

iv

PREFATORY NOTES ON SOURCES AND REFERENCES This thesis is based on my own research, and incorporates no works published by myself elsewhere or submitted towards another degree. Use of other’s work is referenced in the footnotes and listed in the bibliography. The bibliography is divided into two sections: a primary bibliography with sourced works by Deleuze and Kant, and a secondary bibliography with all other sources. A list of abbreviations for frequently cited works by Kant and Deleuze follows these notes. The standard scholarly pagination is used for Kant’s three Critiques and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Apart from printed works, I have also made reference to some of Deleuze’s seminars at the Université de Vincennes in the 70s and 80s, transcribed and made available online by Richard Pinhas, whose translation is being overseen by Timothy Murphy. In these cases I have provided the subject and date of the seminar, and the paragraph number. The URL for the site is provided in the bibliography. In researching this thesis, I have mostly worked from the original French texts by Deleuze and the other French authors used, and English translations of Kantian sources. In references to the French texts, I have given both the French (F) and English (E) pagination, where both were available. I have often made modifications of the published English translation, mostly expressing relatively minor stylistic preferences of wording, stress and syntax, and often in order to bring out a ‘Kantian’ resonance in the French that is less apparent in the English rendition (for example, rendering “s’orienter dans la pensée” as “to orient oneself in thought” rather than “to find one’s bearings within thought”). Where modifications are made, this is indicated in the notes. Where there is a significant semantic divergence between my own and the standard translation, I have clarified the grounds and substance of the difference in the notes, along with the original French text. Translations of passages from untranslated French sources are my own. I have included as appendices translations of three untranslated French texts to which extensive references are made: Deleuze’s address to the French Society of Philosophy in 1968, “La Méthode de dramatisation”, Emile Bréhier’s article on “La notion de problème en philosophie” from the Swedish journal of philosophy Theoria in 1948, and Deleuze’s introduction to Instincts and Institutions from 1953. The original pagination of these works has been retained in their reproduction here.

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ABBREVIATIONS FOR KEY TEXTS BY DELEUZE AND KANT

DELEUZE: CC

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

DR

Différence et répétition (1968)/Difference and repetition (1994)

ES

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

NP

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

MD

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

PCK

La philosophie critique de Kant: Doctrine des facultés (1963)/Kant's critical philosophy: the doctrine of the faculties (1984)

QP?

Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991)/What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994)

KANT: AP

Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798)

CJ

Kritik der Urtheilskraft/Critique of Judgement (1790)

CPR

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

OT

“Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?”/“What is orientation in thinking?” (1786)

QE

“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?”/“An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” (1784)

vi

INTRODUCTION

Deleuze, Kant and ‘Kantianism’ In the discussion following a presentation on Kant to the French Society of Philosophy in 1968, French philosopher Ferdinand Alquié is reported to have said: Why does Kant have the sad privilege of being, among all philosophers, the one who everyone wants to prolong in one direction or another?... The most diverse interpretations come from thinkers who all nevertheless agree in saying that Kant, whether through timidness or inability, did not fulfil his own thought. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Kant perfectly well fulfilled and expressed his thought, which doesn’t prevent me from recognising that there may be other thoughts one might prefer to his.1

We can recognise the phenomenon that Alquié is lamenting as ‘Kantianism’: a specific form of response to Kant’s philosophy which, distinct from Kantian scholarship or influence, treats Kant’s thought as something which both falls short of and exceeds itself in such a way that its identity can be pursued in thoughts ‘other’ to it. Jules Vuillemin’s book, L’heritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne, is dedicated to examining the mechanism of and dialectic between three successive waves of ‘Kantianism’, through their key representatives— post-Kantianism

(Fichte),

neo-Kantianism

(Cohen)

and

existentialism

(Heidegger). He describes the ‘Kantian’ approach in the following manner: The interest of these interpretations is… not at all historical: it is not a matter of reconstituting Kantian thought with all its elements and, if there is the occasion, with all its contradictions; rather one must detach the kernel and the husk, the interior and the exterior, trusting that health is in the former, all sickness and rot only coming from the latter.2

In this way, ‘Kantianism’ is a selective and ‘untimely’ kind of reading where, in Steven Galt Cromwell’s terms, “Kant” refers to a “semantic field” rather than an “historical figure.”3 If Kant has been the special object of such attention, it is because he successfully conveyed his thought as revolutionary: the famous ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy to match that in the sciences, as well as an expression of broader cultural changes attendant to the Enlightenment era. While the notion of critique is a signature concept of Kant’s, as the sign of a revolution, and thus in some respects a ‘call to arms’, it already implies an origin and a

INTRODUCTION destiny beyond an individual thought. Already during his lifetime, debates concerning Kant’s work were addressed to the ‘spirit’ of the revolution rather than its letter, and the history of Kantianism assumes traits typical of revolutionary fallout in any field: dramas of fidelity and betrayal, ‘carrying on the banner’, denunciation and counter-revolutions. If ‘Kantianism’ came into being through persuasion of the revolutionary nature of Kant’s work, it is perpetually renewed by divisions concerning its sense. The second character follows from the first to the extent that part of the notion of a revolution is a certain indeterminacy concerning its ultimate causes and significance, or at least an openness in principle to constant re-evaluation. The character of Kant’s oeuvre itself contributes to the disparity of the traditions that claim to be heir to Kant. There is, for example, its literal ambiguity, whose symbol is perhaps the discrepancy between the first and second editions of the first critique. There is also the multiplicity of its dimensions, as Kant’s vision proceeds through the progressive revelations of the first, second and third critiques, each of which themselves contain striking subdivisions, as so many possible perspectives from which to view the whole. Vuillemin identifies for example in the successive waves of Kantianism a respective focus on the Dialectic, the Analytic and the Aesthetic of the first critique, each seeking the “privileged element of the system assumed to be essential by the interpretation, [leaving] to the side all that, not agreeing with it, risks contradiction.”4 It is the status of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a ‘Kantian’, rather than as a scholar of Kant or a philosopher ‘influenced by’ Kant, which is the particular object of this thesis. In his 1980 book surveying the contemporary philosophical scene in France influenced by the local interpretation of German idealism, Vincent Descombes opens his section on Gilles Deleuze with the statement: “Gilles Deleuze is above all a postKantian.”5 In Deleuze’s work, we find at once the affirmation of the revolutionary potential of Kant’s project, the accompanying reservations concerning its realisation, and the subsequent commitment to its reinvention. The theme of the critical destiny of philosophy runs throughout Deleuze’s philosophy, from his first book on Hume in 1953, to his last collection of essays in 1993, entitled Critique et clinique. At the same time, Deleuze frequently

2

INTRODUCTION expresses a great ambivalence towards Kant, almost as if the greatest enemy of the critical project were Kant himself. Kant is perhaps the most canonical of the philosophers to whom Deleuze devotes a book, and at one point he distinguishes it from the others as “a book about an enemy, where I try to expose how he functions, what his mechanisms are.”6 When Deleuze opposes Nietzsche, for example, or Hume, to Kant as the ‘true’ avatar of critique, however, it is on the grounds of principles that are recognisably Kantian. In many ways, Kant occupies a similar place in Deleuze’s work to that of Plato: a great philosophical “sign” with a double edge, “one by which it expresses… the productive dissymmetry, the other by which it tends to annul it.”7 It is part of Deleuze’s conception of philosophy that it has a duplicitous nature, comprising a disparity between the competing perspectives of difference and identity, production and product. At one point, Deleuze writes that in taking up Nietzsche’s project of “the reversal of Platonism”, it is not only “inevitable”, but “desirable” that this reversal conserve many aspects of Plato.8 It is in the same way that we can understand Deleuze’s relationship to Kant, as not only a challenge to Kant that also retains many aspects of his philosophy, but a challenge to Kant in order to preserve what he sees as valuable in critique. The relationship between Kant and Deleuze is one that is relatively underdeveloped in the secondary literature on Deleuze (and certainly in that on Kant). The ‘breakthrough’ work of Deleuze’s in both the French- and English-speaking world was his manifesto-style volume with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume I, published in 1972 and written in the wake of the political and intellectual upheavals of May ’68.9 The English translation appeared five years later, in 1977, and in the same year there appeared several translations of chapters from Deleuze and Guattari’s follow-up work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume II, published in 1980 and completely translated into English in 1987. It is fair I think to say, in the first place, that the secondary literature on Deleuze as a whole is dominated by threads drawn from these two major works, over Deleuze’s relationship with any other thinker, or even on his own. Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, and probably the work which most integrates

3

INTRODUCTION Deleuze’s own philosophy and his debt to Kant, appeared in English only in 1994. There is thus the simple ‘facticity’ of timing in the impact and reception of an author’s work when considering the prominence of this area in interpretations of Deleuze. There is also the related fact, which Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam draw attention to in their introduction to Deleuze’s book on Kant, namely that “it is difficult to think of two philosophers more apparently opposite than old Immanuel Kant, ‘the great Chinaman of Königsberg’, and Gilles Deleuze, the Parisian artist of nomadic intensities.”10 This disparity in ‘image’, or perhaps in readership, between two philosophers, is less marked in the case of the other major figures that feature in Deleuze’s work, such as Nietzsche, Bergson and even Spinoza and Leibniz. It is a disparity Deleuze himself remarks upon, as in the reference given above to Kant as an “enemy”, and in comments in his lectures about the suffocating “fog” of Kant’s work, so unlike Deleuze’s own mercurial lightness.11 Presenting Deleuze as a ‘Kantian’, however, is one way of re-evaluating this disparity, so that it is not a simple antipathy, or an intriguing localised deviation, but rather an organising principle for understanding Deleuze’s philosophy: it is entirely natural for a ‘Kantian’ to entertain a certain rivalry with Kant; it is part of what makes a Kantian a Kantian. Deleuze is a singularly eclectic philosopher, and it is not necessary to claim any priority for this perspective over the many others that can be employed to elucidate Deleuze’s work. Following Deleuze’s own tendency to ‘make over’ the objects of his studies in the light of a governing problem, the intention here is to produce ‘a’ Kant and ‘a’ Deleuze whose resemblance to each other or to the ‘original’ is less important than an internally coherent development of the issue in question: in this case, the project of a critical philosophy. Through a ‘Kantian Deleuze’, which both highlights and reflects a ‘Deleuzean Kant’, we arrive at a perspective on both which no doubt goes beyond the position of either one alone. As suggested above, ‘Kantianism’ as much implies a polemical engagement with previous Kantianisms as one with Kant himself. While this thesis will focus primarily on the direct links between Kant and Deleuze, and the themes arising from these links, it is worthwhile here to briefly situate

4

INTRODUCTION Deleuze in relation to other Kantian traditions. In the first place, Deleuze manifests an affiliation with the group of German philosophers contemporary with and immediately following Kant, commonly called “post-Kantian”, including Fichte, Maimon, Schelling, Novalis and Hölderlin.12 Maimon and Hölderlin, in particular, are foregrounded in Deleuze’s reflections on Kant. Maimon, who greatly influenced all of the post-Kantians, as well as Hegel, carried out a sceptical critique of Kant’s philosophy, whose vulnerabilities he claimed to solve through the reintroduction of a Leibnizian-inspired metaphysics. To Kant’s analysis of the structures of our understanding based on the question of right—quid juris?—he repeatedly opposed the question of fact—quid facti?—and argued for the necessity of a “genetic” method which would account for the production of our real experience rather than remaining at the external and hypothetical conditions of possible experience. Maimon posits an infinite understanding within our finite understanding in the form of a “differential unconscious”: an ideal field beneath representation of what might be understood as ‘micro-schematisms’, whose laws of combination generate both the form and content of our understanding, and overcome the Kantian duality of concept and intuition. At a relatively early point in his writings on critique, Deleuze embraces the necessity of positing “genetic” principles for thought, which account for ‘real’ experience beyond its conditions of possibility.13 In his earliest work on critical philosophy, however—his book on Hume—Deleuze explicitly repudiates the question of “genesis” as a valid concern.14 There, he considers this notion to refer either to matters of psychology—which he excludes from the purview of philosophy—or to metaphysical questions of origin, which do not enter into his critical reading of empiricism: “empiricism does not raise the problem of the origin of the mind but rather the problem of the constitution of the subject”.15. As this distaste for psychology and questions of origin is maintained by Deleuze throughout his work, we can anticipate some of the modifications that the notion of genesis undergoes in order to become integrated into Deleuze’s perspective on critique. In the first place, genesis becomes essentially what ‘comes about’—a genesis in the sense of an “epigenesis”16—instead of being an innate principle of generation: the external relationship forged in an encounter between an interiority and exteriority that are properly transcendental rather than psychological or metaphysical. In the 5

INTRODUCTION second place, Maimon finished his Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie (Essay on Transcendental Philosophy) a year before Kant published the Critique of Judgement. Kant himself, on Deleuze’s account, goes some way in this work to address the problem of genesis in his own terms, also going beyond the “thetic” or “hypothetical” model of judgement objected to by Maimon in order to develop a dialectical conception of reflective judgements.17 In fact, we can appreciate some of the most important aspects of Deleuze’s position in relation to Maimon through his estimation of Hölderlin as a reader of Kant. Deleuze introduces Hölderlin into his discussion of Kant around the issue of the role of time in thought. Hölderlin’s analysis of tragedy is based around the notion of a “caesura” that splits the subject and the dramatic action into two unequal and irreconcilable halves. It is, on Deleuze’s reading, the “pure and empty form of time” itself, the form of the indeterminate or image of the future, that constitutes this unbridgeable “fracture.”18 This tragic form lies at the heart of Kantian thought in the form of the “paradox of inner sense”, whereby I am unable to reconcile the thought of my action as a spontaneous ‘I’ and my passive experience of myself as an object of sense.19 Between the two comes precisely the form of time as the condition of determinability, which both introduces an ‘outside’ into thought at the same time as being its condition. In the first place we can note here a divergence from Maimon. Maimon’s ‘infinite understanding’, whether constitutive or regulative in nature, is a form of ‘intellectual intuition’ which ultimately reduces all spatio-temporal determinations to conceptual analysis, and renders the subject transparent to itself in principle if not in fact. The autonomy of space and time and the heterogeneity of sensibility and the understanding remain important Kantian tenets for Deleuze, even if he reinterprets their nature and relationship. On the other hand, it is precisely within the “fracture” that Deleuze locates the “swarming of Ideas” which constitute the differential unconscious.20 Between Maimon and Deleuze, there is the influence of Bergson, who identifies time with subjectivity itself, beyond the personal ‘ego’. In his last work, Deleuze posits the “transcendental field” as precisely an unconscious and supra-personal plane of “qualitative duration”.21 Unlike the Maimonian unconscious, this sub-representative domain is one that is accessible to us: we can “reach right to the roots of spatio-temporal dynamisms, to the Ideas which are actualised within them.”22 It is an open and undetermined field, rather than 6

INTRODUCTION being tethered by the unifying principle of the divine. As Dan Smith has suggested, Deleuze frequently renews classical philosophers by reconfiguring their thought as if it were based on the absence rather than the presence of God: in this case, time itself takes the place of God, as productive indeterminacy rather than an ultimate ground of determination.23 It is this maintenance of an ‘outside’ to thought that marks one of Deleuze’s main divergences from the post-Kantians: the refusal to posit the unity of thought and being in the form of an organising concept. In this and other respects there are points of affinity between Deleuze and the neoKantians: the group of the Marburg School formed around the turn of the 20th century, which included such figures as Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. One of the main platforms of the neo-Kantians against the post-Kantians is the resurrection of the question of right as the sole terrain on which questions of morality and knowledge can be posed. A transcendental philosophy cannot take either ‘being’ or ‘experience’ as its point of departure, as morality and knowledge are constituted not as matters of fact (whether empirical or metaphysical), but through their lawfulness, which is an agent rather of the transformation of fact. The Kantian project, in Cassirer’s words, “does not concern things, but judgements on things.”24 The neo-Kantians thus focus on the epistemological significance of the transcendental apparatus, understood as the methodological conditions of a universally valid science, rather than a quasi-psychological metaphysics of the innate conditions of subjective experience. The Kantian ‘subject’ is science itself: the ‘I’ of transcendental apperception is neither a psychological nor metaphysical subject but the quasigrammatical ‘persona’ or ‘subject of enunciation’, who authorises the judgement and ensures the coherence of the system of knowledge. The indeterminacy of experience outside of this process of legitimation is implicit in this position, as is the susceptibility of the edifice of knowledge to constant reevaluation. Despite the ‘scientistic’ focus of the neo-Kantians, and the associated reclamation of ‘possible experience’ as the proper object of thought (which is to say, the natural world as constituted through science), there are many elements

which the neo-Kantian

perspective shares

with Deleuze’s

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

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INTRODUCTION already suggested by Deleuze’s position on “genesis”, is the ‘anti-innateism’ and anti-representationalism of the neo-Kantians, opposed to a psychology of the structures of experience or a metaphysics which simply reproduces psychological experience on a more “refined” plane.25 Deleuze has a special understanding of empiricism, which will be examined at a later point, but its negative sense is invariably identified with the field of the representation of objects by a subject. It is not this field that Deleuze identifies with “real experience”, and in this respect he repudiates its philosophical value as much as the neo-Kantians. Beyond “experience”, in this sense, for Deleuze, are the ideal transcendental conditions which serve as its foundation, but this is also the indeterminate or determinable field from which ideas emerge, as described above. There is again a Bergsonian inflection to Deleuze’s position here: that of Bergson’s project of going beyond the “turn” below which our habits organise our field of experience, in order to analyse both the “real” elements of experience and their laws of combination.26 Deleuze also shares with the neoKantians the notion of thought as a legislative and transformative instance, rather than being subordinated to an existing state of affairs. This fiat is not for Deleuze restricted to the scientific domain: it belongs to the creative character of all thought, more artistic than scientific. Similarly, a methodological apparatus is for Deleuze simply one case of the broader category

of

the

“dramatological”

nature of

thought,

organising

a

transcendental field of right as its scenario and assigning “conceptual personae”, neither of which can be assimilated to empirical states of affairs or persons. Following Vuillemin’s classification of the ‘Kantianisms’, something should be said of Deleuze’s relationship to the phenomenological school and Heidegger. Here, Deleuze keeps a certain distance. In the first issue of Magazine littéraire dedicated to Deleuze, appearing in 1988, there appears a set of “biographical coordinates” for Deleuze, most likely written by himself. 27 Among the list of “distinguishing characteristics” is included: “has never been either a phenomenologist or a Heideggerian.” In Deleuze’s lectures on Kant, he notes the transformation that the notion of “appearance” undergoes in Kant’s philosophy, such that it refers not to an essence but to its “sense”, this transformation representing both a starting point for the subsequent phenomenological tradition and an important aspect of Deleuze’s own reading 8

INTRODUCTION of Kant.28 As Michel Foucault notes, however, Deleuze’s own philosophy of sense could not be more “alien” to a work such as Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in which “the body-organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations, which arise from the perception of things.”29 It is indeed the normative and pre-determined aspect of notions such as the ‘primal’ and ‘primordial’ that Deleuze typically criticises when he addresses phenomenological thinkers in his work. Thus, for example, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze cites Heidegger’s notion of the “preontological comprehension of Being” as a form of the myth of “common sense”, whereby the fundamental elements of thought are shared by all in a subjective and pre-conceptual form.30 Similarly, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze reproaches Husserl for maintaining the form of consciousness in the transcendental domain and positing a fundamental matrix of sense as “non-modalized rootform” or “Urdoxa.”31 Deleuze’s reservations with regard to the phenomenological school are not unrelated to his explicit and violent hostility towards Hegel. Although there is no shortage of material in Deleuze’s work from which we can gather the main points of this antipathy—the critique of the negative, the ‘intellectualism’ of understanding difference as contradiction—it remains a challenge to precisely locate the problem which defines their difference. This is partly because, as is also the case with the phenomenologists, there seem also to be many concerns that they share: the question of the unity of thought and being in difference, for example, or the struggle against abstraction and the critique of a conventional understanding of the concept. Mostly, however, it is because while Deleuze often finds aspects of major thinkers objectionable, he tends nevertheless to find ways of adapting their thought to his own purposes, or identify more productive ‘undercurrents’: Hegel alone is singled out as a kind of ‘plague’ on thought with no redeeming features. Deleuze has been accused of (wilfully) misreading Hegel, which is undoubtedly the case, but this simply begs the question of his motivation for doing so. Whether Deleuze is ‘really’ so different from Hegel or not, it is clearly the case that from Deleuze’s point of view, his entire philosophy could be understood as a ‘corrective’ of sorts to Hegel, and as such this is an important structuring theme that should not be overlooked.

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INTRODUCTION It is not the object of this thesis to directly examine in any detail the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel. However, given Hegel’s own denunciation of critical philosophy, by pursuing the idea of Deleuze as above all a critical thinker we provide one context within which their disparity can indirectly be understood. If we confront Kant and Hegel rather than Hegel and Deleuze, the dividing issue that immediately raises its head is the speculative relationship to the Absolute: the signature of transcendental illusion for the one, the only true ground of philosophy for the other. With this in mind, what a critical reading of Deleuze in turn highlights regarding his relationship to Hegel is not the question of negation or difference per se, but precisely Hegel’s affirmation of the Absolute as the highest object and subject of thought—its highest ‘being’—, and the unity of thought and being within the concept. In Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche, Deleuze describes this affirmation as the “yes” (ja) of the ass: the thought that wants to take on what ultimately “is”, to assume its weight and truth, and is opposed to the thought animated by the powers of the false which seeks to create new possibilities for existence: Nietzsche is engaged in a critique of all conceptions of affirmation which see it as a simple function, a function of being or of what is. This applies however this being is conceived: as true or as real, as noumenon or phenomenon, and however this function is conceived: whether as development, exposition, unveiling, revelation, consciousness-raising or knowledge. Philosophy since Hegel appears as a bizarre mixture of ontology and anthropology, metaphysics and humanism, theology and atheism, theology of bad conscience and atheism of ressentiment.32

What, for Hegel, is the reciprocal and meaning-generating embrace of the Whole, is, for Deleuze, a stifling ‘totalitarianism’ of the concept which allows of no escape or outside to thought, and thus no allowance for freedom, change, or the absolutely new. Conversely, what is simply an external and abstract position of “reflection” for Hegel, is for Deleuze the evaluative position of the Master (in the Nietzschean sense), the spirit of levity who “discharges” and transforms being rather than taking it on. Some of these ‘anti-Hegelian’ aspects of Deleuze have already been indicated under the auspices of Deleuze’s ‘neo-Kantianism’. A more telling reference point, however, which encompasses both Deleuze’s affinities and divergences with this group, as well as the particular character of his anti-

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INTRODUCTION Hegelianism, would be to speak of Deleuze’s “pragmatic” orientation: his selfproclaimed “radical empiricism”, of the sort contemporary with the neoKantians themselves (thus James, Peirce and Bergson himself). Like the neoKantians, the early pragmatists were partly inspired by a scientific methodology that attended to localised problems, provisional results and experimentation rather than a totalising speculative system. Unlike the neoKantians, however, the pragmatists, and James and Bergson in particular, with Deleuze, are ‘anti-intellectualist’ in orientation: pluralist, suspicious of the concept and focused on immediate phenomena of novelty and change. In his piece in Dialogues, “On the superiority of Anglo-American literature” (which also addresses certain Anglo-American schools of philosophy), it is precisely a kind of ‘levity’ that elicits Deleuze’s admiration: the absence of the weight of ‘being’ as a problem, the pursuit of external relations “outside of everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole.”33 It is the sense in which Deleuze develops the critical project in this direction, and the issues it raises concerning the “theoretical” and “practical” orientation of thought, which will form the particular focus of this thesis, as the substance of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism.” The difference in nature between the theoretical and practical interests of reason is of course a theme of defining importance in Kant’s critique, and the illusions which are created when our speculative drive holds sway is one of the central motivations of Kant’s project. We also know, however, that this division is not selfexplanatory: “practical”, for Kant, does not mean ‘instrumental’ in the sense that a narrow understanding of pragmatism would suggest, and theory itself is for Kant based in a model of thought as a kind of action. The highest expression of our reason, for Kant, is neither theoretical nor utilitarian, but moral: the realisation of our lawful freedom. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the ultimate secret of our freedom and thus all of our thought is to be found rather in the realm of the aesthetic. In developing this problematic between the two authors, the hope is not only to provide insights into an important aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy, but to revitalise certain problems in Kant, in the way all new ‘Kantianisms’ do, and also to provide material for reflection on some questions regarding “orientation in thinking” on its own account.

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INTRODUCTION

The critical problems: foundation, coherence, orientation The trajectory of this thesis develops the problem of the foundation and orientation of thought in Kant’s work, as addressed by Deleuze. In broad terms, this development is marked by a progressive ‘tapering’ of the conception of the foundational instance of thought, in three stages: from the speculative field of being to the practical field of reason; from the intellectual category of the concept to the problematic category of the Idea; from the teleological notion of the organism to the aesthetic notion of the singular. This progression can also be noted within each of these separate stages, as a polemic between two terms: it is in each case a question of the ‘sufficient reason’ of thought, the conditions of the actuality of thought beyond its possibility. There is thus a relative autonomy to each of the sections as they broach this issue from different standpoints. The first section addresses the ground of thought in terms of its model or image, the second section addresses the determination of thought in terms of its problem or schema, and the third section addresses the genesis of thought in terms of its ‘event’. The problem of foundation in Kant’s philosophy can first be raised in a ‘global’ or ‘metaphysical’ sense. At the same time as the revolutionary impact of Kant’s philosophy is recognised by both its supporters and its detractors, it presents a disconcerting image of the status of ‘man’ in the world. Kantianism would never have existed if the stakes involved in identifying its essential core were not perceived to be so high. If these stakes could be adequately summarised in a phrase, it would be something like “the modern human condition”, or: “what is man?” It is not a matter here of repeating ‘eternal’ questions, but of locating the genesis and nature of a field of enquiry. It is again a matter of ‘Kant’ being the name or marker of an event: questions concerning the human condition, or “man”, now incorporate a difference between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, which is perhaps another way of saying that modernity itself becomes a philosophical object. By asserting that finite reason is the ultimate author and authority for our knowledge and morality, Kant’s critical philosophy seems, on the one hand, to greatly magnify the dignity of the human subject. On the other hand, however, this enlarged figure is now ‘alone’ on the worldly stage. Indeed, the

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INTRODUCTION sense of the human milieu being a ‘world’—as existing ‘for us’—is in fact greatly reduced, as what it contained of order and meaning is shown to be perhaps wholly given to it by ourselves. The source of the anxiety lies in the basic critical principle that we can have no knowledge of things in themselves. Kant’s work of course consists just as fundamentally in the attempt to show that we also have no need to know things as they are in themselves in order to have a science, a metaphysics and a morality, and that these are in fact impossible based on such an assumption, as well as a diagnosis of why we think we need such knowledge. These ‘compensations’, however, cannot ultimately eradicate the conviction of reason that it is entitled to entertain the absolute— as this for Kant is not simply an error but a “transcendental illusion”, inscribed within the tendency of reason itself to surpass experience. If this anxiety concerning foundations in an ‘existential’ sense can be put aside, there remain similar problems on the more formal or specific level of our cognitive apparatus. Kant rejects a purely rationalist basis for philosophy on the grounds that our cognitive judgements could not be just conceptual, but must be ‘synthesised’ with the material of sensibility. Concepts and sense impressions are different in source and in nature, but must be combined in order to form valid judgements. The nature of this connection, along with the status of the ‘thing in itself’, is probably the most controversial area of Kantian scholarship: their interpretation differentiates mutually antagonistic schools of ‘Kantianism’. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason, which deals with the problem of the necessary connection between our a priori concepts and sensibility, is the most changed between the first and second editions of this work, and manifests ambiguities that touch on Kant’s work as a whole. Appearing at worst like Descartes’ introduction of the “pineal gland” to overcome the mind/body dualism, having created a clear separation between the concept and sensibility, Kant creates a mediating third term in the form of the “schematism” in order to render “homogenous” these separate elements. The schematism is by Kant’s own admission a “secret art”, whose full clarification is beyond the scope of his treatise. The nature of this problem itself depends on one’s interpretation of Kant’s critique. The language of the ‘faculties’ and ‘conditions of experience’ easily gives Kant’s critique at times the appearance of a psychological study or

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INTRODUCTION even a physiology of coherent perception, despite the fact that Kant energetically distances himself from empirical approaches to philosophy, and differentiates perception from his notion of “experience.” At the other extreme, the radical nature of Kant’s claims against metaphysics form a fertile ground for the construction of a kind of ‘metaphysical anti-metaphysics’: the postcritical meditations on our finite ‘being’. Either interpretation is particularly sensitive to the presence of ‘gaps’ in the system. It is in this respect that readings of the more ‘scientistic’ kind are on stronger ground, considering the critique as essentially a formulation of methodological rules. The schema is a vital tool here, as simply the “rule of construction” for our concepts. The central notion of critique on this reading is the judgement: it is our judgements which combine our concepts with the data from intuition and it is our ‘judgement’ which sees fit to do so. These are of course informed by the methodological apparatus, which is open to revision, and the experimental possibilities of the schema. Given inevitable contingencies, however, the ‘gap’ is straddled by judgement, whose nature is to be adaptable, provisional and to ‘make leaps’. The psychology or metaphysics of such an operation is not a pertinent question on this model. The notions of method, schema, and judgement are guiding and interrelated themes in the development here of Deleuze’s interpretation of Kant. They are not raised as solutions to the problems raised by Kant’s critique, but, in the first place, as suggesting a way of posing them. To connect the mystery of the schematism to the more familiar impenetrability of the art of judgement is not to dismiss both as beyond discussion, but rather to open an avenue of enquiry that may shed light on both. At the same time, to ‘shed light’ on these notions does not mean that the ‘gaps’ in their explanation can be filled in, but is just as liable to reveal how such gaps form a necessary part of their operation. For a thought that wishes to remain critical, the challenge posed by Kant’s uprooting of knowledge and morality from a transcendent ground is not how to re-establish this connection, but how to make this disconnection or ungrounding viable—how it is workable, and how it can be lived with. Descombes’ account of the ‘Kantian’ character of Deleuze’s philosophy immediately raises the issues contained in the problems of the critical ‘worldview’ and the internal coherence of critique as outlined above. In the

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INTRODUCTION first place, Descombes sees Deleuze’s thought as an affirmation of the criticism Kant undertakes in the Transcendental Dialectic of the ideas of the soul, the world, and of God: “No experience can justify us in affirming a single substantial self, a totality of things and a first cause of this totality.”34 On the contrary, for Deleuze, it is the postulation of a transcendent first principle that prejudices and enslaves. In the second place, Descombes identifies the character of Deleuze’s philosophy of “difference” in Kantian terms, its focus being not the difference between two concepts or identities, but that between the conceptual and the non-conceptual: the one which obliges thought to introduce difference into its identities, particularity into its general representations and precision into its concepts. The real difference is that which exists between concept and intuition, between the intelligible and the sensible, between the logical and the aesthetic.35

Descombes also indicates the framework that Deleuze utilises to approach these issues, itself based on an understanding of Kant. This is the reading of critique as above all the substitution of a practical ideal of thought for a speculative one: Liberation of the will is the significance of the critical idea… Deleuze gives the name ‘philosophy of being’ to the old, pre-Kantian metaphysics, and ‘philosophy of will’ to the metaphysics born of the accomplished critique.36

The affirmation of critique as a “philosophy of the will” is evident from Deleuze’s first monograph on the philosophy of Hume. Deleuze gives a ‘critical’ reading of Hume, minimising its ‘naturalist’ or psychological aspects to portray it instead as a study of the principles by which we surpass experience in order to constitute a subject of knowledge and morality. The greatest obstacle to his critical reading however is Hume’s notion of the “intentional finality of nature” which is postulated as a ground of the validity of our associations. After dedicating his final chapter to the question of finality, Deleuze concludes with a tranquil dismissal of the necessity of this postulate: This accord can only be thought; and no doubt it is the most empty and impoverished thought. Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we do, not as the theory of what is. What we do has its principles, and Being can never be grasped except as the object of a synthetic relation with the very principles of what we do.37

A synthetic conception of knowledge is by its very nature ‘active’, for Deleuze. In one of his seminars at the University of Vincennes, Deleuze contrasts Kant’s

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INTRODUCTION position with Leibniz’s claim that all knowledge claims are in principle 38

analytic. Such a claim needs to be understood, according to Deleuze, as reflecting “a certain idea of knowledge, that is, that to know is to discover what is included in the concept.” More specifically, I would say of knowledge in this case that it is modelled on a particular model which is that of passion or perception. To know is in the end to perceive something; to know is to apprehend, it is a passive model of knowledge, even if many activities depend upon it.38

In the case of Kant, however, the postulation of the synthetic a priori judgement as the basic element of knowledge translates into a conception of knowledge whose nature it is to “go beyond the concept to affirm something else… it is a model of knowledge as act.” 39 In his book on Kant, Deleuze understands the distance of critique from both rationalism and empiricism to be based in its postulation of the selfdetermination of the will. If philosophy is “the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason”,40 it is in the first place distinguished from empiricism, which subordinates reason to the ends of Nature, and in the second place from rationalism, which takes “a Being, a Good or a Value” as its ultimate goal.41 In both cases, it is an external object that determines the will and compromises its autonomy: In so far as the representation is of something external to the will, it hardly matters whether it is sensible or purely rational; in any case it determines the act of willing only through the satisfaction linked to the ‘object’ which it represents.42

The elaboration of the internal ends of human reason according to its interests is the object of both the critique of pure and practical reason. The ‘practical’ nature of the “philosophy of the will”, as Deleuze conceives it, is thus not connected to any utilitarian or instrumental conception of thought, but rather a legislative one. The critical ‘purity’ of both the theoretical and practical interests of reason concerns the immanence of its principles and independence from external determinations. It is on the contrary the most ‘speculative’ philosophies that reveal themselves to be animated by the pursuit of an object, however idealised, and thus representative of a ‘lower’ (non-transcendental) expression of the will. There is thus little sense in Deleuze’s reading of Kant as the philosopher of ‘finitude’, in the negative sense: the one who bars our path to the absolute and confines thought to all-too-human limits. In the first place, 16

INTRODUCTION this is because, in Deleuze’s view, Kant has transformed the terrain of thought such that the sense of these notions has radically changed. It is also because the absence of a transcendent foundation for thought is the object of a more direct affirmation in Deleuze’s work. It is the presence, rather than the absence, of a transcendent absolute, that signifies limits for Deleuze. Deleuze describes the Kantian milieu in the absence of God as a “desert terrain”, and such a terrain is a space of freedom rather than constraint, prefiguring a new ‘persona’ and quest of the thinker: the Romantic wanderer in search of a foundation.43 In his later work with Guattari, Deleuze presents the desert as the symbol for the “nomadic” milieu of thought.44 Deleuze more specifically affirms the ‘modern’ character of Kant’s thinking because it breaks with a ‘cosmic’ vision of a holistic order of things to focus rather on the universal laws that regulate local events. This reading of Kant within the context of cultural modernity is one reason why the Critique of Judgement is a pivotal text for the relationship between Deleuze and Kant. Deleuze reads aesthetic judgements as symbols of discord, or a “discordant accord” rather than as the symbol of a return to a cosmic ideal under the auspices of a teleological, organised nature.45 It is this aspect of Deleuze’s work that makes him, along with Foucault, a rather atypical heir of the tradition of the Enlightenment. Although Deleuze considers Kant to have fallen short of the more radical potential of critique, he affirms the critical understanding of the Enlightenment project as an exercise in demystification, a challenge to traditional authorities, an agent of liberation, and as promoting the ideal of “thinking for oneself”, or “saying simple things in ones own name”46: Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? Exposing as a mystification the mixture of baseness and stupidity that creates the astonishing complicity of both victims and perpetrators. Finally, turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, which is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion.47

It is to the extent to which Kant still upholds orthodox ideals of truth and morality, and the ‘form’ of the orthodoxy in the structure of cognition that he comes under attack by Deleuze. It is nevertheless in the name of the critical ideals and formulae laid out by Kant that he leads this attack, and pursues its possibilities in his own and other’s thought.

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INTRODUCTION If Deleuze denounces or dismisses any loss of ‘connection’ to an essential or supreme being that ensues from the critical ‘worldview’ (or lack thereof), there is on the other hand his preoccupation with the necessity for thought to attain what is singular and concrete—pure “difference.” This latter aim can appear to contradict the former critical commitment, as in his essay on “the conception of difference in Bergson”, where he claims that the aim of a philosophy of difference is “to ‘return’ to things themselves, to account for them without reducing them to something other than themselves, to grasp them in their being.”48 He readily cites to this end the Bergsonian ideal of philosophy as a special form of empiricism, which tailors for the object “a concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely be say is still a concept, since it applies only to that one thing.”49 A first step towards reconciling this apparent disparity in Deleuze’s work is to understand it in the context of his criticism of the concept of identity as the basic element of thought. The function of the concept of identity in philosophy, on Deleuze’s account, is effectively to ‘manage’ difference. On the one hand, the concept subordinates differences by picking out qualities as ‘the same’ or identical across different cases. On the other hand, differences are inscribed within the concept as a mode of its division, for example on the Aristotelian model of genera and species, where a concept is divided according to the difference of contrasting attributes, or on the Hegelian model where the concept is divided according to the difference of contradiction. In either case, the explicit or implicit argument is that whatever differences may exist outside of the concept, these cannot be ‘thought’ without being referred to a concept or category of identity. A pertinent example in this context is Hegel’s critique of the alleged “richness” of “sense-certainty” at the beginning of his Phenomenology.50 The immediate data of consciousness appears to be the truest and most concrete form of knowledge, but when it comes to formulating this knowledge it reveals itself to be the most abstract and impoverished: simply an “I’, “this”, “here”, “now”, which could apply to any experience and precisely says nothing of ‘this’ one. The problem is one of both analysis and synthesis: what are the terms of a division that follows the true ‘differences in nature’, and how do we integrate the dispersal of the given in such a way that it can be thought?

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INTRODUCTION Deleuze’s response to these problems continues his emphasis on a model of thought grounded in action. Hegel’s example, for Deleuze, presupposes the centrality of the general concept as reference point for the thinking of particulars, according to a speculative model of thought as representation. Deleuze posits instead the Kantian notion of the Idea as the ‘animus’ of thought, which integrates singularities in function of a fundamental problem, according to a model of thought which he calls “dramatisation”: Hegel substitutes the abstract relation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation of the singular and the universal in the Idea. He thus remains in the reflected element of ‘representation’, within simple generality. He represents concepts, instead of dramatizing Ideas…51

The significance of the singular—“this”, “here”, “now”—is only grasped within the context of a problem, a ‘drama’ of thought that gives it sense, in the absence of which it is effectively impoverished. The state of ‘being thought’ here is not one of representation or comprehension through a concept, but being aligned along the coordinates of an action or event. Deleuze contrasts the converging of the data of the faculties in representation, where an identity is formed at the overlap of what I perceive, remember and conceive, to the open relay of information, transmitted across each faculty in turn, without a common measure. There is thus no identity posited as underlying the passage from the unthought to the thought: thought is an addition, it creates something new. Rather than an act of representation, Deleuze conceives thought as an act of unilateral determination: unilateral because there is ultimately no reciprocity or common measure between thought and its outside. The “difference” of interest to Deleuze is thus not the conceptual difference represented by its division, nor in effect the sea of differences too large or small to be inscribed within a concept, but the difference that thought makes in its act of determination: Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such [LA determination]. The difference ‘between’ two things is only empirical, and the corresponding determinations are only extrinsic… Difference is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction. We must therefore say of difference that it is made, or makes itself, as in the expression ‘make the difference’.52

Deleuze credits Kant with this discovery of “a transcendental Difference between the Determination as such [LA determination] and what it

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INTRODUCTION determines”.53 This non-identity of the unthought and thought, this unthinkable “difference”, is precisely the highest object of thought for Deleuze: How could thought avoid going that far, how could it avoid thinking that which is most opposed to thought? With the identical, we think with all our force, but without producing the least thought: with the different, by contrast, do we not have the highest thought, but also that which cannot be thought?54

The conditions of thought “making” a difference follow from Deleuze’s ‘anti-cosmic’ reading of critique. It presupposes the existing state of affairs as indeterminate by default, rather than there being an essential nature of things which it is the task of thought to represent. The relationship between the intellectual and the sensible is presented as a conjunction of orders that differ in kind, where truth is an effect of this meeting point rather than its cause. It is this meeting point that Deleuze has in mind when he enjoins philosophy in his essay on Bergson to return to the true “articulations” of the real, his interpretation of Plato’s injunction to carve nature at its joints. This conjunction, however, presents itself ultimately as more of a “disjunction”, on Deleuze’s interpretation, in virtue of the irreducible disparity between the two sides of thought, and the dissymmetry between thought and the unthought. In another of his seminars, Deleuze describes Kant’s critical subject as one who “limps”: Finally man becomes deformed [deformed], deformed in the etymological sense of the world, which is to say dyes-formed [dys-forme], he limps on two heterogenous and non-symmetrical forms: the receptivity of intuition and the spontaneity of the ‘I think.’55

Thus, rather than representing a return to the “thing-in-itself”, in the precritical sense, Deleuze’s insistence on the relevance of the singular in thought is based rather on recasting thought in an active mould, as a response to problems, and on a position of principle concerning the open-ended nature of thought. It is perhaps the notion of thought as “problematic” which forms the thematic centre of Deleuze’s relationship with Kant’s philosophy, as well as forming the literal centre of this thesis. It is thought considered as a responsiveness to problems which both distances its character from a speculative ideal, but equally, in virtue of the element of indeterminacy that a problem carries at its heart, from a simple resolution of a technical difficulty. The competing viewpoints concerning the nature and goal of thought 20

INTRODUCTION themselves form the terms of a problem that is the starting point of the critical project, in turn expressed in a dialectic of true and false problems rather than truth and falsity per se. The problem, by its nature, engages and transforms the subject of thought, and ‘complicates’ its object by entwining the simplicity of the concept with its spatio-temporal coordinates and the horizon of an Idea. It is, finally, the imperative of a problem that challenges our habits or presuppositions and obliges us to be creative in our thinking, to think per se, under the compelling force of what is most singular in experience.

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INTRODUCTION Endnotes for the Introduction Discussion following Alexis Philonenko’s “Hegel Critique de Kant”, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, vol. LXII (1967). 2 Jules Vuillemin, L’heritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne, p. 12. 3 Steven Galt Cromwell, “Neo-Kantianism”, in (eds) Simon Critchley & William Schroeder, A Companion to Continental Philosophy, p. 186. 4 Vuillemin, L’heritage kantien, p. 12. 5 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 152. Descombes uses ‘post-Kantian’ here in the broad sense of ‘following from Kant’, rather than related to the specific group of thinkers immediately subsequent to Kant. 6 Negotiations, F14-15/E6, translation modified. 7 DR, F31/E20, translation modified. 8 DR, F82/E59. 9 By ‘breakthrough’ work, I mean both the work that brought Deleuze to the attention of a broad public within France (when Deleuze died, in 1995, he was still recalled in French news reports as “the co-author of Anti-Oedipus”) and the one which (almost) marked his debut in the English-speaking academic world (before Anti-Oedipus, only Deleuze’s Proust and Signs had been translated into English, in 1972). 10 PCK, Exv. 11 First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 1. 12 See, for example, Deleuze’s response to Philonenko in the discussion following his presentation on “dramatisation”, MD, p. 116. 13 In his 1962 work on Nietzsche, for example. 14 See ES, F15/E31, F122/108. 15 ES, F15/E31. 16 “Epigenesis” is a term from biology, “the theory according to which an embryo develops through the successive differentiation of new parts” (Petit Robert), and is opposed to the theory of “preformation”. Deleuze’s interest in embryology is pervasive in his work, and can be seen for example, in his ‘Method of Dramatisation’, Appendix 1. 17 Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”, p. 62: “The post-Kantians, notably Maimon and Fichte, addressed a fundamental objection against Kant: Kant had ignored the demands of a genetic method… If we consider that Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy appeared in 1790, we must recognize that Kant, in part, foresaw the objection of his disciples.” 18 DR, F117/F87 19 CPR, B158. 20 DR, F220/E169. 21 Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: une vie…”, Philosophie, p. 3. 22 MD, p. 117. 23 Dan Smith, “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence”, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion, p. 175 and endnote 21, p.181. 24 Cited in Philonenko, Métaphysique et politique chez Kant et Fichte, p. 154. 25 Vuillemin, L’heritage kantien, p. 135. 26 Bergson, Matter and Memory, F321 (original pagination 205, E184, 185), cited in Deleuze’s Bergsonism, F17-18/E27. Bergson himself goes on to refer to the calculus of differentials following this passage: “To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn [le tournant] of experience, when we have profited from the faint light which, illuminating the passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.” 27 Magazine littéraire, no. 257, September 1988, p. 19. 28 First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 15, and Deleuze’s reading of critique in NP. 29 From Michel Foucault’s review of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, p. 170. 30 DR, F169/E129. 31 The Logic of Sense, F123-124/E101-102. 32 NP, F210/E183, translation modified, Deleuze’s italics. 33 Dialogues, F71/E57. 34 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 152. 1

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INTRODUCTION

Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 153. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 156. 37 ES, F152/E133, translation modified, my emphasis. 38 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20th May 1980. 39 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20th May 1980, para. 6. 40 PCK, F5/E1, quoting CPR (A839/B867). 41 PCK, F6/E2. 42 PCK, F7/E2. 43 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20th May 1980, para. 49. 44 For example, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus. 45 See discussion in Part III, Chapter 3. 46 “Letter to a severe critic”, Negotiations, F15/E6, translation modified. 47 NP, F121/E106. 48 “Bergson’s Conception of Difference”, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes, F79/E42. 49 “Bergson’s Conception of Difference”, F80-81/E43, citing Bergson’s La pensée et le mouvant, in Oeuvres, p. 1408, English translation The Creative Mind: an Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 175. 50 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Section A, I: “Sense-certainty: or the ‘this’ and ‘meaning’”. 51 DR, F18/E10. 52 DR, F43/E28. 53 DR, F116/E86. 54 DR, F292/E226. 55 Seminar on Kant and Foucault, c. 1982-3, para 3. Nb. Deleuze’s ‘etymology’—substituting the Greek ‘dys’ [=bad] for the Latin ‘di/de’ [=‘un’] in order to make a connection with the Greek/Latin ‘duas’/‘dy’ [=two]—is, characteristically, highly dubious if not entirely fabricated, but not essential to the point, which is no doubt inspired by Hölderlin. 35 36

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PART I.

BEGINNINGS: SURVEYING THE TERRAIN

CHAPTER 1.

DELEUZE’S READING OF CRITIQUE

What it means to ‘do’ the history of philosophy is a question that recurs throughout Deleuze’s many works in this field, and it is continuous with Deleuze’s understanding of what it means to do philosophy per se. Deleuze’s reconstruction of the thought of other thinkers, and his use of their concepts in his own work, is frequently combined with a polemic regarding the true nature of relationship between philosophers and the oppressive effect of “the history of philosophy” in its institutional forms. Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ reflects his understanding of thought, and its history, as itself revolutionary. Deleuze often invokes Nietzsche when speaking of the relationship between philosophy and history, and his approach resembles the “suprahistorical” perspective diagnosed in Nietzsche’s essay on “the uses and disadvantages of history for life.”1 In this piece, Nietzsche contrasts the “forgetfulness” or “unhistorical” sense, required for action and happiness, to the mire of reflection or “rumination”, in which those over-endowed with a historical sense can become trapped. Against both, however, he sets the suprahistorical vantage point, from which one “could scent out and retrospectively breathe this unhistorical atmosphere within which every great historical event has taken place.”2 Insofar as great actions are accomplished “against their time”, with a view to creating the future, they have an oracular quality. History itself acquires nobility and strength when it understands this quality and uses it in turn to serve as an “architect of the future”: “only he who constructs the future has a right to judge the past.”3 It is in this “untimely” way that Deleuze reads the work of other philosophers: as both revolutionary in themselves and by nature, and as participating in a contemporary philosophical gesture with its own revolutionary interests. This ‘creative’ or ‘motivated’ approach to interpretation is also expressed in the ‘affirmative’ character of Deleuze’s reading of philosophy, again itself a part of a philosophy of affirmation. Deleuze frequently stresses that where we see an apparent negation or negative element in philosophy, we

PART I CHAPTER 1 must try to find the positive element of which it is a by-product: “every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes.”4 Negation is never primary in philosophy for Deleuze, which is to say that it cannot be the basis of a philosophical position.5 Thus when it comes to critique, we cannot define critical philosophy through the notion of the inaccessibility of the thing-initself, but must rather look to see what it is that makes access to the thing-initself redundant, or more specifically, a “false problem.” After sketching Kant’s position on knowledge as applying to phenomena rather than things in themselves, for example, Deleuze writes: It should not be thought that Kant has need of any long demonstrations to arrive at this result: it is a point of departure for Critique, the real problem of the Critique of Pure Reason begins beyond this point.6

Philosophy proceeds by the succession of problems, which displace rather than contradict previous ones. We do not gauge the value of a philosophy by examining points of agreement or disagreement with other philosophies or with ‘experience’, which is to say, on a propositional level, but by looking to what new possibilities it creates and what new problem it poses: what it does rather than what it says. Deleuze’s expression of what he considers to be the central principles of a critical philosophy is largely consistent across his work. His ‘casting’ of the figure of Kant, however, varies according to the polemic in which he is engaged. In his works on philosophers from history, and most explicitly in his books on Hume and Nietzsche, he casts his subject in the role of a rival to Kant for the achievement of the critical project, thus performing a sort of philosophical ‘ventriloquism’, where the work of others is made to express his own critical aspirations and reservations. The aim of his discussions of Kant and critique is nevertheless the clarification of what he considers to be important in the critical project, and not an attack on Kant for its own sake. Thus, his own book on Kant only marginally raises the criticisms of Kant’s position which he has previously expressed, instead building a positive and coherent account of the “architectonic” of Kant’s three critiques in just over a hundred pages. In this context, moreover, he does not hesitate to recast Hume, for example, as a ‘pre-critical’ thinker. Similarly, in Deleuze’s lectures in the 70s and 80s, Kant’s importance and originality is presented using many of the

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PART I CHAPTER 1 same terms with which Deleuze had previously characterised Nietzsche’s importance as a critical philosopher, at Kant’s expense. When Deleuze is writing philosophy ‘in his own name’ rather than through the philosophy of others, he adopts the customary ambivalence of the Kantian: on the one hand applauding Kant’s insights while on the other supplementing his perceived deficiencies. The motif that both dominates Deleuze’s understanding of critique and characterises his affinity with Kant is his conception of thought as “active.” In the first place, this means that the problems and ends of philosophy must be approached from the perspective of the thinker as actor rather than spectator. As an actor or agent, the thinker is a point of transformation or “transmutation” of forces and values. The key to the active status of the thinker is that she does not simply ‘follow’ what is given, but combines and distils the given into the principle of an action. By contrast, the figure of the ‘spectator’ is less that of one who does not act than one whose actions are not assumed as such, and are thus turned against themselves in what Deleuze calls, after Nietzsche, the mode of the “reactive.” The thinker as actor also has a dramatic sense, implying a typology of ‘attitudes’ and corresponding configurations of the scenario of thought, according to the stakes of the action. These stakes, at the centre of the act of thought, beyond its subject or object, are the question and the problem: the imperative of the question and the dialectic of the problem, which fuel and govern the ongoing process of thought.

Hume: ‘empirical’ critique The critical exclusion of the thing-in-itself as a theoretical object is bound up with this active conception of thought. Their connection forms the topic of Deleuze’s first reference to the notion of critique: his reading of Hume’s empiricism, which is the topic of his first book, Empiricism and subjectivity: an essay on Hume's theory of human nature. Having presented philosophy in general as the “search for a plane of analysis”, from which a critique of experience can be undertaken, Deleuze presents Hume’s empiricism as a

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PART I CHAPTER 1 variant that, beginning with the immanent field of passions and impressions, poses the question of how a subject capable of knowledge and morality is constituted.7 Empiricism, for Deleuze, is not above all an epistemological tendency regarding the source of our knowledge, but a practical theory regarding the constitution of the subject of knowledge and morality. Both require that we go beyond the partiality of the given to make universal claims, and it is through our adherence to a set of principles through our beliefs and moral commitments that we constitute ourselves as subjects endowed with a “human nature” beyond the vagaries of “spirit.” In his way, the problem of empiricism emerges as the following: “how, in the given, can a subject be constituted such that it goes beyond the given?”8 He contrasts this fundamental question of “empirical critique” to what he here calls “transcendental critique”, which begins with “a methodologically reduced plane that provides an essential certainty” and poses instead the question: “how can there be a given, how can something be given to a subject, how can the subject give something to itself?”9 In either case, however, we are to understand that the critique of experience is ultimately “the critique of a philosophy of Nature”10—the renunciation of speculation as to the ‘real’ operations of things as they exist in themselves: The two critiques, in fact, merge to the point where they become one. Why? Because the question of a determinable relation with Nature has its own conditions: it is not self-evident, it is not given, it can only be posed by a subject, a subject questioning the value of the system of his judgements, that is, the legitimacy of the transformation to which he subjects the given undergo or of the organisation which he confers upon it.11

It is only as an effect of the negotiation or agon between what is given and the principles we bring to bear on it that we can address the notion of a Nature of things, including even any physiological nature that we may want to admit as the minimal presupposition of an act of thought: It will be said that the given, at least, is given to the senses, that it presupposes the organs or even a brain. No doubt, but what must be avoided again and always, is to grant in the first place to the organism an organisation which comes to it only when the subject itself comes to the spirit, which is to say an organisation which depends on the same principles as the subject itself.12

It bears noting here that in Deleuze’s book on Kant, he makes an identical point regarding critique—that “the given” obeys the same principles as our

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PART I CHAPTER 1 subjectivity: “that which presents itself to us in such a way as to form a Nature must necessarily obey principles of the same kind (or rather, the same principles) as those which govern the course of our representations.”13 In this context, however, he makes the point against Hume, who is presented as a philosopher who derives principles from a (psychological) “human nature”, rather than one who constitutes a human nature through principles, and it is Kant instead who “transforms the problem.” This tendency of Deleuze to ‘switch roles’ or ‘change names’ has already been mentioned. What is important, however, in so far as it bears upon the understanding of Deleuze’s relationship with Kant, is that the point remains the same and is thus what is most essential, and that it is a recognisably Kantian point, even if applied and attributed to a pre-Kantian philosopher. Because the theoretical content of a philosophy is the product not of a reflection on Nature, but of a dialectic between the given and a set of principles, its value is secondary in relation to this central process which forms the proper object of a critical philosophy and critical practice. Deleuze’s second discussion of critique in Empiricism and subjectivity extends this principle to the context of the reading of philosophers in history. Most criticisms of “great philosophers”, Deleuze argues, fall short of being truly philosophical because they remain at the level of the theoretical proposition, and locate the conditions of the theory outside of philosophy in empirical circumstances rather than at its heart: They consist in criticising a theory without considering the nature of the problem to which it responds, and in which it finds its foundation and its structure. Thus, Hume is reproached with the ‘atomisation’ of the given, and it is considered sufficient to denounce an entire system by showing at it base a decision of Hume the person, a particular taste of Hume’s or the spirit of his time.14

Instead, Deleuze contends that a philosophical theory, and the vision of nature it yields, is necessary only in virtue of a driving question: “a philosophical theory is a developed question, and nothing else… It shows us what things are, what indeed things must necessarily be, on the condition that the question is good and rigorous.”15 Deleuze presents critique as a “putting into question”, where this process is understood not as a contemplative distance or suspense, but a positive imperative that generates a “nature”: “To

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PART I CHAPTER 1 put something in question means to subordinate, to submit things to the question in such a way that in this constrained and forced submission they reveal to us an essence, a nature.”16 It is, on the contrary, those who read theory as a simple representation of “how things are” who trivialise the difficulty of thought, as if it were born “from itself and for the fun of it.”17 This understanding of the imperative character of the question recalls that of Kant in his Preface to the first critique, where reason approaches nature in the manner of “an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions that he himself has formulated.”18 The critic or reader of philosophy continues this process of developing the implications of the question, showing in what sense it is rigorous or not, “in other words, how things would not be what they are were the question different from the one formulated.”19 The critical operation is thus presented in the same terms across the different levels of the production of thought: the constitution of the knowing and moral subject in Hume’s critique; the development of a philosophy and philosophical interpretation.

Nietzsche: ‘genealogical’ critique From the first pages of Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s philosophy is presented as a specifically critical philosophy, one of whose “principal motives” is to redress the errors of Kant.20 Critical philosophy is identified with a philosophy of value, which has two primary senses here. In the first place, “value” plays a role analogous to that of the “principle” in Deleuze’s reading of Hume: that to which the ‘given’ is referred—“values appear or are given as principles: an evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomena are appraised.”21 In the second place, and on a more profound level, the philosophy of value addresses not just different values, but the multiple points of view from which values are generated: “The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation.”22 As phenomena are referred to values for their sense, so values are themselves referred to a centre of evaluation or “mode of existence” as their own principle of significance. This double sense of the philosophy of value underlies the “genealogical” method in philosophy. It is 30

PART I CHAPTER 1 opposed both to the notion of “established” or “given” values, and to the attempt to derive value from the authority of ‘fact’, which either misunderstands the specificity of value or the question of its genesis. In so doing, they reduce the essential “pluralism” of a philosophy of value, by subjecting their variety to the unitary character of a subjective nature or objective datum: pluralism… is but one with philosophy itself. Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, invented by philosophy; the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violent atheism.23

The genealogical method serves both to distinguish the opposed orientations of the “high” and the “low”, or the “active” and the “reactive”, and is itself an expression of an “active science”, as it approaches phenomena from the perspective of the actor who bestows their value and sense. The persona of the philosopher in Nietzsche is analysed by Deleuze into three figures that represent different aspects of the genealogical method: the philosopher-doctor who interprets the phenomenon as symptom of a force; the philosopher-artist who establishes a typology and the philosopher-legislator who assigns rank or lineage.24 This portrait of thought as diagnostic, artistic and legislative runs throughout Deleuze’s philosophy, and is connected to his understanding of judgement in Kant’s philosophy. Deleuze explains reflective judgements in his book on Kant, for example, with reference to the diagnostic procedure of the doctor, and the art of the creation of concepts is referred to a form of “taste” in What is philosophy?.25 After his presentation of the philosopher “type”, Deleuze introduces his notion of the “dramatic” method in philosophy, which displaces the question of essence—what is x?—with the more primary question—who?, as the mark of a centre of evaluation which gives sense or value to the thing. This is in turn allied with Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s “will to power” as the “genetic and critical” instance of thought. The will to power is misunderstood, on Deleuze’s account, as a desire for power. The determining nature of willing is in fact betrayed by any account which considers the will to be determined by an object or end rather than representing an end in itself: “Ends and objects, even motives, are still symptoms… What a will wants is always its own quality and the quality of corresponding forces.”26 Subjecting the activity of the will to a representation 31

PART I CHAPTER 1 of which it is a function degrades our conception of the will as creative and instead makes it a struggle for power or recognition in the arena of established values. It is this in turn which gives the conception of power and will—as for example in the philosophies of Hobbes, Hegel and Schopenhauer—what Deleuze calls an “affective tonality” of pathos and contradiction: “It is as if the essence of the will puts us into an unliveable, untenable and deceptive situation.”27 The conception of the will as inherently contradictory reaches its apotheosis in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, where the will, as “the world seen from the inside” and thus essence, futilely seeks to fulfil itself in the world of representation or appearance—hence the Buddhistic conception of will as suffering and the postulated solution in the form of a mystical renunciation. Nietzsche’s attempt to liberate philosophy from the “old metaphysics” with a philosophy of the will is thus at the same time an attempt to liberate the will from its previous misconceptions. Against the notion of the will as representing suffering and struggle, Nietzsche’s philosophy posits the principles of the creativity of willing and the joyfulness of the will, principles which “take on an extremely precise meaning if one understands their critical aspect.”28 The reversal consists in seeing the will as something that gives rather than seeking to acquire or take, which determines itself and its value rather than receiving it from others or elsewhere, which affirms rather than negates. This is the “high” or “masterly” conception of the will, where negation is only the ‘wake’ of a prior affirmation, and is opposed to the “low” or “slave” conception where affirmation is derivative of a primarily negative drive. It is in its masterly form that Deleuze understands the “critical” conception of the negative: Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. The creator of values cannot be distinguished from a destroyer, a criminal and a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness.29

Kantian critique While Deleuze directs much of his analysis of the ‘critical’ Nietzsche against Kant, his own book on Kant, appearing in the following year (1963), provides a reading of Kant that mirrors in many respects his understanding of Nietzsche. Kant’s philosophy is presented as in the first place a theory of the will, and,

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PART I CHAPTER 1 more importantly, of the autonomy of the will, which is to say its independence from an object or representation that would determine it. Deleuze’s book begins by identifying the principal rivals to Kant’s critique as empiricism and rationalism, in virtue of the fact that each of these schools present the will as determined by an object or end—a “representation”—external to reason. In empiricism, as it is conceived here, reason is only a means or form of “detour” for ends which ultimately belong to nature. For rationalism, while it accepts the existence of properly rational ends, these too are conceived in the form of a transcendent instance: “a Being, a Good or a Value, taken as rule of will.”30 Consequently, there is less difference than might be supposed between rationalism and empiricism. An end is a representation which determines the will. In so far as the representation is of something external to the will, it hardly matters whether it is sensible or purely rational; in any case it determines the act of willing only through the satisfaction linked to the ‘object’ which it represents.31

Against this, Deleuze contends that for Kant, “the supreme ends are not only ends of reason, but… in positing them reason posits nothing other than itself.”32 In the matter of reason’s interests, it is reason alone that posits and judges their value, to the exclusion of external instances, whether empirical or divine. The object of each critique is to discover whether in the case of each faculty (understanding, desiring, pleasure and pain), it is capable of a ‘superior’, which is to say autonomous, exercise: “We may say that a faculty has a higher form when it finds in itself the law of its own exercise”.33 Its ‘inferior’ form would consist in its external determination, or “heteronomy.” The second point of resonance with the reading of Nietzsche’s critique is the focus on the “pluralism” of a philosophy of will. Deleuze defines a “faculty” as in the first place corresponding to an interest of reason: the faculty of knowledge, the faculty of desire and the faculty of pleasure and pain. The difference in nature between the interests of reason represents for Deleuze an essential pluralism and one of the most original points of Kantianism, being a second point of departure from the empirical and rationalist schools. Kant’s limitation of the speculative drive of reason to the field of appearances is a function of this differentiation. It is by contrast the ‘inflation’ of the speculative interest, as in a dogmatic rationalism, and the attempt to derive all others from it, which represents a restriction of the possibilities of thought:

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PART I CHAPTER 1 Under the pretext of developing the speculative interest, reason’s deeper interests are mutilated. The idea of a systematic plurality (and a hierarchy) of interests—in accordance with the first sense of the word ‘faculty’— dominates the Kantian method. This idea is a true principle, principle of a system of ends.34

This itself reiterates a point made by Deleuze regarding Kant in his book on Nietzsche: there he remarks that Kant’s critique is of a positive character because “it does not restrain the power of knowledge without liberating other previously neglected powers.”35 This pluralism is continued in the second sense of the “faculty”, as a source of representations—reason (source of Ideas), understanding (source of concepts) and sensibility (source of intuitions). For empiricism and rationalism, such differences are understood only as differences in degree: “whether a difference in clarity, from the point of view of the understanding, or difference in vividness, from the point of view of sensibility.”36 The difference in nature between the faculties in this second sense corresponds to the distribution of activity and passivity between the understanding, which acts on behalf of reason in the speculative interest, and sensibility. Conversely, a difference only of degree between sensibility and understanding assigns a subordinate role to thought in relation to a transcendent instance. In his university seminars in the 80s, Deleuze maintains that the homogeneity of the faculties is demanded by classical metaphysics because of the priority it accords the infinite over the finite: “metaphysics cannot—it is not that it does not want to—it cannot attain this situation of heterogenous faculties.”37 This is the case because for the infinite understanding of God, which exists by right, there is no given, and thus no distinction between spontaneity and receptivity. That it exists for our own understanding is simply the sign of our finitude, “a simple fact which derives from an originary infinity”, rather than being a difference in principle and by right.38 Deleuze’s seminars on Kant in the 70s present the Kantian revolution in terms that show a further overlap with the understanding of critique given in the book on Nietzsche. Here, Deleuze presents the transition to a constitutive finitude that exists by right as the crucial gesture of a philosophy concerned with the problem of value or sense rather than essence. The philosophical opposition between an intelligible essence and sensible appearance supposes, for Deleuze, a particular position of the thinking subject:

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PART I CHAPTER 1 the very notion of appearance refers to a fundamental deficiency in the subject. A fundamental deficiency, which is to say: appearance, in the end, is the thing such as it appears to me in virtue of my subjective constitution which deforms it.39

The phenomenon, on the other hand, is not at all an appearance, in the precritical sense of implying an essence, but rather “what appears in so far as it appears”, or an “apparition.”40 The apparition refers not to an essence but to its conditions or sense: “something appears, tell me what is its sense or—and this amounts to the same thing—tell me what is its condition?”41 An appearance has a negative relationship to its essence: together they form a “disjunctive couple” or opposition. The apparition or phenomenon on the other hand bears a positive relationship to its conditions, forming a “conjunctive couple.” As the conditions of the apparition belong to the one to whom the apparition appears, the position of the subject is reversed such that it is now constitutive: the substitution of the conjunctive couple phenomena-conditions, or apparitions-conditions, ensures a promotion of the subject in so far as the subject constitutes the very conditions of the apparition, instead of constituting and being responsible for the limitations of appearance, or the illusions of appearance.42

The critique of Kant Deleuze’s criticisms of Kant are best appreciated in the light of what he does with Kant rather than what he says against Kant, not only because what Deleuze ‘says’ is so particularly a function of context, but because, as indicated above—and this amounts to the same thing—criticism per se is not a matter of interest for Deleuze except as a by-product of a more fundamental affirmation. Deleuze’s criticism is precisely the “aggressivity of the creator.” At the end of an essay on structuralism, Deleuze writes: “No book against anything ever has any importance; all that counts are books for something, and that know how to produce it.”43 The details of what Deleuze ‘does’ with Kant, and its implied criticism, form the substance of the remainder of the thesis. What can be outlined here are the basic elements of what he ‘says’ against Kant, which indicate the direction of his development of the critical project, or the particular ‘tonality’ of Deleuze’s Kantianism. It is worthwhile to begin such an outline by directly addressing this question of ‘tonality’, or the ‘temperamental’ differences between the two

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PART I CHAPTER 1 philosophies. Deleuze’s method of “dramatisation” precisely integrates such questions into the idea of philosophy, distinguishing the ‘type’ or ‘persona’ of the thinker from the empirical person of the philosopher, and situating the former within a scenario that forms part of the transcendental condition of the concept. When introducing Kant to his students in the 70s, Deleuze presents the first challenge of the Critique of Pure Reason as its “excessive” atmosphere, at once foggy and “stifling”: the important thing before anything else is not to understand, the important thing is to take on the rhythm of the man, the writer, the philosopher in question. If one holds fast, all this northern fog that comes down on us dissipates, and underneath there is an amazing architecture. When I was saying to you that a great philosopher is in the end someone who invents concepts, in the case of Kant, in this fog functions a sort of thinking machine, a sort of concept-creation that is strictly frightening.44

Just as Deleuze says elsewhere that his book on Kant is a book which attempts to decipher the mechanisms of “the enemy”45, so here Deleuze describes the approach to Kant like a medieval or Gothic quest to infiltrate a remote citadel, within which functions an infernal machine-monster. In fact, the accusation of ‘monstrousness’, coming from Deleuze, is more a compliment than a criticism. Kant’s hybrid notion of the ‘synthetic a priori’ is precisely appraised by Deleuze as a “monster”, a character shared by all new concepts insofar as they disturb classes previously considered to be natural—“a philosopher can only fabricate new concepts as monsters.”46 It is rather to the extent that Kant remains a spokesperson for “established values” or recognised categories that he comes under attack from Deleuze. While Kant announces the project of a critique that would be “total and positive”, Deleuze questions whether the reader of the Critique of Pure Reason can seriously believe that the ideals of church and state have been truly undermined therein, “and can we really believe that Kant ‘ever had any intention of doing such a thing’?”47 Instead of the noble master philosopher who engenders new values, Kant’s ‘persona’ is that of the “justice of the peace” or magistrate, a “civil servant” who enforces ‘correct usage’ of existing values, condemns trespasses, and ensures that no boundaries are overstepped: Kant merely pushed a very old conception of critique to the limit, a conception which saw critique as a force which should be brought to bear on all claims to knowledge and truth, but not on knowledge and truth themselves… Three ideals are distinguished: what can I know? what should I do? what can I hope for? Limits are drawn to each one, misuses

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PART I CHAPTER 1 and trespasses are denounced, but the uncriticisable character of each ideal remains at the heart of Kantianism like the worm in the fruit: true knowledge, true morality and true religion.48

In the attempt to produce an immanent critique that refuses any transcendent instance as a source of value, Kant is accused of simply interiorising the same values, which as ‘facts’ of reason remain beyond the scope of critique. Deleuze distinguishes in Kant the ideal of an “internal” critique, and the actuality of Kant’s critique as a reflexive process with reason as its own judge: “Kant lacked a method which permitted reason to be judged from the inside without giving it the task of being its own judge.”49 This latter model produces a peculiar form of the will turned against itself, embodying both master and slave, judging and judged: “both priest and believer, legislator and subject, conquering and conquered slave, reactive man in the service of himself.”50 Deleuze identifies a tension in Kant that is remarked upon by Émile Bréhier, in the account that he gives of Kant and critique in his series of volumes on the history of philosophy. Within Kant’s project of “the justification of values” we find “two directions, which are perhaps are irreconcilable.”51 On the one hand, Kant foregrounds the principles of activity, liberty and spontaneity throughout the three critiques. On the other hand, these are to a greater or lesser extent placed out of the reach of experience, and their products impose themselves as ‘givens’. It is a tension within critique between two tendencies, one of which presents itself under the dynamic aspect of an open-ended process of transformation, and the other which appears as the formalisation of a status quo that is impervious to actual variables: Criticism has thus indeed been, and it remains, under the first aspect, a stimulus to thought, a doctrine which transforms the “givens” into tasks for activity, a philosophy of spiritual work, and it has given birth in the 19th century to all of the doctrines which seek in reality a work to be done rather than a thing to be verified. But, under the second aspect, it appears as an implacable justification of the given. He has a static conception of science, subjecting it to conditions which science has long since overcome; a rigorist conception of morality, which places it outside of the real conditions of human activity; a formalist conception of art, which risks emptying it of all of its content. In this way the mind is everywhere forced to follow paths already traced: the Kantian a priori marks both its domination and the subjugation.52

It is this tendency of Kant to allow the ‘given’ to re-enter thought on the level of values and reproduce metaphysical structures of thought on the level of the transcendental that constitutes the ‘failed’ aspect of critique for Deleuze.

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PART I CHAPTER 1 The focus of an “internal” critique, that is not thereby a reflexive circle, must be where values are engendered, and where the synthesis broaches a ‘new path’. In his book on Kant, Deleuze himself locates what he sees to be the hinge between a ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ conception of thought in Kant. In order for the faculties of reason, understanding and intuition to function in the moral and theoretical interest, they must presuppose a form of ‘common sense’—a sensus communis expressed in the determinate relationship between the faculties in each exercise. Despite the mutability of the relation according to the different interests, within any given perspective the collaboration of the faculties to a theoretical or moral end can only appear as a fait accompli: Kant says that the accord of the faculties is capable of several proportions (depending on which faculty determines the relation). But each time we assume the perspective of a relationship or an accord which is already determined, it is inevitable that common sense should seem to us a kind of a priori fact beyond which we cannot go.53

The problem of the deduction of the relationship between the faculties cannot thus be posed for Deleuze within the context of the first two critiques, and remains its “ultimate task.” The detail of Deleuze’s analysis of this problem will be presented in the third section of the thesis, but its direction can be anticipated here. What is presupposed by the formal and determined common sense exercised in the moral and theoretical interest is not a more profound determination issuing from being or nature but rather the “free and indeterminate accord” which is the topic of the third critique: “It is only at the level of this free and indeterminate accord (sensus communis aestheticus) that we will be able to pose the problem of a ground of the accord or a genesis of common sense.”54 The ‘empirical’ character of Deleuze’s critique—his “transcendental empiricism”55—is to be understood in the light of this problem of ‘engendering’ an accord: discovering ‘conditions of actuality’ that would not be external or indifferent to the conditioned. By distinguishing the positive and negative sense which each of these terms—“transcendental” and “empirical”— has, for Deleuze, we arrive at an adequate conception, in summary form, of the points of affiliation and departure between Deleuzean and Kantian critique. Deleuze’s embrace of empiricism, as already indicated, has never been in order to support a ‘psychological’ or ‘naturalist’ approach to philosophy. On this point, like Kant, he is adamant that philosophy distinguishes itself by 38

PART I CHAPTER 1 operating on a plane of right and value over fact. Deleuze appraises empiricism rather in the mode of a “radical” empiricism or pluralism, whose central tenet is the absence of internal or pre-determined relations. At the centre of empiricism is not sensation or ‘lived experience’, but rather the imagination, which undergoes a ‘becoming-thought’ in an ongoing dialogue with circumstance: [Empiricism] treats the concept as the object of an encounter, as a hereand-now or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly always new ‘heres’ and ‘nows’, distributed differently… I make, remake and undo my concepts from the perspective of a moving horizon, an always decentred centre, and an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them.56

The empirical world, in its positive sense, is the world where the term of being—est—is replaced with the term of conjunction—et—, thought following a “Harlequin” mosaic of the conjunction and addition of finite and nontotalisable elements.57 The negative sense of the empirical for Deleuze, aside from its psychological implications, is that by which it refers to a form of ‘common sense’, or the habitual coordinates of lived experience: subject, object, representation, recognition. This notion of common sense as a dominant “image of thought” will be examined in the third chapter of this section. Deleuze reproaches Kant, for example, for having confused the “empirical”, in this sense, with the transcendental, by incorporating the subject and object into thought’s conditions of possibility. The negative sense of the empirical is thus inseparable from the negative sense of the transcendental for Deleuze. It is not the transcendental per se that is rejected, but rather its presupposition of the same categories that it is required to account for. As we saw in Deleuze’s portrayal of “transcendental” critique in his book on Hume, the problem comes from assuming in advance or as given—in particular the subject, and its ‘inherent’ disposition to thought—what can only be posited within the context of a determined synthesis. Deleuze argues that the specification of the subject and object of identity presupposes a more profound synthesis or “dramatisation” on the level of the Idea, which is the topic of the next section. The last piece published by Deleuze during his lifetime reiterates his commitment to a transcendental empiricism, and resumes this understanding of the term. It begins:

39

PART I CHAPTER 1 What is a transcendental field? It is distinguished from experience, in so far as it does not refer to an object nor belong to a subject (empirical representation). Thus it presents itself as a pure current of a-subjective consciousness, pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, qualitative duration of consciousness without a self. It can appear curious that the transcendental is defined by such immediate givens: we will speak of transcendental empiricism, by opposition to everything that constitutes the world of subject and object.58

The overriding problem of critique for Deleuze—both his own version and according to his understanding of Kant—is how thought negotiates those elements of determinacy and indeterminacy occurring in thought and the world. Deleuze is by no means an anti-systematic thinker for whom ‘anything goes’: on the contrary, his approach invariably works on the assumption of the existence of an intricate mechanism of interlocking ideas, even where this seems the least probable—as in the case, for example, of Nietzsche. Deleuze’s notion of a conceptual system, however, is inseparable from the question of its relationship with an ‘outside’ to philosophy: its point of departure and regeneration through an imperative encounter that is as idiosyncratic as it is compelling. In the “Letter-Preface” to Jean-Clet Martin’s book on his philosophy, Deleuze indicates that he considers his own combination of a systematic thought which nevertheless integrates an account of its differentiation and renewal to be an original project: “I believe in philosophy as a system… For me, the system must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must be a heterogenesis—something which, it seems to me, has never been attempted.”59 Determination lies on the side of thought rather than being, but this determination is an act rather than a given, and it is provoked precisely in virtue of ‘objective’ indeterminacy. Rather than identify the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in Kant from Deleuze’s perspective, it is rather the case in Deleuze —as per Bréhier’s appraisal—that for a given element in Kant’s thought we can apprehend its productive or restrictive dimension, trace a ‘noble’ or ‘base’ lineage.

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PART I CHAPTER 1 Endnotes for Part I Chapter 1 Nietzsche, “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life”, Untimely Meditations. “On the uses and disadvantages…”, pp. 64-65. 3 “On the uses and disadvantages…”, p. 94. 4 DR, F71/E50. 5 Even Hegel’s philosophy, within which negation features as a central concept, is grounded according to Deleuze in a more fundamental stance which generates this role given to the negative, such as the position of ‘the slave’ (in the analysis of Hegel in Nietzsche and Philosophy), or the use of the question “what is?” (in the presentation of Hegel in “Method of Dramatisation”). 6 PCK, F11/E6, translation modified: the English gives “begins here” rather than “beyond” for “commence au-delà”. 7 ES, F92/E87. 8 ES, F91-92/E86, translation modified. 9 ES, F92/ES87. 10 ES, F94/E88. 11 ES, F95/E88-89. 12 ES, F95/F89, translation modified, Deleuze’s italics. 13 PCK, F21/E12-13. 14 ES, F118/E105, translation modified. 15 ES, F119/E106, translation modified. 16 ES, F119/E106, translation modified. 17 ES, F119/E106. 18 CPR, Bxiii. 19 ES, F119/E106. 20 NP, F1/E1, translation modified (reading mobiles as ‘motives’ or ‘motivations’ rather than ‘motifs’, as rendered in the English translation). 21 NP, F1/E1. 22 NP, F1/E1. 23 NP, F4/E4, translation modified. 24 NP, F86/E75. 25 PCK, F85-86/E59-56; QP?, F13/E8, F74/E77. 26 NP, F89/E78. 27 NP, F94/E82. 28 NP, F96/E84. 29 NP, F99/E87 30 PCK, F6/E2. 31 PCK, F7/E2. 32 PCK, F7/E2. 33 PCK, F9/E4. 34 PCK, F13/E7, my italics. 35 NP, F102/E89, translation modified. 36 PCK, F34/E22. 37 Gilles Deleuze, Seminar on Kant/Foucault, c. 1982/83, para. 1. 38 Seminar on Kant/Foucault, c. 1982/83, para. 2. 39 Gilles Deleuze, First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 14. 40 The distinction here that Deleuze makes between appearance and phenomenon is not that made by Kant, but rather between the pre-critical sense of appearance as ‘illusion’ and its critical sense as a presentation referred to its conditions of possibility. 41 First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 18. 42 First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 19. 43 “How do we recognise structuralism?”, F334/E282. 44 Gilles Deleuze, First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 1. 45 “Letter to a severe critic”, Negotiations, F14-15/E6. 46 Gilles Deleuze, First lesson on Kant, 14/3/78, para. 39. 47 NP, F102/E89, referring to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, III, 25. 48 NP, F102-103/E89-90. 49 NP, F104/E91. 50 NP, F107/E104, translation modified (French: “Non pas l’être raisonnable, fonctionnaire des valeurs en cours, à la fois prêtre et fidèle, législateur et sujet, esclave vainqueur et vaincu, homme réactif au service de soi-même.” English edition: “The reactive man serving himself 1 2

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PART I CHAPTER 1

rather than the reasonable being, functionary of current values, both master and slave, judging and judged: both priest and believer, legislator and subject, conquering and conquered slave.”) 51 Emile Bréhier, “Kant et la philosophie critique”, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle, F564/E249, translation modified. 52 “Kant et la philosophie critique”, Le Dix-Huitième Siècle, F564/E250, translation modified. 53 PCK, F36/E23. 54 PCK, F36/E24. 55 DR, F79/E56. 56 DR, F3/Exx-xxi, translation modified. 57 Deleuze, “Hume”, in François Chatelêt (ed), Histoire de la Philosophie 4—Les Lumières: le XVIIIe Siècle, Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1972, p. 67. See also the section ‘Sur l’empirisme’ (F6873/E54-59, within the chapter “Sur la supériorité de la littérature anglaise-américaine”), in Dialogues, F69/E55. 58 Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: une vie…”, in Philosophie, p. 3. 59 “Lettre-Préface” to Jean-Clet Martin’s Variations: La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, p. 8.

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CHAPTER 2:

KANT AND THE ORIENTATION OF THOUGHT

The critical attitude Kant understood his critical philosophy as both an expression of the Enlightenment spirit of his time and as an agent of its further development. These two functions are united in so far as Enlightenment, like critique, is not so much an achieved state as a proposed, and perhaps perpetual, task. In his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, Kant makes a point of distinguishing between living in an “age of enlightenment” and living in an “enlightened age”1, and if, in the Critique of Pure Reason, our age is “in especial degree, the age of criticism…”, this character takes the form of an injunction: “…and to criticism everything must submit.”2 On the levels of the subject, society, and philosophical discourse, Kant poses the problem of enlightened thought in terms of relations of power, which is to say, in terms of the will and its relation to authority, rather than knowledge. A practical orientation is already at the heart of critical philosophy before it turns its attention to the principles of morality in Kant’s practical philosophy ‘proper’: in either case it is a matter of identifying the relationship between freedom and lawfulness which is consistent with the autonomy of reason. The maxim of enlightenment for Kant is “to think for oneself” or Sapere aude!: “Have the courage to use your own understanding!”3 It is not through lack of knowledge that we do not think for ourselves, and conversely “those who are exceedingly rich in knowledge are often least enlightened in their use of it.”4 The meaning of this motto in the political or social context of Enlightenment is continuous with the philosophical axiom of critique, whereby the internal sense of reason is the “supreme touchstone” of truth.5 The obstacles to thinking for oneself come from both inside and outside. Kant begins his essay on the Enlightenment by defining it as “man’s

PART I CHAPTER 2 emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”, where “immaturity” is the “inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”6 This immaturity is “self-incurred” in so far as it is based in deficiencies of the will—“laziness and cowardice”—rather than ignorance. We maintain ourselves in a state of immaturity when we alienate the effort of thought in another person or thing—“a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience in place of me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on”—or simply when we rely on “dogmas and formulas.”7 This is, on the one hand, a matter of convenience for ourselves, but this dependence is also fostered and reinforced by the interests of those “guardians” in whom we entrust the work of understanding, who “will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous.”8 This influence may become so ingrained that an individual may become “really incapable for the time being of using his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt.”9 This “ability to think for oneself” does not mean for Kant to educate oneself on a matter before passing judgement, the existence of innate ideas revealed through introspection, or the rights of personal opinion. Autonomy means following a law which one gives to oneself. Thinking for oneself is based on the assumption and extension of the principles of freedom and lawfulness, which are combined in the notion of autonomy. When we think for ourselves on a given matter, we consider whether its basis and implications are consistent with these principals: to employ one’s own reason means simply to ask oneself, whenever one is urged to accept something, whether one finds it possible to transform the reason for accepting it, or the rule which follows from what is accepted, into a universal principle governing the use of one’s reason.10

Because this process does not bear on the content of what is proposed, no objective grounds of refutation are necessary. At the same time, it does not consist in a ‘merely’ subjective refutation, in the sense of being based on private opinion, as it appeals to lawful principles—the principle of law itself. The principles of autonomous reason are thus at the same time internal to the act of thought and of a public nature.

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PART I CHAPTER 2 In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant focuses on the autonomy of reason as necessary condition for the constitution of thought as a discipline, which is to say a “science.” He recounts the way logic, mathematics, geometry and (much later) the natural sciences constituted themselves qua sciences under the effect of a revolution in thought, critique being the attempt at a similar revolution, or ‘becoming-scientific’ of metaphysics. The revolutionary gesture in each case is to assign reason a leading role in the determination of it objects: it is only if reason provides the conditions of knowledge that this knowledge can be truly a priori. In geometry, the first true geometrician learns that he does not “read off” geometrical properties from a concept or a figure, but “bring[s] out what was necessarily implied in the concepts that he had himself formed a priori, and had put into the figure in the construction by which he presented itself.”11 Similarly in the natural sciences: [Galileo, Stahl] learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgement based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining.12

Following this procedure in metaphysics, Kant contends that what is given to our faculty of knowledge can become known only in virtue of its conforming to the a priori principles of our intuition and understanding, the Critique of Pure Reason being the elaboration of these principles. The critical gesture is thus to consider the possibility of a science not through the relation that its claims have to things in themselves, but to the principles of reason. Human reason is not considered to be relative to an ‘initself’ of knowledge—the ideal knowledge of a divine understanding—but as valid in its own right. Neither are appearances relative to an ‘in-itself’ of the object, but only to their sense within the structures of this same understanding. It is this transmutation of thought from the plane of objective truths or essences to that of value or sense that gives critique its positive meaning and force, as well as its ‘revolutionary’ impact. If a ‘critical’ position implies being ‘outside’ the object being criticised, this is not, in the case of Kant’s critique, a position of higher or more profound truth, but precisely a shift in orientation from the object to its conditions:

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PART I CHAPTER 2 The critique of pure reason can be regarded as the true tribunal for all disputes of pure reason; for it is not involved in these disputes—disputes which are immediately concerned with objects—but is directed to the determining and estimating of the rights of reason in general.13

It is because critique assumes at its outset the autonomy of reason, and takes as its task the formal elaboration of its internal constitution and principles, that the limitations that this uncovers need not be understood in a negative sense. The inability of reason to know objects beyond experience is a by-product of its power to know objects by determining their conditions. The “unanswered” questions of reason lose in effect their implication of a deficiency on the part of reason once referred to the principles of reason’s internal constitution. “I have not evaded [the questions of metaphysics] by pleading the insufficiency of human reason”, Kant writes in the first Preface to the first critique, On the contrary I have specified these questions exhaustively, according to principles; and after locating the point at which, through misunderstanding, reason comes into conflict with itself, I have solved them to its complete satisfaction.14

If Kant has emerged historically as a philosopher of ‘finitude’, this term should

thus

not

be

understood

as

referring

to

a

physical

(empirical/psychological) or metaphysical limitation—i.e. an inferiority in relation to a divine understanding. This is not a term used by Kant in this sense, but has rather come to be attached to Kant through the work of the post-Kantians (Fichte, Hegel) and Heidegger. It is part of the revolution that critique effects that reason’s ‘finitude’ is that of self-containment rather than inadequacy, at least in Kant’s view: “Pure reason is, indeed, so perfect a unity that if its principles were insufficient for the solution of even one of all the questions to which it itself gives birth we should have no alternative but to reject the principle.”15 The essential elements of critique are the constitution of an internal transcendental field of reason, defined by its autonomy or selflegislation, and the removal of external standards of relativity to a divine understanding or conformance to an object. The difference between seeing critique as positive or negative, as a restricting or liberating gesture, is in the ordering of these factors: whether we see the turning to the internal structure of reason as a reaction to a realisation of limits, or an action in the name of reason with the consequence that external standards drop away. It is a different philosophical gesture to claim that knowledge of a thing in itself is

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PART I CHAPTER 2 impossible, and that it is redundant, or even noxious. The first implies a restriction of thought, the second a departure in another direction. The first implies that the question of a relation to things in themselves is the central problem, the second that it is no longer a problem, having displaced the centre elsewhere. The contention here is not just that, in fact, Kant’s critique occupies this latter position, that it has displaced the problem, as most philosophical innovations do, but also that it thematises this principle of turning back to the source of a contention, the formulation of a problem, and makes this arena the centre of thinking. As initially suggested, critique does not (just) displace former problems by erecting an alternative system, but by turning to the problem of problem-formulation itself.

Orientation and disorientation: the division of reason Central to the notion of critique is the notion of “transcendental illusion.” Unlike “logical” illusions, in the form of “formal fallacies” of argument, transcendental illusion cannot be simply corrected and dispelled once the error is pointed out, but is a structural problem belonging to the nature of reason itself.16 The defining character of reason, for Kant, is the tendency to always go beyond, to repugn limits: to search for the unconditioned principle of any conditioned state of affairs. Thus it posits objects beneath appearances, essences beneath existents, and a range of metaphysical or ‘speculative’ concepts beyond all possible experience, such as a Supreme Being. Following this tendency, if reason goes beyond what is given to something which makes it possible, this idea, qua ‘unconditioned’, is itself posited as something beyond its relative status with respect to reason, as something independently existing: not only does our reason itself feel a need to make the concept of the unlimited the basis of the concept of everything limited—and hence of all other things; this need in fact also extends to the assumption that the unlimited exists.17

The error of reason is not in thinking entities such as a thing in itself or a Supreme Being, but in claiming to know them, and assigning to a transcendent idea the principle of its own foundation. Kant thus establishes a division within reason between its knowledge, which applies to appearances (the given

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PART I CHAPTER 2 constituted as phenomenon by the understanding), and its thought, which applies to the Ideas of reason or noumenon. This division broaches that between the theoretical and practical application of reason. What is not known theoretically may nevertheless serve as a practical horizon for our experience, whether theoretical or moral: “it is still open to us to enquire whether, in the practical knowledge of reason, data may not be found sufficient to determine reason’s transcendent concept of the unconditioned.”18 The corrective operation of critique is thus not to suppress this tendency to posit transcendent ideas as such, but to assign it another place, or to understand its sense. Kant’s essay on “What is Orientation in Thinking?” is dedicated to the sense in which reason’s tendency to “surpass experience” in its theoretical and moral endeavours serves as both a source of illusion and its corrective. The “proper function” of our concepts, he writes there, is their “experimental” use in conjunction with sensible intuitions. In the case of concepts of a “speculative” nature, however, such as a Supreme Being, which go beyond the scope of any possible experience, we require a principle that guides us as to their significance: “how else could we endow our concepts with sense and significance if we did not attach them to some intuition…?”19 In this case, it is more than the problem of “thinking for ourselves” without need for objective knowledge, but thinking for ourselves in cases where objective or empirical information is impossible. And in the same way that certain basic interests are served by renouncing our rational autonomy in everyday life, the positing of a supreme entity beyond all experience corresponds to a fundamental need of reason. The essay on orientation in thinking asserts the need of philosophy to establish and justify its primary coordinates before proceeding with its theoretical propositions. In his well-known analogy, Kant compares the procedure of orienting oneself in thought with the concrete process of physical orientation in space, starting with its original astronomical or navigational meaning: “to use a given direction… in order to find the others, and in particular that of sunrise [the orient].”20 In this process, the identification of objective coordinates—eg. the time, the position of the sun—are necessarily related to the internal “feeling” which differentiates right and left. Kant deliberately uses the term “feeling”, as right and left do not present any

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PART I CHAPTER 2 differences “seen from the outside”, but differ in nature from objective coordinates and are irreducible to them. This subjective aspect of orientation is nevertheless the more fundamental insofar as if there was a systematic alteration of objective coordinates—if the position of the celestial bodies were reversed, following Kant’s example—it would be necessary and sufficient for the astronomer to attend to the internal sense of right and left to establish the reversed situation and thus re-orient herself. Further still, when no clear external reference point is available it is an internal principle of orientation alone that serves as a guide, “if I have to walk and take the correct turnings at night on streets with which I am otherwise familiar, but in which I cannot at present distinguish any of the houses.”21 Transposing this principle to orientation in thought, Kant presents reason as the internal, subjective principle that is both the source of all objective sense and our guide when objective coordinates are lacking. Kant’s argument hinges on maintaining the “rights” of the subjective tendency of the will as a principle of the foundation of thought over and against appeals to “good sense” or a “sense of the truth” which claim an intellectual or intuitive insight into transcendent entities. The subjective principle of orientation that Kant evokes, unlike a “common sense”, has no content and is not an intellectual faculty, but consists only in the formal sense or directionality of reason per se—“the feeling of a need inherent in reason itself.”22 It is the apprehension of the objective pretensions of reason in terms of its subjective tendency to surpass limits, “to extend its sphere beyond the frontiers of experience.”23 The “illusion” of reason is to translate the subjective necessity of reason to posit an unconditioned principle into the revelation of an objective necessity. The critical gesture of Kant is to take the movement of reason one step further, to push even this apparent limit and address the question of right to this tendency itself. Given that we do, in fact, posit a range of principles and entities which form the purportedly objective infrastructure of our knowledge and practice, by what right do we do so? This question refocusses the problem of thought back on reason and the will as the source of objects and their value, subordinating transcendent grounds to immanent conditions of right. As the French Kantian scholar Alexis Philonenko writes:

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PART I CHAPTER 2 The answer is, according to Kant, in the question itself; it is in the need of reason to raise itself beyond the sensible world that we will find its principle of orientation in thought. It is thus in reflecting on its own desire for being that reason will be able to orient itself in being; it is in penetrating the “sense” of its need that it will find a sense in suprasensible space, in thought.24

Critique consists in the correct “use” of the tendency of reason to surpass experience by reformulating this transcendence as its autonomy from the given. The solution is thus a matter of recognising the specific “right” of this need of reason without thereby according it objective validity. Kant’s denial of an objective status to supra-sensible entities does not amount to considering them as figures of the imagination or theoretical fancies. If reason proposes certain concepts which do not admit of any correlate in possible experience, we are entitled to admit them as subjective principles in a hypothetical relationship to the objects of experience, but without thereby making any claim as to their objective existence: “We must simply refrain from claiming that what is only a necessary presupposition is in fact a free insight.”25 In so far as they are capable of functioning as principles, their subjective status should not be understood in a privative sense (‘merely’ subjective), but rather as signifying their role as immanent dimensions of our actions and judgements rather than objects of knowledge. In all cases we only legitimately exercise our reason according to the principles it gives itself, but in doing so we may also presuppose or ‘act with’ the belief in a particular conception of the universe as a whole, a unified nature or a Supreme Being. The ‘weight’ of these presuppositions, and the ‘need’ of reason, effectively waxes and wanes according the necessity of decisive action. In theoretical judgements, where we have no objective grounds of knowledge, we may be safest in refraining from any judgement, but where “it is not a matter of indifference whether one wishes to make a definite judgement on something or not”26, it is then that “the right of the need of reason supervenes as a subjective ground for presupposing and accepting something which reason cannot presume to know on objective grounds.”27 The constraint of the necessity of judgement is further accentuated in the case of our moral actions, where “we are compelled to assume that God exists not only if we wish to pass judgement, but because we must pass judgement.”28

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PART I CHAPTER 2 Kant’s argument for the orientating principle of reason in its subjective exercise is both directed against and an attempt to explain the speculative grounding of reason in the existence of a Supreme Being as the object of logical demonstration, “intellectual intuition”, or “good sense”. He intervenes in a historical debate between the philosophers Mendelssohn and Jacobi over the nature of reason and its compatibility with our freedom and religious faith. Mendelssohn assimilates the laws of reason to a logical apparatus by which we can formally demonstrate philosophical truths and the existence of a Supreme Being. If we are in danger of losing ourselves in such an abstract sphere— specifically, if logic leads us to conclusions incompatible with faith—we can appeal to our faculty of “good sense”. As Kant notes, apart from its extreme vagueness, the appeal to good sense is already an admission of the inadequacy of logic alone.29 The most serious problem however, for Kant, with the notion of a “good sense” which forms a counterpoint to logical reason, is that it was taken up by Jacobi and others as a faculty of “rational inspiration” which would allow of an intuitive confirmation of the divine beyond the lawful limitations of reason. Both Jacobi and Mendelssohn misinterpret the sense of the autonomy of reason—Jacobi placing an overemphasis on the freedom of reason to the neglect of its laws, and Mendelssohn an overemphasis on the rules of conceptual logic to the neglect of reason’s freedom: since human reason nevertheless continues to strive for freedom, the first use which it makes of its long unaccustomed liberty, once it has broken its bonds, must degenerate into misuse, into a presumptuous confidence in the independence of its own powers from every restriction, and into a conviction of the sole authority of speculative reason which accepts only what can be justified on objective grounds and by dogmatic conviction, but brashly dismisses everything else.30

Despite the distance between Mendelssohn’s confidence in the powers of logical demonstration, and Jacobi’s faith in the genial insight, both testify to an ‘infatuation’ with the supra-sensible concepts of reason which leads them to make an illegitimate leap from their conception to their existence. Kant uses the notion of the autonomous judgement of reason to articulate this gap: maintaining its distance, while at the same time using the difference between subjective and objective sense to give it a practical relevance. Kant maintains reason between a subordination to ‘objective’ ideals or its reduction to subjective whim by aligning it with the notion of duty. It is neither grounded

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PART I CHAPTER 2 in what is—any external nature or rule—nor expresses simple possibilities, but is driven by its own presupposition of right: of what must be.

Truth and method It is apparent why Kant’s Copernican revolution is sometimes understood as a movement whereby the object, once the ‘centre of gravity’ of knowledge, now ‘revolves around’ the subject: the new transcendental relation is not that between a knowledge or representation and the thing in itself, but knowledge and the principles of the faculty of knowing.31 But this explanation shows as well why the ‘revolution’ is not simply a reversal, but a displacement onto another plane. A transcendental field is constituted through the establishment of principles that assure the autonomous exercise of reason in relation to its interests. It is not as a being that the subject grounds the critique but as a principle of unity and freedom within the multiple exercises of the faculty of reason. It is in relation to these that any objective, or subjective, fact acquires value, outside of which it may be anything at all, but mean nothing. There is nevertheless an asymmetry in the relation of the subject and the object to ‘pure reason’ that distinguishes the formality of critique from the formality of a general logic. The subject of the critique is the index of its active nature: a proposition cannot exist in itself but is always the connected to a subject as a judgement. In addition to this, a judgement does not only refer to a subject who judges, but also to an interest or domain of operation. The identity of an object is thus doubly subordinate to the subjective conditions of judgement and the interest which determines the production of that judgement, outside of which it is entirely indeterminate. It is thus that a critical methodology implies a kind of pluralism, as it is now reason’s interests, which are multiple, and its judgements, which are synthetic, which determines essence rather than a thing-in-itself or ‘being’ which would be unitary. In this way, Kant interposes between concept and thing the questions “who?”, “how?”, “in what case?”, “where?”. The answers to these questions are not empirical examples but places assigned by a transcendental apparatus, the topoi of reason’s legislative and regulative domains, the type of subject which 52

PART I CHAPTER 2 corresponds to these, the action which determines its objective coordinates. Kant’s three Critiques each present conceptions of the subject which differ in nature: the “I” of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason is not the “I” apprehended as a pure freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason nor the “indeterminate accord” of the Critique of Judgement. We know, from Kant’s problematisation of the notion of the ‘soul’, and his denial of the self as object of knowledge, that these differences are not simple variations of an underlying substantial identity. Each subject is rather a component of a synthetic apparatus generated from a distinct problem, and it is this apparatus that forms the “centre” of thought. Whatever principle—unity, spontaneity, ‘responsiveness’—it may represent within a given synthesis, this remains a ‘role’ immanent to the synthesis itself. In critique, methodology goes beyond a technical protocol to integrate space, time and point of view into thought. This notion will be examined in detail in the next section in relation to a ‘problematic’ model of thought, but it contributes here to the question of the overall ‘image’ of thought in critique. Jules Vuillemin has drawn out the importance of the role of method in philosophy in establishing a table of philosophical systems, and in particular the category of “intuitionism”, into which he places the philosophies of Kant, Descartes and Epicurus.32 The intuitionist system is defined by Vuillemin in opposition to “dogmatic” criteria of truth. The essential tenets of the dogmatic system are that truth belongs to the relationship between the proposition and the thing or state represented by the proposition, that the relationship is one of adequation, and that the truth-value of this relationship transcends the conditions of its demonstration. In an intuitionist system on the other hand, truth pertains to a relationship of conformity between a representation or proposition and a “canon”, which is to say a system of rules or a method that comprises an intuitive or a-logical element. The basic element of thought is not the proposition but the judgement. As the existence of a truth depends on its demonstration, it is possible for a proposition to have no determinate truthvalue (those pertaining to the future, for example), and one can speak of a “genesis” of truth and falsity at the moment of its demonstration according to the canon.

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PART I CHAPTER 2 Vuillemin’s typology is drawn to show how different philosophies negotiate the tension between a theoretical imperative, that demands logical consistency in the world, and a practical imperative that requires an allowance for freedom. Vuillemin addresses the terms of this debate as it was posed in antiquity (“the aporia of Diodorus”), but it is also this conflict that forms the backdrop to Kant’s essay on orientation in thinking. The “intuitionist” system on the one hand appears to present a negative resolution to the problem: by circumscribing the domain of truth to possible experience, the physical field of appearances, a space for freedom is allowed by default, because this field does not touch things as they are in themselves. It is however a different and more positive picture that emerges both in Kant’s essays on orientation and enlightenment, and in his analysis of the “illusions” of thought. The ‘negative’ picture resembles the ordinary understanding of the tension between freedom and necessity, which places necessity on the one side, as an objective fact which we ‘know’, and freedom on the other, as private desire which we (want to) ‘believe’, however unaccountably. This however is the reverse of how Kant distributes the terms in his analysis. It is on the contrary the drive to complete a logical chain of reasons which Kant ‘pathologises’ as an inevitable but ultimately illogical impulse of reason, which is opposed to the necessary constraints of knowledge and which itself forms indirect evidence of our freedom. It is in fact the duality of “two sides” that the centrality of the methodological apparatus overcomes. The distinction between noumenon and phenomenon has a sense only within thought rather than representing an independent division between the ‘reality’ of the object and our subjective apprehension of it.33 Assigning a determining role to method integrates the duality of the theoretical and the practical: one is immediately the other. This self-sufficiency of thought is nevertheless the opposite of an idealism: the dualism of thing and representation is not overcome by reducing one to the other, but by eliminating the transcendent point of view which could give ‘real’ meaning to the distinction by embracing them both and measuring one against the other. This divine place is not vacated in order that the human may replace it: it is left vacant as the seat of indeterminacy in the world, the preservation of a real outside to thought. An implied consequence of confining truth to

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PART I CHAPTER 2 judgement is the necessity of suspending or withholding judgement in any final or definitive sense, a tolerance of the indeterminate, including within the self. Conversely, it is this tolerance or assumption of indeterminacy that gives sense to the affirmative judgement as a committed act rather than an emanation of a “thinking thing” or a psychological habit. It is in this way that the notion of transcendental method sets the necessity of “discipline” against a metaphysics or anthropology of thought, as a function of what knowledge and morality must be, rather than what they cannot do. Michel Foucault characterises the philosophical impulse of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment as an orientation of thought towards the demands of the present, which is expressed in two principal activities, for him inseparable: an interrogation the conditions of autonomy of Western rationality, and an elaboration of the ethos of the individual thinker—“the indefinite work of freedom.”34 Attention to “the present” is not, for Foucault, a question of the content of thought, but belongs to its form. When Kant enjoins his audience to “think for themselves”, to set themselves aside from social, scientific and metaphysical authority and make an independent judgement when something is proposed to them, he brings the act of thought into the “present” in a way that is not to do with a historical or empirical moment in time, but rather an actuality cleared by thought itself as the rule of both freedom and law. Foucault aligns Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment with an understanding of modernity that he identifies with the consciousness of “attitude” and which, like Deleuze, he traces to the Greeks: “a manner of both acting and behaving which at the same time marks a belonging and presents itself as a task.”35 It is “attitude” which “makes it possible to grasp the “heroic” aspect of the present moment.”36 The relationship of critique with the broader question of modernity is examined in detail in the third section, where it overlaps the issues raised by Kant in his third critique on judgement. The point here is how Kant displaces the problem of foundation in philosophy by reconceiving thought as a framework for the production of truths rather than their revelation. The premise of thought as a mode of orientation is an underlying disorientation or absence of foundation in the traditional, transcendent, sense, the ‘negative’ condition of a reason that claims to be

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PART I CHAPTER 2 autonomous, and the ‘positive’ condition of a reason which sees itself as a perpetual task. It is this notion of discipline as a transformational practice ‘against nature’ which Deleuze presents as the correct understanding of “method.” Deleuze rejects method in so far as it serves as a “dogmatic” tool, a way of preserving the integrity of thought by transcending contingent circumstances: “Time and place matter little if we apply method: it enables us to enter the domain of ‘that which is valid for all times and places.’”37, and later: “Method in general is a means by which we avoid going to a particular place, or by which we maintain the option of escaping from it.”38 To this he opposes the (Greek) notion of culture or paideia as the selection and integration of internal and external forces that are consolidated in an “attitude” of the thinker: “We have the truths that we deserve according to the place where we carry our existence, the hour we watch over, the element that we inhabit.”39 These truths are not simply the reflection of a given moment but represent a critical response to actual forces by laying the coordinates of a territory. Deleuze’s “territorial” conception of philosophy is the topic of the next chapter.

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PART I CHAPTER 2 Endnotes for Part I Chapter 2 QE, p. 58. CPR, Axin. 3 QE p. 54. 4 OT, p. 249n. 5 OT, p. 249n. 6 QE, p. 54. 7 QE, p. 54. 8 QE, p. 54. 9 QE, p. 54. 10 OT, p. 249n. 11 CPR, Bxii. 12 CPR, Bxiii. 13 CPR, A751/B779, my italics. 14 CPR, Axii-Axiii. 15 CPR, Axiii. 16 CPR, A296-298/B353-355. 17 OT, p. 241. 18 CPR, Bxxi. 19 OT, p. 237. 20 OT, p. 238. 21 OT, p. 239. 22 OT, p. 240. 23 OT, pp. 239-240. 24 Alexis Philonenko, Introduction to Kant’s Quest-ce que s’orienter dans la pensée?, p. 67. 25 OT, p. 242n. 26 OT, p. 240. 27 OT, pp. 240-241. 28 OT, p. 242. 29 OT, p. 243. 30 OT, p. 248. 31 The precise interpretation of how Kant’s re-orientation of thought is analogous to the Copernican revolution in astronomy is of course a subject of great debate. The simplistic representation of the change as a simple reversal of the direction of the relations between subject and object is nevertheless, I think, a common one—it is referred to (probably with irony) by Vuillemin for example: “Such was the project of the famous Copernican Revolution… making the object turn around the subject instead of making the subject turn around the object…”, L’heritage kantien et la revolution copernicienne, p. 1. 32 Jules Vuillemin, Nécessité ou contingence: l’aporie de Diodore et les systèmes philosophiques, pp. 208-229. 33 CPR, A255/B311: “The division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and the world into a world of the senses and the world of the understanding, is… quite inadmissible in the positive sense, although the distinction of concepts as sensible and intellectual is certainly legitimate.” 34 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, F71/E46, translation modified. 35 “What is Enlightenment?” (Foucault), F67/E39, translation modified. 36 “What is Enlightenment?” (Foucault), F67/E40. 37 NP, F118/E103. 38 NP, F126/E110. 39 NP, F125/E110, translation modified. 1 2

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CHAPTER 3:

DELEUZE AND THE “IMAGE OF THOUGHT”

The problem of beginning in philosophy has always been considered, quite rightly, as very delicate. 1 —Deleuze, Différ enc e et r épétiti on, Chapter 3: “The Image of Thought.”

The search for the “plane” In his 1953 book on Hume, Deleuze writes: We could say that philosophy in general has always sought a plane of analysis, from which it can undertake and lead the examination of the structures of consciousness, which is to say its critique, and justify the whole of experience.2

The notion of a “plane” posited by thought as its point of departure, is one which pursues Deleuze’s philosophy from its earliest expression to his last monograph, What is philosophy?, with Guattari, forty years later. It forms the cornerstone of a prolonged polemic around the problem of foundation in philosophy. The problem of foundation is addressed by Deleuze from the perspective of philosophy as a whole as well as in relation to individual claims. What interests him is the set of implicit presuppositions that constitute the disciplinary ‘terrain’ of philosophy: the “image of thought” that underwrites the legitimacy of a philosophical practice. A philosophy or a philosophical claim has, for Deleuze, in the first place a territorial or quasi-judicial sense before its truth status can be considered. The notion of thought’s “image” persists throughout Deleuze’s work, and has a particular pertinence to his understanding of critique. In the most general terms, it refers to “the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to be oriented in thought.”3 Deleuze first introduces the notion of the “image” that thought gives to itself as an orienting principle in the section on “Critique” in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy.4 Here, the notion of thought’s image is developed in the context of diagnosing what, over the course of Deleuze’s treatment of this

PART I CHAPTER 3 notion, is variously called a ‘classical’, ‘dogmatic’, or ‘traditional’ conception of philosophy. It is an attempt to identify the crucial “deficiency” which afflicts philosophy’s conception of its foundational plane and hampers the realisation of critique.5 The analysis of the dogmatic image of thought is developed in most detail in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, where it forms the subject of the central chapter, singled out by Deleuze in his preface to the 1994 English translation as the chapter “which now seems to me to be the most necessary and the most concrete.”6 Like the Kantian understanding of orientation in thinking, the image of thought is the mode by which a philosophy represents its own beginning or point of departure, and thus incorporates an understanding of the relationship between the pre-philosophical and philosophy proper. The critical nature of this approach is first indicated by the level of the analysis. While the specific notion of an “image of thought” is wholly Deleuze’s, to address philosophical thought from the perspective of its identity and foundation as a discipline, and in particular its self-conception, is a recognisably Kantian procedure.7 In the second place, the conceptualisation of thought in terms of its territorial “rights”, legislative domains, and variant interests is a cornerstone of the critical method. The originality of Kant’s famous essay on orientation in thinking pertains as much to its formulation of the question of thought in quasi-geographical terms as to the answer that is given therein. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari consider Kant’s revolution to consist in his “territorial” conception of thought, privileged over either its subject or object: Subject and object give a poor approximation of thought. Thinking is neither a line drawn between a subject and a subject, nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth. Kant is less a prisoner of the categories of subject and object than he is believed to be, since his idea of Copernican revolution puts thought into a direct relationship with the earth.8

These analogies are not simply metaphors, but indicate the basis of critique as, following Kant’s view, “a completely new science”9—the science of ‘scientificity’ or disciplinarity itself. In non-figurative terms, the questions of the territory and orientation of thought refer to critique’s concern with the domain of “right” as distinct from “fact.” Deleuze aligns the foundational plane of philosophy or its ‘image’ with what it designates as belonging to it ‘by right’, as distinct from its empirical coordinates: 59

PART I CHAPTER 3 The image of thought implies a strict division between fact and right: what pertains to thought as such must be separated from contingent features of the brain or historical opinions… The image of thought retains only what thought can claim by right.10

The distinction between the domains of right and fact is a defining feature of philosophy as a discipline, for Deleuze. It operates a selection among all possible things in order to circumscribe what belongs to philosophy proper, whether this is a certain ‘kind’ of thing, or all things taken under a certain aspect. This is what is immediately ‘active’ about philosophy for Deleuze: already in its enunciation it changes the world through a virtual redistribution of its coordinates and alliances. While it belongs to all philosophy to repugn ‘this’ world (of fact) in favour of a plane of right, for Deleuze this character of philosophy has two sides: a revolutionary impulse which institutes an original plane and constructs a new world immanent to thought, and a “reactive” or moral impulse which posits a transcendent realm ‘behind’ the variabilities of this world. These divergent tendencies represent alternative resolutions to the ‘problem’ of foundation and mark the distinction between the “dogmatic” image of thought and its critical form. It is thus conflicting understandings of the notion of ‘right’ in philosophy, the status of the foundation of thought as transcendent or immanent, that is first at issue in the philosophical project of critique. Both Kant and Deleuze understand this conflict in terms of a central tension within thought which leads it to alienate its autonomy in external authorities. The originality of Kant’s category of the transcendental for Deleuze is that it represents the identification of the plane of right with ‘right’ itself: the principles of lawfulness and autonomy as self-sufficient and immanent criteria for thinking. It is an active model that demands conformity from nature as opposed to the speculative ideal of conformity to nature. Deleuze reads Kant’s revolution as a reversal of the hierarchy obtaining in classical philosophy between an infinite plane which exists ‘by right’, represented by the figure of a Supreme Being, and our own de facto finite powers of thought.11 Instead, Kant makes finite reason coextensive with the plane of right, in relation to which even a divine being must be measured and judged, and which relegates infinity to the worldly mode of the indefinite. This “discovery” of the transcendental by Kant is compared by Deleuze to the act of a great explorer, a discoverer “not of another world, but mountain or underground of this one.”12

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PART I CHAPTER 3 Like Kant, Deleuze traces the privilege of a transcendent notion of ‘right’ to the movement of thought which works back from conditional or conditioned forms to the principle that serves as their condition, thus establishing an ideal plane in order to define an independent essence which corresponds to the concept of identity. Deleuze refers to Plato to account for the privilege of this conception of right: Plato’s “mathematical” or “hypothetical” method separates the Idea as essential and unitary quality from its diverse physical manifestations. It is this notion of right that supports the traditional authority of the question ‘what is x?’ over the apparently more ‘minor’ questions of ‘who?’, ‘how?’ etc. In Plato’s dialogues, it is the signature of the philosopher to ask what is the Beautiful, or the Just itself, as distinct from the non-philosopher who resort to examples of who, for example, is beautiful, or cases of justice. The question ‘what is?’, however, is only apparently crucial to the discovery of essence, according to Deleuze. Alongside the mathematical conception of right in Plato’s work there is at the same time in the dialogues a ‘juridical’ or dialectical notion of right—the question ‘by what right?’—concerned with the legitimacy of claims. The ambiguity of the status of Plato’s ideas can be understood as the slide between these two senses of ‘right’. The importance of identifying the Idea frequently gives way to the importance of the dialectical process itself, the set of philosophical ‘conditions’ immanent to the drama of thought: the question What is? in the end only animates the so-called aporetic dialogues… As soon as the Platonic dialectic becomes a serious and positive thing, we see it take other forms: who? in the Politics, how much? in the Philebus, where and when in the Sophist, in what case in the Parmenides.13

The error of the ‘non-philosopher’ is not in asking these more ‘minor’ questions, but in misunderstanding their transcendental status, as part of an ideal distribution of coordinates in thought: the topics of “a transcendental typology, topology, posology, casuistic.”14 This dramaturgical sense of the conditions of thought forms what Deleuze calls the “method of dramatisation.” Just as the image of thought describes a philosophical terrain of right, the method of dramatisation indicates philosophical personae and the nature of the ‘quest’. Both are part of Deleuze’s contention that what is primary in the act of philosophical foundation is not an underlying logos, but a drama or mythos that orients thought by laying out its

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PART I CHAPTER 3 scene, ideal protagonist and goal. Deleuze develops the notion of the method of dramatisation alongside that of the image of thought in Nietzsche and Philosophy, where the argument focuses on the replacing the metaphysics of identity with the notion of the will as a transcendental and generative principle, corresponding to the legislative notion of right: Willing is not an act like any other. Willing is both the critical and genetic instance of all of our actions, feelings and thoughts. The method is as follows: relating a concept to the will to power, in order to make it the symptom of a will without which it could not even be thought (nor the feeling experienced, nor the action undertaken).15

The conditions of sense of a given concept or phenomenon are thus the quality of will that posits it, the “type” of subject it supposes, and the world that it implies. It is by way of a “dramatisation” of the concept of truth that Deleuze’s conception of the dogmatic image of thought takes shape: “Who is seeking the truth? In other words: what does the one who seeks the truth want? What is his type, his will to power?”16 The dogmatic image incorporates an ideal of the persona of the thinker, a community of other thinkers, and the backdrop of a well-disposed nature. Thus, while being a tool for analysing the image of thought of a given philosophy, the method of dramatisation is thus itself based on a particular image of thought, as precisely the effect of a will which determines its world and its subjects. The special problem which assigning a foundational plane must negotiate, on Deleuze’s account, is that, on the one hand, it must satisfy the need of philosophy to have a secure ground, and on the other, make it possible for philosophy to present itself as operating “without presuppositions.”17 It must thus ‘belong’ to philosophy, in order to be the foundation of philosophy and not something else, without being part of philosophical discourse proper, in which case it would in turn need to be founded. The plane is not identical with philosophy, but is rather that from which or in relation to which the activity of thinking is undertaken. While posited by philosophy, the foundational plane thus represents a pre- or not-yet- philosophical state of affairs. There is thus an ambiguity in the notion of foundation: it must maintain a position sufficiently distant from philosophy proper so as not to become identified with it, and sufficiently close that it not run the risk of turning away or against it, “as if it vacillated between falling into what it founds and being engulfed in groundlessness.”18 This dilemma reflects what is later identified as the double

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PART I CHAPTER 3 function of the plane of thought: to give form or ‘consistency’ to chaos on the one side, and to serve as a corrective or counter-measure to common opinion: It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance—the struggle against opinion, which nevertheless claims to protect us from chaos itself…19

Chaos is prefigured in the threat of groundlessness and regress, but the inability to eliminate presuppositions, i.e. taking something already given as a foundation, risks a deferral to opinion: the doxa or ‘orthodoxy’. The temptation to employ the evidences of ‘common sense’ to ward off chaos is more treacherous to thought for Deleuze than pure disorder, and it is this tendency that forms the basis of his critique of the dominant ‘illusion’ concerning philosophical foundation in the form of the “dogmatic” image of thought.

The dogmatic image of thought The core idea of the dogmatic form of the image of thought is that thought has a ‘natural’ affiliation with the truth, and the thinker a natural predisposition to think and a good will towards the truth. Truth is what belongs to thought ‘by right,’ even if not always in fact, and the task of the thinker is thus to realise the truth that is promised by this principle: “it is therefore sufficient to “truly” think in order to think truthfully.”20 The dogmatic image presents the foundation of thought in the form of an implicit nature which unites the subject and object of thought and forms the common ground of a community of thinkers. It conceives of the pre-philosophical as an unrealised identity—a “state of nature”—which awaits formalisation through concepts. It is in part the presupposition of the ‘naturalness’ of thought that explains why it is eminently ‘unthought’ and implicit within this image: it is what ‘goes without saying’. The assumption of naturalness is also one of the respects in which this image of thought is characterised as ‘dogmatic’: its implicit claim is that the formal basis of its activity is in a ‘nature of things’. In What is philosophy?, the dogmatic illusion is presented as the projection of transcendent “figures” onto a properly immanent foundational plane: “great Object of contemplation, Subject of reflection, Other subject of communication”.21 The universality of these figures allows philosophy to claim a genuine beginning, as it presupposes 63

PART I CHAPTER 3 nothing that is not shared by all, while their underlying affinity provides the security it requires. What thus characterises the dogmatic image of thought is its identification of the foundational plane with a transcendent given, whose direction it simply ‘follows’, instead of assuming responsibility for its position. Deleuze uses the example of the Cartesian cogito in order to illustrate the mechanism of the dogmatic image.22 Having eliminated all objective or conceptual assumptions that would require further elaboration or justification, Descartes’ cogito presents itself as a point of departure for philosophical enquiry endowed with an internal certitude. Deleuze argues however that rather than eliminate presuppositions, the cogito only changes their form and scope so that instead of openly appealing to a specialised knowledge, it silently invokes a universally shared ‘common sense’. The cogito can only serve as a starting point only because it is assumed that “everybody knows” what it means to think, to be and to be a self: It is clear, however, that [Descartes] does not escape presuppositions of another kind—subjective or implicit—that is, contained in a feeling instead of in a concept: it is presumed that everyone knows, independently of concepts, what is meant by self, thinking and being. The pure self of ‘I think’ thus appears to be a beginning only because it has referred all its presuppositions back to the empirical self.23

The formula of self-evidence, “everybody knows”—what precisely ‘goes without saying’—allows philosophy to proceed secure in its foundation, while maintaining an innocence with regard to its assumptions because it has coded them as natural and universal. It is for this reason that Deleuze nominates the “postulate of common sense” as the first characteristic of the dogmatic image of thought. This philosophical common sense, rather than representing any particular set of opinions, is simply the assumption of a natural capacity for thought within the subject: a ‘cogitatio natura universalis’. According to this principle, thought is the natural exercise of a universally shared faculty: thought, in short, has a nature. In order to be a secure foundation for thought this nature must of necessity be ‘good’, i.e., oriented towards the truth. The corollary of common sense is thus the postulate of “good sense”: that “thought is in affinity with the true; it formally possesses the true and materially wants the true.”24 It makes no difference to the dogmatic image that “in fact” we often or mostly do not

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PART I CHAPTER 3 think, and that thought is difficult and fraught with error: these characteristics refer to what belongs to thought “by right”, to thought qua thought. The activity of philosophy thus consists in presenting in an explicit and conceptual form what is apprehended implicitly under the form of common sense: a matter of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning, of recognising, bringing to light what was simply known without a concept in an implicit manner—whatever the complexity of the extraction, whatever the difference between the procedures of different authors.25

This process is reflected in the third and fourth ‘postulates’ of the dogmatic image: the act of recognition as the model for philosophical activity, with representation as its element. The essence of this model is the recovery or reproduction of an identity through the convergence of information from different sources. If the ‘I think’ is the icon of common sense, this is because it is the site of the coordination of the different faculties of perception, memory and imagination on an object that is thereby identified as ‘the same’: “As Descartes says of the piece of wax: ‘It is of course the same wax that I see, which I touch, which I picture in my imagination, in short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start.’”26 It is both the banality and conservative character of recognition as a model of thought that Deleuze considers to be particularly “deplorable” (facheuse).27 While a given philosophy may renounce a particular ‘doxa’ or ‘common sense’ on the level of content, as long as it retains “the essential, which is to say the form”28, it compromises its duty to operate independently from the orthodoxy. Beneath the banality of recognition as a model of speculation lies the menace of recognition as an acquiescence to established values: “The form of recognition has never sanctified anything but than the recognisable and the recognised; form will never inspire anything but conformities.”29 The fifth postulate of the dogmatic image is error as the only “negative” of thought. Error is simply the reverse of the ‘correct’ functioning of thought, a case of misrecognition or misrepresentation, which Deleuze analyses as the confusion of the object of one faculty (eg. perception) with another object of another faculty (eg. memory or imagination): “as in the case of ‘Good morning Theodorus’ when it is Theaetetus who passes by”.30 Because the dogmatic image posits an internal affinity between thought and truth, the source of error can only be external, coming from the fact that “we are not only thinkers.”31 65

PART I CHAPTER 3 The activity of thought consists in the attempt to reconcile the plane of what belongs to philosophy by right and the world of fact, in two senses or directions. On the one hand, the promise or potential of the implicit nature of thought must be brought to light in an explicit form, and on the other the deviations that befall thought through outside influences must be corrected. These two functions are fulfilled by establishing a philosophical orthodoxy in the form of an agreed set of conventional signs for thought, or the application of a method: “Method is an artifice but one through which we are brought back to the nature of thought and ward off the effect of the alien forces which alter it and distract us.”32 Cases more complicated than simple error—the “terrible Trinity of madness, stupidity, and malevolence”33—must also be reduced to forces external to thought, although this indicates the ambiguity of the relationship of the nature of thought to its “accidents”: “[error] would not have a place within pure thought if thought were not diverted from the outside, but it would not result from this outside if it were not within pure thought.”34 The status of error as the principal negative of thought correlates with the sixth postulate of the dogmatic image, which privileges the proposition and its referential function as the site of truth and falsity. Deleuze again protests the triviality of this image of truth and falsity—“Who says ‘Good morning Theodorus’ when Theaetetus passes, and “It is three o’clock” when it is threethirty, and that 7 + 5 = 13? The myopic, the distracted, the small child at school.”35 More profoundly, these postulates fail to grasp both the true enemy or “negative” of thought and the true ‘transcendental’ or ‘genetic’ conditions of truth and falsity. The dogmatic image of thought separates the referential function of a proposition, in which lies its truth and falsity, from its expressive function, wherein it has a meaning. It is only in the case of isolated examples that are invented or divorced from any context that this separation is possible, according to Deleuze. He instead contends that a non-trivial notion of truth and falsity is entirely dependent on conditions of sense: “Every time a proposition is replaced within the context of living thought, we see that it has exactly the truth that it deserves according to its sense, and the falsity appropriate to the non-sense that it implies.”36 It is stupidity, the inability to appreciate or produce these conditions, which constitutes the internal threat to thought, and it depends not on the categories of true and false in the propositional sense, but rather the remarkable and the ordinary: 66

PART I CHAPTER 3 Already teachers know well that one rarely encounters errors or something false in “homework” (except in exercises where propositions must be translated one by one, or a fixed result is required). But nonsenses, remarks without interest or importance, banalities taken to be remarkable, the confusion of ordinary ‘points’ with singular ones, problems which are badly posed or divorced from their meaning, such is the worst and the most frequent, and yet pregnant with menace, a lot we all share.37

The sense of a proposition relies on grasping “that set of problems and questions in relation to which propositions serve as elements of response and cases of solution.”38 The postulate according to which reference or designation is privileged over sense is thus reinforced by the seventh postulate of the dogmatic image that privileges the modality of the solution over that of the problem or question. Like sense, the problem or question is considered to be the “neutralised double” of the proposition: the construction of problems is based on a modification of the propositional form (as in Aristotle), and the value of the problem is defined according to its possibility of receiving a solution. This tendency is in turn supported by the eighth and final postulate of the dogmatic image: the postulation of knowledge as the goal of thought rather than learning or “culture.” The necessity of locating truth and falsity at the level of the problem is a persistent theme in Deleuze’s work, and one that will be most fully elaborated in the second part of thesis. Deleuze defines learning as the “subjective acts carried out when one is confronted with the objecticity (objectité) of a problem.”39 This process constitutes a form of spiritual training and an “involuntary adventure”40 that Deleuze identifies with the work of culture, in the disciplinary sense outlined above. By contrast, knowledge rests on “the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions”41, the collaboration of the faculties in the “premeditated decision”42 of the thinker. There is always an arbitrary quality, Deleuze contends in Proust and Signs, to truths that are arrived at through an intentional process of ‘realisation’, by applying a method and achieving a consensus.43 The profound truths are rather those that interpellate us against our will, which emerge from nowhere and demand our attention.

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The (non-) sense of the dogmatic image Deleuze’s diagnosis of the dogmatic image of thought is not focused on a particular philosophy or tradition, but aims at “a single Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole.”44 As with Kant’s transcendental illusions, it represents an ‘undertow’ of thought which reigns in the absence of critical vigilance. The diagnosis of the dogmatic image as a pernicious ‘habit’ of thought represents the first step of its critique. The Kantian notion of error being internal to thought in the form of inevitable illusions is recognised by Deleuze as representing an important challenge to the traditional conception of error coming to thought from outside. It also provides an important model of philosophical analysis for Deleuze, prefiguring the typical form of relationship he establishes between the terms of a dichotomy, where one is a degraded version of the other, or ‘the same thing’ viewed from a degraded perspective. Kant is appraised by Deleuze as contesting the “naturalness” of thought presented by the dogmatic image, both on the grounds that reason left to its ‘natural’ tendencies leads into error, and because the task of reason is to ‘give the orders’ to nature rather than to follow it. This theory of critique as a thought ‘against nature’ runs throughout Deleuze’s reflections on the subject. It begins with his diagnosis of empiricism as a form of critique based on the theory of external relations: “we will call non-empiricist every theory according to which, in one way or another, relations are derived from the nature of things.”45 In Nietzsche’s philosophy of will, again presented as a critical philosophy, the forces in thought that oblige us to think are identified with the transformation of culture, or the Greek notion of paideia: “Culture, according to Nietzsche, is essentially training and selection… It expresses the violence of the forces which seize thought in order to make it something affirmative and active.”46 Deleuze’s next book, on Kant, begins with Kant’s definition of philosophy as the relation of all knowledges to the ends of human reason, declaring that: “The supreme ends of Reason form the system of Culture.” 47 What is opposed to “culture” is less “nature”, in its ordinary sense, than its laudative sense in philosophy, denoting what is universally shared, universally given, or what belongs most essentially to something. “Culture”, for Deleuze, denotes the principle by which thought necessarily marks a departure from an 68

PART I CHAPTER 3 established state of affairs or status quo, whether natural or cultural, in their ordinary senses. From Deleuze’s account of stupidity, it is clear that in one sense the dogmatic image is a particular manifestation of the obtuseness that threatens thought from within: taking the superficial for the profound, the commonplace for the significant, what is secondary for what is primary. More precisely, Deleuze accuses the dogmatic image of a systematic confusion of the true conditions of thought and its external expressions: the transcendental and the empirical. Thus on the one hand the dogmatic image assumes that thought is generated along the lines of the coordinates of everyday experience: the subject and object and the act of recognition. On the other hand, it is precisely the elements of thought which Deleuze considers to belong to thought ‘by right’— learning, the form of the problem and question, the events that provoke thought—which on the dogmatic model are relegated to the level of the empirical, psychological or historical. Of all the traits of the dogmatic image of thought, the most important one, which distances it most from critique, is how it suppresses the active nature of thought and effaces the process of its own construction under the auspices of ‘nature’. The ideal of a philosophy without presuppositions is not itself the object of Deleuze’s criticism, only its dogmatic interpretation where this ideal comes at the expense of the accountability of thought. As Deleuze writes on the dogmatic image of thought in Nietzsche and philosophy: By establishing a bond of right between thought and truth, by relating the will of a pure thinker to truth in this way, philosophy avoids relating truth to a concrete will of its own, to a type of forces, to a quality of the will to power.48

and later: We are never referred to the real forces that make thought, thought itself 49 is never related to the real forces it supposes as thought.

Insofar as the dogmatic image conceives thought as the expression or reflection of nature—subjective or objective—rather than a specific will, it can maintain both an ideal of innocence and an indifference to how thought comes about. A critical understanding integrates its presuppositions as the immanent coordinates of a will or act which posits them, this latter assuming the central role of a foundation that is opposed to nature.

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PART I CHAPTER 3 The lack of accountability of thought in the dogmatic image has two senses. On the one hand, the apparent ‘innocence’ of the dogmatic image represents for Deleuze a real impotence. By referring the production of thought to the expression of a natural tendency, the dogmatic image of thought avoids all the questions that pertain to its ‘conditions of actuality’: its where, when, in what case, who and why. Neither desire nor good will are enough for Deleuze to explain how and why the potentiality of thought is realised—what is it that makes us think? To refer thinking to a faculty of thought and to conceive truth as a property of ‘true’ thought amounts to an invocation of ‘occult powers’ on the scholastic model. Deleuze refers to the “natural stupor” and “eternal possibility” of this image of thought: it lacks a “claw, which would be that of absolute necessity, which is to say an original violence inflicted upon thought, a strangeness, an enmity which alone would bring it out of its natural stupor or eternal possibility”50. On the other hand, Deleuze analyses the dogmatic image precisely as an expression of a “concrete will” beneath the apparent innocence of the “will to truth”, and it is from this perspective that the eminently conservative character of the dogmatic image emerges. The “will to truth” is not a speculative drive, according to Deleuze, but rather moral. The transcendent plane of right posited by the dogmatic image is ‘another world’ behind this one, and it is through a corrective activity undertaken in this world that passage to the other one is assured. The essence of its activity of recognition and representation is the elimination of nonconforming elements: “we always come up against the virtuism of the one who wills the truth: one of his favourite occupations is the distribution of wrongs, he renders responsible, he denies innocence, he accuses and judges life, he denounces appearance.”51 In both its ‘concrete’ and apparent form, the dogmatic image of thought testifies to a certain ‘will to nothingness’: firstly through its will to anonymity, the suppression of its conditions, and secondly because it only acts in the name of returning to an original state. The dogmatic image of thought posits the nature of thought as a possibility and the task of thought as the realisation of this possibility, the process being based on an underlying identity. In Deleuze’s ‘critical’ image of thought, the actualisation of thought is instead inseparable from a departure or difference from ‘nature’, taking the form of a drama and an event rather than reproducing an identity. Deleuze uses the term “virtual” to describe the status 70

PART I CHAPTER 3 of the foundational plane of the critical image of thought in relation to its actuality, in order to mark its difference from the order of possibility. While the possible represents a form of pre-existence or predetermination in relation to the real, the virtual is indeterminate in relation to an actual determination. The indeterminacy of the virtual as condition for the actual, however, has both a negative and a positive sense. In the first place it is indeterminate ‘by default’, because actualisation is identified with the act of determination. In order for indeterminacy to be a sufficient rather than a simply necessary condition of action, however, it must provoke it in some sense. An actualisation is provoked by an encounter with indeterminacy in the positive form of a problem or problematic object. The gauge and definition of a problem, like that of an act, resides in its departure from a natural or essential state of affairs, which precisely calls for an action, for something to be done. The engendering of thought through an encounter with an external instance is what Deleuze calls the “genitality” of thought—after Artaud—which he opposes to the notion of thought’s “innateness.” Ultimately, the distinction between “realisation” and “actualisation” is not one between two different processes but rather a different distribution of their coordinates—precisely the difference represented by divergent images of thought. Any “realisation”, for Deleuze, presupposes an “actualisation”: the drama that gives it sense, and the necessary element of the real that differs from the possible and gives impetus to action. These are simply effaced or subsumed in the dogmatic image in virtue of its position that what counts is the principle of identity, and what animates thought is its own nature. The next section will focus on this juncture between the possibility of thought and its actuality, namely the various forms of combination between Idea, concept and sensibility in Kant and Deleuze’s synthetic conception of thought. These combinations come under the heading of the ‘problematic’, in virtue of the special meaning we can give to this term from its function in geometry, where it integrates conceptual and non-conceptual factors in thought, and its related sense in Deleuze’s thought as the Ideal guide for conceptual synthesis.

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PART I CHAPTER 3 Endnotes for Part I Chapter 3 DR, F169/E129, translation modified. ES, F92/E87, translation modified. 3 QP?, F39-40/E37, translation modified. 4 NP, Ch. 11: “The concept of truth”, F108/E94. 5 NP, F108/E95. 6 DR, Exvii. 7 See, for example, the Preface to the first edition of CPR, Axi: “It [the indifference to metaphysics] is a call to reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its task, namely that of selfknowledge…” 8 QP?, F82/E85. 9 Prolegomena, Preface, p. 12 (scholarly pagination 4:262). 10 QP?, F40/E37. 11 In, for example, his book on Foucault, (“The ‘Classical’ Historical Formation”, F131/E124) and in his teaching in the seventies. 12 DR, F176/E135. 13 MD, p. 91. 14 MD, p. 92. 15 NP, F88-89/E78. 16 NP, F108/E94-95. 17 cf. DR, F169/E129. 18 DR, F351/E274. 19 QP?, F191/E203. 20 NP, F118/E103, translation modified. 21 QP?, F52/E51. 22 DR, F169/E129. 23 DR, F169/E129, trans. modified: English gives ‘opinion’ rather than ‘feeling’ for ‘sentiment’ in the original. 24 DR, F172/E131. 25 DR, F170/E129. 26 DR, F174/E133, citing Descartes’ second Meditation. 27 DR, F175/E134, translation modified (English edition: “Such an orientation is a hindrance to philosophy”). 28 DR, F175/E134. 29 DR, F176/E134. 30 DR, F193/E149. 31 DR, F194/E149. 32 NP, F118/E103. 33 DR, F194/E149. 34 DR, F194/149, translation modified, Deleuze’s italics. 35 DR, F195/E150, translation modified, Deleuze’s italics. 36 DR, F200/E154, translation modified. 37 DR, F198-199/E153, translation modified. 38 DR, F204/E157. 39 DR, F214/E164, “Objectité”, referring to a state, means ‘objecthood’, but in this context, as referring to a kind of thing, most probably derives from Husserl’s Logical Investigations, where an “objectity”—Gegenständlichkeit—means not an individual thing, but a complex event or state of affairs as expressed by a sentence. 40 DR, F215/E165. 41 DR, F214/E164. 42 DR, F215/E165. 43 Proust and signs, F116-117/E95-96. 44 DR, F172/E132. 45 ES, F123/E109. 46 NP, F123/E108. 47 PCK, F5/E1. 48 NP, F108/E95. 49 NP, F118/E103-4, translation modified. 50 DR, F181/E139, translation modified. 51 NP, F110/E96. 1 2

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PART II.

MIDDLES: PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER

CHAPTER 1:

THE SENSE OF THE PROBLEM

The last section gave some indication of the importance of the problem and question for Deleuze, as foundational structures of a critical thought. One of the traits of the dogmatic image of thought was the priority it accorded to the proposition as the ultimate “sense” of the question or problem (in the form of an answer or resolution), which Deleuze counters by locating the sense of the proposition in the question or problem from which it derives. As a general formula, however, this reversal is a more or less familiar philosophical adage, which can be accommodated within a ‘commonsensical’ conception of thought, as Deleuze himself notes: everybody ‘recognises’ after a fashion that problems are the most important thing. Yet it is not enough to recognise this in fact, as if the problems were only provisional and contingent movements destined to disappear in the formation of knowledge, which owed their importance only to the negative empirical conditions imposed upon the knowing subject. On the contrary, this discovery must be raised to the transcendental level, problems must be considered not as ‘givens’ (data), but as ideal ‘objecticities’ [objectités] possessing their own sufficiency and implying acts of constitution and investment acts in their respective symbolic fields.1

Deleuze seeks to give a transcendental status to the problem, in order to redress its negative and instrumental status in the dogmatic image of thought, and distance it from a more commonplace understanding. The context of critique already provides a more determinate and positive sense of the problem than in its ordinary meaning. When Kant attaches himself to the questions and problems posed by reason, independently of their results, he means that he is engaged in an enquiry into the terms and conditions of our thought, whose sense must be founded prior to an evaluation of its assertions. Deleuze reaffirms this principle, and in addition produces a notion of the problem, which both derives from its geometrical sense and the sense of the ‘problematic’ in Kant’s philosophy. In this chapter we will examine not only the ‘sense’ of the problem in terms of its definition and role in geometry and philosophy, but how, in so doing, we grasp the problem as precisely a generator of sense in its integration logic and existence.

PART II CHAPTER 1

The problem in geometry and philosophy The history of the notion of the problem in geometry and philosophy forms a backdrop to Deleuze’s development of this notion, and is useful for considering the specificity of Kant’s own critical methodology. The word “problem” comes from the Greek προβληµα, which literally means something thrown or put forward, hence the sense it has acquired of being a proposed task, question or difficulty to be resolved. This derivation aligns with its original sense in geometry, most simply rendered by the Concise Oxford: “a proposition in which something has to be done.” This property of the problem in geometry, where “something has to be done”, distinguishes it from its closest geometrical counterpart, the theorem, which is defined as “a proposition to be proved by a chain of reasoning.” Both problems and theorems are propositions that follow from first principles (axioms, postulates and hypotheses) and demonstrate properties of geometrical figures. Their difference lies in the mode of this ‘following’ and manner of demonstration. The theorem proceeds by a theoretical process of deduction that derives essential properties of a figure from its conceptual definition. The problem requires a material process of construction or transformation, in the course of which properties of a figure come to light which cannot be deduced from its concept. The principal source for the discussion of the status of the problem in ancient geometry, which is drawn on by Deleuze, is the commentary by the neo-Platonist Proclus (412-484) on Euclid’s Elements.2 The distinction between the problem and the theorem is a recurrent topic in this work, the main points of which are summarised in Table 1 on page 76. The majority of these points simply represent an elaboration of what is more or less implicit in the contemporary conception of the distinction between the theorem and the problem. The difference is rather the great amount of attention paid to the significance of each term and their relationship to each other that is evident from Proclus’ work, an issue capable of dividing schools of thinkers. In a context where there is such an overlap of the boundaries of knowledge and science, philosophy and mathematics, the meaning of the theorem and the problem bears directly on the nature of truth and the epistemological status of

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PART II CHAPTER 1 Table 1. Proclus’ distinctions between the problem and the theorem (scholarly pagination given)

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PART II CHAPTER 1 the proposition per se. It is also for this reason that it provides such an instructive framework for the examination of the “problematic” in Kant and Deleuze. The ‘problem’ with the problem, as it emerges in Proclus’ discussion, is that it intrudes on an ideal model of truth, as eternal by right and implicitly contained within a conceptual essence, removed from the changeability of matter and linked to other truths in a continuous and self-contained deductive flow. Problems appear to actually bring truths into existence, and can only do so by adjoining a material process to the concept, thus succeeding where purely intellectual methods fail, in a domain of practice that is scientifically opaque. The relative worth of the problem in relation to the theorem is closely connected to the arguments that can be made regarding its affiliation with the “mechanical” arts. The lesser worth of these in relation to the speculative sciences is in turn allied with the understanding of the nature of truth as eternal. Proclus recounts that one school of thought, the followers of Speusippus and Amphinomus, refuses to recognise the existence of problems at all, insisting that all geometrical propositions be called theorems, and that the apparent “making” in problems be treated as simply a species of understanding, a sort of ‘acting out’ of the understanding, or even a ‘play acting’, which treats eternal things “as if” they were in the process of coming to be.3 It is an engineer, Carpus of Antioch, who makes a claim for the priority of the problem over the theorem, for the reason that if the theorem studies the nature of a thing, the problem must first determine the subject to be investigated. He argues that the order of presentation in Euclid’s Elements itself, which begins with problems, indicates this precedence, and that even the first theorem “is completely dependent on the clear judgement of sense perception”4, which is to say, a non-conceptual process. Using a similar line of argument, the school of Maenaechmus considers all processes of investigation to be problems, with one sort (the problematic ‘proper’) providing the object to be investigated, and the other (‘theorematic’) investigating the qualities of the provided object. These defences of the problems however are at odds with the prevailing episteme, at least as it is presented by Proclus. The problem in geometry is inevitably compromised by its affiliation, if only by “analogy”, with the lesser practical and mechanical arts. One of Proclus’ first remarks with respect to the

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PART II CHAPTER 1 problem is: “as the productive sciences have some theory in them, so the theoretical ones take on problems in a way analogous to production.”5 While Proclus understands problems and theorems to genuinely differ in nature, there is no question in his mind concerning the superior rank and scope of the theorem. It is the more general term in geometry than the problem, because “every problem has some theory in it, but the reverse is not true”, and “demonstrations in general are the product of theory.”6 If the formal processes of thought, might be “plausibly said to resemble acts of production”, even in the case of discovering theorems, these take place in the imagination alone (and not in the changeable world), and “the contents of our understanding all stand fixed, without any generation or change.”7 If problems precede theorems in Euclid’s order of presentation, this sequence is a procession from the lower in worth to the higher: “where [geometry] borders on the highest science it rises by way of theorems from problems to theorems, from secondary to primary things, from the more practical arts to the more scientific insights.”8 French historian of philosophy Émile Bréhier addresses the transition from the technical sense of the problem to its philosophical sense in his article on “The notion of the problem in philosophy.”9 Though evidently an object of philosophical reflection in the context of geometry, the term “problem” was rarely used in philosophical discourse proper in antiquity. In Aristotle’s Problems (a title not given by Aristotle himself), the problem emerges in relation to biology and morality, as well as mathematics, but has only a restricted sense, referring to “a concrete, limited and defined question, whose very posing assumes the pre-existence of the science within which it is posed, the science which will provide the means to resolve it.”10 It appears in its more philosophical sense however in Aristotle’s Topics, where the problem orients a discussion by designating the subject matter of the argument, reformulating a proposition as a kind of open-ended question: The difference between a problem and a proposition is a difference in the turn of the phrase. For if it be put in this way, “‘An animal that walks on two feet” is the definition of man, is it not?’ or ‘“Animal” is the genus of man, is it not?’ the result is a proposition: but if thus, ‘Is “an animal that walks on two feet” a definition of man or no?’ [or ‘Is “animal” his genus or no?’] the result is a problem. 11

This is the source, according to Bréhier, of an essential relationship between the problem and a dialectic process: “the proposition only considers a thesis which demands to be accepted, while the problem considers the antithesis of 78

PART II CHAPTER 1 the proposed thesis as also a possibility, and calls for the examination of both arguments for and against.”12 While dialectics in general refers to the art of discussion and argument, for the ancient philosopher it more specifically concerns the determination of essential principles and truthful ideas through the testing of opinions and classification of concepts. It is in this way that the philosophical dialectic distinguishes itself from the sophistic dialectic, considered as the virtuoso manipulation of theses and arguments for pure effect. If there is an affiliation of the theorem with the classic question of essence (“what is…?”), the question of right (quid juris?) engages the question of how a truth or an essence is legitimately determined as such in the first place, regardless of its internal nature once determined, hence its affiliation with the problem-form. In this context, the backdrop to the philosophical problem—what Bréhier calls the “metaproblematic”—is not, as in science, a defined set of propositions, but the “doxa” of “more or less probable opinion.”13 As a body of competing assertions, none of which have unquestionable certainty, these provide the material for the dialectic and the point of departure for its arguments, but do not of themselves provide a means to move beyond the alternative of for and against, of forcing the problem, and indeed risk sinking the dialectic into aporia or scepticism. In this sense, Bréhier argues, the essential element of a philosophical problem, beneath any given alternative in a particular problem, is the alternative between the alternatives posed by the doxa itself, and the decisive instance that allows thought to move beyond this alternative. It is for this reason that Bréhier considers the lesson of the Socratic dialectic exemplary and perhaps instrumental in its method for moving beyond the problematic impasse: “Philosophy would perhaps never have moved beyond this [aporetic] situation without Socrates.”14 The crucial element of the Socratic method for Bréhier is that it interiorises the dialectic within the person of the interlocutor, such that the struggle between competing points of view is not between two people, but between the subject and himself, who thus finds the contradiction a painful and personally intolerable experience. What the Socratic example shows is that the perspective from which a problem is addressed forms a key to the problem itself. Bréhier marks the

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PART II CHAPTER 1 difference between the problem in mathematics, whose resolution presupposes an already given set of material, and the problem in philosophy whose very posing is only possible in the light of the correct metaproblematic, the problem in turn shedding further light on this latter, in a progressive, reciprocal movement—precisely dialectical. The correct identification of the appropriate “metaproblematic” is a decisive factor in resolving a philosophical problem— thus, in the example given by Bréhier, the importance of Kant, who reformulates the problem of morality by reassigning its domain of resolution from the theoretical to the practical. In doing so, he at the same time resolves, or dissolves, a former problem, designates a new “metaproblematic”, poses a new problem, and does so in a way that it contains its own resolution. Hence Bréhier’s affirmation of Bergson’s saying: “In philosophy, a well-posed problem is a problem resolved.”15 Other examples that Bréhier cites, as similarly decisive philosophical instances, are the Platonic vision of the Good, Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas, the dialectic of spirit in Hegel, and Bergsonian intuition.16 These cases resemble each other in that they both offer means of resolution to a problem, and more profoundly represent the perspective by which a false problem is transformed into a true one, from a false set of alternatives, external to each other and to their solution, to a true alternation which internalises its dialectic and its solution.

Logic and existence: the problematic orientation of critique The critical force of the problem in philosophy lies in its polemical relationship to an image of thought based on the concept of identity. In geometry, the problem intervenes at the point where the possibilities provided by conceptual knowledge of an object alone are exhausted. It also, in both geometry and philosophy, precedes the concept in the sense of determining the object under investigation. In both cases the problem attaches the truth to a process that engages non-conceptual parameters in thought: space, time and the orientation of the subject. The problem modifies the traditional question of the philosophical weight of the sensible or non-eternal, the duality of the essential and non-essential. It sets up a contrast not between the eternity of essence beneath changing appearances, but raises rather the question of the

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PART II CHAPTER 1 relationship of truth to the process which gives rise to it, and whether this relationship is itself essential or inessential. From a ‘theorematic’ bias, the operations involved in the problem can be considered as secondary with respect to their results, which once obtained, can be considered as having ‘already’ existed in a virtual fashion within the concept, and are hence independent of their coming to light. From a ‘problematic’ bias, the concept appears inadequate in itself as a ground for truth, having on the one hand to be first assigned as a legitimate topic of inquiry, and on the other to be further determined with regard to its existential value. In a general sense, Kant treats the concept as the sign of a problem: something which calls for an investigation into its conditions of possibility with respect to experience, as well as its source and function with respect to our cognitive apparatus. The ‘temptation’ of the concept, for Kant, is its superiority with respect to logical values such as necessity, universality, and self-sufficiency. It thus directly satisfies the demands of reason and the understanding for unconditioned principles and strict laws, in relation to which the partial and variable character of experience appears impoverished.17 The ‘deficiency’ of the concept is that it remains valueless except in reference to the experience and interest that gives it meaning. The concept is in the first place the expression of a internal tendency or need of reason rather than the object of an insight, to which no reality is obliged to correspond. It is in this sense that reason cannot but ask questions that it is incapable of answering, but it is also in this sense that the solution consists in the correct position of the problem. In a global sense, then, the ‘problematic’ nature of Kant’s critique can first be approached in terms of its project of a philosophy whose judgements are both a priori and synthetic. A ‘theorematic’ attitude to philosophy is represented by ‘dogmatism’ for Kant, which represents one of the principal targets of the critical project. Dogmatism, for Kant, is the attempt to arrive at certain philosophical truth in a manner which models itself on what it takes to be a mathematical method: by defining and analysing a priori concepts and establishing the necessary relations between them. In order for dogmatism to present an analytic method as a form of knowledge, which is to say as ‘objective’ (relating to an object), it must assume that the nature of reality itself is

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PART II CHAPTER 1 continuous with conceptual necessity, such as when sense perception is considered to be a ‘confused’ form of intelligible reality, or a ‘supreme’ concept is deemed to include its existence. Such an assumption is for Kant entirely unfounded, and also impossible to found: if we look to our ideas, we find necessity, but such ideas are only a product of reason itself, and if we look to the content of our experience, we do not find anything that is necessary or universal. The ‘knowledge’ gained by reason through the analysis of its concepts is thus a knowledge only of itself, analytic in the tautological sense, and at best a “preparatory” stage for “metaphysics proper.”18 If conceptual analysis cannot claim to yield knowledge of any object, all philosophical knowledge must be not analytic but synthetic, which is to say necessarily related to experience.19 At the same time, Kant does not relinquish the demand for necessity and universality in our philosophical knowledge, hence the project of seeking the grounds of possibility of judgements which are both synthetic and a priori. These grounds are found in the a priori conditions of our experience: the categories of the understanding and the forms of space and time with respect to intuition. Kant’s critique thus transforms the notion of the ‘conditional’ within philosophy. In attempting to go beyond the conditions of experience and grasp an unconditional principle that would be their source, reason posits an unconditioned idea as what is first and highest in a logical order of being. From a critical perspective, such an idea is not only what in fact comes last in this movement of reason, but its unconditioned status translates as a state of complete indeterminacy, so low as an idea that it raises the question of whether it is even a ‘thought’: The expedient of removing all those conditions which the understanding indispensably requires in order to regard something as necessary, simply through the introduction of the word unconditioned, is very far from sufficing to show whether I am still thinking anything in the concept of the unconditionally necessary, or perhaps rather nothing at all.20

Logic alone has no power to positively determine an object with respect to its existence according to Kant: its role in thought is wholly negative—a “cathartic” for the understanding in removing contradictions, but “far from being sufficient to determine the material (objective) truth of knowledge.”21 To “determine”, in this sense, is not to ‘cause’ (as in “determinism”), but to assign a ground, to specify or classify. The “determination” of an empirical concept is

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PART II CHAPTER 1 the sense it acquires through its specification in experience, just as the particulars of experience receive determination through being assigned a concept. The backdrop to Kant’s refutation of dogmatism, in both a positive and a negative sense, is the rationalist philosophy of Leibniz. Kant’s ‘pre-critical’ work was influenced by the Leibnizian philosopher Wolff, “the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers.”22 The difference between the negative function of logic or the general concept and the positive determination of existence in the particular is crucial to Leibniz’s methodology and ontology. While Leibniz’s philosophy represents in some respects the summit of rationalist dogmatism by submitting all truth to a strictly analytic model, it can only do this by transforming the traditional nature of the concept, and by supplementing the rationalist model with principles that are not logical in nature. All true predications of a subject, for Leibniz, are to be understood according to the model of analytic truth, where the predicate is contained within the notion of the subject. He distinguishes, however, two modes of “inclusion”, according to whether the predicate is “logical” or “existential.” Logical predicates are those that are analytic in the traditional sense: propositions of identity whose negation implies a contradiction. These form the basis for the first principle of our reasonings on nature: the principle of non-contradiction. Existential predicates are those whose negation does not imply a contradiction, such as what ‘happens’ to a subject and the fact of its existence itself. These predicates are to be considered in the light of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which “nothing ever happens without there being a cause or at least a determining reason, which is to say that can serve to provide an a priori reason why something exists rather than not and why it is in such a way rather than another.”23 The principle of non-contradiction is only a negative principle of our reasonings: it eliminates the impossible, and hence sanctions a range of possibilities, but is unable to positively account for the fact that only one of those possibilities is actual. The fact that existential predicates admit their negation without contradiction testifies to the insufficiency of the principle of contradiction alone to determine existence. The principle of sufficient reason is thus introduced as a supplement to the principle of contradiction: not in order to absorb the deficiencies in our powers of understanding, but in order to supplement the limitations of logic alone. 83

PART II CHAPTER 1 On a methodological level, the principle of sufficient reason provides a framework for judging and in some cases foreseeing explanations of natural phenomena, according to principles of simplicity and continuity, and incorporates the notion of ends or finality into the study of nature. Its metaphysical underpinning is the notion that, given the range of equally possible worlds from a logical perspective, God has selected the “best” of these, which is to say, the one which achieves the greatest total good while satisfying the economic principles of unity, continuity, simplicity etc. It is thus the creative act of God which at the same time gives actuality to a logical possibility and renders necessary what appears to be contingent, such that all aspects of an individual existence are contained within its concept. The contingency of this world relative to logical necessity in effect remains, even for God, but it is absolutely necessary ‘sub judiciae’ (in Leibniz’ terms, “hypothetically” necessary), from the perspective of its optimal goodness, the full evidence of which is clear only to a divine understanding. We use general concepts, or “incomplete notions” through expediency, because our powers of understanding are insufficient to pursue the analysis of a concept to the level of the individual, this nevertheless being the heuristic model for our understanding. Kant interprets the key aspects of Leibniz’s cosmology in his examination of the “transcendental ideal of pure reason.”24 If an idea is a presentation of a pure concept, an ideal is such a concept presented as an individual thing: “By the ideal I understand the idea, not merely in concreto, but in individuo, that is, as an individual thing, determinable or even determined by the idea alone.”25 Kant describes the process by which we arrive at such a notion in two stages, which recapitulate Leibniz’s principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. An undetermined concept is subject to the formal “principle of determinability”, according to which it can only contain one of two contradictory predicates. But a thing (i.e. an existent) is in addition subject to a principle of “complete determination”, according to which it possesses not only one of a pair of contradictory predicates, but one of each pair of all possible predicates of things. This principle is not a simply logical or formal one, but a transcendental or material one, as it considers the identity of a thing in relation to the “share which it possesses in this sum of all possibilities”26—the meaning of its actuality in relation to a range of 84

PART II CHAPTER 1 possibilities rather than its attributes in relation to their opposites. The notion of the “sum total of all possibilities” presupposes the notion of a “transcendental substrate that contains, as it were, the whole store of material from which all possible predicates of things must be taken.”27 Such a concept is the transcendental ideal of the ens realissimum: “the supreme and complete material condition of all that exists.”28 In the procedure by which reason determines the concept of a thing, this ideal forms the “major premise” of a disjunctive syllogism, whereby all possible things are considered with respect to the selection they represent (the “minor premise”) of this totality. Leibniz’s philosophy represents in some ways a middle term between a strictly logical dogmatism and Kant’s critical position. Leibniz’s philosophy anticipates Kant’s by referring the intelligibility of things to a judgement that exceeds logical analysis. The principle of sufficient reason posits a horizon of sense as a necessary requirement for the determination of concepts. It is only through conceiving phenomena within the framework of value and interest that Leibniz is able to integrate events into a conceptual framework and integrate concepts into the order of what happens. Despite the fact that the Leibnizian individual ‘unfolds’ in space and time in strict accordance with its concept, the deployment of this concept remains contingent upon an external decision, and its integrity is only intelligible in relation to this choice. It is such a fiat which not only gives existence to the thing-concept, but—which amounts to the same thing in this context—gives it sense, sense or inclination being what unleashes a decision by distinguishing one path among other possibilities. It has its analogy in Leibniz’s ‘positive’ theory of freedom: an act is incomprehensible in the context of a situation of complete neutrality or indifference—something must tip the balance for the action to arise at all. Concept and existence form the two inseparable but distinct aspects of sense, understood alternately as what grants actuality to a concept and intelligibility to an existence.29 The beginning of Kant’s critical philosophy is dated from his contestation of the Leibnizian tenet that space and time are reducible to conceptual determinations. While Leibniz distinguishes existential predicates (such as would relate to space and time) from logical predicates, and changes the nature of the concept so that it corresponds to an individual thing, it

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PART II CHAPTER 1 remains that spatio-temporal determinations are in principle contained within the concept, as orders of simultaneity and succession. For Leibniz, to conceive of space and time “in general”, separately from the particular distribution of spaces and times inscribed within the individual concept, is to fall into the error of “incomplete notions” and creates a margin of indifference intolerable for the principle of sufficient reason. Kant asserts the irreducibility of space and time to the concept or any substantial order, and redefines them as the formal condition of phenomena. In this way, Kant removes the ground of the internal or analytic unity of logical and existential predicates, and posits instead an external or synthetic unity of logical and existential predicates in the form of the synthesis of the concepts of the understanding with intuitions in space and time, effected in this case by the fiat issuing from the transcendental imperative of reason. A synthetic unity implies the loss of the individuality of the philosophical concept, as concept and intuition are no longer related to each other internally via a divine creative pact, but externally through the legislation of reason. The concept here remains the sign of a possibility, which receives (or not) external confirmation or enlargement in the actuality of intuition, but it becomes general in relation to the particulars of sensible experience, and general “by right” rather than simply in fact, although open to an indefinite process of specification in relation to experience. At the same time, the epistemological status of the ideal of a complete determination changes so that it forms an ideal backdrop to the process of specification: a guide for our scientific activity, but not the object of a scientific knowledge. The next chapter of this section will examine the details of the synthetic operations which negotiate this differential between concept and intuition, experience and idea.

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PART II CHAPTER 1 Endnotes for Part II Chapter 1 DR, F206/E159 (See endnote 39 to previous chapter on ‘objectités’). Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. 3 Commentary, p. 64 (original pagination p. 78). 4 Commentary, p. 189 (original pagination p. 243). 5 Commentary, p. 63 (original pagination p. 77). 6 Commentary, p. 65 (original pagination p. 79). 7 Commentary, p. 64 (original pagination p. 79), my emphasis. 8 Commentary, p. 190 (original pagination p. 243). 9 Émile Bréhier, “The notion of the problem in philosophy”, Appendix 2, pp. 1-7. 10 “The notion of the problem…”, p. 2. 11 Aristotle’s Topics, 530 B, cited in “The notion of the problem…”, p. 2. 12 “The notion of the problem…”, pp. 2-3. 13 “The notion of the problem…” p. 4. 14 “The notion of the problem…” p. 4. 15 “The notion of the problem…”, p. 6. 16 The remaining examples: Maine de Biran’s “primitive fact” and the value of science in positivism. 17 cf. Kant’s Prolegomena §33, p. 69. 18 CPR, B23. 19 Mathematical knowledge itself, as will emerge later, is not based on the analysis of its concepts but their construction in intuition. 20 CPR, A593/B621. 21 CPR, A60/B85. 22 CPR, Bxxxvi. 23 Theodicy, I. 24 CPR, A567-583/B595-611. 25 CPR, A568/B596. 26 CPR, A572/B600. 27 CPR, A575/B603. 28 CPR, A576/B604. 29 It is worth comparing the “sense” of sense here with the linguistic notion of “value”, being the sense a word acquires through having been chosen in preference to other equally possible words. 1 2

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THE PROBLEM AND THE PROBLEMATIC IN KANT

In geometry and philosophy, the problem is the sign of a task: on one side implying a decision and a field of deployment and on the other providing a leading thread, the following of which represents a progressive definition of the field and determination of the subject in question. Kant’s adaptation of the concept expresses these two directions, which are functions of each other: on the one hand connecting the concept to its development in intuition, and as a result, producing on the other hand the category of the Idea as the nonintuitable concept that forms the horizon of our actions. A ‘problematic’ operation features in four principal areas in Kant’s first critique: 1. The construction of the concept in a priori intuition and possible experience. 2. The application of the philosophical concept to empirical experience. 3. The problematic as a modality of judgements of experience. 4. The problematic as a modality of the Idea in the systematisation of knowledge. The first two cases engage the operations of schematism and synthesis, the processes by which concept and intuition are integrated with each other. The second two express the sense in which the problem forms a horizon for the activity of thought. The connection between these two aspects of the problematic is suggested by Kant in the last instance, where the regulative Idea is portrayed as an “analogon” of the sensible schema.

Schematism Kant’s claim for the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge is based in the first instance on the example of the mathematical and geometrical sciences. He challenges the notion that as models of necessary and universal knowledge,

PART II CHAPTER 2 mathematics and geometry rest on analytic principles. On the contrary, what distinguishes mathematical knowledge for Kant is that it proceeds via the construction of concepts in intuition, and that it thus rests on synthetic principles alone. By the “construction” of a concept, Kant means its exhibition in an a priori intuition, the a priori character of the intuition ensuring that it serves as a “universal representation” of the concept, even though it is a single intuition.1 Thus, when we construct the figure of a triangle, regardless of empirical details such as whether we do so only in imagination or on paper, or what size or type it is, this figure is, for all geometrical purposes, the concept of the triangle itself, and not simply an ‘example’ or ‘illustration’, while at the same time being irreducibly intuitive and hence synthetic. No amount of analysis of a “concept” of a triangle that has no intuitive component, such as “a three-sided enclosed figure”, will yield its specific properties, and such “concepts” are not in fact properly geometrical or mathematical at all, for Kant, but rather philosophical.2 In this sense, all geometrical truths are, for Kant, ‘problems’. The assumption that a necessary truth, such as a mathematical equation, is thereby analytic, is for Kant more or less a prejudice based on an abstraction of what should be the case from what actually is the case: the question is not what we ought to join in thought to the concept, but what we actually think in it, even if only obscurely; and it is then manifest that, while the predicate is indeed necessarily attached to the concept, it is so in virtue of an intuition which must be added to the concept, not as thought in the concept itself.3

Paradoxically, while it is the solid reputation of mathematics and geometry that leads philosophers to attempt to replicate its methods in their own field—a solidity assumed to be based on its analytic character—it is precisely this synthetic basis of mathematics that for Kant both accounts for its apodeictic nature and its difference from philosophical knowledge. It is because geometry proceeds via the construction of concepts—because, in this construction, the universality and necessity of its truths are attained—that it is valid in this discipline to speak of “definitions” of concepts, “demonstrations” of truth, and “axiomatic” propositions. These notions, however, as expressions of “exactness” in mathematics4, cannot be legitimately extended to philosophy. Kant distinguishes mathematics, as knowledge through the construction of concepts, from philosophy, as knowledge “according to concepts”, or “from concepts”. This is not to say that philosophical knowledge is analytic, as 89

PART II CHAPTER 2 opposed to the synthetic basis of mathematics, although philosophy does comprise an analytical part in the form of general logic. Philosophical knowledge is also synthetic, but its concepts yield knowledge through their application to empirical intuitions in possible experience rather than their construction in an a priori intuition. The material element of intuition, which is a matter of indifference in the exhibition of mathematical concepts, is essential in the case of philosophical knowledge. Kant distinguishes “mathematical” and “dynamical” principles of synthesis, according to whether the concept bears on a priori intuition alone, or, in addition to this, on an existence. It is because of this material element that any attempt to define a philosophical concept, except in its most general sense as the principle of the unity of sensibility, can only be provisional, as further experience may additionally determine the concept. If there is an analogy between the construction of a mathematical concept in a priori intuition and the application of a philosophical concept to experience, it is that both processes pass via a “schema” of the concept. The schematisation of mathematical and geometrical concepts is relatively straightforward, being simply the rule of their construction in intuition. Even in the case of notions which (unlike the triangle) cannot be easily presented in intuition, or at all, such as large or infinite numbers, I can still present to myself their schema, which is to say the method by which I would produce them (eg. n + 1). In this sense the schema is the key to the way in which the construction of concepts in mathematics differs in nature from their ‘illustration’, and how these a priori intuitions differ from simple ‘images’. The difference of the schema from an image is also emphasised by Kant in its role in applying of philosophical concepts, although its precise operation in these cases is not always clear. As a rule for the application of concepts, the section on schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason comes at the beginning of the Transcendental Doctrine of Judgement. What is required for the subsumption of an empirical intuition under a concept is something that is in one respect “homogenous” with the concept and in another respect “homogenous” with intuition. It is the transcendental determination of time, as both the condition of all syntheses in intuition, as well as a form of rule-governed universality, that provides the model for the schematisation of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the

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PART II CHAPTER 2 categories. Kant thus analyses each of the categories in so far as they can be expressed as temporal determinations. The category of quantity is schematised as a numerical magnitude or aggregate in the form of a time-series. Quality is schematised as an intensive magnitude or “coalition”, pertaining to degrees of sensation represented as a time-content. The categories of relation—substance, causality and community—are schematised in terms of a time-order. Modality, finally, which pertains to possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexistence and necessity and contingency, is schematised as a time-scope, according to whether the object is determined as existing at some time, at a determinate time, or at all times. The specific characters that differentiate the philosophical concept from the geometrical one are this necessity for a temporal schematisation, and the material element of experience.

Synthesis Kant’s theory of the schematism addresses the problem of rendering homogenous the heterogeneity of intuition and concept in all synthetic a priori judgements. In the judgements of mathematics and geometry, the necessity of the relationship between intuition and concepts is implicit in the construction of the object, which is at the same time the demonstration of the concept. In philosophical judgements, however, there is an element of the given which cannot be constructed, and its necessary relation to the concept thus stands in need of justification. This justification is the object of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, which seeks to establish the grounds of objective validity in the subjective conditions of thought, and specifically the a priori concept as the condition of the objective determination of experience. The basis of this possibility is the underlying unity of representations in knowledge: the unification of the sensible manifold under the general form of an object, and the unification of experience in a transcendental subject. All synthetic judgements involve a combinative schema, whether mathematical or dynamic, and imply the application of the category of unity, but these themselves presuppose a ground of unity in experience as their condition of possibility: Combination is representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise out of the combination. On the contrary, it is what, by adding itself to the

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PART II CHAPTER 2 representation of the manifold, first makes possible the concept of the combination.5

It is most importantly the “I think” which must be “added” to my representations in order that they can be thought as one experience. This principle—the transcendental unity of apperception—is the supreme principle with regard to the employment of the concepts of the understanding, just as the formal conditions of space and time are “the supreme principle of all intuition in its relation to sensibility.”6 In the version of the Deduction given in the first edition, Kant outlines three a priori syntheses of the understanding that grant unity to the manifold. These do not replace transcendental apperception as the supreme principle of possible experience, but they account for the temporal unity of the field of experience. The first is the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, which enables the sensible manifold to be apprehended as a single representation at any given moment. The second is the synthesis of reproduction in imagination, which ensures the unity of a series of representations in time: their continuity from one moment to another through the reproduction of the preceding moments. The synthesis of recognition in a concept, finally, is what allows us to consider that this series of representations are the manifestations of a single object: the pure form of an object—the object or concept=x—which is added to our representations. This recognition is inseparable from my consciousness of the unity of my act of synthesis, in other words the unitary nature of my consciousness, and hence reflects the principle of apperception as ultimate principle of objective unity.

Modality The other sense of the “problematic” in Kant, as a ‘mode’ rather than a process, refers back to the category of modality, which arose in the discussion of the temporal schematism. In traditional (Aristotelian) logic, modality refers to whether the relationship expressed in a judgement is held to be a matter of fact, of possibility (or impossibility) or necessity (or contingency). Kant retains this sense, with the critical qualification that these determinations express for him the relationship of a concept or relation to our understanding rather than

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PART II CHAPTER 2 something that holds between objects or concepts in themselves. Modality, as a kind of existential determination, is an extra-conceptual qualification: it does not ‘enlarge’ the content of the concept in any way, but nevertheless signifies its value in relation to thought. Thus, possibility expresses the minimal accordance between a thing and the formal conditions of concepts and intuitions, actuality an accordance between the concept of a thing and a given particular in experience, and necessity the conformity of a relation to the universal laws that constitute experience (it is thus not things that are posited as necessary, but states).7 From these follow the distinctions between the modal categories of judgements. “Problematic” judgements are those whose “affirmation or negation are admitted as only possible (optional).”8 They classically concern “disjunctive” propositions—propositions containing a choice of alternatives that cannot be decided by an appeal to experience, eg. “The world is either the effect of chance, or of an external cause, or of an internal necessity.” “Categorical” judgements are those where the proposition is affirmed as true or pertaining to reality, and “apodeictic” judgements those where a logical necessity is affirmed in the relationship between judgements. Kant considers these modal categories as “so many moments of thought”9, if thought can be understood as passing from a problematic “moment”, where the mere possibility of something is posited, then it is affirmed as real, and finally there is the recognition of its necessary relationship with the laws of our understanding. These stages in philosophical understanding parallel the distinguished “moments” of mathematical knowledge, marked by the definition, the demonstration and the axiom.

Ideality The determination of modality is a key critical function as it is this value which distinguishes what can be thought from what can be known. Kant’s use of the term “problematic” mostly arises in relation to the status of notions which by their nature are beyond any possible experience and are thus thoughts, but not objects of knowledge: the ‘thing-in-itself’, noumena and the Ideas of reason

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PART II CHAPTER 2 (God, the world, and the soul). The separation of the content of a concept from the question of its existence forms the basis of Kant’s rejection of such metaphysical concepts as foundational in philosophy. In this context, “problematic” does not indicate a provisional stage that is overcome as knowledge progresses, but an absolute division between objects of possible experience, even if not yet encountered or developed in relation to this field, and objects which may or must be thought as subtending this field of experience, but which cannot be the object of knowledge. They form a background or a horizon for an enquiry rather than its object, and their epistemological status is definitively in suspense. The unity of the world, for example, while not able to be illustrated in experience, is nevertheless a regulative assumption for the science of nature, just as a God must be postulated as an Idea for the functioning of morality. The function of the Idea in this context is not dissimilar to the role of the hypothesis of the ens realissimum as a background to the determination of concepts. An Idea of reason is by its nature not susceptible to any direct application to experience. It does however bear on experience indirectly through the concepts of the understanding in a mode analogous to the application of concepts to experience: Reason is never in immediate relation to an object, but only to the understanding; and it is only through the understanding that it has its own [specific] empirical employment… Just as the understanding unifies the manifold in the object by means of concepts, so reason unifies the manifold of concepts by means of ideas, positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the understanding, which otherwise are concerned solely with distributive unity.10

This systematisation of the concepts of the understanding is expressed in three principles or rules. The first is the principle of “homogeneity” or genera, by which we seek to understand particular phenomena in nature as divisions of a more general concept. Its corollary is the principle of “variety” or specification, by which we seek to make distinctions within a general concept in the interest of the “completeness” or “extent” of a system. The third is the thread between the two: the principle of “affinity” or “continuity”, which seeks to eliminate ‘leaps’ in the progression from species to species by presupposing a gradual evolution of forms. Unity, diversity, and continuity, and the principles on which they rest, are not for Kant derived from the observation of nature: they simply express the different directions of the interest of reason, one of whose

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PART II CHAPTER 2 tendencies may be more or less emphasised in a given individual or ‘type’. Thus Kant distinguishes the more ‘empirical’ type as most interested in differentiation from the more ‘speculative’ type who seeks always to unify11: Thus one thinker may be more particularly interested in manifoldness (in accordance with the principle of specification), another thinker in unity (in accordance with the principle of aggregation). Each believes that his judgement has been arrived at through insight into the object, whereas it really rests entirely on the greater or lesser attachment to one of the two principles.12

Kant compares the Idea of the unity of reason, in its undetermined status, to the undetermined status of the understanding in the absence of the schemata of sensibility. The principles or rules for the systematisation of the understanding outlined by Kant outlines thus represent “analogon” of the sensible schemata in the progressive determination of the system of the understanding. They do not, as in the case of the sensible schema, produce knowledge of an object, but simply “indicate the procedure whereby the empirical and determinate employment of the understanding can be brought into complete harmony with itself.”13 Kant later designates this “ideal” or “analogical” form of schematism, “symbolisation”, in order to clearly distinguish it from its conceptual application. The case where an action must be brought into conformity with a rule recurs in the Critique of Practical Reason, except it is here the case of subsuming freedom to the law of pure practical reason in the moral interest.14 The closest analogy is the law of causality such as it is applied to sensible nature. Causality through freedom cannot be subsumed via a sensible schema in this way, however the process of deciding whether a possible action conforms with the moral law involves considering its viability ‘as if’ it were a natural law. We thus consider natural causality as a ‘type’ or a ‘symbol’ of the moral law, in order to apply the concept of freedom in particular cases. There are two essential differences between the schema and the symbol. Firstly, the former establishes conformity between a concept and an intuition, and the latter between an action and a rule or law. Secondly, the former is able to exhibit or determine a concept adequately and directly, and the latter can only exhibit the idea indirectly, or by analogy, and represents an essentially incomplete or provisional fulfilment of the Idea. Deleuze’s revision of Kant can be summarised as both a reversal of the relationship of dependence between the schematic activity of combination and

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PART II CHAPTER 2 the synthetic unity of the understanding that is posited by Kant, and a reorientation of the activity of the schematism such that it directly engages Ideas. Deleuze contends that it is a schematic process of construction, as a function of Idea-problems, which is presupposed by the synthesis of recognition in a concept. This process is thus in one respect modelled on the construction of geometrical concepts, but it is also presented as a “dynamic” rather than a “mathematical” process—the determination of the Idea takes place through “spatio-temporal dynamisms.” Deleuze’s development of the problem-Idea extends his critique of what remains of the dogmatic image of thought in Kant’s philosophy: the foundation of thought in the relationship between an identical subject and object based on the model of recognition. In his lectures on Kant in the 70s, Deleuze defines the schema as following a ‘rule of production’ as distinct from the ‘rule of recognition’ that governs the synthesis.15 His conception of the schema also continues his preoccupation with the ‘territorial’ basis of thought, as through the schema we understand the concept as demarcating a ‘bloc’ of space-time: if the synthesis operates on the manifold here and now, if the unities of synthesis or categories are continuous universals or categories which condition all possible experience, the schemata are a priori determinations of space and of time, which transport in all places and in all time, but in a discontinuous manner, real complexes of places and moments. The Kantian schema would take flight, and overcome itself towards a conception of the differential Idea, if it were not unduly subordinated to the categories which reduce it to a state of simple mediation in the world of representation.16

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PART II CHAPTER 2 Endnotes for Part II Chapter 2 CPR, A713/B741. Cf. CPR, A716/B744, A718-9/B746-7. 3 CPR, B16. 4 CPR, A726/B754. 5 CPR, B130-131. 6 CPR, B136. 7 CPR, A227/B279-280. 8 CPR, A74-75/B100. 9 CPR, A76/B101. 10 CPR, A643-644/B671-672. 11 CPR, A655/B683. 12 CPR, A666-667/B694-695. 13 CPR, A665/B693. 14 Critique of Practical Reason, “Of the Typic of Pure Practical Judgement.” 15 Fourth lesson on Kant, 4/4/78, para. 5. 16 DR, F365/E285, translation modified. 1 2

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This approach to the problem overwhelms my own habits of thinking. —N. Mouloud, in response to Deleuze’s presentation on “La Méthode de dramatisation.”1

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze extends the Kantian notion of the problematic status of the Idea to the claim that Ideas are in fact problems, and that “problematic” is the proper significance of “regulative”.2 Deleuze’s understanding of the Idea is, in one sense, very close to Kant’s. The Idea forms a “unitary and systematic field” which gives maximum “comprehension and extension” to the concepts of the understanding and a ground of continuity for the discontinuous efforts of the understanding.3 It is also as such, however, that the Idea is understood to be problematic. Concepts and propositions acquire their sense and their scope once they are understood as solutions to a problem, which provides them with their ideal unity and universality: The understanding by itself would remain stuck in fragmentary operations, a prisoner of partial empirical investigations or enquiries with regard to this or that object, never raising itself to the conception of a “problem” capable of providing a systematic unity for all its operations. Alone, the understanding would obtain results or responses, here and there, but these would never constitute a ‘solution’. For any solution presupposes a problem, which is to say the constitution of a unitary and systematic field orienting and subsuming enquiries and investigations in such a way that responses in turn precisely form cases of solution.4

Deleuze’s conception of the problem involves both Kant’s conception of the special nature of mathematical and geometrical knowledge, and Proclus’ remarks on the problem: a kind of “constructivism” of the Idea, or its “dramatisation.” The analogy between the Idea-problem and the mathematical concept allows Deleuze to develop his own distinction between concepts and Ideas, and to integrate the mechanism of the schema with the “analogical” schema of the Idea. At the same time, Deleuze incorporates a material and temporal element into this process, which both founds and disrupts the synthesis of thought.

PART II CHAPTER 3

Ideal determination The alliance of the problem with the Idea marks its difference in nature from a conceptual possibility on an epistemological level. As ideal, it serves as an element of action rather than an object of knowledge: Questions and problems are not speculative acts, and as such completely provisional and indicative of the momentary ignorance of an empirical subject. They are living acts… destined to survive a provisional and partial state which on the contrary affects answers and solutions.5

By aligning the problem with the Idea, Deleuze is keen to emphasise its difference from the theoretical sense of the “problematic” as a modality of the concept, where this refers to the hypothetical status of a judgement: a simple possibility. In this context, ‘problems’ differ only formally from the concepts or propositions on which they are based, and are effaced in the light of additional knowledge that either excludes or confirms the possibilities they present. It is this model that is at the heart of various illusions concerning the role of the problem in thought for Deleuze, whereby it marks only a provisional stage or signals an obstacle for or inadequacy in the subject. It is understanding the progress of thought in general as a passage from the “hypothetical” to the “apodeictic” that Deleuze considers to be misleading, a tendency which he traces through Plato, Descartes and evidently Kant himself: There is at least something in common: namely, the point of departure found in a ‘hypothesis’ or proposition of consciousness affected by a coefficient of uncertainty (as with Cartesian doubt), and the point of arrival found in an eminently moral apodicticity or imperative (Plato’s One-Good, the non-deceiving God of the Cartesian cogito, Leibniz’s principle of the best of all possible worlds, Kant’s categorical imperative, 6 Fichte’s Self, Hegel’s ‘Science’).

The ideal status of the problem in Deleuze, as on the one hand demarcating a field of action, is matched on the other hand by its relationship to a constructive operation, which renders it analogous to the mathematical function of the Kantian schema. The peculiarity of geometrical/mathematical knowledge was that the conceptualisation of its objects was also their construction in intuition. This already gives a unique understanding of a concept as a mode of, or rule for, occupying space, rather than a logical identity, which clearly influences Deleuze. In his “Method of Dramatisation”, for

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PART II CHAPTER 3 example, Deleuze presents the distinguishing character of a thing in terms of its “remarkable points and regions”, the way in which it “determines and differenciates a whole exterior space, as in the hunting ground of an animal”, rather than in terms of its conceptual definition.7 A consequence of the concept being identical to its construction is that the relationship of concept to intuition in geometrical knowledge is not an external one between a general concept and a particular instance but an internal relationship, whereby the singular instance embraces the universal scope of the concept. As Kant writes: The latter [intuition] must… be a single object, and yet none the less, as the construction of a concept (a universal representation), it must in its representation express universal validity for all possible intuitions which fall under the same concept.8

Deleuze similarly considers the relationship between the problem-Idea and its solution as an internal one between the universal and the singular, which he opposes to the extrinsic relationship between the general concept and particular instance. The ‘schematism’ of the Idea consists in staking out coordinates at the intersection of the ideal relationships of the problem and the field of its resolution: the problem or the Idea is a concrete singularity no less than a true universal. Corresponding to the relations which constitute the universality of the problem is the distribution of remarkable and singular points which constitute the determination of the conditions of the problem.9

While the model of problem-resolution allows Deleuze to develop a notion of thought distinct from the theoretical model based on the concept of identity, it also diverges from the simple construction of a concept in pure intuition that underlies Kant’s understanding of geometrical knowledge. The essential difference between the mathematical and philosophical methods for Kant was that the latter involved a material element that could not be determined a priori. It was also this factor that precluded the a priori definition of a concept and means that philosophical knowledge is necessarily bound up with the categorical determinations of possible experience, including those bearing on modality. Mathematical and geometrical knowledge are essentially sciences of space, being quantitative, while the schematic framework of philosophical knowledge is above all occupied with temporal determinations. Deleuze incorporates this necessary connection with an external element into his constructivist model of the problem, and in doing so refers back to the

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PART II CHAPTER 3 ancient distinction between the theorem and the problem in geometry, which is effectively collapsed by Kant. The integrity of geometrical propositions relied on their referring to the conditions of pure intuition alone rather than empirical factors. Deleuze maintains this priority of the pure over the empirical in his model, while at the same time introducing a relationship to the outside, by proposing that the core of the problem is the determination of an event that is ideal rather than real or empirical in nature: Proclus, even while maintaining the primacy of theorems over problems, rigorously defined the latter as concerning an order of events and affections… These events, however, are ideal, of another nature and more profound than the real events which they determine in the order of solutions.10

The specificity of the problem in this context is that its construction takes place in conjunction with a contingent element that is not determined by the concept: the theorem develops internal relationships from principle to consequences, while the problem introduces an event from the outside— ablation, adjunction, section—which constitutes its own conditions and determines the ‘case’, or cases.11

Deleuze describes the Idea-problem as a complex entity—an objectité— which is “dramatised” through the “spatio-temporal dynamisms” that are the agents of the Idea’s actualisation. Deleuze opposes these characters of the Idea to the unitary nature of the concept, whose ‘multiplicity’ only comes extrinsically from the number of empirical examples that represent it. The Idea implies a multiplicity in an internal, and double, sense, following the two spellings—differentiation

and

differenciation—used

by

Deleuze.

The

differentiation of the idea refers to the virtual distribution of singularities and relations it presents in its “objective”, but “undetermined” state.12 These coordinates represent one ‘side’ of the problem, whose other side is provided in its differenciation: its dramatisation/resolution in an actual state of affairs. The horizon of the Idea integrates and gives an ideal scope to what would otherwise be simply empirical coordinates: precisely as a case of resolution of a problem. On the other side, while a case of resolution expresses the essence or universality of the Idea, it does so not essentially, but only as a matter of fact. It does not exhaust the Idea or thus exclude other possible resolutions: “[here] it is the inessential which comprehends the essential, and which comprehends it only in the case”.13

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PART II CHAPTER 3 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze presents the Idea as both integrating and articulating the three moments of Kant’s regulative model of ideal determination, as outlined in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. This process, which Deleuze calls “conjugation”, combines the constructive model of the schema and the process of ideal determination. It both recapitulates the regulative role of the Idea in Kant’s critique and serves as a substitute for the “moments” of theoretical understanding as a passage from the hypothetical to the apodeictic. These stages are the indeterminacy of the Idea as an object, its “analogical” or “reciprocal” determinability in relation to the objects of possible experience, and the ideal that it represents of a complete determination. Deleuze interprets these moments of the Idea as constituting the process of learning, which he opposes to knowledge as the goal of thought. “Learning” is distinguished from knowledge, or its pursuit, in the same way that the problem is distinguished from a possibility or hypothesis. In the first instance, the Idea is in itself indeterminate, as it cannot be given or known, but nevertheless represents for Deleuze an entirely positive and objective structure, in so far as it serves as a problematic horizon for the systemisation of the objects of experience. It presents itself as a “sign” or “problematic object”, which is the object of an encounter. In the second place, there is the determination of the conditions of resolvability of a problem—“we must discover the adjunctions which complete the initial body of the problem, as such, whether varieties of multiplicity in all dimensions, fragments of an ideal future or past event which renders the problem solvable.”14 Finally, a solution to the problem is determined as the ‘fusion’ or ‘condensation’ between the problem and the case provided for its resolution. Deleuze uses as an illustration of this process an example inspired by Leibniz: To learn is to enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities. The Idea of the sea, for example, as Leibniz showed, is a system of liaisons or differential relations between particles [particules], and of singularities corresponding to the degrees of variation among these relations—the whole of the system being incarnated in the real movement of the waves. To learn to swim is to conjugate the remarkable points of our body with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field. This conjugation determines for us a threshold of consciousness on which level our real actions adjust to our perceptions of the real relations of the object, thus providing a 15 solution of the problem.

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PART II CHAPTER 3 Deleuze’s thought here strikingly resembles the meditations of John Dewey on the nature and “stages” of the problem developed in his Logic: the theory of inquiry. Dewey argues for the grounding of logical categories in methodological practices. We cannot separate knowledge from the purposes for which it is sought, nor the actual processes by which it is sought, which engage, beyond “reason”, the bodily apparatus and circumstance of the thinker. The starting point of an inquiry is an “indeterminate” situation, or rather a particular kind of indeterminacy that qualifies the situation as “questionable”— a completely chaotic situation would be one that would allow no hold for even the possibility of an inquiry. Indeterminacy is, for Dewey, an irreducibly temporal concept: what is indeterminate, in one way or another, is the outcome of the situation. While Dewey emphasises that indeterminacy is an attribute of the situation, it thus also necessarily refers to the interests of the subject within it. The subject of the situation is initially only engaged “existentially”, at a precognitive level, which for Dewey is a necessary pre-condition of inquiry. At the point where the situation is seen as calling for an inquiry it moves from being questionable to being problematic ‘proper’, which marks the introduction of an intellectual level of engagement. The next step is to determine the problem, which firstly consists in locating the determinable “constituents” of a situation that provide the terms of the problem. A situation may be globally indeterminate, which is what first invites inquiry, but if it is capable of inquiry—if it is not absolutely chaotic—it should at least have some determinable coordinates. The example that Dewey gives is being in a crowded hall where there is a fire: When an alarm of fire is sounded in a crowded assembly hall, there is much that is indeterminate as regards the activities that may produce a favorable issue. One may get out safely or one may be trampled and burned. The fire is characterized, however, by some settled traits. It is, for example, located somewhere. Then the aisles and exits are at fixed places. Since they are settled and determined in existence, the first step in institution of a problem is to settle them in observation.16

The determination of the problem then proceeds through a temporal dialectic between the identification of constituents and possible solutions which Dewey calls “ideas.” “Facts” and “ideas” are necessarily operational terms for Dewey—a constituent of a situation is sought and located only with a view to a possible solution, and a possible solution can suggest the location of further constituents, which in turn can affect the nature of the idea. The process 103

PART II CHAPTER 3 described by Dewey here recalls Deleuze’s description of the problem-Idea as a formula that traces a ‘curve’ through singularities.17 Dewey uses the term “singulars” for these constituents of a situation, which can only be defined differentially with respect to each other and to the global problem: Singulars are named by demonstratives, such as this, that, here, now, or in some cases by proper nouns… Singular objects exist and singular events occur within a field or situation. This or that star, man, rock or whatever, is always a discrimination or selection made for a purpose, or for the sake of some objective consequence within an inclusive field. The singular has no import save as a term of differentiation and contrast. If its object is taken to be complete in itself, loss of differential force destroys all power of reference on the part of the demonstrative act. The very existence of differentiation, however, shows that the singular exists within an extensive field… It represents, at a given stage of inquiry, that which is crucial, critical, differentiatingly significant.18

Similarly, an “idea” has no sense if it is understood as simply a mental impression rather than a functional element referring to the solution of a problem. In a move again recalling Deleuze, Dewey suggests that this dialectic between ideas and singularities in the “problematic situation” represents the true unity or synthesis between concept and intuition overlooked in Kant’s division.

Subjective determination The dramatisation of an Idea constitutes the transcendental subject of thought and action. In the ‘swimming’ example, Deleuze speaks of the process of problem-resolution as “determining a threshold of consciousness”, and elsewhere refers to the problem as an “unconscious” structure.19 These remarks need to be understood in relation to Kant’s contention in the Transcendental Deduction that it is the unitary consciousness of the thinker and the apprehension of this unity that underwrites the possibility of all knowledge. In Kant’s Deduction, consciousness is on the one hand identified analytically with the possibility of representing the ‘I think’: It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.20

On the other hand, “That representation which can be given prior to all thought is entitled intuition”21, and the analytic identity of the ‘I think’ is both 104

PART II CHAPTER 3 distinct but not conceivable apart from the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition: through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given; only in intuition, which is distinct from the ‘I’, can a manifold be given; and only through the combination in one consciousness can it be thought.22

If intuition can be given “prior to all thought”, this is because it is essentially passive: simply the form of receptivity of the given, while combination and synthesis testify to the “spontaneity” of the understanding. Deleuze also associates consciousness or selfhood with the process of synthesis or the ‘binding’ of a manifold, and unconsciousness, conversely, with a state of dispersion.23 The relationship of the ‘I think’ to the synthesis, however, is more ‘problematic’ for Deleuze, figuratively and literally: its mode of ‘accompaniment’ is presented more as the effect of a synthetic operation than a representation of its source. The notion of synthesis, in addition, has also changed, so that it follows a schematic structure of problem-resolution. Just as the ‘objective’ pole of this process is an Idea that differs in nature from the concept, its ‘subjective’ pole also differs in nature from the relation between the faculties posited in Kant’s Deduction. When seeking to encapsulate the contribution of Kant to modern philosophy, Deleuze frequently returns to the significance of the new status of space and time as the “forms of determinability” of the concept. Its challenge to the concept of identity as a foundation for philosophy is particularly apparent for Deleuze in what he calls the Kantian “cogito”, in its difference from its Cartesian counterpart. In Descartes’ meditation, the connection between thought and existence, which we know through the formula ‘I think, therefore I am’, immediately gives rise to the question: ‘what am I?’, and concludes: “I am a thing which thinks.”24 Deleuze analyses Descartes’ thesis into the components of an act of determination: an indeterminate term of being—‘I am’—is determined as thinking—‘I think’— with the resulting determination—‘I am a thing which thinks’: Everything happens as if Descartes’ cogito operated with two logical values: determination and undetermined existence. The determination (I think) implies an indeterminate existence (I am, because ‘in order to think one must exist’)—and determines it precisely as the existence of a thinking being: I think therefore I am, I am a thing which thinks.25

From a Kantian perspective, the problem arises not in the logical implication of being and thought as expressed in the cogito ergo sum, but at the point of its ontological extension or application: the assertion of a thinking thing. In the

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PART II CHAPTER 3 Paralogisms of Pure Reason, Kant examines the qualities that Descartes attaches to the ‘I think’ which lead him to assert its existence as a separate substance—the res cogitans. My activity, unity, identity and distinction from all external objects are all necessarily implied in the statement, “I think”, but as such they do not express any insight into or knowledge of myself as an object, but only represent a logical analysis of the concept of myself as the subject of thought. Kant introduces a third term between the determination and the thing to be determined, namely the ‘how’ of this determination, or the form of the object’s ‘determinability’: “The ‘I think’ expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already given thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence… is not thereby given.”26 The mode in which I determine my existence is the same as that which governs all intuitions in Kant’s system, namely the a priori forms of space and time, time being the especially pertinent form here as the condition of “inner” sense. Thus I determine myself not as a thing, but as an intuition in space and time. This intuition is necessarily accompanied by the thought of myself as the spontaneous principle of its unity, but there can be no intuition and hence no knowledge of myself as a determining subject, because I can only be given to myself as appearance.27 A split thus appears between the representation of myself, as an active subject in the ‘I think’, and the form under which ‘I am’ as appearance, which both nevertheless refer to one another and are inseparable. This constitutes the “paradox of inner sense”: time is both the mode under which I determine my existence and reason why which I am only an appearance to myself. For Deleuze, “The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the indeterminate.”28 This “third logical value”—the form under which the indeterminate is determinable—represents the constitution of transcendental logic and the discovery of transcendental difference, “no longer as empirical difference between two determinations, but transcendental Difference between the Determination as such [LA détermination] and what it determines”.29 This difference is not one that separates or mediates, but rather represents the interiorisation of thought and being as difference rather than identity. Kant effectively reverses the rationalist order of determination such that it is not an

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PART II CHAPTER 3 order of reasons that determines an order in space and time, but space and time that are the non-conceptual conditions of the determination of reason. Space and time not only wrest the privilege of foundation from the concept of identity, but ground it in an exteriority foreign to the concept. This revolution in thought on the level of conceptual determination is reproduced in the stages of ideal determination, which merge in Deleuze’s rewriting of the functionings of the transcendental apparatus. Deleuze connects the three ‘moments’ of the Kantian cogito—“the I am as indeterminate existence, time as the form under which this existence is determinable, and the I think as determination”30—with the three ‘moments’ of the Idea: “indeterminate in its object, determinable in relation to the objects of experience, bearing the ideal of an infinite determination in relation to the concepts of the understanding.”31 This ‘split’ or ‘fracture’ [fêlure] between the Idea and its complete realisation, due to its necessary relationship with the forms of space and time, is conceived by Deleuze as a positive ‘articulation’ of thought: it serves to ‘pace’ the Idea, and provides material which feeds and is fed by the Idea in the dialectic of resolution: it must be said that Ideas swarm in the fracture, constantly emerging on its edges, ceaselessly coming out and going back, being composed in a thousand different manners. It is not, therefore, a question of filling that which cannot be filled. Nevertheless, just as difference immediately reunites and articulates that which it distinguishes, and the fracture retains what it fractures, so Ideas also contain their dismembered moments. It belongs to the Idea to interiorise the fracture and its ant-like inhabitants. There is neither identification nor confusion in the Idea, but rather an internal problematic objective unity, of the indeterminate, the determinable, and determination.32

The “mistake” of dogmatism, Deleuze writes, “is always to fill that which separates”33: this is the dream of a rational determination that would elide or reduce to the concept the spatiotemporal element in thought. The error of empiricism, on the other hand, is “to leave external what is separated”34, thus the extrinsic relationship between concept and intuition. Kant, he suggests, is still too “empirical”, in this sense, insofar as the Idea for him is still only determinable in relation to the objects of experience and the concepts of the understanding, rather than these moments being conceived as internal to the Idea. As an independent system, such as Deleuze conceives it, the Idea emerges as the central generator of thought rather than simply its horizon, and

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PART II CHAPTER 3 integrates as its own moments the difference in nature between the ideal and the sensible.35

Temporal determination The three ‘parts’ of the problematic structure—the event or problematic instance, the search for an ‘adjoining’ body or the determination of conditions, and the ‘condensation’ of singularities or the determination of a solution—have a particular connection for Deleuze with the formation of sensibility, memory/imagination, and thought respectively. The ‘nature’ of these faculties and the relationship between them is in the first place for Deleuze only developed in situ, under the auspices of a problem. At the same time, each of the faculties on Deleuze’s account result from syntheses that manifest the problematic structure in a mode specific to them. Deleuze contrasts the engagement of the faculties, in his understanding of the operation of thought or learning, to the coordination of the faculties in the act of recognition, by which the different contributions of each faculty are brought to bear on an object thereby identified as the ‘same’ for an identical subject. The encounter with a problematic instance is first experienced on the level of intuition and in fact engenders this faculty in its “transcendental exercise.” Its imperative is transmitted to the other faculties (memory, reason) in turn, in a transmission or “relay” which proceeds via the differentiation of the faculties rather than a form of identity that mediates the relationship of the faculties to an object and to each other. Deleuze describes three principal syntheses: the two “passive” syntheses that constitute sensibility and memory/imagination, and an “active” synthesis of thought. The division clearly recapitulates Kant’s account of the relationship between the faculties in the Transcendental Deduction. As outlined in the last section, he distinguishes here the syntheses of apperception in intuition, reproduction in imagination and recognition in a concept, as the conditions of all possible experience. At the same time, this parallel implies a criticism, as the operation of these three syntheses rewrites and undermines the logic of Kant’s account. Deleuze assigns the synthesis of representation ‘proper’ to a minor role, as a derivative ‘fourth’ synthesis. In addition, just as each faculty on 108

PART II CHAPTER 3 Deleuze’s account has both an affinity with one ‘stage’ of the problem and manifests an internal problematic structure, the correspondence with Kant’s three syntheses is found within the dimensions of the one faculty as much as across the three faculties outlined by Deleuze. In Deleuze’s revision, the syntheses are ‘schematic’ structures that generate a complex of space-time proper to them. Each synthesis marks the genesis of a faculty, represents a particular temporality, and expresses a mode of learning. The problem which motivates Kant’s account of the “threefold synthesis” of intuition, imagination and the understanding in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is the idea that “if every representation were completely foreign to every other, standing apart in isolation, no such thing as knowledge would ever arise.”36 The syntheses outlined by Kant represent three interconnected levels of the ‘binding’ of representations which form the conditions of possible experience that make knowledge possible. The first, of apprehension, is the modification of the mind in intuition such that the manifold is apprehended in a single representation. The second, of reproduction, bears on the necessary reproducibility of appearances in order for associations between representations to be established. The empirical law that “bring[s] about a transition of the mind” from one representation to the other, is based on the conformity of representations themselves to such a law: their reproducibility in the transcendental exercise of the imagination. The final synthesis, of recognition, is based on the necessary reference of experience to the transcendental unity of consciousness and the transcendental concept=x. Deleuze’s account of the syntheses has the same point of departure as Kant’s: the independence of presentations from each other ‘in themselves’—“the state of matter as mens momentanea”37—and the necessity for their synthesis in thought. His first synthesis, of sensibility, draws on the theories of Hume and Bergson regarding the retention and contraction of repeated instances in the mind, which produce a qualitative impression of a certain weight and a corresponding structure of anticipation: “When A appears, we expect B with a force corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs.”38 Deleuze thus calls this first synthesis the “empirical” synthesis of ‘habit’ or Habitus: it moves from an order of particularity in the repetition of cases to a general notion “extracted” from the cases, embodied in the attitude of

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PART II CHAPTER 3 expectation. This synthesis corresponds to the constitution of the “living present”: a contraction marks the scope of the present understood as a variable duration. An immediate past and future appear as dimensions of this present, in the form of the retention of elements and the expectation of continuity. A form of subjectivity—a passive self of contemplation—is coextensive with this contraction. In this passive synthesis we can see traces of all three of Kant’s syntheses of apprehension, reproduction and recognition in ‘larval’ form (impression, retention, generality). Deleuze presents this pre-reflexive synthesis as the ground of an active synthesis of representation, wherein memory transforms the immediate past of retention into “the reflexive past of representation,

of

reflected

and

reproduced

particularity”,

and

the

understanding transforms the immediate future of anticipation into the “reflexive future of prediction, the reflected generality of the understanding”39. It comprises the element of self-awareness which is essential to Kant’s experience, “not only to represent something, but to represent one’s own representativity.”40 This synthesis is not, however, Deleuze’s own active synthesis of thought, but simply the reflexive form of a structure of habit— what he calls a “derived” active synthesis.41 This was in effect Deleuze’s criticism of recognition as the model for the commonsense model of thought, and its survival in Kant: that it was simply a reproduction of habitual experience on the level of the transcendental, without accounting for its true conditions of production. The reflexive present of representation is based on the empirical synthesis of habit, but both have their foundation in a second “passive” synthesis, this time transcendental, of memory, or the past.42 In order for the reflective synthesis to reproduce the immediate past of habit as a series of distinct cases, a general form of the past is presupposed as the context and condition of their reproduction: “The past is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon the latter.”43 It is this general or pure form of the past that allows the present moment to pass: “No present would ever pass if it were not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present.”44 The synthesis of the past forms a totality of which the present and future appear only as its dimensions:

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PART II CHAPTER 3 the present as the most contracted point of the totality of the past, and the future in the form of a destiny that echoes the past. Kant’s syntheses of apprehension, reproduction and recognition in a concept appear here as secondary to more fundamental syntheses which constitute ‘problematic’ fields: “if we reconsider the active syntheses themselves in the light of this basis which they presuppose, we see that they signify rather the constitution of problematic fields in relation to questions.”45 Deleuze refers in the context of the first synthesis to “the question-problem complex as this appears in the living present (the urgency of life).”46 The moments of the problem appear in the initial indeterminacy of dispersion, the constitution of a field of determinability in the scope of the contraction, and the production of a ‘solution’ in the constituted habit. Thus we can consider Deleuze’s example of learning to swim in this context as engendering a sensibility whose field would be the ‘living present’ and which would lend itself to becoming a habit. We can see within this process the structure of problem-resolution as Deleuze describes it, but also—in so far as the habit is not yet acquired—the shadow of the other syntheses: the work of memory, imagination and thought. In the second synthesis of memory, he refers to the “echoing” of presents on the different levels of the past as forming “a persistent question, which is developed in representation as the field of a problem, with the rigorous imperative to respond, to resolve.”47 Here it is the pure past which is in itself indeterminate, but which emerges, in a Proustian manner, as potentially determinable in relation to a present with which it resonates. “Learning”, here, is expressed in the modes of reminiscence and love (Mnemosyne and Eros): it is exemplified by the functions of Eros and reminiscence in Plato’s dialogues which Deleuze sees as “dramatisations” and catalysts for learning. The significance of this introduction of time into thought is lost, however, in so far as the past is reduced to a former present and the Idea to a concept or object of knowledge rather than the instigation of a personal quest—“a task to fulfil, an enigma to resolve.”48 Deleuze posits a third synthesis, of thought, which is active, and concerns the future, or the “pure and empty form” of time.49 This synthesis both englobes and undermines the first two: it represents the ‘ungrounding’ (éffondement) of the terrain of the present and the past. Deleuze introduces this

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PART II CHAPTER 3 synthesis with the comparison of the Cartesian and the Kantian cogitos, as outlined above, where the determination of the Idea implies the rift of time as form of determinability. Deleuze’s explication of the third synthesis of time returns him to the language of Kant’s schematism. In Deleuze’s case, the challenge is not the application of the concept or category, but the enactment of the Idea, or resolution of the problem. The crux of Deleuze’s account is the “image of the action”, which has a double sense here. A schema can itself be defined as an “image of the action” that guides the construction of a concept. Here, the need for a schematism issues from the imperative to act: the action itself must be schematised. The time of the third synthesis is a “time out of joint”, as it is no longer measured by what takes place in it but rather imposes itself as the law of the event that distinguishes only a “before” and “after”: [Time] ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time. Hölderlin said that it no longer ‘rhymed’, because it was distributed unequally on both sides of a ‘caesura’, as a result of which beginning and end no longer coincided… Having abjured its empirical content, having overturned its own foundation, time is not only defined by an empty and formal order, but also by a scope and a series.50

Deleuze presents the order of time as determined by the “caesura” or ‘cut’ that divides past and present into unequal parts. He then moves to the determination of temporal scope (in French: ensemble), in which the action is symbolised as adequate to the “whole of time”: the idea of temporal scope corresponds to this: that the given caesura must be determined in the image of an action, of a unique and formidable event, adequate to the whole of time. This image itself exists in a riven form, in two unequal portions; and yet in this way it gathers together the scope of time.51

The symbolisation of the action paves the way for the series of time, which determines the distribution of a transcendental past, present and future. Deleuze uses the stories of Hamlet and Oedipus as models of this structure. The past, or the “before”, is defined as the time “where the action in its image is posited as ‘too big for me.’”52 The present corresponds to the time of the caesura, in which the self is metamorphosed and becomes equal to the action through “the projection of an ideal self into the image of the action.”53 The defining moment is that of the future, in which the action reveals an independent coherence, which excludes the agent and disperses the self: “turning against the self which became equal to it, projecting him into a

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PART II CHAPTER 3 thousand pieces as if the gestator of the new world was carried away and dispersed by the force of what he gives birth to.”54 Deleuze uses the motif of death, or Thanatos, for this synthesis, for a variety of reasons. Following Blanchot (and the Stoics) Deleuze considers death to be the paradigm of an event in the sense that it is both what concerns me most intimately and what is most beyond ‘me’, and this character is replicated in the highest ‘thought’. In direct contrast to Kant’s model of recognition, the object of thought in Deleuze’s third synthesis, or “the work”, presents itself as what is most alien to me, in the sense that the work of art has a life independent of its creator. This is also the way that the first and second syntheses are both present in the third synthesis and undermined by it: in the third synthesis, however, the present is no more than an actor, an author, an agent destined to be effaced; while the past is only a condition operating by default. The synthesis of time here constitutes a future which affirms at once both the unconditioned character of the product in relation to the conditions of its production, and the independence of the work in relation to its author or actor.55

The main model of the third synthesis used here is the revolutionary action or event: it is the source of what is most dramatic and transformational over all the syntheses and all “learning”: all that relegates the present and past to merely dimensions of the future. While Deleuze refers to historical revolutions and theatrical action, it is not external or empirical criteria that determine the scale of an event: “Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence, just as under the natural light there are the little glimmers of the Idea.”56 It is also connected to Deleuze’s idea of the “dice-throw” as “divine game”, through which Deleuze expresses the imperative of the question, the affirmation of contingency and the nature of the problem-Idea as an object of faith rather than knowledge.57 In Deleuze’s third synthesis of time, which both grounds and ‘ungrounds’ thought, we can see elements of Kant’s aesthetic judgements—the sublime in particular—which form the topic of the next section. These are apparent firstly in its structure: the confrontation with an event that is “too big for me”, and which yet involves a metamorphosis in order to become “equal to the event”. In the second place, the role of the third synthesis corresponds to Deleuze’s understanding of the function of aesthetic judgements in Kant’s critique, not only as the ultimate ground of the possibility of all judgements,

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PART II CHAPTER 3 but also what “frees” thought from its pre-determined structures and attaches it to what is most contingent. In analysing Kant’s aesthetic and Deleuze’s understanding of its function, we return to the heart of the problematic model of thought: the encounter with a “problematic object” or “sign” which “awakens” thought. At the same time as following the thread of Deleuze’s philosophy to this most singular notion of foundation, we can consider its broader implications as reflecting an ‘image of nature’ or ‘being’. Kant’s third critique is especially engaged with the kinds of “nature” constituted by reason and the relationship between them—its legislative domains of operation as well as the possibility of forming more ‘minor’ territories. It is thus the possibility of assigning a foundational role to the aesthetic qua “mode of existence”, as well as category of judgement, which will form the topics of the last section.

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PART II CHAPTER 3 Endnotes for Part II Chapter 3 MD, p. 102. DR, F218/E168. 3 DR, F219-220/E168-169, F211/E162. 4 DR, F219/E168, translation modified. 5 DR, F141/E106, translation modified (reading “survivre à” as the transitive form of the verb “survive” rather than “to survive in”—English edition renders “destiné à survivre à l’état provisoire et partiel qui affecte au contraire les réponses et les solutions” as “destined to survive in the provisional and partial state characteristic of answers and solutions”.) 6 DR, F254/E197. 7 MD, .p. 92. It is also in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, present the concept as made of ‘distinctive points’ that mark out a territory or “neighbourhood”: “The concept of a bird is not its genre or species but in the composition of its postures, its colours and its songs…”, QP,? F25/E20. 8 CPR, A713/B741. 9 DR, F211/E163, translation modified. See also QP?, F27/E22, in which Deleuze and Guattari develop their theory of the creation—the construction—of concepts: “Constructivism unites the relative and the absolute.” 10 DR, F211-212/E163, translation modified. 11 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, F227/E174, translation modified. See also The Logic of Sense, F69/E54. 12 DR, F219-220/E169. 13 MD, p. 93. 14 DR, F246/E190, translation modified. 15 DR, F214/E165, translation modified. 16 Logic: the theory of inquiry, p. 109. 17 See, eg., Foucault, F85-86/E79. 18 Logic: the theory of inquiry, p. 123. 19 DR F249-250/E192-193. 20 CPR, B131-132. 21 CPR, B132. 22 CPR, B135. 23 See, for example, DR F128/E96. Deleuze understands the meaning of the “Id”—in French, le Ça—within the context of the expression “ça et là”—“here and there”. 24 Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation II, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I, p. 152 25 DR, F116/E85, translation modified. 26 CPR, B158, my emphasis. 27 CPR, B158. 28 DR, F116/E85, translation modified. 29 DR, F116/E86, translation modified. 30 DR, F220/E169. 31 DR. F220/E169, translation modified. 32 DR, F220/E169-170. 33 DR, F221/E170. 34 DR, F221/E170. 35 This theme is further pursued below with regard to Deleuze’s “third” synthesis of time (this chapter, p. 151), and with regard to Deleuze’s ‘cosmological’, or ‘anti-cosmological’ theory of ‘time out of joint’ in the next chapter, p. 167. 36 CPR, A97. 37 DR, F96/E70, translation modified. 38 DR, F97/E70. 39 DR, F98/E71. 40 DR, F109/E80. 41 DR, F108/E79. 42 DR, F110/E81. 43 DR, F109/E80. 44 DR, F111/E81. 45 DR, F107/E78. 46 DR, F107/E78. 47 DR, F115/E85. 1 2

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DR, F88/E63, translation modified. DR, F117/E87. 50 DR, F120/E89, translation modified, Deleuze’s emphasis. In order to clarify the Kantian reference, I have used the terms used in the standard English translation for Kant’s objects of temporal schemata. 51 DR, F120/E89, translation modified. 52 DR, F120/E89, translation modified. 53 DR, F121/E89, translation modified. 54 DR, F121/E89-90, translation modified. 55 DR, F125/E94. 56 DR, F212/E163. 57 DR, F363-4/E284. 48 49

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PART III:

EXTREMITIES: GROUND ZERO

CHAPTER 1:

THE CRITIQU E OF JU DG EMENT AND THE IMAGE OF NATURE (1)

Introduction to the problem The relationship between Deleuze and Kant’s philosophy culminates in the ideas and themes of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The third critique not only contains, from Deleuze’s perspective, the ultimate ground of the previous two critiques, and thus the critical project as a whole, but also addresses some of the limitations that in Deleuze’s view compromise the impact of Kant’s philosophy. The third critique directly confronts the problem of the ‘gap’ between the a priori conditions of possibility of knowledge and morality, and their relationship with actual experience as encountered a posteriori. It is thus of particular interest to Deleuze’s project of developing critique beyond thought’s “conditions of possibility” to its “conditions of actuality.” Part of this development consists in the elaboration of a thought that is independent from the concept of identity as condition of knowledge, as outlined in the last section, instead taking the Idea as a focal point for the construction of problems. The aesthetic experience, in which the activity of the imagination enters into a “free” relationship with the understanding, without the direction of a determinate concept, forms in many ways the model of this new image of thought. Deleuze frequently attributes aesthetic capabilities to the philosopher ‘type’, whether in terms of the creativity of the philosopher-artist or the philosopher as one endowed with a heightened “taste”—the fine judgement of the diagnostician.1 As in Kant’s critique, these capacities are allied with a vital attention to the contingent in experience, and a thought whose substance is its event rather than its object or subject. On a broader level, the Critique of Judgement is directly concerned with the question of the viability of the critical philosophy as a whole, in several senses: the coherence of its different parts, the ‘worldview’ it bequeaths us, and finally in the literal sense of the ‘feeling of life’ itself. For Deleuze, as for Kant,

PART III CHAPTER 1 the ‘nature’ of the Nature produced by a philosophy reflects its ethos—the “mode of existence” it implies, in Deleuze’s case, and the orientation of our moral destiny, for Kant. In both cases, it is the question of an accord between the subject of knowledge and morality and empirical nature which is the focus of the ethical problem. It is the notion of “formal purposiveness” in the third critique, as the transcendental principle of judgement, which forms the focus of this problem of reconciliation. In aesthetic judgements, this principle is expressed in the relationship of a presentation upon the subject, which engages or enlivens the faculties in an indeterminate fashion. In teleological judgements, purposiveness is invoked as a principle of reflection for the study of natural phenomena that manifest a principle of organisation. While aesthetic judgements represent the only pure manifestation of the transcendental principle of judgement, it is the teleological model of nature that seems to most directly speak to the problem of ‘mediating’ between the realm of nature and freedom. The image of an organised nature, an ordered whole whose parts also function as quasi-autonomous wholes in a hierarchy of ends or purposes, is a notion which uniquely synthesises scientific credibility and moral edification. It is indeed indispensable to the study of living things to introduce the notion of purpose and specification, and the ingenuity of living systems is considered by Kant to be the strongest of all arguments for the existence of a Supreme Being. In contrast, the integrity and intelligibility of aesthetic judgements suffers from being formulated in largely negative and paradoxical terms: by the absence of a determinate concept or Idea, the absence of any theoretical or moral interest or purpose, ‘purposiveness without a purpose’, ‘lawfulness without a law’, singular and yet universal. Kant himself indicates that the phenomenon of aesthetic judgements involves a certain “obscurity” that is “not altogether avoidable” due to its lack of a concept, a problem that does not affect “the second part of this work.”2 The question of the relationship between the two parts of the Critique of Judgement, and of both to the critical oeuvre as a whole, is a recurrent one when addressing this work. This question is of particular interest when it comes to the relationship between Deleuze and Kant, for several reasons. In the first place, as already mentioned, Deleuze presents aesthetic judgements as the cornerstone of the integrity of the transcendental apparatus and hence fundamental to the unity of the critical system. In addition to this, we find in 119

PART III CHAPTER 1 his work the basis for establishing a clear difference in nature between an aesthetic and a teleological ‘worldview’. While Deleuze makes claims to being a “vitalist” thinker, he emphasises the non-organic quality of his conception of life.3 The development of this distinction between the vitality of organic and non-organic life is most evident in his work with Guattari: one of their signature concepts is the “body-without-organs.”4 Its elements, however, are present throughout Deleuze’s work. It forms part of his philosophy of difference that attempts to construct a coherent account of the thinkability and communicability of singular or individual differences that exist outside of the concept, against the regime of specific and generic differences which rely on conceptual division. Above all it forms part of his denunciation of the notion of cosmos in philosophy: the hierarchical distribution of identity and difference within an organised whole. Deleuze affirms the ‘modernity’ of Kant in terms of his rupture with this notion, which is expressed both in Kant’s contestation of transcendent principles of foundation, and in the subordination of bodies to space and time as independent parameters. For Deleuze, Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgements represents the continuation and exacerbation of this rupture rather than a compensatory gesture. For both Kant and Deleuze then, the problems that govern the Critique of Judgement form a nexus of epistemological, methodological, cosmological and ethical concerns. Each part of the third critique resonates on several of these levels as well as reviving questions arising from the previous critiques. This chapter will thus address the philosophical implications of the different forms of ‘nature’ in Kant’s critique, and the relationship between them, and conversely the impact of the critical position on the image of the natural world. A starting point for this position is the revolution in thought that constituted modern science.

Critique and the scientific revolution The scientific revolution is customarily presented through the contrast between the ancient and modern understanding of movement, dated from the work of Galileo.5 The shift in thinking is inadequately represented as a shift in the seat of knowledge from an extra-worldly domain of eternal essences to the 120

PART III CHAPTER 1 intra-worldly machinations of nature: it is rather the redistribution of the meaningful coordinates of this knowledge. A summary description of the shift would be that the intelligibility of nature is no longer grasped through identifying the specific place of things within an overall order but through identifying the laws that regulate events. Galileo’s work was directed against the Aristotelian conception of movement which considers movement to be a departure from the natural resting state of a body, and hence in need of explanation. Movement is classified by Aristotle as either “natural” or “violent” according to whether it follows a path back to a body’s natural place or is diverted from this trajectory. By contrast, on Galileo’s model, which forms the initial outline of the laws of inertia, movement is understood as a state rather than a process and does not represent any intrinsic modification of a body nor require explanation in itself. Movement and rest are no longer pertinent or inherent ontological qualifications regarding the state of a body (along moreover with all other non-quantifiable attributes). What is pertinent is only the change (of speed or direction) in the movement of a body, whether moving or at rest, this change signaling the presence of a causal relation. The categories of “natural” and “unnatural” or “violent” cannot be applied to causal change, any more than they apply to movement or rest in this model. At first glance, the Aristotelian formulation of the principle of movement—“each body, if not impeded, moves to its own place”6—seems to express a similar idea to the Cartesian formulation of the principle of inertia— “that each thing as far as in it lies, continues always in the same state.”7 Aristotle’s formula, however, is the expression of his notion of movement as the actualisation of an inherent potential of a body, different according to its type, and defined by the place to which it naturally tends: the inherent nature of fire, for example, is to move upwards, of earth to move downwards, and up and down are absolute and independently existing coordinates of nature.8 The possibility of an external impediment—producing a “forced” movement—is secondary and uninformative in relation to the natural movement whose explanation is internal to and reflective of the nature of things and places. By contrast, the “change” referred to in Descartes’ formula is the only informative aspect of movement. Because change is defined as a change in either the direction or speed of a movement (or both), movement per se, apart from its change, is of necessity and by default both a state and constant, uniform and 121

PART III CHAPTER 1 rectilinear in nature, in which respects it is indistinguishable from an unmoving body. The change expresses an external relation of causality between two unspecified bodies, the paradigm of which, in Descartes’ model of mechanism, is “shock”. Part of the motivation and inspiration for the Critique of Pure Reason was this revolution in science, exemplified by the physics of Newton. The influence of the new experimental methodology and its conceptualisation of nature in terms of basic laws applied to matter can already be seen in the structure and operation of Kant’s transcendental apparatus of cognition, as well as in the nature thereby constituted. The autonomy of space and time with respect to a conceptual order, for example, correlates with their independence as variables in the physics of mechanism. In addition, the unity and nature of the world is only contingent upon its legislation through the understanding, rather than being presupposed as a given totality. Emile Bréhier describes the concordance between Kant’s philosophy and the physical principles of the new science in his History of Philosophy: We saw that Newton had freed physics from the notion of universe, by considering, instead of the total system of things, the elementary law connecting the different parts of matter; the position and motion of a particle at a given moment are determined, not by a detail in the general design, but by the relation, according to the law of attraction, between it and all other particles; thus the elementary law suffices for as much matter as one wishes to provide for it. We also saw that Kant had pushed to the limit the type of knowledge assumed by Newtonian physics: transcendental apperception introduces unity and connections in the manifold which is indefinitely supplied by sensibility.9

In Kant’s synthesis, as in the modern laws of movement, it is the points of conjunction that yield meaningful information, rather than the identification of an internal directing principle. The coherence of the nature of modern physics is of a different kind to its pre-modern conception: the lawfulness of bodies and their relationships is a matter of necessity rather than ordained in a normative manner. It is this contrast between the ancient and modern conceptions of movement that Deleuze takes up in the first of his two books on cinema. Deleuze’s analysis reflects the way he develops an aesthetic principle from elements of the new model of nature. There, Deleuze gives his own account of the difference, and how they find expression in philosophical concepts.10 In antiquity, movement is referred to a series of ideal moments or ‘poses’ which

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PART III CHAPTER 1 express an intelligible form or potential, the intermediary moments or departures from this ordered trajectory being without interest. This conception corresponds to the philosophical interest in the eternal as a formal ideal transcendent to its incarnation in matter. In modern science, on the other hand, the analysis of movement into equidistant points means that the basic element of movement is no longer a “privileged instant”, but any moment sampled from its trajectory (l’instant quelconque—‘any-instant-whatever’): “[movement] is no longer recomposed using formal transcendent elements (poses), but immanent material elements (sections).”11 In tracing the path of a body through equidistant points, we may distinguish between regular and singular points, according to whether they mark a continuation or a change in direction and/or speed. This dichotomy differs, however, from that of the ‘privileged’ and the ‘non-privileged’ moment, as it does not represent the expression of an internal principle, but an intersection with an external element regulated by an independent law. The philosophical interest of this conception for Deleuze is the role it accords to contingency. The neutrality of the mechanistic analysis of movement is at the same time what allows for the production of a remarkable event at any given moment: When one relates movement any-moment-whatevers [des moments quelconques], one must be capable of thinking the production of the new, that is, the remarkable and the singular, at any one of these moments: this 12 is a complete conversion of philosophy.

The critical attitude already presents us with a notion of being which is indeterminate outside of its determination within the framework of knowledge or practice. What Deleuze’s analysis of aesthetic experience will focus on is a dialectic between the determinate and indeterminate narrowed down to the impact of a singular event against a background of disinterestedness. The analogy between the modern conception of movement and Kant’s philosophical revolution in particular is also noted by Deleuze. Deleuze argues in the conclusion to Difference and Repetition that the history of the problem of foundation in philosophy relies on the notion of an ideal, substantial or conceptual ‘backbone’ to the universe, which guides and structures its development.13 In a first sense, the foundation is located in the Idea, understood as a principle of identity or essence, which serves as the authenticating or organising principle for a series of “claimants.” This is a model of the foundation as logos, inspired by ancient philosophy, which 123

PART III CHAPTER 1 inaugurates the world of representation, and which sorts ‘true’ from ‘false’ claimants according to the faithfulness of their reproduction of the principle of identity. In a second sense, the operation of foundation is not one of selection between claims, but rather itself makes a claim on an infinity of possible forms in a process of convergence or “mono-centring”, such that all differences can be traced back to a central principle. This model of the foundation as “sufficient reason”, exemplified by the systems of Leibniz and Hegel, seeks to render the regime of representation infinite, such that it incorporates the smallest and the greatest differences with respect to a central identity. What both discourses share on Deleuze’s account is an underlying cosmology in which everything has its moment, its place and time according to its distance or proximity to a central principle. The rhythm of space and time is dictated by an ideal order, as the expression, unfolding or externalisation of the concept. What is repressed, or excluded, in either case, is the indeterminate: the informal, divergent, or singular. It is in light of this model that Deleuze considers Kant’s introduction of space and time into thought as independent conditions to be revolutionary, not because it confines knowledge to the realm of ‘appearances’, but because the ‘liberation’ of space and in particular time disrupts the cosmological model that subtends the discourse of foundation. This is the “fracture” examined in the last section, which subordinates the subject and object of a determination in thought to its form of determinability in space and time. The formal conditions of space and time represent for Deleuze not a limitation of the possibilities of thought, but rather a new form of sufficient reason for the actualisation of thought in the concrete, and the direct engagement of thought with indeterminacy. Deleuze takes Shakespeare’s expression from Hamlet that “Time is out of joint”14, as a “poetic formula” for this aberration from a cosmic model in Kant, but it is also the reflection of a scientific revolution in which space and time are no longer conditioned by the movement which takes place within them, but instead form its condition. On a metaphysical level, the categories of substance and totality, for example, which defined the premodern universe, are now dependent on their determination as schemas of time: Time is no longer related to the movement it measures, but rather movement to the time that conditions it. Thus movement is no longer a

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PART III CHAPTER 1 determination of the object, but the description of a space, a space we must abstract from in order to discover time as the condition of action. Time thus becomes unilinear and rectilinear… insofar as it imposes the succession of its determinations on all possible movement… Kant’s historical situation allows him to grasp the full implication of this reversal: time is no longer the cosmic time of an original celestial movement, nor is it the rural time of derived meteorological movements. It has become the time of the city 15 and nothing else, the pure order of time.

Critique and teleology This physical field of bodies in causal interaction is the nature constituted through the categories in a priori synthetic judgements. It is not because Kant is overly attached to Newtonian mechanism that this is how nature is determined a priori, but rather the reverse: it is only as a mechanical nature that sensibility is able to be anticipated a priori, as the minimum condition of possible experience. There are features of nature indispensable to its study, however, which can only be appreciated a posteriori. The first is the apprehension of nature as a system: which is to say, comprising classes and subclasses of phenomena. A mechanical nature does not exclude the possibility of an “absurd” nature in which each body is the only example of its kind, but as a matter of fact nature appears to organise itself into different types of object.16 More specific to the question of nature as a teleological system is the structure and interaction of living beings. Living organisms pose a problem for a mechanical model because their actions are endowed with a sense that refers them to centres of activity and ends that evoke a different model of causality than a mechanical one. In living organisms, we seem to perceive a relationship between the whole and its parts such that each exists for the other as a function of an overall purpose. The limitations of the nature constituted through pure reason alone represent a scientific concern, but there are also clear moral interests in the representation of nature as a purposeful whole. Kant’s critique of practical reason constitutes the domain of morality through the concept of freedom, which represents the self-legislation of the supersensible self as cause expressed through the categorical imperative. The suprasensible domain of morality and the sensible domain of nature that is the object of knowledge are

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PART III CHAPTER 1 incommensurable. Freedom does not liberate the subject from the causality of nature, qua empirical being, but neither is the subject influenced by nature, qua moral being: the legislations of pure and practical reason concern, or constitute, entirely separate domains. They are, however, constantly confronted through their “effects”, of particular concern in the case of the expression of freedom in moral actions. While a moral action may claim a free subject as its cause, it can only be expressed in the natural world whose causality bears no relationship to morality. The problem here is not that a natural world excludes the possibility of freedom but that it is essentially indifferent to the moral aims of freedom. The free subject can find no reflection of or aid to his or her moral endeavours in external nature, which goes against the grain of reason’s goal of the highest good or summum bonum: the reconciliation of virtue and happiness, or our natural and moral being. Part of the aim of the Critique of Judgement is thus to address the “gaps” between our a priori concepts of nature and actual experience, and our a priori concepts of morality and the sensible world. At the same time, any real or objective mediation would imply a unity or continuity between the domains of the sensible and the supersensible, the rejection of which forms a point of departure for the critical system. The notion of a totality which unites the sensible and the supersensible, the possible and the contingent, is the preserve of the Idea. The necessity of the thought of such a totality, following the demands of reason, alongside the impossibility of it being known, is the central disjunction that forms the basis of the critical project. In the previous critiques, this disjunction is attenuated by the regulative status accorded to Ideas. Thus, in the first critique, the problematic ideal of complete determination serves as a regulative model for the systematic unity of our concepts of nature: the horizon of an indefinite process of unification and specification. In the second critique, the ideal of a complete determination of existence through the concept of freedom, as expressed in the idea of a summum bonum, is similarly postulated as a regulative principle which places our moral efforts within the perspective of an infinite approximation and subtends the thesis of the immortality of the soul. In both cases, the horizon of the ideal is what founds the positive sense of knowledge and morality rather than being an expression of their limitations. It is the disjunction between concept and existence that gives sense to the judgements of our synthetic cognitive apparatus, just as it is through the 126

PART III CHAPTER 1 discrepancy between the moral law and our natural inclinations that we realise the significance of morality. The distinction, and discrepancy, between possible and actual experience is for Kant a function of the structure of our cognitive faculty: the separation between the understanding, which produces concepts, and sensibility, which provides intuitions.17 The independence of our intuitions from our concepts, whether by exceeding their purview or falling short, is what constitutes our experience of nature as contingent. We are aware of this independence because we can conceive of a concept that meets no correlative intuition, and an experience for which we have no concept. This distinction is also operative for practical reason: while the faculty of desire posits a causal relationship between its representations and an actual reality, the possibilities we posit as desires frequently outstrip our capacities as subject to natural causality. We may, however, imagine an understanding for whom this distinction did not exist: an ‘intuitive’ understanding for which all objects would be actual, and which would thus have no sense of the notion of contingency: An understanding to which this distinction did not apply would mean: All objects cognized by me are (exist); such a being could have no presentation whatever of the possibility that some objects might not exist after all, i.e., of the contingency of those that do exist…18

It is reason which prompts us to posit such an understanding, which transcends the conditions of our own cognition, and corresponds with its assumption “that the original basis of nature has unconditioned necessity.”19 It demands a similar unity from a practical point of view, where the distinction between the possible and the actual translates into the discrepancy between obligation and action. Combined, they form an image of “an intelligible world in which everything would be actual because it is (both good and) possible.”20 This ideal of reason is not presented in order to serve as a regulative model after the fashion of the first two critiques, but rather forms a ‘spur’ for the understanding to develop the notion of “purposiveness” as the transcendental principle of the faculty of judgement. In the first critique, the principles of the systematisation of our concepts of nature were presented as analogons of the sensible schema: rules of production that governed relations between concepts rather than presentations. Here, “purposiveness” is instead something like an ‘analogon of the Idea’: the interpretation of the 127

PART III CHAPTER 1 understanding, according to its own limits, of an ideal of Reason. The peculiar difficulty of the understanding in grasping the notion of an “intuitive” intellect, is that it can only present such an understanding to itself as an image or possibility, which is precisely the character that differentiates our intellect (an ‘intellectus ectypus’) from a non-discursive understanding (an ‘intellectus archetypus’).21 In such cases, “where cognising certain objects is beyond the ability of our understanding”, we must “think them in accordance with the subjective conditions for exercising our powers.”22 Thus, reason conceives of an understanding for which there is no distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the universal and the particular, and thus no need to produce an accord between the one and the other. The understanding, however, can only conceive, by analogy, of a contingent harmony between nature and our understanding, a “lawfulness of the contingent” which is expressed in the notion of “purposiveness.” And while reason conceives of an understanding which would intuitively grasp the whole of nature in a determinate fashion, with no distinction between its possibility and actuality, the analogy for the understanding is “having the presentation of the whole contain the basis that makes possible the form of that whole as well as the connection of the parts required to make this form possible.”23 This form of causality through a presentation of the whole is how Kant defines a (natural) purpose. The notions of purpose and purposiveness feature in various interrelated senses in the critique of teleological judgement. The idea of the purposiveness of nature for our understanding clearly serves a moral interest in the idea of a divine creator, as well as being a subjective regulative principle for our study of nature: in these ways it resembles Leibniz’s notion of natural finality. The notion of purpose, as an organising concept relating parts to each other under the auspices of a whole, serves alternatively as a methodological principle for the organisation of our knowledge, a principle for the classification of nature into species and genera, and a biological principle for the understanding of the functioning of living organisms.24 The key in each case is that an idea of the whole precedes and regulates the parts, which themselves can represent ‘wholes’ relative to their own parts, such that the whole forms a “system”, rather than a simple “aggregate” (where the whole is simply the addition of parts). Such an organisation is of a different order to any mechanical causality: in the introduction to the critique of teleological 128

PART III CHAPTER 1 judgement Kant distinguishes the “causality of purposes” (nexus finalis) from mechanical causality (nexus effectivus).25 Any apparent order or ‘design’ in nature can only be considered to be accidental from the perspective of the latter. Kant’s approach to reconciling the determination of nature through causal laws and the regulative model of teleology will be addressed in the next chapter. The question of interest at this point is the relationship between ‘this’ nature and that presented in aesthetic judgements. In Kant’s terminology: what is the difference between the principle of a “logical purposiveness” in nature, or “purposiveness with a purpose” (which is to say, “purposefulness”), and that of “formal purposiveness” or “purposiveness without a purpose”?— This is the basis for dividing the critique of judgement into that of aesthetic and that of teleological judgement. By the first I mean the power to judge formal purposiveness (sometimes also called subjective purposiveness) by the feeling of pleasure and displeasure; by the second I mean the power to judge the real (objective) purposiveness of nature by understanding and reason.26

The tendency in interpreting the “subjective purposiveness” experienced in aesthetic judgements is to present it negatively, as in effect an experience of the “purposefulness” of nature without the benefit of a determinate concept, on the level of feeling. Thus Werner S. Pluhar, in his introduction to the Critique of Judgement, states that “The difference between the concept of subjective purposiveness and the concept of a purpose is precisely that the first concept is indeterminate, the second is determinate”, and he goes on to explain the purposiveness of nature for our judgement in terms of the organisation of its laws into a hierarchical system.27 Another way this is expressed (again by Pluhar) is to speak of the aesthetic as an experience of the purposiveness of nature for our understanding “in general”, as opposed to the specific purposiveness apprehended when a particular purpose is identified.28 These formulations are consistent with many of Kant’s own, and satisfy an intuitive appreciation of how we experience beauty and sublimity—in natural beauty, for example, we can indeed feel “favoured” by nature in a way that is “general” or “indeterminate”, and which may encourage us in our separate scientific or moral endeavours. However, just as Kant’s theoretical understanding proceeds on the basis of a difference in nature between sensibility and the concept, one of the

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PART III CHAPTER 1 innovations of Kant’s aesthetics is to maintain that aesthetic appreciation is of a different order to any cognitive appreciation, and not simply a “confused” perception of a concept or in any way related to conceptual insight. This is not Pluhar’s meaning when he distinguishes aesthetic and teleological judgements on the grounds of the “determinacy” of their concept, as he himself has already given an account of this originality in Kant with respect to his predecessors. We do not proceed by degrees from an aesthetic appreciation to a teleological one; the difference is in the absence and presence of a concept. But when the absence of a determinate concept translates as the presence of an indeterminate concept, whose determinate correlate is found in teleological judgements, it becomes difficult to understand in what the independence of the aesthetic consists, both in its aconceptuality, and as claiming a principle in any way distinct from that of teleological judgements. It is possible, however, to account for the difference and relationship between the principle of aesthetic and teleological judgements in a way that preserves the integrity and in a certain sense the priority of aesthetic judgements—given their primary position in the Critique of Judgement as the unique manifestation of the pure transcendental principle of judgement. The concern in the next chapter will be to determine the distinct “nature” of the aesthetic based on the different understandings of the concept of “life” raised by the third critique, and how it serves as a potential principle of integration for the different orders of reality in critical thought.

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PART III CHAPTER 1 Endnotes for Part III Chapter 1 In NP, F86/E75, QP?, F13/E8, F74/E77, F13/E8, F74/E77. CJ, p. 170. 3 See, in particular, CC, “To Have Done with Judgement”, F164/E131. 4 Eg., Chapter 6 in A Thousand Plateaus: “November 28. 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”. 5 This account is principally drawn from Elhanan Yakira’s, La causalité de Galilée à Kant, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. 6 Aristotle, Physics, IV.I, 208b8. 7 Principles of Philosophy, Part II, Principle XXXVII, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I. 8 Physics, IV.I, 208b8. 9 Emile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie. Tome II: La philosophie moderne. Vol II: Le dix-huitième siècle, F539/E228. translation modified. 10 Cinema 2: The Movement-Image, F12-17/E3-8. 11 Cinema 2, F13/E4, Deleuze’s emphasis. 12 Cinema 2, F17/E7. 13 DR, F349-350/E272-273. 14 “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy”, in CC, F4049/E27-35, first published as the Preface to the English translation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. 15 CC, F41-42/E27-28, translation modified. 16 Philonenko, “L’antinomie du jugement téléologique”, in Etudes Kantiennes, pp. 151-152. 17 CJ, §76-§77. 18 CJ, p. 403. 19 CJ, p. 403. 20 CJ, p. 404. 21 CJ, p. 408. 22 CJ, p. 403. 23 CJ, pp. 407-408. 24 Henry Allison, for example, notes the variety of possibilities and laments their indistinction: “In particular, it is not clear whether it [the principle of logical purposiveness] concerns the possibility of unifying empirical laws into a system (theory construction), of formulating empirical laws in the first place, of forming empirical concepts, of classifying “natural forms” into genera and species, or of attributing necessity to empirical laws.”, “Is the Critique of Judgement “Post-Critical”?”, in Sedgwick, ed., The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 83. 25 CJ, p. 360. 26 CJ, p. 193. 27 CJ, p. lvi-lvii. 28 CJ, p. lvii. 1 2

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CHAPTER 2:

THE CRITIQU E OF JU DG EMENT AND THE IMAGE OF NATURE (2)

…individuation is the prior condition under which specification, and division or composition, operate in a system. —Deleuze, “Method of dramatisation.”1

The concept of “life” is one of the notions that offers a thread of continuity between the critique of teleological judgement and aesthetic judgements, and is particularly pertinent to the relationship between Deleuze and Kant. While the principles of teleological judgement offer rules for reflection on living organisms and systems, in their difference from mechanical processes, the principles of aesthetic judgements refer to the immediate sentiment of vitality within the subject. The faculty of judgement is defined by Kant as bearing on the feeling of pleasure and pain, which expresses the effect of a representation upon the subject independently of its objective status: the pure feeling in the subject or the modification of its state, in so far as there is a ‘furthering’ or ‘inhibiting’ of its vital forces.2 Rudolf Makkreel has examined the evolution of the concept of life and the notion of the “feeling of life” in Kant’s work, in a way that offers clues towards the relationship, and also the differences, between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘teleological’ vitality.3 While Kant initially approximates the action of living things to the causality of the faculty of desire, at later points it is rather a form of ‘responsiveness’ that marks the specificity of life. We can understand how the notion of ‘responsiveness’ can be equally applied to aesthetic and teleological judgements, as perhaps its ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ form, or as a subjective feeling and an objective capacity. What the notion of ‘responsiveness’ brings out, however, is that at the basis of any ‘harmony’ is a ‘disharmony’ or disequilibrium that is overcome. The notion of purposiveness or contingent harmony in the Critique of Judgement is already introduced as an image of mediation between the realms of the possible and the actual, but it is equally, and necessarily, not the seamless unity of the two represented by the idea of reason. A tension between

PART III CHAPTER 2 notions of accord, symmetry, regularity, and purpose and those of discord, dissymmetry, irregularity and “contra-purposiveness” recurs throughout the Critique of Judgement. For Deleuze, the originality of the Critique of Judgement is found in its notion of a ‘discordant accord’, or an accord through discord, which is particularly expressed in aesthetic judgements. Deleuze’s understanding of aesthetic judgements resonates with his writings on biology and empiricism, in which he distinguishes between the modus operandi of organised forms, and an individual form of ‘responsiveness’ to contingency whose inventiveness outstrips the capacities of the organism and is in fact presupposed by them.

The feeling of life Makkreel’s study on the “feeling of life” in Kant traces the sources of this notion in Kant’s philosophy of nature and anthropology, as well as its role in the Critique of Judgement. In its first presentation, Kant’s definition of life forms a simple contrast to inertial movement, evoking instead the inner principle of a body that directs its course. It is “the capacity of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle, of a finite substance to determine itself to change, of a material substance to determine itself to motion or rest as change of its state.”4 The Critique of Practical Reason provides a more cursory definition of life as the “capacity of a being to act according to the laws of the faculty of desire.”5 In the Critique of Judgement and Kant’s anthropology, however, the conception of life is refocussed on the notion of a subjective feeling—the affective response within the subject to a presentation. In this sense, the notion of life integrates “not only the capacity to act, but also the consciousness of being acted upon.”6 In Kant’s final reflections on nature, these modifications of the understanding of life are incorporated into his initial framework—thus in the Opus postumum the initiation of movement in a subject implies at the same time an ability to “anticipate counteracting movement of matter.”7 As Makkreel notes, while Kant’s understanding of life is generally examined through his understanding of teleology, it is rather in the first part of the Critique of Judgement that the notion of life receives greater attention. The arena of aesthetic judgement is distinguished from the judgements of pure and practical reason, in that while these latter judgements engage an interest 133

PART III CHAPTER 2 of reason and refer presentations to an object, the former abstracts from all interest and refers representations “to the subject and to its feeling of life, under the name of the feeling of pleasure and pain.”8 In all their forms, pleasure and pain express the experience in the subject of the enhancement or restriction of its vital forces. While Kant’s earlier writings on aesthetics refer the pleasure in the beautiful to the conformity of our presentations with our conditions of sensibility alone, in the Critique of Judgement aesthetic judgements engage all of the faculties in relation to the presentation and to each other. The ‘play’ of the faculties in aesthetic reflection is attached to a duration: what characterises the aesthetic imagination is that “here the presentations themselves are bases merely for preserving their own existence in the subject.”9 On the basis on this account, Makkreel connects aesthetic experience to Kant’s description of “interior sense” in his anthropological writings, which is distinguished from the “inner sense” presented in the first critique. “Inner sense” refers to our empirical intuition, and is presented passively as “what we undergo insofar as we are affected by the play of our own thought.”10 “Interior sense”, which engages pleasure and displeasure is described as a state somewhere between activity and passivity: it is “the responsiveness of subject in being determined by certain representations, either to preserve or to reject the state of the representations.”11 Further reading of Kant’s anthropological analysis of pleasure and pain provides additional insight into the temporal dimension of pleasure, and the central tension between movement and rest at its heart.12 On the one hand, Kant defines pleasure as what drives one to maintain a state, and displeasure as what provokes one to leave it. The fact that we exist in time, however, means that we are constantly changing states, if only from one moment to the next, regardless of our desire. If pleasure is thus to be maintained over this succession of different states, the question for Kant arises as to whether the pleasure arises from leaving the present moment or from the prospect of entering the next. Although the latter case presents a more positive definition of pleasure, the directionality of time means that “only the first will happen”, and “the cause of our agreeable feeling can only be that we are compelled to leave the present, though it is not specified into what other state we shall enter—except that it is another one.”13 Despite what appears to be a negative definition of pleasure, it is in fact a positive theory that Kant develops. What 134

PART III CHAPTER 2 constitutes pleasure in the final analysis, is the stimulation that consists in an alternation of contrasting affects, of pleasure and pain. This is already implied in the nicety of the temporal analysis: if pleasure resides in the leaving of a present state, leaving a given state also always occasions pain. Kant argues that pleasure, conceived as a continuous state, would amount to either a swooning unconsciousness or inertia—vitality is only felt and maintained through a continuous change of state, and thus the intermittence of pain: So pain must precede any enjoyment: pain always comes first. For if the vital force were continuously promoted, though it cannot be raised above a certain level, what could follow but swift death in the face of joy? Again, no enjoyment can follow directly upon another: between one and the other, pain must intervene. Slight inhibitions of the vital force alternate with slight advancements of it, and this constitutes the state of health. We mistakenly think that in a state of health we feel continuous well being; but in fact, it consists in agreeable feelings whose succession is only intermittent (with pain always intervening between them). Pain is the spur of activity, and it is in activity, above all, that we feel our life; without pain, inertia would set in.14

Kant remarks that “(animal) life is a continual play of [the] antagonism” of pleasure and pain, but this vital stimulation is also the object of the “cultivated man”, the man “attentive to his life and to time”.15 Kant ultimately characterises the impetus which impels us to leave our present state as a “positive pain.”16

Life and teleology What is the relationship between the “life” expressed in aesthetic experience and that of the teleological model? Deleuze’s earliest writings address the relationship between the institutional or ‘organised’ structures that regulate thought and action, and factors arising from individual circumstance. Deleuze’s first published volume was Instincts et Institutions, a collection of short textual extracts, chosen and introduced by Deleuze, the second of a series directed by Georges Canguilhem for the use of secondary school philosophy teachers and students.17 Published in the same year as his monograph on Hume (1953), it reflects many of the problems which inform this work, and which will recur throughout Deleuze’s career: the relationship between the individual and the species, between the natural and the artificial, between life and thought. Even in the quite short introduction, we can perceive the outline of a problematic which structures Deleuze’s subsequent reflections, and the choice and

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PART III CHAPTER 2 disposition of the texts clearly manifest an argumentative thread, even if this impression is enhanced by the knowledge of Deleuze’s later works. In his introduction, Deleuze draws an analogy between the function of the instinct in the animal and the institution for the human subject. Both represent “processes of satisfaction” for the needs and drives of the animal or human subject.18 In the first case, the animal reacts to and “extracts” elements from the external environment in order to form its “specific” instinctual world. In the second case, the human subject artificially “elaborates” an original world between its needs and the external milieu: this institutional satisfaction represents both a liberation from nature and a transformation of the initial drive. From this perspective, Deleuze writes, we can consider a specific or institutional world as presupposed, “as an a priori”, by any individual experience.19 The problem that arises, however, in relation to both the instinct and the institution, is “how does the synthesis between the tendency and the object which satisfies it come about?”20 While the need is satisfied within the instinct and institution, the particular forms of the latter are not explained by the need. In the case of the institution, for example, “The same sexual needs will never explain the multiple forms of marriage.”21 And in the case of the instinct, “the internal factor, even self-identical, will not explain that it gives rise to different behaviours in different species.”22 Institutions never satisfy needs without at the same time transforming them, such that a utilitarian explanation is never sufficient, or must be supplemented by the question, “for whom?”—“For all those who have the need? Or else for a few (privileged class), or even only to those who operate the institution (bureaucracy)?”23 The problem thus lies in finding this “other” instance on which the connection between the need and the means of satisfaction depends. From this perspective, it is rather individual and aesthetic factors that are presupposed by the organised form. While an established instinctual behaviour may appear inseparable from the species and resistant to analysis, an instinct in the process of being developed more readily manifests its affiliation to a variety of individual factors: the more [an instinct] is perfectible, and thus imperfect, the more it is subject to variation, indecision, the more it can be reduced to simply the play of individual internal factors and external circumstances—the more it gives way to intelligence.24

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PART III CHAPTER 2 In the case of the institution the “other” instance lies in the direction of the symbolic: the ritualistic aspect of institutions which surpasses utility in order to provide a form of subjective identification or “model” for the user, in his or her relationship to society in general. On the one hand, instincts and institutions represent a functional ‘world’ for the individual, which is in one sense the presupposition of any individual action. On the other hand, these organised worlds presuppose for their initial development, and any subsequent development, a work that can only be referred in the final instance to the contingencies of circumstance. This dialectic between a normative environment and circumstantial contingency constitutes one of the principal themes of the work of Georges Canguilhem himself, in his writings on the history and philosophy of science, and on biology and medicine in particular. The irreducibility of the operations of living systems, and their study, to a mechanical model, is one of the central contentions of Canguilhem’s work. While a physical field is characterised by an objectivity and neutrality without any privileged centre of reference, living organisms are defined by the relationship between subject and milieu. This relationship is itself inseparable from the capacities and aspirations of the organism, which form the evaluative framework for its negotiation of the environment. The defining trait of living beings, and of life itself, for Canguilhem, is thus its “normative” nature. The movement of life is inseparable from its sense and directionality—its nonindifference: the fact that a living being responds to a lesion, infestation, functional disorder by becoming sick expresses the fundamental fact that life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible, that life is polarity and for this reason unconscious attribution of value, in short that life is in fact a 25 normative activity.

and shortly afterwards: The simplest biological nutritive system of nutrition, assimilation and 26 excretion expresses a polarity.

If Canguilhem’s major work addresses the categories of the normal and the pathological with respect to the history of biology, this is in part because it is the concept of pathology which most clearly distinguishes a biological system from a physical one. The effect of modern science—in its difference from Aristotelian physics—is to render all movement natural: “Any medication aims at restoring certain properties to their natural type: as physical properties 137

PART III CHAPTER 2 never lose this type, they do not need to be restored to it. Nothing in the physical sciences corresponds to what is therapeutics in the physiological sciences.”27 If there is no sense of the pathological for a physical system, for this reason it also cannot be said to be “normal.” While “normality” suggests a default or standard state of affairs, ‘all things being equal’, its essence for Canguilhem lies in its expression of a preferred state of affairs against which an existing state—by default abnormal or “anormal”—is judged. Canguilhem understands the normal as an essentially polemical concept. Its sense resides in the active and renewable process by which norms are posited, instituted, enforced and revised against a constant background of deviation. The ambivalence of the term is reflected in its etymology, which designates rectitude, the straight line. This image conflates both a passive or negative sense of the norm, as what exists in the absence of deviating influences, and an active or positive sense of a rule or a preferred path. Canguilhem emphasises the active and dynamic conception of the norm whereby there is a task of normalisation that is the rendering normal of the abnormal, rather than a state of normality opposed to its deviation. The aim of this task is to establish an equilibrium between a posited norm and an a-normal reality rather than one that exists apart from the abnormal. Canguilhem’s insistence on the active nature of normality prepares the way for his final thesis that the highest expression of this power of normativity is the ability to construct new norms from the material of the infraction itself. It is not simply that the norm is inseparable from its infraction, but that an infraction, anomaly or pathology is inseparable from the possibility of a new norm. In this sense, the true test of “normality” is not the strength of a given norm, but the capacity of an organism to depart from a given norm when faced with a truly anomalous circumstance. Conversely, the ultimate hallmark of pathology is a rigid attachment to a conventional set of responses. It is a sign of decline or infirmity in an organism if it is limited to only a certain set of possibilities, whether internal or external. It is in this sense that the successful institution of a norm can register as a failure within the broader context of normativity: “In adaptation perfect or completed means the beginning of the end of the species.”28 In the final analysis, it is not “normality” and “pathology”,

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PART III CHAPTER 2 in their conventional sense, that represent the decisive polarity, but rather “health” and “sickness”, understood as higher or lower levels of “normativity”: the capacity or incapacity to accommodate and produce variability. Canguilhem extends this index of health even to unsuccessful mutations insofar as they express the fundamental inventiveness of nature: an eliminated form can be considered as an “adventure” rather than a “failure” according to a wider understanding of the aspirations of life.29 There is thus a paradoxical sense in which normativity, the signature trait of life forms, taken to a theoretical extreme, emulates the modus operandi of purely physical bodies: a path on which every inflection is immediately integrated as law, and thus for which all movements are “good”. A normative framework of evaluation is present for Canguilhem wherever there can be said to be life: it is expressed in a variety of ways from the level of the cell to the institutions of human society. In culture, we understand the institution and application of norms in terms of an open-ended process of self-overcoming. However, while normativity is on one level coextensive with the fact of being alive, as human subjects, normative values also feature as objects within the cultural ‘imaginary’. Canguilhem analyses cultural myths of origin, which abstract and isolate the components of the process of normalisation, and situate culture in relation to an ideal of normality.30 Thus, an initial chaos, where norms are totally absent, is succeeded by a state of paradise, in which norms are unnecessary. A subsequent disruption represents both the first infraction of the norm and the necessity of introducing norms. It marks the beginning of culture and history, whose task is to put the two halves of expectation and reality back together again. Canguilhem understands the cultural endeavours of knowledge, religion and art as activities governed by the ideal of a world of perfect equilibrium and unity: “an unproblematic agreement between demands and realities, whose continuous jouissance… would guarantee the definitive solidity of its unity.”31 The ideal of perfect equilibrium—“of normality without normalization”32—is not only one projected back into a mythical past, but is also identified with the natural world by way of contrast to culture. Man seeks perfect harmony with his milieu, on Canguilhem’s account, not only “because he has lost it”, but “more precisely because he suspects that other beings beside him possess it.”33 We can see an analogy here with the ideal reconciliation between possibility 139

PART III CHAPTER 2 and actuality as posited by Kant in the Critique of Judgement, and indeed with “the need of reason” as subjective presupposition of our action in general. The ideal of self-regulating natural harmony that serves as the normative inspiration for cultural activity is thus at the same time its negation. Following a similar understanding of vitality to Kant’s, Canguilhem notes that the reality of paradise is “mediocrity”: “the satisfactions there are modest— aurea mediocritas—because they are not a victory over an equivalent obstacle.”34 This ideal of normality correlates with the static, or passive, ideal of the normal, which is expressed not only in images of natural “harmony”, but in the cultural habits that form a “second nature”. What Canguilhem’s interpretation of norms in the cultural imagination suggests is that the dialectic of normativity is not only between the normal and abnormal, but between normalisation understood as an activity, and normality as a “natural” state. If normalisation seeks to resolve the difference between an expectation and reality, any given resolution, to the extent that it is stable and persists over time, will tend to present itself as an original and “natural” state of affairs rather an interested activity maintained against constant deviation. Once again we are presented with a vital polarity with, at one end, the “perfection” of an achieved form, and at the other, the “cutting edge” of contestation and novelty.

Noematic fields and the field of the noematic Alexis Philonenko writes on the different “noematic fields” which feature in the “architectonic” of Kant’s critique.35 Reproducing Leibniz’s “orders of reality” within a transcendental framework, Philonenko distinguishes in Kant’s critique, in ascending order, the general phenomenon as object of the first critique, organisation or the organism as the object of the critique of teleological judgement, life or the living individual as the object of the critique of aesthetic judgement, and the person as object of the critique of practical reason.36 The distinction between life and the organism is one that Philonenko is particularly keen to emphasise as one that is commonly overlooked: “By putting the theory of organisation in place of the theory of life, one quite simply ends up demolishing the meaning of the Critique of Judgement, by misrecognising its architectonic value, which is ultimately expressed in classification.”37 While the identity of an organism can be transferred through graft or reproduction, life

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PART III CHAPTER 2 and the aesthetic refers to the ineffable “ipseity” of the individual, “what is most living in us, but also the least graftable, by which I mean taste.”38 This distinction is supported by the “logical” difference between teleological and aesthetic judgements: the former deals with the specific or particular in nature, and the latter with the singular. In Kant’s architectonic, it is obviously the ethical status of the person which corresponds to the most profound order of rational being. Deleuze will argue that if the person, as end in itself, is the “highest” subject of Kant’s critique, the operation of judgement is nevertheless the “deepest” level of critique, its “secret heart”, and the ultimate ground of his own, modified, architectonic: his analysis will be presented in the next section. Because the principle of aesthetic judgements only provides a rule for the experience of the subject rather than applying to objects, it does not, for Kant, need to be reconciled with the principles of objective nature constituted in the first critique. It is rather the antinomy of teleological judgement that, as bearing on our study of nature, raises the question of the reconciliation of teleology and mechanism as principles for our reflections. If, however, we consider aesthetic judgements in vital terms, as a subjective principle for ‘responsiveness’ to indeterminacy, and as the genesis of the relationship between the faculties, there are grounds to consider the ‘nature’ it refers to and its relationship to or consistency with both teleological and mechanical nature. In critically examining the antinomy of teleological judgement, we can see the resolution to the problem it poses as producing a model of the thinking subject as ‘purely’ reflective in a way that resembles the aesthetic ‘attitude’. In his essay on the antinomy of teleological judgement, Philonenko analyses Kant’s argument as a meditation on the specificity of judgements of reflection.39 The case of reflective judgements, for Philonenko, expresses the irreducible difference in Kant’s philosophy between the possible and the real. While a categorical judgement may be determining, it only determines the form of the possible: it does not construct the content of the real, and a posteriori reflection is required to bridge this gap. Thus in the critique of teleological judgement, mechanism is presented as a maxim of reflection alongside the principle of purposiveness. The ‘false problem’ raised by the antinomy, on Philonenko’s account, is that the thesis presents mechanism as a determining principle which reduces the real to the possible, and the antithesis presents

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PART III CHAPTER 2 teleology as the ‘refutation’ of mechanism as a determining principle, reducing the possible to the real. Even if this antinomy can be avoided by considering mechanism and teleology as maxims of reflection rather than constitutive principles, their relationship to each other as methods still requires clarification. Kant describes the two principles as “disparate”, which is to say different rather than contrary.40 He refers them to the limitations of our faculties and postulates the identity of the two principles in the suprasensible realm. For Philonenko, however, reflection is essentially antithetical, or dialectical, insofar as it negotiates the difference between the possible and the real. It presents a case of the complementarity of different principles, rather than their disparity, which is negatively grounded in its distance from an ideal unity. Kant’s neglect of any positive and scientific sense for the dialectical process of reflection accounts, according to Philonenko, for the subsequent emergence of an ontological dialectic of contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy: Substituting the ‘disparate’ for the ‘dialectical’, Kant introduced an unsustainable definition of thought since while demonstrating the impossibility of a purely thetic thought he revealed reflection as antithetical, without deciding to confer a positive value to the duality of the maxims.41

Canguilhem addresses the mechanistic and ‘vitalist’ model of nature in terms of the ‘antinomic’ opposition between concepts presented throughout its history, which he suggests can be understood as reflecting an essential dialectic of ‘life’ that transcends either term: over its history, biological theory reveals itself as a divided and oscillating thought. Mechanism and Vitalism clash regarding the problem of structures and functions; Discontinuity and Continuity, regarding the problem of the succession of forms; Preformation and Epigenesis, regarding the problem of the development of the existent; Atomicity and Totality, regarding the problem of individuality… But one can, transposing the dialectical process of thought into the real, maintain that it is the object of study itself, life, which is the dialectical essence, and that thought must espouse its structure. The opposition between Mechanism and Vitalism, Preformation and Genesis, is transcended by life itself prolonging itself into the theory of life.42

Like Philonenko, Canguilhem maintains that it is unacceptable to posit two constitutive principles of nature: There cannot be an empire within an empire, if not there is no more empire, either as container or as content… One cannot defend the originality of the biological phenomenon and consequently the originality of biology by delimiting within the physico-chemical territory, in a milieu of inertia or externally determined movements, enclaves of indetermination, 43 zones of dissidence, foyers of heresy.

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PART III CHAPTER 2 This, however, is the classical approach of the vitalist on Canguilhem’s account: to posit its status as ‘exceptional’ with respect to the physical sciences and to maintain a strict delimitation between the methodologies and objects of the biological and physical sciences. The only possible rectification of this “philosophically inexcusable fault”44, for Canguilhem, is not to concede the ‘empire’ of the physical sciences, but rather to universalise the model of the biological sciences and understand the science of matter within the context of the activity of the living being. Rather than reduce the sense of the physical sciences and their objects, for Canguilhem such a gesture rather justifies and guarantees their place.45 If we understand the physical model of nature in the more comprehensive context of the scientific projects of the living being, however, we must also understand the teleological model within this context. As Canguilhem has indicated, both in this study and elsewhere, the category of ‘life’ or the living transcends a vitalist position, understood in its teleological sense. Vitalism and mechanism, as models of nature, have an objective scope, whether they project a model of subjectivity in order to comprehend their objects, or abstract from any centre of reference. In referring scientific claims to the context of the living being, this latter can only be understood in the narrowest sense of an immediate subjectivity: precisely the ‘feeling of life’, or the formal ‘normative’ polarity that defines life for Canguilhem. It is this minimal position that forms the point of departure for either, or any, objective claim that is subsequently made, and back to which it must be ultimately referred. The ‘pivotal’ position of a pure indeterminate reflection is suggested in Canguilhem’s ‘diagnoses’ of vitalism and mechanism as expressing contrasting ‘dispositions’ of the subject in relation to nature: Man… can consider nature in two ways. In the first instance he can feel himself to be a child of nature and experiences in relation to it a sentiment of belonging and subordination, he sees himself in nature and he sees nature in himself. Or else he stands in the face of nature as before a foreign, indefinable object.46

An aesthetic attitude falls between these two alternatives. Like the vitalist attitude it operates on the level of ‘feeling’ and expresses, if not a ‘belonging’, then a ‘connection’. Like the second attitude it experiences nature as provocative and indefinable.

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PART III CHAPTER 2 For Canguilhem, the ‘suspense’ in which this leaves the status of objective nature is entirely compatible with the scientific spirit. As he notes in his essay on cellular theory, arguing for the value of the history of science, it is most frequently the disciples of a scientist, or the demands of pedagogical instruction, that ‘dogmatise’ a scientific theory and can inhibit the insights of its more equivocal initial expression. The value of a theory is precisely in a form of hesitation in which the possible is ‘engendered’ rather than in its confirmation as necessary: The fecundity of a scientific theory precisely lies in the way it does not impose the methodological or doctrinal choice to which it is inclined. The reasons of the choice must be sought elsewhere than in it… To know is less to confront the real than to validate a possibility in making it necessary. Given this, the genesis of the possible has as much importance as the demonstration of the necessary. The fragility of the former does not deny it the dignity which will come to the latter from its solidity. Illusion could have been a truth. Truth will reveal itself some day perhaps to be an illusion.47

The special nature of the faculty of aesthetic judgement as a “genesis of possibilities” on Deleuze’s analysis forms the subject of the next chapter. Deleuze considers the third critique to be the lynchpin of the critical project and a model for his own “image of thought”. We will examine there more closely the mechanism of aesthetic judgements as engendering thought.

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PART III CHAPTER 2 Endnotes for Part III Chapter 2 MD, p. 94. CJ, p. 278. 3 Rudolf Makkreel, “The Feeling of Life: Some Kantian Sources of Life-Philosophy”, in DiltheyJahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geistewissenschaften, pp. 83-104. 4 From Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (trans. James Ellington, Indianapolis, 1970, p. 105), cited in Makkreel, p. 87. 5 From Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (trans. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis, 1956, p. 9n), cited in Makkreel, p. 87. 6 Makkreel, p. 87. 7 Ak 22, 506, cited in Makkreel, p. 101. 8 CJ, §1, cited in Makkreel, with his emphasis, p. 88. 9 CJ, p. 207’ (First Introduction). 10 AP, §15, cited in Makkreel, p. 90. 11 AP, §15, cited in Makkreel, p. 90. 12 AP, §60-§61. 13 AP, p. 231. 14 AP, p. 231. 15 AP, p. 233. Kant gives a series of examples to support his contention that pleasure relies on an antagonism of forces: gambling (alternation of hope and fear), the theatre (obstacles to a goal), romantic stories (quarrels and jealousy), work (difficulty and achievement), and tobacco (unpleasant activity with pleasant side effects). 16 AP, p. 233. 17 Instincts et Institutions: textes et documents philosophiques. Deleuze was a secondary school teacher of philosophy at the Lycée d’Orléans at the time of publication, and Canguilhem the General Inspector of Public Education. The series began with Canguilhem’s own collection on the theme of “Needs and Tendencies” (Besoins et Tendances). 18 Instincts et Institutions, Appendix 3, p. viii. 19 Instincts et Institutions, p. viii. 20 Instincts et Institutions, p. x. 21 Instincts et Institutions, p. ix. 22 Instincts et Institutions, p. x. 23 Instincts et Institutions, p. ix. 24 Instincts et Institutions, p. xi. 25 Le normal et le pathologique (5th edition), F77/E70, translation modified (the English edition renders “un vivant” as “a living man”, although Canguilhem is making the point that the attribution of value is not confined to the human, to “celui qui parle, c’est-à-dire evidemment un homme”). 26 Le normal et le pathologique, F79/E71. 27 Citation of Bichat’s Anatomie générale appliqué à la physiologie et à la médecine (General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medecine, trans. George Hayward, vol. 1, Boston, Richardson and Lord, 1822, pp. 20-21) in Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, F78/E71. 28 Le normal et le pathologique, F197/E163. 29 La connaissance de la vie (“Le normal et le pathologique”), p. 159. 30 Le normal et le pathologique, F178-180/E147-149. 31 La connaissance de la vie (“Introduction: La pensée et le vivant”), p. 11. 32 Le normal et le pathologique, F178/E147. 33 La connaissance de la vie (“Introduction: La pensée et le vivant”), p. 11. 34 Le normal et le pathologique, F179/E148, translation modified. 35 Philonenko, “Kant et les ordres du réel” and “L’architectonique de la Critique de la faculté de juger”, in Métaphysique et politique chez Kant et Fichte. 36 Philonenko, Métaphysique et politique chez Kant et Fichte, p. 179. 37 Philonenko, Métaphysique et politique chez Kant et Fichte, p. 182. 38 Philonenko, Métaphysique et politique chez Kant et Fichte, p. 181. 39 Alexis Philonenko, “L’antinomie du jugement téléologique chez Kant”, Etudes Kantiennes. 40 CJ, §72. 41 “L’antinomie du jugement téléologique…”, p. 158. 42 La connaissance de la vie (“Aspects du vitalisme”), p. 85. 43 La connaissance de la vie (“Aspects du vitalisme”), p. 95. 44 La connaissance de la vie (“Aspects du vitalisme”), p. 95. 45 La connaissance de la vie (“Aspects du vitalisme”), p. 96. 1 2

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46 47

La connaissance de la vie (“Aspects du vitalisme”), p. 88. La connaissance de la vie (“Aspects du vitalisme”), p. 47.

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CHAPTER 3:

THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC

Judgement and accord The faculty of judgement holds a unique place in Kant’s critical philosophy, even outside of the developments of the third critique. Rather than producing its own concepts, ideas, or intuitions, judgement is rather what forms the connections between them. Because of the diversity of the sources of representation in Kant’s philosophy, the art of combining and applying these assumes a particular importance. Hence Kant’s contention, for example, that it is not intuitions that can be said to be false or misleading, but rather the judgements we make regarding them; and that error does not reside in our transcendent ideas, but rather in their transcendent use or application. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines the understanding in general as the faculty of rules, and judgement the faculty of subsuming under rules.1 His comments on judgement are prefatory to his exposition of the schematism, as the rule of the construction or application of concepts. Judgement is central to the distinction between a general or formal logic, which deals with rules alone, and Kant’s transcendental logic, which seeks rules for the application or employment of our a priori concepts in experience: “Transcendental philosophy has this peculiarity that besides the rule (or rather the universal condition of rules), which is given in the pure understanding, it can also specify a priori the instance to which the rule is to be applied.”2 Outside of this transcendental application “by means of determinate rules”, judgement appears as an opaque art: a “natural gift” or “peculiar talent” which may only be practiced and not taught.3 The appearance of the Critique of Judgement marks a shift in this perspective on the role of judgement in transcendental philosophy, which coincides with Kant’s decision that aesthetic judgements themselves are susceptible to a transcendental formulation. Kant defines judgement in the third critique as the operation by which a particular is deemed to be

PART III CHAPTER 3 subsumable under a universal rule or concept, but this definition now yields two distinct types of judgement. On the one hand, where the universal is given a priori, the judgement is “determining” and constitutes an objective field: that of nature and freedom respectively for the first and second critiques. On the other hand there is the case of “reflective” judgement, where instead of proceeding from the universal to the particular, one begins with a particular or singular presentation for which a universal must be sought: the particular presentation is held up for “reflection” in relation to other presentations and the cognitive faculty in general. In the first case, judgement has an ‘executive’ or ‘auxiliary’ role, carrying out the directions given by the understanding or reason. A process of “reflection” may also be involved in these determinations, but its originality emerges in those cases where it is occupied with aspects of experience for which no determinate concept or Idea can be provided by reason or the understanding, namely empirical diversity and aesthetic experience.4 As judgement is the faculty of applying rules, it cannot itself be based in a universal rule, which would in turn require another act of judgement for its correct application. It is this character of judgement which leads Kant, in the first critique, to observe that it can only be an object of practice rather than instruction, outside of its determinate (transcendental) use. In the third critique, this trait is what makes the transcendental principle of judgement uniquely subjective, or “immanent”, and non-legislative in nature. It is not an autonomous faculty, because, by definition, it produces no concepts or ideas of its own that it can objectively prescribe to experience. As an original faculty, however, which is not simply directed by the other faculties or empirical laws, it has its own principles that it prescribes to itself. Kant uses the term “heautonomous” to designate the unusual position of the faculty of judgement between “autonomy” (prescribing over objects) and “heteronomy” (submitted to external rules).5 The challenge of the third critique is that it must present a faculty whose specificity is its absence of a determinate concept or idea not only as a self-contained ‘residence’ for the exercise of reason, but one with claims to necessity and universality.6 It has been shown how the problems of pure and practical reason underlying the third critique are addressed in the previous critiques through the regulative function of an idea or ideal. If the postulation of an ideal unity represents an attempt to resolve the problem ‘from above’, the recourse to the principles of the subjective faculty of 148

PART III CHAPTER 3 judgement appears rather to represent a resolution in a certain sense ‘from below’. In the pure exercise of judgement, there is no faculty which plays a determining role in relation to the object, there is rather a “free” accord of the faculties in relation to a presentation reflected by the imagination. In the absence of a determinate concept, Idea, or interest, the faculties of reason and understanding participate in aesthetic judgements as a pure ‘tendency’. Thus in the judgement of beauty, the understanding is present as a ‘lawfulness’, but without a law or an object; in judgements of the sublime, reason is present as a demand for totality, but without this demand being informed by a determinate Idea. In both judgements, imagination exercises a pure and undetermined power of presentation. Deleuze addresses the significance of the third critique both in his book on Kant, and in a separate article published in the same year (1963) on “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics.” As the title suggests, aesthetic judgements present for Deleuze a dynamic in which thought is engendered or ‘awakened’. As noted in the Introduction, Deleuze avoided the term “genesis” in his earliest works, because of its association with the idea of a metaphysical or psychological ‘origin’.7 The freedom and spontaneity of the accord in judgement does not however signify the presence of an innate tendency or unifying principle but rather the absence of a determinate interest or concept: the “absence of presuppositions” that Deleuze had noted in his work on the image of thought as the criterion of truly beginning in philosophy. Deleuze opposes the genetic approach to thought to the discourse of the conditions of knowledge. Kant remains a dogmatic thinker for Deleuze to the extent that, on the side of the object, he starts from the ‘fact’ of science and morality and works backwards to their conditions of possibility, and, on the side of the subject, he assumes the existence of ‘ready-made’ faculties and their coordination in producing these ‘facts’: “The first two critiques invoked facts, searched for the conditions of these facts, and found them in already-formed faculties.”8 The limitations of this method were the object of Kant’s earliest critics: the notion of a ‘genetic’ method is present in the work of both Maimon and Fichte. The Critique of Judgement already anticipates these objections in posing the problem of a free accord between the faculties, thereby moving the critique from the perspective of the “conditioning” of possible experience to the reflection of and on real experience: “a transcendental formation, a 149

PART III CHAPTER 3 transcendental culture, a transcendental genesis.”9 There is a systematic reversal of the customary order of foundation in Deleuze’s argument, whereby a determined structure is presented as being grounded in an undetermined or “free” relation, and this in turn is located in a contingent event of genesis. Deleuze’s position is based in the first place on the kind of relationship he sees as existing between determining and reflective judgements. In all cases, on Deleuze’s account, judgement expresses a kind of accord between the faculties. In the first two critiques this accord is determined in function of a “predominant” or determining faculty: the understanding in the case of the theoretical interest of reason, and reason in the case of the practical interest. The determinative judgement is ultimately a reflection of this determined relationship between the faculties: Judgement is said to be determining when it expresses the accord of the faculties under a faculty which is itself determining: that is, when it determines an object in accordance with a faculty posited at the outset as legislative.10

The relationship between determining judgements and reflective judgements, on Deleuze’s account, is one of implication rather than being two distinct types.11 Even where the concept is “known”, in the abstract, reflection is required in order to apply it to a particular case: Deleuze gives the example of the doctor making a diagnosis, which recalls Kant’s own examples of empirical judgements in the first critique.12 On the transcendental level, the schematism itself, Deleuze notes, is already an “art” enveloped within the determining judgement which indicates the conditions for a particular to be subsumed beneath the concept. If Kant refers to the schematism as a “hidden art”, Deleuze suggests that it is this hidden art which reveals itself in the case of pure reflective judgements, and thus, conversely, that reflective judgement is the “secret” heart of all determining judgements: In fact, determining judgement and reflective judgement are not like two species of a same genus. Reflective judgement manifests and liberates a depth which remained hidden in the other. But the other, already, was only judgement in virtue of this living depth.13

Reflective judgements thus express a “free” or “indeterminate” accord between the faculties, which Deleuze argues is ultimately the ground of the determinate accords between the faculties in the other two critiques: How can a faculty, legislative in a given interest, induce the other faculties to indispensable complementary tasks, if all the faculties

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PART III CHAPTER 3 together were not first of all capable of a free spontaneous accord, without legislation, with neither interest nor predominance?14

The third critique thus does not simply “complete” the first two critiques, but “provides them with a basis or makes them possible.”15 It is in this way that aesthetic judgements represent for Deleuze not simply a transcendental principle of judgement, but the ground of the coherence of the transcendental apparatus as a whole and a model for the “deepest” operation of thought. If a

determinate relationship

between

the faculties

is only

comprehensible on the basis of their free and indeterminate relationship in reflective judgement, this does not yet account for the origin or intelligibility of the latter. The indeterminate nature of the accord means that it can neither be affirmed categorically, which would imply its being based in a concept, nor can it be postulated as the object of a practical determination. Kant refers to the accord expressed between the faculties in aesthetic judgements as a kind of aesthetic “common sense.”16 But this cannot, from Deleuze’s perspective, be an occasion to invoke a ‘natural’ affinity of the faculties, and Kant himself raises the question of whether aesthetic common sense can be said to be natural or acquired: But is there in fact such a common sense, as a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or is there a still higher principle of reason that makes it only a regulative principle for us, [in order] to bring forth for us, for higher purposes, a common sense in the first place? In other words, is taste an original and natural ability, or is taste only the idea of an ability yet to be acquired and [therefore] artificial, so that a judgement of taste with its requirement for universal assent is in fact only a demand of reason to produce such an agreement in the way we sense?17

The hallmark of the aesthetic accord for Deleuze is its contingency: it is essentially something that comes about rather than being presupposed. The task of the Critique of Judgement is thus to show that the accord between the faculties is the object of a genesis: How can we escape the question: where does this free and indeterminate accord of the faculties come from?… This is the only issue: to establish the genesis of aesthetic common sense, to show how the free accord of the faculties is necessarily engendered”18

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Genetic structure: the sublime While the accord between the faculties expressed in aesthetic judgements is free, an element of constraint or tension is essential on Deleuze’s account for an accord to be engendered. This constraint cannot be in the form of a determination, which presupposes the activity of a faculty through a concept or Idea, but rather takes place through the purely aesthetic realm of feeling. Pure aesthetic judgements are an expression of a ‘superior’ or transcendental form of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain express the effect of a representation upon the subject independently of its objective status: the pure feeling in the subject or the modification of its state, in so far as there is a ‘furthering’ or ‘inhibiting’ of its vital forces.19 Any representation may be considered under this aspect, but it is only the case of judgements of the beautiful and the sublime that we lay claim to a transcendental principle for this feeling, which is to say, claim a universality and necessity for the judgement. Deleuze takes the experience of the sublime as the model for the mechanism of genesis. In the case of the sublime, it is the very conflict between the nature of the faculties, and the “contra-purposive” nature of a presentation that ultimately produces an attunement: we thus apprehend an accord generated from discord itself, or the production of what Deleuze calls a “discordant accord.” This is the specificity of the sublime in its difference from the beautiful, on Kant’s account. While the “liking” in the beautiful arises from an encounter with an object that “seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgement”, sublimity appears to go against our powers of judgement, being “incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination.”20 The “liking” or pleasure in the sublime thus alternates with pain: there is a “feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces”, followed by “an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.”21 While neither the beautiful nor the sublime are ‘objective’ judgements per se, the judgement of the sublime especially pertains to a feeling in the subject rather than any external referent.

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PART III CHAPTER 3 Kant divides judgements of the sublime into two types, the mathematical and the dynamical, according to whether our power of presentation enters into an accord with our cognitive powers or our power of desire. The first case, mathematical sublimity, pertains to what is “absolutely large.” Largeness, as distinct from magnitude, is not a cognitive category, but a category of judgement, based on a reflection that is aesthetic and subjective. The absolute degree of magnitude is the concept of infinity, but our aesthetic appreciation of largeness is finite: while we may apprehend a successive series of presentations indefinitely, our ability to comprehend this series in a single intuition has a limit. Reason, however, “demands totality for all given magnitudes”, even in the case of an infinite series pertaining to intuition. Where the comprehension by the imagination is outstripped by apprehension, it is nevertheless inspired by reason, which “demands comprehension in one intuition, and exhibition of all the members of a progressively increasing series, and it exempts from this demand not even the infinite (space and past time).”22 It is in this striving that we obtain an aesthetic appreciation of absolute largeness or the sublime, an idea that “surpasses all standards of sense”, enlarges the imagination and produces the sentiment of our suprasensible vocation. The combination of the imagination of being compelled to present such an idea, and its inability to do so, produces the combination of pleasure and pain in the sublime. In the case of the dynamically sublime, which follows a similar structure, the presence of immense might in nature arouses fear, because we are aware of our relative physical impotence, while at the same time evoking the absolute rational powers we possess, which are of a different kind to the physical and place us outside of the dominion of nature. For Deleuze, the sublime presents a case where the faculties are genuinely awakened and enter into a relationship that is not based on the representation of an identity. Imagination and reason realise their specific destiny in being confronted with their difference and their limit in a living dynamic rather than from the vantage point of a hierarchical legislation. In the sublime, according to Deleuze, Kant comes close to a “dialectical conception of the faculties”23: [The sublime] brings the various faculties into play in such a manner that they struggle against each other like wrestlers, with one faculty pushing another to its maximum or limit, to which the second faculty reacts by pushing the first toward an inspiration it would not have had on

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PART III CHAPTER 3 its own. One faculty pushes another to a limit, but they each make the one go beyond the limits of the other. The faculties enter into relationship at their deepest level, where they are most foreign to each other. They embrace each other from their greatest point of distance.24

This interpretation of the sublime that serves as a model for Deleuze’s presentation of the communication of the faculties faced with the problem, in the absence of a mediating identity: the crucial experience of a “thought without an image” and the rupturing of “common sense”. In the sublime, the imagination is constrained by the demand of reason, but this constraint is at the same time the urge to overcome its own limits and is thus a liberation. It thus forms the background to his account of the event of thought, which combines the notion of undergoing a violence and at the same time realising a higher freedom: we are faced with a presentation that is “too big for me”, and our capacities are expanded in response. The hallmark of the genetic mechanism is thus the presence of an indeterminate idea which spurs the faculties to ‘overreach’ themselves in a paradoxical exercise that both constrains and liberates, and in which they realise their specificity, their relation with the other faculties and their highest vocation. While this structure is most explicit in the case of judgements of the sublime, it is a relationship that is repeated on different levels throughout the Critique of Judgement, and marks a relationship to the ideal that represents a significant development from the approach of the first two critiques. The critical convention regarding Ideas is that they are theoretically undetermined but susceptible to a practical determination. The practical determination of an idea is realised in the case of the concept of freedom, but their status otherwise is on the whole regulative. In this latter case, we have seen how principles of reason present themselves as analogons of the schemata in providing a rule for actions, and to systematise the operations of the lower faculties. It has already been indicated with respect to the concept of “purposiveness”, that in the case of the Critique of Judgement, consistent with its approach ‘from below’, it is rather as if the lower faculties attempt to present ‘analogons’ of the Idea. In the sublime as well, the imagination “strains to treat nature as a schema” for the Ideas.25

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The aesthetic idea and genesis in the beautiful The clearest example of a sensible analogon of the Idea in pure aesthetic judgements, however, is Kant’s notion of the “aesthetic idea.” The aesthetic idea is first introduced with respect to beauty in fine art, particularly poetry, where a given concept is connected with an image (or a series of images) that goes beyond any determinable content of the concept and is nevertheless connected to it. The concept is ‘expanded’ indefinitely, the cognitive powers ‘quickened’ in response to a presentation that it cannot adequately account for.26 Kant then suggests that the aesthetic idea is also operative in natural beauty27, with the difference that no concept of the object acts as a starting point. The aesthetic idea forms a ‘counterpart’ to the rational idea, designating the ‘unexpoundable presentations of the imagination’ (by concepts), which represent an inversion of the rational idea as ‘indemonstrable concepts of reason’ (in intuition).28 From the perspective of the artist, the ability to produce aesthetic ideas is what defines “genius.” Through aesthetic ideas, the imagination “creates, as it were, a second nature”, giving sensible expression to rational ideas “in a way which goes beyond the limits of experience, namely, with a completeness for which no example can be found in nature.”29 In a similar approach to that followed with regard to the two types of judgement, Deleuze argues that aesthetic and rational ideas are not two separate types of idea, but rather that the former is simply the ‘reflected image’ of the rational idea, whose indemonstrability is expressed subjectively, or immanently, on the level of the presentation, as its inexpoundability by concepts. From a creative point of view, the aesthetic idea “expresses what is inexpressible”30 in the rational idea, by producing the intuition “of a nature other than that which is given to us: another nature whose phenomena would be true spiritual events, and whose events of the spirit, immediate natural determinations.”31 The aesthetic idea takes its place alongside the sublime as a “positive, but secondary” presentation of the idea, while the sublime presentation is “direct, but negative” presentation through the projection of the infinite onto nature.32 Deleuze does not consider that Kant’s account of judgements of the beautiful presents on its own the key characteristics for a true engendering of 155

PART III CHAPTER 3 an accord. Reason does not appear to have any direct role in judgements of taste, at least in their initial exposition, and the nexus of pleasure and pain that formed the crucial index of the “discordant accord” in the sublime appears to be absent from the beautiful. Kant presents the beautiful as “restful” in comparison to the “agitation” of the sublime, without the “rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object” that characterises the latter.33 Understanding the beautiful as expression of the aesthetic idea, however, does suggest the participation of reason in judgements of taste, and however subdued the beautiful appears in relation to the sublime, it remains that by itself it just as much represents an ‘enlivening’ and ‘expansion’ of our cognitive powers in relation to a presentation that both exceeds and compels our attention. The nature of the aesthetic idea highlights a dynamism in the beautiful that may be overlooked in Kant’s apparently formalist aesthetic. This in turn can be placed alongside Kant’s theory in his anthropological writings concerning the essentially “oscillating” character of pleasure in order to suggest that the beautiful does in fact present the ‘genetic’ qualities outlined by Deleuze. In bringing out the analogy and complementarity between the beautiful and the sublime we can present a more balanced picture of the aesthetic underpinnings of Deleuze’s image of thought. While Deleuze often presents the genesis of thought as a sublime—monstrous and overwhelming— event, it also appears, on a more “micro” level, under a more “beautiful” aspect: a spark which runs through a series of contingent fragments, precisely the “curve” drawn through singular points. The pleasure in the beautiful arises from the reflection of a singular object in the imagination. What is reflected is the ‘form’ of the object: the object taken in abstraction from its material or sensational elements. The pleasure in the beautiful is “disinterested”, which is to say that we consider the object apart from any theoretical or moral interest, and also apart from the ‘lower’ aesthetic interest in what is “agreeable” to us. The free play of the imagination in its reflection upon the object arouses the activity of the understanding, which nevertheless cannot provide any determinate concept. In the light of Kant’s account of the aesthetic idea, we can appreciate that the absence of a determinate concept is essential in order that the activity of the faculties is extended and maintained in an indefinite ‘play’ upon the object. The ‘formality’ of beauty is thus not that of perfect geometrical shapes or strict 156

PART III CHAPTER 3 regularity.34 In the first place, these forms manifest a determinate concept or law (the geometric definition of the square, or mathematical measurement), but in addition such forms are ultimately ‘boring’, which is to say that they are static, or of a uniform movement, a quality which is directly attributable to their being grounded and ‘stabilised’ in a concept. Thus, as in the example given by Kant, if someone can describe the regularity of a plantation as “beautiful” after spending days in the uncultivated jungle, this is only in virtue of an immediate appreciation of a change in state: only the “extravagant diversity” of nature, however, can “nourish taste permanently.”35 To understand “form” as a ‘snapshot’ perception of the determinate shape or structure of an object is to lose this dynamism implicit in Kant’s notion of formal purposiveness, and is to tend towards a conceptual rule of form. We have already noted that the experience of the beautiful is attached to a certain duration: the character of its presentations is the tendency to selfpreservation.36 It is not only mathematical and geometrical concepts that are excluded from pure aesthetic judgements, but also the introduction of notions of purpose into aesthetic appreciation—the accord between form and function that represents the classical or teleological ideal of beauty. There is a paradox in the quality of the presentation of the beautiful, as the absence of a determinate concept entails both its singularity and its repetitive character. It is irreducibly singular, because it is endowed with an internal coherence that is nevertheless unaccountable for conceptually in a way which would identify what constitutes its singularity (and thus eliminate what is inessential). At the same time, this is also what gives rise to an indefinite succession of incomplete determinations, as the absence of a concept produces the dynamism of the presentation, the indefinite “play” of the faculties in relation to the object, which repeats the object as always different. Kant’s anthropological observations on pleasure thus appear to have a transcendental correlate in the aesthetic principles developed in the Critique of Judgement, where presentations manifest a perpetual differentiation and renewal that does not rely on an empirical and external difference between states, but rather a state that ‘in itself’ is a change of state. In the beautiful, the pleasure arising out of the reflection upon the object is experienced as essentially contingent. This is not a cognition of

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PART III CHAPTER 3 empirical contingency, which would oppose and refer this contingency to a concept of causal necessity, but rather constitutes an aesthetic principle.37 We can appreciate this principle as the positive formulation of the absence of a determinate concept or idea in the beautiful. In the absence of a structuring concept, we can assign no beginning or end to the presentation, in the form of a ‘right’ or paradigmatic moment: it is grasped at ‘any moment whatever’, such that any moment is the ‘right’ one. The beautiful is experienced as purposive for our cognitive powers, despite the fact that no concept can be produced for it, and pleasure is the dominant ‘tone’ of the experience of the beautiful, because it envelops this favouring contingency which stimulates the faculties. If in the sublime the imagination projects a “negative” presentation of the idea onto nature as its supersensible substrate, the aesthetic idea of beautiful is made up a positive presentation of indeterminacy, provoked by the singular, which we could express, following a Bergsonian formula, as the “continuous creation of unpredictable novelty.”38 We can suggest, then, an analogy between the relationship of reason and the imagination in the sublime, and that of reason and the understanding in the beautiful. Just as the sublime commands the imagination to exceed itself in attempting to grasp the supersensible, the imagination enjoins the understanding to exert and expand itself in attending to the aesthetic idea. The difference between the two does not pertain to the absence of discord in the beautiful but, as Kant suggests, the ‘direction’ of the accord, whether based in purposiveness, or contra-purposiveness. The paradox of the beautiful is that it presents us with the commensurability of the incommensurable: the beautiful presentation is ‘commensurate’ with our powers of understanding, without thereby being ‘understood’, and the imagination is ‘commensurate’ with the understanding without thereby being subordinated under a concept. The paradox proper to the sublime seems rather to be the incommensurability of the commensurable. The supersensible is revealed as the true ‘measure’ of nature and ‘adequate’ to it, its ultimate law, but in this gesture the imagination, and the sensible nature that it apprehends, are revealed to be inadequate to their own adequation, their own law. Supersensible nature is adequate to sensible nature, which paradoxically is not adequate to it: the incommensurability of nature and freedom is demonstrated at the same time that freedom makes itself commensurate with nature. If, in the beautiful, nature presents itself as 158

PART III CHAPTER 3 commensurate with our faculties, which are nevertheless unable to comprehend it, in the sublime we present our powers as commensurate with nature, which in turn cannot respond in kind. The subsistence of pain as a definite ‘note’ in sublime, rather than being indistinguishable in the oscillation of pleasure and pain that makes up the ‘feeling of life’, can be accounted for by the fact that, while the failure of the imagination is in a sense ‘compensated’ by the revelation of its supersensible destiny, it can only carry out its ‘destiny’ by representing its own failure. The pleasure in the sublime relies on a ‘humiliation’ of the activity of the imagination, whereas in the beautiful the exercise of the understanding is rather ‘suspended’: never proceeding to a determinate concept, but never having a sense of absolute failure either by virtue of the perceived purposiveness which always makes comprehension seem possible. This chapter has focused on how aesthetic judgements can be said to engender thought. The next and last chapter will address the broader issue of aesthetic experience as a model for thought. Throughout his work, Deleuze incorporates aesthetic elements in his accounts of the operation of thought: in its “event”, but also in its mode of communication with others and way of inhabiting the world. The viability of such an approach is already raised by Kant, forming the central problem of the antinomy of aesthetic judgements. The spur of the aesthetic is ultimately the element which both singularises and universalises our expressions of thought: the drama and beatitude of life on the “plane.”

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PART III CHAPTER 3 Endnotes for Part III Chapter 3 CPR, A132-136/B171-175. CPR, A135/B174. 3 CPR, A133/B172. 4 CJ, 213’ (First introduction). Kant gives an account of the determination of nature in its universality, where judgement “not only reflects but also determines”, but requires “no special principle” for this reflection. 5 CJ, p. 185 6 CJ, p. 174. 7 See ES, F15/E31, F122/108, and discussion in the Introduction. 8 “The Idea of Genesis…”, p. 62. 9 “The Idea of Genesis…”, p. 62. 10 PCK, F85/E59. 11 This is also an argument of Béatrice Longuenesse, in her Kant and the Capacity to Judge. 12 CPR, A134/B173, “A physician, a judge, or a ruler may have at command many excellent pathological, legal, or political rules, even to the degree that he may become a profound teacher of them, and yet, nonetheless, may easily stumble in their application.” 13 PCK, F87/E60. 14 “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”, p. 60. 15 PCK, F72/E50, Deleuze’s italics. 16 CJ, p. 238. 17 CJ, p. 240. 18 “The Idea of Genesis…”, p. 62. 19 CJ, p. 278. 20 CJ, p. 245. 21 CJ, p. 245. 22 CJ, p. 254. 23 “The Idea of Genesis…”, p. 63. 24 “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy”, CC, F4849E34, translation modified. 25 CJ, p. 265. 26 CJ, p. 315. 27 CJ, p. 320. 28 CJ, p. 342-344. 29 CJ, p. 314. 30 PCK, F82/E57. 31 PCK, F82/E56-57, referring to CJ, §49. 32 PCK, F83/E57. 33 CJ, p. 258. 34 CJ, pp. 242-243. 35 CJ, pp. 242-243. 36 CJ, 207’ (First Introduction). 37 CJ, p. 191. 38 “The possible and the real”, La pensée et le mouvant, Oeuvres, F1344 (scholarly pagination 115)/E123, translation modified. 1 2

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CHAPTER 4:

‘A’ TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC

The interest of aesthetic judgements for Deleuze is that they further the critical project by providing a model for the viability of a thought that does not rely on a transcendent ground of identity, a “free” schematism whose affiliation is rather with the Idea than with the concept. It is in the beautiful and the sublime that we directly apprehend the positive dimension of the disorientation that this implies. Kant mediates the discrepancy between the realms of nature and freedom by projecting an underlying unity of the sensible and supersensible, as regulative ideal in the second critique through the notion of the immortality of the soul, and as principle of reflection in the third critique through the notion of natural purposiveness. Deleuze, by contrast, seeks the sense of the discrepancy between nature and freedom in the immediate experience of the aesthetic, where discord is itself the principle of an accord. It is at the limit of the possibilities of the experience of nature—the effect on the subject of a presentation that exceeds it—that Deleuze discerns the foundation of the relationship of thought and nature. Having analysed the functioning of aesthetic judgements on their own account and with respect to Kant’s critique, we can provide an overview of the way in which elements of the aesthetic experience are integrated into Deleuze’s conception of thought. This is first reflected on the level of the experience of thought as an event, inseparable from the contingencies of “life”. In the second place we can examine how this conception of thought is “translatable” in the light of its extreme singularity, thus referring to Kant’s antinomy of aesthetic judgements and his theory of artistic expression.

PART III CHAPTER 4

The aesthetic image of thought Apart from his analysis of the “genetic” function of aesthetic judgements in Kant’s critique, Deleuze has always referred the ultimate sense of thought in his own philosophy to the provocative impact of a contingent encounter which divests the subject of her habitual frames of reference. Deleuze perhaps most succinctly expresses the essential elements of this conception and their relationship to each other in a passage from his work on Proust, in which art communicates through “signs” capable of arousing the pure power of thought1: What forces us to think is the sign. The sign is the object of an encounter; but it is precisely the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of what it leads us to think. The act of thinking does not proceed from a simple natural possibility; on the contrary, it is the only true creation. Creation is the genesis of the act of thinking within thought itself. This genesis implies something that does violence to thought, which wrests it from its natural stupor and its merely abstract possibilities.2

It is this configuration of thought in terms of its event that is both opposed to the dogmatic image of “common sense” and which evokes Kant’s aesthetic experience. It is this event, in the form of a “problematic instance” which formed the point of departure for the determination of Ideas in the previous section, displacing the operation of concepts. It also forms one side of a dichotomy that opposes the “normative” elements of thought in its established form to the conditions of the initiation of thought. Reprising these terms of his work on Proust, one of the recurring themes of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is the necessity for thought to undergo a “violence” in order to be awakened from its “natural stupor”, “so much is it the case that there is no thought but involuntary thought, solicited in a constrained form within thought, all the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, from the fortuitous in the world.”3 This position is reflected throughout Deleuze’s work on critique. In his book on Hume, for example, Deleuze sets up an opposition between the laws of association which account for the “habits of thought, everyday notions of good sense, current ideas, and complexes of ideas which correspond to the most general and most constant needs common to all minds…”4, and the affective force of circumstance, which alone can account for “the singular content, the profound and the particular”: “Circumstance gives the relation its sufficient reason.”5 There is in

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PART III CHAPTER 4 Hume, according to Deleuze, a dialectic between, on the one hand, the principles of association that “provid[e] the subject with its necessary form”, and on the other hand the principles of the passions that, reflected in the imagination, have a selective role as a principle of individuation, and “provid[e] it with its singular content.”6 As well as justifying the particular form of a relation, the conjunction of circumstance and the affective response of the subject determine the direction of the relation of thought, its irreversibility, which is the condition of the practical constitution of the subject. Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche continues this thread of the necessary encounter with an outside element to provide the “sufficient reason” of thought. Against the image of thought which posits an internal power of thought to realise itself, we must introduce “the forces or power that determine it to think, and to think this rather than that”: “any thinkable or thought sense is only brought into effect insofar as the forces that correspond to it in thought also take hold of something, appropriate something, outside thought.”7 Deleuze again describes a dialectic, this time Nietzschean, whereby life serves to render thought “active”, which in turn serves to render life “affirmative”.8 As in Deleuze’s account of the sublime, undoubtedly inspired by Nietzsche, this relationship is a dynamic one in which each term obliges the other to exceed itself and the other: Life would be the active force of thought, but thought would be the affirmative power of life. Both would go in the same direction, carrying each other along, smashing restrictions, matching each other step for step, in a burst of unparalleled creativity.9

This affinity between thought and life emerges as “the essence of art”.10 Art is a “stimulant” to the will to power: the will to power posits its affirmation of the active forces of life in the work of art and the work of creation. The work of art elevates the powers of the false against the ideal of the true and the real, creating a “second nature” and tracing paths of “new possibilities of life”: “For the artist, appearance no longer means the negation of the real in this world, but this kind of selection, correction, duplication, affirmation.”11

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The aesthetic community of thinkers Insofar as Deleuze seeks to make aesthetic experience a model for the foundation of thought, one of the principal challenges he faces is to show how the singularity of aesthetic experience is reconcilable with some form of communicability. In the terms of Kant’s analysis, this is the problem of reconciling of the singularity of the aesthetic judgement with its universality, as aesthetic judgements imply a demand for, or the necessary possibility of, universal assent. The apparent contradiction in these qualities of aesthetic judgements provides the terms of the antinomy of taste in the third critique. The nature of this universality is essentially problematic: empirical agreement between subjects on the subject of the beautiful not only cannot be the basis for such a sense of universality, they cannot even be said to themselves derive from any objective principle of universality at the basis of a judgement of taste, such as would be represented by an objective concept. The absence of a concept for judgement is why judgement—judgement as taste, and judgement in its general sense—can neither be taught or learned, hence Kant’s reference to judgement in the first critique as “the specific quality of so-called mother-wit”, whose “lack no school can make good.”12 In this respect, taste resembles the capacity to make beautiful objects. For art to be the object of an aesthetic judgement, there must also be no determinate rule of its production. Art is thus the product of “genius”, understood as the “innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”13 This rule is indeterminate and unable to be analysed or communicated scientifically (through concepts) by the artist. The relationship between artist or instructor and pupil is one where the teaching is done by example, however much may be learned from acquiring ‘academic’ skills. The aim is not to imitate the works produced by past masters, it is rather the “spirit” of the masterpiece which is to be emulated. The ‘community’ between artists, and between artworks, does not involve any similarity or underlying identity, but rather the opposite—“originality” is required of works of fine art. It is for this reason that art, unlike science, does not ‘progress’, but also for this reason that it is never ‘complete’, having no determinate rule that can be 164

PART III CHAPTER 4 passed on and built upon or established once and for all (which is why the artwork is an “example”, but not an “archetype”).14 Genius is nevertheless a talent of communication: of expressing aesthetic ideas in such a way that they arouse the audience, and send a form of message to geniuses to come. The new genius naturally does not reproduce or imitate but renews the principle expressed in the original: the product of a genius… is an example that is meant not to be imitated, but to be followed by another genius….The other genius, who follows the example, is aroused by it to a feeling of his own originality, which allows him to exercise in art his freedom from the constraint of rules, and to do so in such a way that art itself acquires a new rule by this15

In the case of the universal assent to aesthetic judgements as well, Kant emphasises that we cannot simply ‘imitate’ other’s judgements of taste, but must recreate them anew for ourselves.16 This is to suggest that the true ‘agreement’ between judgements of taste is not an empirical one where the ‘same’ object is judged to be beautiful by different people, but that between different judgements (whether of the ‘same’ object or not), insofar as they lay claim to the same principle. It is the existence of a principle for aesthetic judgements which can endow them with an ‘internal’ (“subjective”) universality and necessity which is important for Kant, over and above any empirical agreement or disagreement between subjects. Understanding the universality of aesthetic common sense on the same model as genius, as exemplary in nature rather than determinate, explains the ambiguous status of aesthetic common sense, as both presupposed and ideal. In concrete terms, the character of the example is that it refers outside of itself: to the student, to the future genius. If Kant defines pleasure as “the way in which we are instantly obliged to leave the present, without it being determined into what other present we will enter, apart from it being at least a quite other present”17, we can understand the sense of universality in aesthetic judgements as the felt obligation to refer the experience to an indeterminate future which would form the virtual thread linking actual cases of the beautiful. Deleuze’s model of the communicability of thought resembles this interpretation of the universality, or “transmissibility”, of aesthetic judgement in several respects. It also reproduced his notion of the communication between the faculties of thought as a communication ‘at the limit’, rather than an accord based on a concept of identity. The principal feature is that 165

PART III CHAPTER 4 communication does not take place on the basis of a common denominator, but rather through a form of relay where the injunction is to repeat what cannot be represented, and (thus) repeat as different. Deleuze begins his Difference and Repetition with the definition of repetition as the only possible response to “something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent… Not to add a second and a third time to the first, but to raise the first time to the ‘nth’ power.”18 Deleuze’s model of the thinker is analogous to Kant’s figure of the “genius”, a position also influenced by Nietzsche. In Dialogues, Deleuze speaks of the “great health” of the philosopher, which is not the physical health of the organism, but expresses a positive and aesthetic aberration of nature. He cites here Nietzsche on Schopenhauer: It sometimes seems as though the artist, and the philosopher in particular, is only a chance in his time… nature, which never makes a leap, has made its one leap in creating them, and a leap of joy moreover, for nature then feels that for the first time it has reached its goal—where it realises it has to unlearn having goals and that it has played the game of life with too high stakes. This knowledge transfigures nature, and a gentle evening-weariness, that which men call ‘beauty’, reposes on its face.19

In his book on Kant, Deleuze describes the genius as “a call thrown out to another genius; but taste becomes a sort of medium between the two, allowing for the waiting period if the other genius is not yet born.”20 In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze takes up Nietzsche’s image of the philosopher as a “comet”, whose “fantastic paths” we must rediscover21: The succession of philosophers is not an eternal sequence of sages, still less a historical sequence, but a broken succession, a succession of comets. Their discontinuity and repetition do not amount to the eternity of the sky which they cross, nor to the historicity of the earth which they fly over.22

The essential feature of this communication is that each instance is animated by the “spirit” of the first, from a wholly different position, and at the same time refers to a future from which another will arise. This repetition expresses a “disjointed” temporality, which is neither eternal nor historical, but that of the “untimely”, following Nietzsche’s imperative to “act in an untimely manner, thus against the time, and in this way on the time, in favour (I hope) of a time to come.”23 Deleuze in fact repudiates the communicative ideal in philosophy of “discussion” or “democratic conversation” based on a shared understanding of meaning: “Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say:

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PART III CHAPTER 4 ‘Let’s discuss this.’”24 Where communication arises in philosophy, it is not through a pooling of common interests and problems, but precisely through a tangential relationship where a component of one problem becomes a component of a new, and necessarily different, problem. In one sense, this means thought is a necessarily solitary activity—“When you work, you are necessarily in absolute solitude.”25 On the other hand, this solitude is, according to Deleuze, “extremely crowded.”26 The crowd consists of “encounters”, and the elements of an encounter are the opposite for Deleuze of an object of “recognition”: it is rather a merging of “movements, ideas, events, entities.”27 Just as Deleuze seeks to undermine the notion that the basic structure of experience is the representation of an object by a subject, by uncovering the engagement of “larval subjects” and “fragmentary objects” conjugated in function of a problem, he also challenges a particular configuration of the relationship of the subject to the Other as ground of communication. It is not necessary to have taken aesthetic experience as a model of thought in order for it to raise issues of the communicability of what appears to be the most singular phenomenon. Philonenko analyses Kant’s antinomy of aesthetic judgement as posing the problem of communication with “concrete” others: aesthetic pleasure, like love, is precisely what most demands to be communicated and which is least susceptible in principle to formulation in a concept.28 He presents the antinomy in terms of a “tragic” choice between an empirical

position

involving

the

renunciation

of

the

possibility

of

communication, given the fundamental “ipseity” of the self, or a dogmatic renunciation of the concrete self in favour of a solely rational communication through the concept, which reduces the “ipseity” of both self and other. The resolution of the antinomy bears on issues concerning the whole of critique, as its basis is the problem of reconciling form and content, the universal and the particular. In this sense, the Critique of Judgement, for Philonenko as well, engages the stakes of the entire critical project. For Philonenko, the antinomy confronts us with what he calls, following Fichte, a “necessary circle.” The critical process that could yield a solution to the antinomy of aesthetic judgement—which precisely raises the possibility of critique—presupposes that the logical principles of communication in which critique is founded are already given. But “if I don’t presuppose the laws of general logic, I can no longer even think, nor think with others.”29 This necessary circle on the part of 167

PART III CHAPTER 4 human thought to presuppose itself and the other is the inevitable character of a “finite reason” for whom concept and laws are tools, rather identical with its being or masters of its existence. We can consider this circle at which Philonenko considers it necessary to stop as in some respects the point of departure for Deleuze. Deleuze’s analysis of aesthetic judgements as a process of genesis is ultimately based on defying the postulated necessity for critique to “presuppose itself.” If we consider Deleuze’s understanding of communication and the role he accords to “Otherness”, his tendency in the final instance is to develop a thought which operates in the absence of the other, in any ordinary sense—as also without a conventional subject. The “nature” of this world without self or other, moreover, is precisely aesthetic. Deleuze analyses the concept of “Otherness” (autrui) in his reading of Michel Tournier’s Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique.30 The crucial significance of the Other, for Deleuze, is not in its status as an object or another subject within our perceptual or ethical field, but as a structuring principle for the field of our experience as a whole. It is the presence of the Other—as a principle if not as a fact—which provides a virtual “margin” around all objects of my experience, mental or physical, so that I not only perceive them in the immediate aspect which presents itself to my perspective, but also sense, however indeterminately, their relationship with respect to other points of view: “The part of the object that I do not see I posit as visible to Others… the objects behind my back, I sense them coming together and forming a world, precisely because they are visible to, and are seen by, Others.”31 The principle of the Other represents what is possible in my own field of experience, and actual Others express the principle of a possible world outside of my experience. It is thus a condition of the constitution of objects and ‘worldness’, per se, and in this sense there is some agreement between Deleuze and Philonenko on the necessity of the category of the Other for the formal constitution of my thought: We have tried to show in this sense how the Other conditions the entire perceptual field, the application to this field of the categories of the perceived object and the perceiving subject, and finally the distribution of concrete Others in each field. In effect, perceptual laws affecting the constitution of objects (form-background etc), the temporal determination of the subject, and the successive development of worlds, seemed to us to depend on the possible as structure-Other.32

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PART III CHAPTER 4 If the Other, in this respect, functions as a condition of possibility of the ‘world’ as we know it, in other respects it represents a limitation. In Deleuze’s reading of Tournier’s novel, which is a rewriting of the story of Robinson Crusoe, the loss of the Other is first felt as a pain: the experience of objects and the self is no longer cushioned or mediated by the intervening principle of the perspective of the other, and becomes sharp and confronting, …there reigns alone the brutal opposition of sun and earth, of an unbearable light and an obscure abyss: the “summary law of all or nothing”. The known and the unknown, the perceived and unperceived confront each other absolutely in a battle without nuance.33

Over time, however, the experience of Crusoe reorganises itself along other lines, or rather, it ‘disorganises’ itself in a manner which is nevertheless viable and which reveals “another” nature. Nature without the Other is expressed as an “elemental” nature, by which Deleuze does not mean a fundamental nature, but rather the opposite: the world as pure surface or “Image”. From this perspective, the principle of the Other is not enabling, but “imprisoning”: it is the “Other” who “has imprisoned the elements within the limits of bodies”, while “hiding” the “pure surface.”34 There is no hostility or “negation” of the Other in this process: in his book on Nietzsche and later works with Guattari, Deleuze will argue that it is precisely the structure of Otherness that generates ressentiment toward the other and inhibits desire. It is rather that, for Deleuze, true communication, and in fact true love and desire, pass via the conjugation of fragments or “elementary fields” rather than on the level of subject and object. In love, Deleuze writes in Dialogues, it is a matter of “extracting the pure event which unites me to those whom I love… when they enter a room they are not persons, characters or subjects, they are an atmospheric variation, a change of hue, an imperceptible molecule, a discrete population, a fog or a cloud of droplets.”35 And in the conclusion to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze locates the field of thought as ultimately beyond the structure of the other as well as the self, “where singularities are free to be deployed and distributed within pure Ideas.”36

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Life and thought on the plane There are cases where old age gives, not an eternal youth, but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one delights in a moment of grace between life and death, and where all of the pieces of the machine come together in order to send into the future a gesture [tr ait] which traverses the ages…. Kant’s Critique of Judgement… 37 —Deleuze, “Thus the question…”, What is Philosophy? A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete force [puis sanc e] and beatitude. Be tw e en one’s life and de ath, ther e is a mom e nt that is no longer anything bu t a life play ing w ith de ath. 38 —Deleuze, “L’immanence: une vie…”

The last of Deleuze’s works to be published during his lifetime returns to the question of how we define the “transcendental field.”39 The piece unites elements of what we have understood to be the pre-philosophical terrain, or plane ‘of right’, with the ‘ground-zero’ of aesthetic awareness. It is a meditation that seems to span and contract all the moments of Deleuze’s philosophy, “all the names in history”, where we precisely glimpse the “crowd” that inhabits Deleuze’s solitary thought. This is no doubt intentional: what a transcendental field is, for Deleuze, is that “pure plane of immanence” populated by singularities which go to make up “A LIFE.”40 The indefinite article, ‘a’, is the “index” of the transcendental: what is not, or not yet, attributed to or actualised in the transcendent figures of subject or object, Being or Act. Deleuze invokes a series of proper names—as singular as the indefinite—in order to express this field: Sartre (on the transcendence of the ego), James (on the flux of consciousness), Spinoza (the immanence of substance), Fichte (the intuition of activity). The vitality and “beatitude” of “a life” is as opposed to the purpose and definition of an organism as it is to the life of a subject. It is a signature trait of “very small children”, who “all resemble each other and have hardly any individuality; but they have singularities, a smile, a gesture, a frown, events which are not subjective characters”41, as well as the dying, in which “the life of the individual has given way to an impersonal life, and yet singular, which extracts a pure event liberated from the accidents of internal and external life.”42 It is characterised by what is essentially “in-between”: the “passage” from one moment to another, the hovering between life and death, a

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PART III CHAPTER 4 transcendental “determinability” which presents “the immensity of empty time where one sees the event still to come and already arrived”.43 The transcendental plane is that ‘from which’ we come to philosophy, and it is appropriately from within this perspective of the “liberty” of old age that Deleuze writes his earlier piece on “what is philosophy?”, before retreating to the beatitude of his transcendental pastures.44 The later piece on “a life” works only with the opposition between the singularities of the pure plane of immanence and the forms of transcendence which subjectify and reify them: in this earlier piece we see how it is possible to “inhabit” this field, and its relation to the activity of thought. Here, the plane is understood as sheltering the “seeds” of the concept and the “conceptual personae” who create the concept. Deleuze uses “concept” here in the same way as he earlier understood the Idea: as that which gives ideal unity to a collection of singularities. In this way, it is also a form of schematism: the creation of the concept is its construction, which presupposes the transcendental plane as source of singularities and guarantor of the autonomy of the concept: the following definition of philosophy can be taken as being decisive: knowledge through pure concepts. But there is no reason to oppose knowledge through concepts, and through construction of concepts in possible experience or intuition. For, according to the Nietzschean verdict, you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them—that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with them but that 45 shelters their seeds and the personae who cultivate them.

The creativity of thought is opposed to its image as discovery, representation, contemplation or communication. The creation of concepts consists in tracing a line through the singularities of the plane and thus redistributing its coordinates. As created, the concept refers necessarily to the persona of the thinker, and her “taste”. As a creation, however, the concept also posits itself as independent of the “artist”: the concept is not given, it is created, or to be created; it is not formed, it posits itself in itself, auto-position. The two imply each other, since what is truly created, from the living thing to the work of art, enjoys by that token an auto-position of itself, or an auto-poetic character which distinguishes it. The more the concept is created, the more it posits itself. What depends on a free creative activity is also what posits itself in itself, independently and necessarily.46

Deleuze notes that we find such an attention to, and respect of, the “philosophical reality” of the concept in the post-Kantians: Schelling and Hegel

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PART III CHAPTER 4 in particular. But this is at the price, according to Deleuze, of “an indeterminate

extension

of

philosophy”

over

other

disciplines,

the

reintroduction of universals, and the reduction of the creators of the concept to “ghostly puppets.”47 To this “universal encyclopaedia of the concept, that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity”, Deleuze proposes for philosophy a more modest task: “a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments.”48 Against the backdrop of the question—“what is…?”, “what is philosophy?”— which encompasses the swarming host of all the names in history, the task of the response is not to “match” [recueillir] the question, in positing an essence or gathering an image of the whole, but to “determine its moment, an occasion and circumstances, its landscapes and personae, its conditions and unknowns.”49

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PART III CHAPTER 4 Endnotes for Part III Chapter 4 Proust and signs, F105-106/E86. Proust and signs, F118-119/E97, translation modified. 3 DR, F181/E139, translation modified. 4 ES, F115/E103, Deleuze’s italics. 5 ES, F115/E103, Deleuze’s italics. 6 ES, F116-117/E104. 7 NP, F118/E104, my italics. 8 NP. F116/E101. 9 NP, F115/E101. Both Deleuze’s account of the sublime and his account of the relationship between life and thought here is no doubt influenced by Nietzsche’s own aesthetic which posits a dialectic between the ‘Dionysian’ and ‘Apollonian’ impulses. 10 NP, F116/E101. 11 NP, F117/E103, translation modified. 12 CPR, A133/B172. 13 CJ, p. 307. 14 CJ, pp. 172-178. 15 CJ, p. 318. 16 CJ, p. 79. 17 AP, §60. 18 DR, F1-2/E1, translation modified. 19 Dialogues, F12/E6. 20 PCK, F82-83/E57. 21 NP, F121/E106. 22 NP, F122-123/E107. 23 NP, F122/E107, translation modified. 24 QP?, F32/E28. 25 Dialogues, F13/E6. 26 Dialogues, F13/E6, translation modified. 27 Dialogues, F13/E6. 28 Alexis Philonenko, “L’antinomie du jugement de gout”, in Le transcendental et la pensée moderne: Etudes d’histoire de la philosophie, p. 222. 29 Philonenko, “L’antinomie du judgement de gout”, p. 231. 30 “Michel Tournier and the World without Others”, appendix to The Logic of Sense, F350372/E301-321. Deleuze reprises the essential features of this analysis in his later work with Guattari, What is Philosophy?, F21-23/E16-17. 31 The Logic of Sense, F355/E305. 32 The Logic of Sense, F370/E318. 33 The Logic of Sense, F355/306, translation modified (English gives “battle with nuances” rather than “without nuance”, for “combat sans nuances”. 34 The Logic of Sense, F363/E312, F366/E315. 35 Dialogues, F81/E66. 36 DR, F361/E282. 37 QP?, F7-8/E1-2. 38 “L’immanence: une vie…”, Philosophie, p. 4, p. 5. 39 “L’immanence: une vie…”, Philosophie. 40 “L’immanence: une vie…”, pp.3-4, p. 4. 41 “L’immanence: une vie…”, p. 6. 42 “L’immanence: une vie…”, p. 5. 43 “L’immanence: une vie…”, p. 3, p. 5. 44 Introduction to QP?, “The Question Then…”. Deleuze published an earlier form of this piece as “The Conditions of the question: what is philosophy?” in 1990, before it was incorporated into his 1991 book with Guattari. I am treating it here as “Deleuze’s” piece. 45 QP?, F12/E7, translation modified. The English edition renders the crucial sentence, “Mais il n’y a pas lieu d’opposer la connaissance par concepts et par construction de concepts dans l’expérience possible ou l’intuition.” as: “But there is no reason to oppose knowledge through pure concepts and the construction of concepts within possible experience on the one hand and through intuition on the other.” This seems not only to be a grammatically awkward or even impossible reading (or ‘division’) of the sentence (you oppose one thing and another, you don’t oppose one thing or another) but shows an unawareness of the Kantian distinction between 1 2

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“knowledge through concepts” and (knowledge through) “construction of concepts”, and that concepts are precisely constructed either in “possible experience” or “intuition.” 46 QP?, p. 16. 47 QP?, F16-17/E12. 48 QP?, F17/E12. 49 QP?, F8/E2.

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IN CONCLUSION…

Deleuze’s status as a ‘Kantian’ does not in the end depend on the extent of Deleuze’s engagement with Kant’s ideas, but on the nature of this engagement: how Deleuze in fact formulates an original philosophy, significantly different from Kant’s, but taking certain key critical tenets as his points of departure. What constitutes a ‘key critical tenet’ is hardly beyond dispute: the choices in this matter are what define and distinguish a strain of Kantianism. Here, the key notions have been the rejection of an transcendent identity as ground or goal of thought; the rejection of conceptual analysis as sufficient reason for the determination of thought; and the location of pure judgement as the implicit centre of an immanent thought, which we might also express as a gesture beyond transcendent rules or norms as universal structure of thought. These mostly negative formulations are based, however, in a positive critical principle: that of the necessary autonomy, freedom and vitality of thought, which no less rejects a sceptical attitude than a dogmatic one. Thus, the rejection of transcendence is based in the development of an auto-orientation of thought, which distributes and populates its own territory, and finds its necessity within itself. The concept of identity is displaced from the centre of thought only in virtue of its more fundamental sense in connection with the ideal and existential determinations of the problem. The challenge to the ‘world order’—macro- and micro- cosmic—represented by the aesthetic is also the principle of its generation and the index of ‘new possibilities of existence’. One of the central connections developed throughout this thesis has been that between the status of thought as an action and the correspondingly indeterminate status of ‘being’ or ‘what is’. This, as we understand it, is the critical ‘overture’ of Kant’s project, literally, in his preface to the first critique. It is a connection, however, that, qua overture, is not the ‘end of the story’, and already in itself has several different senses. In its most well known sense, as given by Kant, it is the theoretical indeterminacy of ‘things-in-themselves’, given the necessary conditions of experience, in the form of our pure a priori concepts and forms of intuition. It is also the indeterminacy of the truth and falsity of the objects of thought, outside of the judgements that give them

CONCLUSION sense and value. It is the ‘default’ indeterminacy, or non-determination, of what exists, given the necessary self-determination of the will. It is thus precisely not, in the first place, an isolable theory of being or existence—that it is indeterminate, chaos—but rather the necessary consequence of a position of thought. ‘Position’ here is used deliberately, as it is the case, as in Kant’s essay on orientation, that what comes first is the position or attitude, from which an action or judgement may ensue, and only then may we—if this is our concern—resolve these elements into a ‘theory’. More pertinent, for Deleuze especially, would be to resolve them into a central problem, question or Idea. The problem combines the notions of the active determination of thought and indeterminacy in several ways. In the first place, the ‘indeterminacy’ of existence takes on a more positive and localised sense, as the problematic instance or event that spurs us to act. It also presents us with an ideal horizon, “objective but indeterminate”, as the horizon of our actions. In both of these forms it preserves the element of an ‘outside’ to thought which is as necessary to its sense as an act as its freedom. This is perhaps especially evident in reflecting on the aesthetic, as it is here that the indeterminacy of existence emerges given the limits of our power to determine, in a legislative sense. Characteristically for Deleuze, however, this encounter with our limits is also the discovery of the secret heart of our power: the dynamic engagement with the actual that continually both grounds and undermines our thought. Deleuze poses the problem of thought in terms of what it presupposes, what gives it sense, and what renews it. We can only properly speak of the relationship between thought and being in those cases where they confront their very limits—the encounter between the unthought and the inactual, the site of a transformation on both sides. The success of this transformation depends on its ability to initiate a productive and viable ‘plane’, forestalling the nihilism of simple chaos, but more importantly keeping at bay the equally nihilistic stupor of habit. It was suggested in the Introduction that the notion of the “problem” forms both a virtual and actual nexus for the concerns of this thesis. In his books on cinema, Deleuze speaks of the problem as being characterised above all by the presentation of an alternative, a choice.1 The choice, as he conceives it, is not between two terms, but between two modes of existence: that of the

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CONCLUSION one who persuades themselves there is no choice, in virtue of a moral, physical or psychological necessity (the Good, the state of affairs, desire), and that of the one who knows that one must choose, and continue to choose2— It is a choice which is not defined by what [the persona] chooses, but by the power that it possesses to be able to start afresh at every instant, of starting afresh itself, and in this way confirming itself by itself, by each time putting the whole stake back into play each time.3

In other words, the alternative is between those for whom there is effectively a problem and those for whom there is none, or who falsely identify its terms. The alternative is not overcome by committing to one path over another, or finding a third term which mediates the choice, but through committing to the problem itself, which Deleuze terms here as the object of “belief.”4 This passage reflects a form of dichotomy and dialectic that has recurred throughout this examination of the critical project between Kant and Deleuze. Kant’s solution to the competing claims of dogmatism, scepticism and ‘enthusiasm’, in the form of the “need of reason”, effectively amounts to choosing the problem itself: it locates the instance which both generates the alternatives and forestalls the errors arising from following a single path. The defining trait of Deleuze’s dogmatic image of thought is that it has persuaded itself that it has no choice, submitting to nature or “established values”, and has precisely chosen to do so. It is a tension which exists within Kant’s philosophy itself, according to whether the “need” of reason settles into its ‘fact’, and follows “paths already traced”, or instead seeks the point which awakens its need and animates its facts. The forms in which dichotomies present and resolve themselves in Kant and Deleuze’s work—antinomy, antithesis, contradiction, contrariety, disparity, and, of course, difference— represent a topic of study by themselves, not able to be attempted here. We can nevertheless observe the tendency in both to refuse the alternative, in the sense of ‘either/or’, and operate a shift in orientation that incorporates both terms while maintaining their distance. This may appear to favour a philosophy of infinitely deferred judgement: a negative philosophy of the suspense of commitment in the absence of any determined course. In what sense then is this a philosophy which affirms thought as “the only moment of presence and precision”?5 Kant presents the ‘problematic judgement’ in terms of an ‘inclusive disjunction’, where alternative hypotheses are equally affirmed as possible. In Deleuze’s 177

CONCLUSION work, this epistemological suspense is transformed into an affirmation of the communication between orders which differ in nature, precisely in virtue of their difference. It is again a matter of emphasising the problem as a ‘vital’ rather than an intellectual instance: an object of a form of faith rather than knowledge, even “hypothetical” knowledge. To “choose to choose”, or to “choose the problem”, from a theoretical perspective, would indeed suggest the suspension of judgement. But this is precisely a choice not to choose, implying an absence of “sufficient reason”, which is to say a (non-)choice that is a function of “the situation.” Kant already reverses this order of reasons: it is the capacity and necessity to judge that confers rights on the status of our concepts, rather than the reverse. To choose to choose, from a practical perspective, is precisely to commit, to “put into play all that is at stake”, even on the most contingent of provocations, and to allow the force of the commitment to surmount and preserve the distance between the ideal and the actual.

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CONCLUSION Endnotes for Conclusion Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, F160-164/E113-116; Cinema 2: The Time-Image, F225235/E173-180. 2 Cinema 1, F160-161/E114. 3 Cinema 1, F162/E115. 4 Cinema 2, F231/E117. 5 DR, F43/E28. 1

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Appendix 1

THE METHOD OF DRAMATISATION

Gilles Deleuze Paper presented to the Société française de Philosophie, 28 January 1967. Bulletin de la Société fra nçaise de Phil osoph ie, vol. LXII, 1967, pp. 89-118.

[SYNOPSIS]

M. Gilles Deleuze, teacher in the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at Lyon, proposes to develop before the members of the French Society of Philosophy the following arguments: It is not certain that the question what is? is a good question in order to discover the essence or the Idea. It is possible that questions of the type: who?, how much?, how?, where?, when? are better—as much for discovering essence as for determining something more important concerning the Idea. Spatio-temporal dynamisms have several properties: 1) they create particular spaces and times; 2) they form a rule of specification for concepts, which would otherwise remain incapable of logically dividing themselves; 3) they determine the double aspect of differenciation, qualitative and quantitative (qualities and extensions, species and parts); 4) they comprise or designate a subject, but a “larval” or “embryonic” subject; 5) they constitute a special theatre; 6) they express ideas.—Under all of these aspects they outline the movement of dramatisation. Under dramatisation, the Idea incarnates or actualises itself, differenciates itself. Thus the Idea must already present characteristics, in its own content, which correspond to the two aspects of differenciation. It is, in effect, in itself a system of

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differential relations, and a distribution of the remarkable or singular points which result from them (ideal events). Which is to say: the Idea is fully differentiated in itself, before differenciating itself in the actual. This status of the Idea accounts for its logical value, which is not the clear-and-distinct, but, as foreseen by Leibniz, the distinct-obscure. The method of dramatisation in its entirety is represented in the complex concept of different/ciation, which must give a sense to the questions that formed our point of departure.

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REPORT OF THE SESSION The session opened at 4.30pm, at the Sorbonne, Michelet Amphitheatre, presided over by M. Jean Wahl, President of the Society. M. Jean Wahl: I will not introduce M. Gilles Deleuze: you know his books, on Hume as well as on Nietzsche and Proust, and you also know his great talent. I give him the stand immediately. M. Gilles Deleuze: The Idea, the discovery of the Idea, is inseparable from a certain type of question. The Idea is in the first place an “objecticity” [objectité] which, as such, corresponds to a way of posing questions. It only responds to the call of certain questions. It is in Platonism that the question of the Idea is determined under the form: What is...? This noble question is supposed to concern the essence, and is opposed to vulgar questions which only refer to the example or the accident. Thus you do not ask who is beautiful, but what is the Beautiful. Not where and when there is justice, but what is the Just. Not how “two” is obtained, but what is the dyad. Not how much, but what... All of Platonism thus seems to oppose a major question, always taken up again and repeated by Socrates as that of the essence or the Idea, to minor questions of opinion which only express confused ways of thinking, whether in old men or awkward children, or in sophists and over-skilful orators. And yet this privilege of the What is...? is itself revealed to be confused and dubious, even in Platonism and the Platonic tradition. For the question What is? in the end only animates the so-called aporetic dialogues. Is it possible that the question of essence is that of contradiction, and that it itself throws us into inextricable contradictions? As soon as the Platonic dialectic becomes a serious and positive thing, we see it take other forms: who? in the Politics, how much? in the Philebus, where and when in the Sophist, in what case in the Parmenides. As if the Idea was only positively

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determinable as a function of a transcendental typology, topology, posology, and casuistic. What the sophists are reproached for, then, is less to have used forms of questions which are inferior in themselves, than not to have known how to determine the conditions in which they take on their ideal scope and meaning. And if we consider the whole of the history of philosophy, we seek in vain the philosopher who was able to proceed using the question “what is?”. Aristotle—above all not Aristotle. Perhaps Hegel, perhaps there is only Hegel, precisely because his dialectic, being that of the empty and abstract essence, is inseparable from the movement of contradiction. The question What is? prejudices the Idea as the simplicity of essence; it then becomes obligatory that the simple essence comprehends the inessential, and comprehends it in essence, thus contradicting itself. A quite different procedure (the outline of which is found in the philosophy of Leibniz), must be wholly distinguished from contradiction: in this case, it is the inessential which comprehends the essential, and which comprehends it only in the case. Subsuming under “the case” forms an original language of properties and events. We should call vicediction this quite different procedure to contradiction. It consists in traversing the Idea as a multiplicity. The question is no longer of knowing whether the Idea is one or multiple, or even both at the same time. “Multiplicity”, used substantively, designates a domain where the Idea, of its own accord, is much closer to the accident than to the abstract essence, and can only be determined with the questions who? how? how much? where and when? in what case?—all forms which trace its true spatio-temporal coordinates. *** We ask in the first instance: what is the characteristic or distinctive trait of a thing in general? Such a trait is double: the quality or qualities that it possesses, the extended space [l’étendue] that it occupies. Even when one cannot distinguish actual divisible parts, one distinguishes remarkable points and regions; and one must not only consider the internal space, but the way in which the thing determines and differenciates a whole exterior space, as in the hunting ground of an animal. In short, every thing is at the intersection of a double synthesis: of qualification or specification, and of distribution, composition or organisation. There is no quality without an extension that underlies it, and in which it

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is diffused, no species without organic points or parts. The parts are the number of the species, just as the species is the quality of the parts. Such are the two correlated aspects of differenciation: species and parts, specification and organisation. They constitute the condition of the representation of things in general. But if differenciation thus has two complementary forms, what is the agent of this distinction and this complementarity? Beneath organisation, as also beneath specification, we find nothing other than spatio-temporal dynamisms: which is to say agitations of space, pockets of time, pure syntheses of speeds, directions and rhythms. Already the most general characteristics of division, of order and class, including generic and specific characters, depend on such dynamisms or such directions of development. And simultaneously, beneath the separating phenomena of cellular division, we again find dynamic instances, cellular migrations, foldings, invaginations, stretches, which constitute an entire “dynamic of the egg”. In this respect the entire world is an egg. No concept would receive a logical division in representation, if this division was not determined by sub-representative dynamisms: we see it clearly in the Platonic process of division, which only operates in function of the two directions of right and left, and, as in the example of line-fishing, with the aid of determinations of the type “surround-strike”, “strike from up downwards—from below upwards”. These dynamisms always presuppose a field in which they are produced, outside of which they would not be produced. This field is intensive, which is to say it implies a distribution in depth of differences in intensity. Although experience always places us in the presence of already-developed intensities in extended space, already covered by qualities, we must conceive, precisely as a condition of experience, pure intensities enveloped in a depth, in an intensive spatium which pre-exists any quality and any extension. Depth is the power of the pure spatium without extension; intensity is only the power of difference or the unequal in itself, and each intensity is already difference, of the type E—E’, where E refers in turn to e—e’ and e, to e—e’, etc. Such an intensive field constitutes a milieu of individuation. This is why it is not enough to remind ourselves that individuation operates neither by prolonging specification (species infima), nor by the composition or division of parts (pars ultima). It is not enough to discover a difference in nature between individuation on the one hand, and, on the other hand, specification

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or division. For in addition to this, individuation is the prior condition under which specification, and division or composition, operate in a system. Individuation is intensive, and is presupposed by all qualities and species, by all the extensions and parts which come to fill or develop the system. Intensity being difference, we still need differences of intensity to communicate with each other. We need something like a “differenciator” of difference, which relates the different to the different. This role is played by what is called the dark precursor. Lightning shoots between different intensities, but it is preceded by a dark precursor, invisible, imperceptible, which in advance determines path, hollowed out in an inverse relation, because it is in the first place the agent of communication of series of differences. If it is true that any system is an intensive field of individuation constructed on bordering series which are heterogenous or disparate, the putting into communication of series, under the action of the dark precursor, induces the phenomena of coupling between the series, of internal resonance in the system, and of a forced movement in the form of an amplitude which overflows the starting series themselves. It is under all of these conditions that a system is filled with qualities and is developed in extension. For a quality is always a sign or an event which emerges from the depths, which flashes between different intensities, and which endures the time required for the annulment of its constitutive difference. In the first place and above all, it is the set of these conditions which determines the spatio-temporal dynamisms, themselves generative of these qualities and these extensions. Dynamisms are not absolutely without a subject. Yet their subjects can only be partial [ébauches], not yet qualified or composed, patients rather than agents, alone able to bear the pressure of an internal resonance or the amplitude of a forced movement. A composed, qualified adult would perish therein. The truth of embryology, already, is that there are movements which only the embryo can bear: here, no other subject than a larval one. The nightmare itself is perhaps one of these movements that neither the awake man, nor even the dreamer, can bear, but only the dreamless sleeper, the sleeper of deep sleep. And thought, considered as the specific dynamism of the philosophical system, belongs perhaps in turn to these terrible movements which are irreconcilable with a formed, qualified and composed subject like that of the Cogito in representation. “Regression” is poorly understood as long as we do not see in it the activation of a larval

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subject, the only patient able to support to requirements of a systematic dynamism. This set of determinations—field of individuation, series of intensive differences, dark precursor, coupling, resonance and forced movement, larval subjects, spatio-temporal dynamisms—these outline the multiple coordinates which correspond to the questions, How much? Who? How? Where and when?, and which give them a transcendental scope, beyond empirical examples. This set of determinations, in effect, is in no way bound to such or such an example borrowed from a physical, or biological, system, but provides the categories of any system in general. No less than a physical experiment, psychical experiments of the Proustian type imply the communication of disparate series, the intervention of a dark precursor, the resonances and forced movements which follow. It happens all the time that dynamisms, qualified in a certain way in one domain, are taken up again in a completely different mode in another domain. The geographical dynamism of the island (island through rupture with the continent and island through emerging out of the water) is taken up again in the mythical dynamism of the man on a desert island (secondary rupture and original recommencement). Ferenczi showed, in sexual life, how the physical dynamism of cellular elements is taken up again in the biological dynamism of organs and even in the psychical dynamism of people. It’s that dynamisms, and their concomitants, work beneath all the qualified forms and extensions of representation, and constitute, rather than an outline, a set of abstract lines coming out of an unextended and informal depth. A strange theatre made of pure determinations, activating space and time, acting directly on the soul, having larvae as actors—and for which Artaud chose the word “cruelty”. These abstract lines form a drama which corresponds to such or such a concept, and which directs both its specification and division. Scientific knowledge, but also the dream, and also things in themselves, dramatise. A concept being given, we can always seek the drama, and the concept would never divide or specify itself in the world of representation without the dramatic dynamisms which determine it in this way in a material system beneath all possible representation. Take the concept of truth: it is not enough to ask the abstract question “what is the true?”. Once we ask “who wants the truth, when and where, how and how much?”,

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our task is to assign larval subjects (the jealous person, for example), and pure spatio-temporal dynamisms (either to make the “thing” emerge in person, at a certain time, in a certain place; or to accumulate clues and signs, from moment to moment and following an endless path). When we then learn that the concept of truth in representation is divided into two directions, one according to which the true emerges in person and in an intuition, the other according to which the true is always inferred from something else, concluded from clues as that which is not there, we have no trouble in finding beneath these traditional theories of intuition and induction the dynamisms of the inquisition or the confession, of the accusation or the enquiry, which work in silence and dramatically, such that it determines the theoretical division of the concept. *** What we call drama particularly resembles the Kantian schema. For the schema according to Kant is indeed an a priori determination of space and time corresponding to a concept: the shortest is the drama, the dream or rather the nightmare of the straight line. It is precisely the dynamism which divides the concept of line into straight and curved, and which, moreover, in the Archimedean conception of limits, allows the measurement of the curve as a function of the straight line. Only what remains quite mysterious is how the schema has this power in relation to the concept. In a certain way, the whole of post-Kantianism attempted to elucidate the mystery of this hidden art, according to which the dynamic spatio-temporal dynamisms truly have the power to dramatise a concept, even though they are of a completely different nature. The answer is perhaps in the direction indicated by certain postKantians: pure spatio-temporal dynamisms have the power to dramatise concepts, because in the first place they actualise or incarnate Ideas. We possess a point of departure in order to prove this hypothesis: if it is true that the dynamisms order the two inseparable aspects of differenciation—specification and division, qualification of a species and organisation of an extension—it would be necessary for the Idea to present in turn two aspects, from which these are derived in a certain way. We must thus question the nature of the Idea, on its difference in nature to the concept. An Idea has two principal characteristics. On the one hand, it consists

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in a set of differential relations between elements without any sensible form or function, which only exist through their reciprocal determination. Such relations are of the type dy/dx (although the question of the infinitely small does not at all have to be introduced here). In the most diverse cases, we can ask if we indeed find ourselves before ideal elements, which is to say without figure and without function, but reciprocally determinable in a network of differential relations: do phonemes fall into this category? And certain physical particles? And biological genes? We must in each case follow our enquiry until we obtain these differentials, which neither exist nor are determined except in relation to each other. We thus invoke a principle, called reciprocal determination, as the first aspect of sufficient reason. On the other hand, differential relations correspond to distributions of “singularities”, distributions of remarkable and ordinary points, such that a remarkable point engenders a series which can be prolonged along all the ordinary points to the neighbourhood of another singularity. Singularities are ideal events. It is possible that the notions of singular and regular, of remarkable and ordinary, have a much greater ontological and epistemological importance for philosophy itself than those of true and false; for sense depends on the distinction and the distribution of these brilliant points in the Idea. We conceive that a complete determination of the Idea, or of the thing in its Ideal form, is effected in this way, constituting the second aspect of sufficient reason. The Idea thus appears as a multiplicity which must be traversed in two directions, from the point of view of the variation of differential relations, and from the point of view of the distribution of singularities which correspond to certain values of these relations. What we were calling before a procedure of vice-diction merges with this double traversal or this double determination, reciprocal and complete. Several consequences follow. In the first place, the Idea thus defined possesses no actuality. It is virtual, it is pure virtuality. All the differential relations, in virtue of the reciprocal determination, and all the distributions of singularities in virtue of the complete determination, coexist in the virtual multiplicity of Ideas. The Idea is only actualised precisely to the extent that its differential relations are incarnated in separate species or qualities, and that the concomitant singularities are incarnated in an extension which corresponds to this

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quality. A species is made up of differential relations between genes, as organic parts are made up of incarnated singularities (cf. the “loci”). We must however emphasise the absolute condition of non-resemblance: the species or quality does not resemble the differential relations that they incarnate, no more than the singularities resemble the organised extension which actualises them. If it is true that qualification and distribution constitute the two aspects of differenciation, we will say that the Idea actualises itself through differenciation. For the Idea, to actualise itself is to differenciate itself. In itself and in its virtuality, it is thus entirely undifferenciated. Yet it is in no way indeterminate. We must attach the greatest importance to the difference of the two operations, marked by the distinctive trait t/c, differentiate and differenciate. The Idea in itself, or the thing in its Ideal form, is not at all differenciated, since it lacks the necessary qualities and parts. But it is fully and completely differentiated, since it possesses relations and singularities which will actualise themselves in qualities and parts, without resembling them. It seems that every thing, then, has, so to speak, two uneven, dissimilar and dissymmetrical “halves”, each one of these halves itself divided into two: an ideal half, plunging into the virtual, and constituted both by differential relations and concomitant singularities; an actual half, constituted both by the qualities incarnating these relations, and the parts incarnating these singularities. The question of the “ens omni modo determinatum” must thus be posed in this way: a thing in its Ideal form can be completely determined (differentiated), and yet lack the determinations which constitute actual existence (it is undifferenciated). If we call distinct the state of the fully differentiated Idea, and clear the state of the actualised Idea, which is to say differenciated, we must break with the rule of proportionality of the clear and the distinct: the Idea in itself is not clear and distinct, but on the contrary distinct and obscure. It is even in this sense that the Idea is Dionysian, in this zone of obscure distinction that it conserves in itself, in this differenciation which is nevertheless perfectly determined: its intoxication. We must finally specify the conditions under which the word “virtual” can be rigorously used (the way in which Bergson for example used it not long ago by distinguishing virtual and actual multiplicities, or the way in which M. Ruyer uses it today). Virtual is not opposed to real; what is opposed to the real is the possible. Virtual is opposed to actual, and, in this sense, possesses

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a full reality. We have seen that this reality of the virtual is constituted by differential relations and distributions of singularities. The virtual corresponds in all respects to the formula by which Proust defined his states of experience: “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”. The virtual and the possible are opposed in multiple ways. On the one hand, the possible is such that the real is constructed in its image [à sa ressemblance]. This is even why, in function of this original flaw, we can never cleanse it of the suspicion of being retrospective or retroactive, which is to say constructed after the fact, in the image of the real that it is supposed to precede. It is also why, when we ask what more there is in the real, we can ascribe nothing except “the same” thing as posited outside of representation. The possible is only the concept as principle of the representation of the thing, under the categories of the identity of what represents, and the resemblance of what is represented. The virtual, by contrast, belongs to the Idea, and does not resemble the actual, no more than the actual resembles it. The Idea is an image without resemblance; the virtual does not actualise itself through resemblance, but through divergence and differenciation. Differenciation or actualisation is always creative in relation to what they actualise, whereas realisation is always reproductive or limiting. The difference between the virtual and the actual is no longer that of the Same in so far as it is posited in one instance within representation, in another instance outside of representation, but that of the Other, in so far as appears in one instance in the Idea and the other instance, completely differently, in the process of actualisation of the Idea. The extraordinary Leibnizian world puts us in the presence of an ideal continuum. This continuity, according to Leibniz, is not at all defined by homogeneity, but by the coexistence of all the variations of differential relations, and the distributions of singularities which correspond to them. The state of this world is well expressed in the image of the murmur, of the ocean, of the water mill, of the swoon or even of drunkenness, which bears witness to a Dionysian ground rumbling beneath this apparently Apollonian philosophy. It is often asked what the notions of “compossible”, of “incompossible” consist in, and what exactly their difference is to the possible and the impossible. The reply is perhaps difficult to give, because the whole of Leibniz’ philosophy shows a certain hesitation between a clear conception of the possible and the obscure conception of the virtual. In truth the incompossible and the compossible have nothing to do with the contradictory and the noncontradictory. It is a matter of something else entirely: of divergence and convergence. What defines the compossibility of a world is the convergence of series, each one of which is constructed in the neighbourhood

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of a singularity, to the neighbourhood of another singularity. The incompossibility of worlds, by contrast, emerges at the moment that the obtained series would diverge. The best of worlds is thus the one which comprehends a maximum of relations and singularities, under the condition of continuity, which is to say under the condition of a maximum of convergence of series. We can understand, given this, how, in such a world, individual essences or nomads are formed. Leibniz says both that the world does not exist outside of the monads which express it, and yet that God created the world rather than the monads (God did not create the sinning Adam, but the world in which Adam sinned). It’s that the singularities of the world serve as a principle for the constitution of individualities: each individual envelops a certain number of singularities, and clearly expresses their relations in relation to its own body. Such that the expressed world virtually pre-exists expressive individualities, but does not actually exist outside of these individualities which express it from proximity to proximity [de proche en proche]. And it is this process of individuation which determines the relations and the singularities of the ideal world to be incarnated in the qualities and extensions which effectively fill the intervals between individuals. The traversal of the “ground” as populated by relations and singularities, the constitution of individual essences which flows on from this, the subsequent determination of qualities and extensions, form the whole of a method of vice-diction, which constitutes a theory of multiplicities and which always consists in subsuming “under the case”. *** The notion of different/ciation does not only express a mathematicobiological complex, but the very condition of all cosmology, as the two halves of the object. Differentiation expresses the nature of a pre-individual ground, which is in no way reducible to an abstract universal, but which comprises relations and singularities characterising the virtual multiplicities or Ideas. Differenciation expresses the actualisation of these relations and singularities in qualities and extensions, species and parts as objects of representation. The two aspects of differenciation thus correspond to the two aspects of differentiation, but do not resemble them:

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a third thing is necessary to determine the Idea to actualise itself, to incarnate itself in this way. We have attempted to show how the intensive fields of individuation—with the precursors which placed them in a state of activity, with the larval subjects which constituted themselves around singularities, with the dynamisms which filled the system—effectively had this role. The complete notion is that of: indi-different/ciation. It is the spatio-temporal dynamisms at the heart of fields of individuation which determine the Ideas to actualise themselves in the differenciated aspects of the object. A concept being given in representation, we know nothing yet. We only learn to the extent that we discover the Idea which operates beneath this concept, the field or fields of individuation, the system or systems which envelop the Idea, the dynamisms which determine it to incarnate itself; it is only under these conditions that we can penetrate the mystery of the division of the concept. It is all these conditions which define dramatisation, and its trail of questions: in which case, who, how, how much? The shortest is only the schema of the concept of the straight line because it is firstly the drama of the Idea of line, the differential of the straight line and the curve, the dynamism which operates in silence. The clear and the distinct is the claim of the concept in the Apollonian world of representation; but beneath representation there is always the Idea and its distinct-obscure ground, a “drama” beneath all logos.

[DISCUSSION] M. Jean Wahl: We warmly thank you for all your words. Rarely have we been in the presence of such an attempt—I will not say at a system—but at a vision through differentiation, written twice, of a world described perhaps quadruply. But I will stop, for the role of the President is to be silent and let others speak. M. P.-M. Schuhl: I will ask Deleuze a question. I would like to know how, in his way of seeing things, the opposition is figured between the natural and the artificial, which is not spontaneously dynamised, but which one can dynamise through auto-regulation. M. G. Deleuze: Is it not because artifice implies specific dynamisms which have no equivalent in nature? You have yourself often shown the importance of the categories of natural and artificial, notably in Greek thought. Are these categories not precisely differentiated

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in function of dynamisms—in function of trajectories [parcours], places and directions? But in artifices as much as natural systems, there are intensive organisations, precursors, partial-subjects [sujets-ébauches], a whole kind of vitality, a vital character, although in a different mode... M. P.-M. Schuhl: That becomes very Nervalian. M. G. Deleuze: Effectively, I would wish it so. M. P.-M. Schuhl: In the Philebus, in 64b, Socrates says that we have managed to create an abstract order that will be able to animate itself independently. The spiritual domain goes of its own accord. There remains this immense domain of matter... M. G. Deleuze: We would have to classify the different systems of intensity. From that point of view, the regulatory procedures you alluded to a moment ago would be of decisive importance. M. P.-M. Schuhl: I would like to add a simple anecdote, in relation to the reference that Deleuze made to the different ways of conceiving fishing in the Sophist. M. Leroi-Gourhan published a few years ago a work on technology which exactly matches the Platonic distinctions. I asked him if he had been thinking of the Sophist, he replied that he had given it any attention. This confirms the permanence of certain divisions that you have underlined. M. N. Mouloud: I will not go with M. Deleuze into the ontological depth of his conception of the idea. This approach to the problem overwhelms my own habits of thinking. What interested me very much in M. Deleuze’s paper is this conception of art. It is certain that the artist takes up a non-serial temporality, which is not yet organised, or a spatiality or a multiplicity of spatialities which are lived and pre-categorical, and that through his artifice, in fact, he brings them to a certain language, to a certain syntax [syntactique]. His style or his personal re-creation consists in imposing, as objective, structures which are borrowed from a non-objective stage. Ultimately, there we have a significant part of the dynamism of art. I would like to ask some questions on the points which bother me a little. Understood as such, how can we apply this conception

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of a priority of spatiality or temporality to science, for example. In a certain way, we can invoke space, time or the dynamism as the opposite of the concept, which is to say as that which introduces variety into a concept which tends towards stability. But there is the opposing view: space and time, at least in the way they are accessible to our intuition, tend towards a certain stability, a certain immobility. The first physics and chemistry began with a mechanics which leant heavily on the idea of spatial continuities or the composition of elements in a composite. Or the first biology began with a sort of intuition of duration, of becoming, as a continuous unfolding which linked apparent forms together and transcended their separation. And it seems to me that mathematicisation introduced on its side a second dramatisation. In this latter case, dramatisation comes from the concept, it doesn’t come so much from intuition. Thus, when chemistry comes to the stage of electronic analysis, there are no longer from its perspective any veritable substances or valencies, there are functions of liaison which are created to the extent that the process is developed and which are comprehended in succession. We have a process which is only able to be analysed by a mathematics of the electron. And to the extent that chemistry becomes quantic, or wave-like, a combination can absolutely no longer be conceived as a simple and necessary transition. It is a probability which results from a energy-based calculus where you have for example to take into account the rotational [spinorielle] symmetry or dissymmetry of electrons, or the overlapping of two wave-fields which creates a particular energy, etc. The energetic evaluation can only be done by the algebraist, and not by the geometrist. In a somewhat similar fashion, modern biology began when the combinatory possibilities [la combinatoire] of genetic elements were introduces, or when we investigated which chemical or radioactive effects could affect the development of genes, and create mutations. Thus the first intuition of biologists, who believed in a continuous evolution, was in a way destroyed and then reinvented by a more mathematical and operative science. I wanted to indicate my feeling that the most dramatic aspects of conceptualisation, if you like, in any case the most dialectical aspects, are brought about, not by the imagination, but by the work of rationalisation. Overall, I don’t really see how the development of concepts, in the mathematical sciences, can be compared to a biological development, to the “growth of an egg”. The

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development is more of a clear-cut dialectical sort: systems are constructed in a coherent manner, and sometimes they must be broken in order to reconstruct them. But I don’t want to prolong my comment too much. M. G. Deleuze: I share your opinion. Isn’t our difference above all terminological? it seems to me that concepts less lead dramatisation than undergo it. Concepts are differentiated by procedures which are not exactly conceptual, which refer rather to Ideas. A notion like the one that you allude to, of “non-localisable linkage”, transcends the field of representation and the localisation of concepts in this field. They are “ideal” linkages. M. N. Mouloud: To be honest, I am not trying to defend the notion of the concept, which is an ambiguous one, over-saturated by philosophical traditions: we think of the Aristotelian concept as a model of stability. I would define the scientific concept by the work of an essentially mathematical thought. It is this that constantly ruptures the pre-established orders of our intuition. And I am thinking, on the other hand, of the ambiguous use which could be made of the term idea, if it is over-likened, as in the case of Bergson, to an organising schema, with its bases in a profound intuition of some biological kind. The development of the sciences, and even the life sciences, has not followed the direction of such schemas. Or, if they have begun with this, they have been put into question by mathematical and experimental models. M. Jean Wahl: There again I see a possible agreement, and a difference in language rather than a difference in conception. M. F. Alquié: I very much admired the presentation of our friend Deleuze. The question that I would like to put to him is quite simple, and bears on the beginning of his paper. Deleuze condemned, from the start, the question “What is?”, and he didn’t come back to it again. I accept what he said afterwards, and I can glimpse of the extreme richness of the other questions he wished to pose. But I regret the somewhat rapid rejection of the question “What is?”, and I don’t know how to accept what he told us, in a slightly intimidating manner, at the beginning, namely that no philosopher had asked himself this question, except Hegel. I must say, this stuns me a little: in effect I

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know many philosophers who asked themselves the question “what is?”. Leibniz certainly asked himself “what is a subject?” or “what is a monad?”. Berkeley certainly asked himself “what is being?”, “what is the essence and the signification of the word being?”. Kant himself certainly asked himself “what is an object?”. One could cite so many other examples that no one will raise any objections on this, I hope. It thus seemed to me that Deleuze, in what followed, had above all wanted to orient philosophy towards other problems, problems which are perhaps not specifically its own, or rather, that he reproached classical philosophy—not without cause, for that matter—for not providing us with concepts that are adaptable precisely enough to science, or to psychological analysis, or to historical analysis. Which seems to me to be perfectly true, and, in this sense, I cannot praise too much what he has said. And yet, what struck me is that all the examples which he gave were not properly philosophical examples. He spoke to us about the straight line, which is a mathematical example, about the egg, which is a physiological example, about genes, which is a biological example. When he came to the truth, I said to myself: finally, here is a philosophical example! But this example quickly turned bad, for Deleuze said to us that we had to ask ourselves: who wants the truth? why does one want the truth? is it the jealous person who wants the truth? etc., very interesting questions without any doubt, but which do not concern the very essence of truth, which are thus not perhaps strictly philosophical questions. Or rather, they are the questions of a philosopher looking towards psychological, psychoanalytic, etc, problems. Such that I would simply like to ask, in turn, the following question: I have understood very well that M. Deleuze reproaches philosophy for having made a conception of the idea such that it is not adaptable, as he would like it to be, to scientific, psychological, historical problems. But I think that, beside these problems, remain classically philosophical problems, namely problems of essence. It doesn’t seem to me, in any case, that we can say, like Deleuze, that the great philosophers never posed such problems to themselves. M. G. Deleuze: It is very true, Monsieur, that a great number of philosophers have asked themselves the question “what is?” But is this not, for them, a convenient way of expressing themselves? Kant certainly asks himself “what is an object?”, but he asks it within the context of a deeper question,

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of a How whose sense renewed: “How is it possible?” What seems most important to me is this new way in which Kant interprets the question “how?”. And Leibniz, when he contents himself with asking “what is?”, does he obtain anything other than definitions which he himself calls nominal? When he comes to real definitions, by contrast, is it not thanks to questions like “how?”, “from what point of view?”, “in which case?”. There is in him a whole topology, a whole casuistic which is notably expressed in his interest in law. But in all these respects, I was too quick. Your other reproach touches me still more. For I believe completely in the specificity of philosophy, and this conviction is one I receive from you yourself. You say, however, that the method that I describe borrows its applications from all over the place, from different sciences, but very little from philosophy. And that the only philosophical example that I brought up, that of truth, turned bad rather, since it consisted in dissolving the concept of truth into psychological or psychoanalytical determinations. If this is the case, it is a failure. For the Idea, as virtual-real, must not be described in terms which are solely scientific, even if science necessarily intervenes in its process of actualisation. Even concepts like singular and regular, remarkable and ordinary, are not exhausted by mathematics. I will invoke the theses of Lautman: a theory of systems must show how the movement of scientific concepts participates in a dialectic which transcends them. Nor, moreover, can dynamisms be reduced to psychological determinations (and when I cited the jealous man as a “type” of the seeker of truth, it was not as a psychological character, but as a complex of space and time, as a “figure” belonging to the very notion of truth). It seems to me that not only is the theory of systems philosophical, but that this theory forms a system of a very particular type— the philosophical system, having its dynamisms, its precursors, its larval subjects, its philosophers, which are quite specific. At least, it is only under these conditions that this method would be meaningful. M. de Gandillac: Behind your suggestive and poetic language, I espy, as always, a solid and profound thought, but I would like, I admit, some supplementary clarifications on the theme of dramatisation, which figures in your title and which you have not considered necessary to define, as if it

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was a matter of a commonly understood concept which goes without saying. When we talk of dramatising, in everyday life, it is in general in a somewhat pejorative way, in order to reproach our interlocutor for giving an overtheatrical aspect to some small incident (as one says, in a more popular language, “Don’t be melodramatic!” [“Ne faîtes pas votre cinéma!”]). Etymologically, a drama is an action, but staged, stylised, presented to an audience. I have difficulty however imagining a situation of this type in relation to these phantomatic subjects which you have just evoked, these embryos, these larvae, these undifferentiated differenciated beings which are also dynamic schemas, for you have used rather vague terms, which are in a way all-purpose philosophical words and are only valid within their context. More precisely, while you refuse the question ti (in so far as it aims at an ousia), you seem to admit the tiV, as subject of a doing (:iV poiei). But can we speak of a subject which does something at the level of larvae? My second question concerns the relation between dramatic and tragic. Does the drama you are thinking of refer, like tragedy, to a conflict, insoluble of itself, between two uneven halves which encounter two other uneven halves, in a very subtle disharmonious harmony? Your allusion to Artaud and to the theatre of cruelty shows well enough that you are not an optimistic philosopher, or that, if you are, it’s somewhat in the style of Leibniz, whose vision of the world is ultimately one of the cruellest conceivable. Would your dramatisation be that of a Theodicy, only this time situated, not in the celestial palaces evoked by Sextus’ famous apology, but on the level of the lemurs [lemuriens] of the second Faust? M. G. Deleuze: I will try to define dramatisation more rigorously: they are dynamisms, dynamic spatio-temporal determinations, pre-qualitative and preextensive, taking “place” in intensive systems in which differences in depth are distributed, having partial subjects [sujets-ébauches] as their “patients”, having the actualisation of Ideas as their function... M. de Gandillac: But, in order to translate all of that (which I grasp only in a slightly confused way), why this term dramatisation? M. G. Deleuze: When you make such a system of spatio-temporal determinations correspond to a concept, it seems to me that you substitute a “drama” for a logos, you

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establish the drama of this logos. You mentioned for example: a family drama [on dramatise en famille]. Some psychoanalysts employ this word, I think, in order to designate the movement by which logical thought is dissolved into pure spatio-temporal determinations, as in sleep. And it is not so far from the famous experiments of the Wurtzburg school. Take a case of obsessional neurosis, where the subject constantly cuts things into smaller pieces: handkerchiefs and towels are perpetually cut, first into two, then the two halves are cut again, a bell-cord in the dining room is regularly shortened, the cord getting closer to the ceiling, everything is whittled down, miniaturised, put in boxes. It is indeed a drama, to the extent that the patient simultaneously organises a space, manipulates a space, and expresses in this space an unconscious Idea. An anger is a dramatisation, which stages larval subjects. You then would like to ask whether dramatisation in general is linked to the tragic or not. There isn’t, it seems to me, any privileged reference. Tragic and comic are still categories of representation. There would be a fundamental link rather between dramatisation and a certain world of terror, which can comprise a maximum amount of buffoonery, of the grotesque... You say yourself that the world of Leibniz is, ultimately, at bottom, the cruellest of worlds. M. de Gandillac: Buffoonery, the grotesque, the snigger [le ricanement] belong, I believe, to the realm of tragedy. Your conclusion evoked Nietzschean themes, ultimately more Dionysian than Apollonian. M. Jean Wahl: I think the reply that Deleuze could have made is the question “When”, because there are moments where all of that becomes tragic and there are moments when it becomes... M. G. Deleuze: Yes, exactly. M. M. Souriau: It’s a question on references that I would like to present. M. Deleuze has cited some philosophers, not many, but in any case some, and there is one whose accent I thought I heard, but that he did not cite, namely Malebranche. There are several things in Malebranche which are foreign to you, for example, the vision in God: in your case it would rather be a matter of a

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sort of “vision in Mephistopheles”. But there is also the Malebranche of the intelligible extension. When you spoke of this becoming of ideas which is in the first place obscure and in any case dynamic, and of this extension which is not quite spatial, but tends to become so, it was indeed a matter of Malebranche’s intelligible extension. M. G. Deleuze: I didn’t have this connection in mind. Effectively, in intelligible extension, there is indeed a sort of pure, pre-extensive spatium. As also in the Leibnizian distinction between spatium and extensio. Mme Prenant: My question follows on from M. Souriau’s. What you call obscure and distinct, would this not be what Leibniz would call intelligible and non-imaginable? Non-imaginable corresponding to obscure—to what you call obscure. For Leibniz, the obscure is thought not being able to determine its object—in the Meditationes for example: a fleeting memory in the form of an image [un souvenir fuyant d’image]. By contrast, the knowledge that metaltesters have of gold constitutes the law of a series of properties: it is not an object of the senses, it does not take the form of an image, and consequently I think he would translate it not by “obscure”, I don’t think he would have liked the word, but by unimaginable, in opposition to clear. And that can even go to include what he called blind thought—not in all conditions since it can lead to verbalism and error, as he says in his critique of the ontological proof. But it can correspond to certain forms of blind thought; for example, to typical features—to rigorously constructed forms. But must not these “distinct and blind” ideas of Leibniz precisely rest in the final instance on “distinct visions”? Leibniz sees that a straight line must be able to be prolonged to infinity because he sees the reason for this: the similarity of the segments. It is thus in the end necessary to come back to “primitive notions” which “serve as their own signs” [sont à elles-mêmes leur propres marques], and to the alphabet of human thought. In other words, I do not think that thought can remain “obscure” in its entirety—in M. Deleuze’s sense—from one end of its path to the other. It must as least “see a reason”, grasp a law. M. G. Deleuze: I am struck by your remarks on the rigour of Leibnizian terminology. But is it not true, Madame, that “distinct” has many senses in Leibniz. The

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texts on the sea insist on this: the little perceptions contain distinguished elements, which is to say remarkable points, which determine, through their combination with the remarkable points of our bodies, a threshold of awareness, of conscious perception. This conscious perception for its part is clear and confused (non-distinct), but the differential elements that it actualises are themselves distinct and obscure. It is true that it is then a case of a ground, which in a certain way perhaps goes beyond sufficient reason itself... Mme Prenant: I think in any case that when a simple substance “expresses” the universe, it does not always express it through an image; it expresses it necessarily through some quality—conscious or not (at the most partially conscious for the finite activity of a created substance), which corresponds to a system of variable relations according to the “point of view”. God alone can think the totality of these virtualities with a perfect distinction—which cancels any need for him of a calculation of probabilities... But I want to ask you a second question. Isn’t this virtuality which claims to correspond to existence a problem for the scientist who is searching for a classification and who encounters “contaminated” samples [“sales” échantillons], which oblige him to rearrange his species? In other words, is it anything but a progressive and mobile expression? M. G. Deleuze: It seems to me that virtuality can never correspond to the actual as essence does to existence. This would be to confuse the virtual with the possible. In any case the virtual and the actual correspond, but do not resemble each other. This is why the search for actual concepts can be infinite, there is always an excess of virtual Ideas which animate them. M. Ullmo: I am a little overwhelmed by such a purely philosophical presentation, that I admired very much, in the first place for its form, unquestionably, and its poetic value, but also for this feeling—but is it a feeling?—that I constantly while listening, that, despite my specifically philosophical ignorance, my naïveté with respect to the concepts, the methods, the references that you used, I had the impression that I understood you, or rather that I could try at each point to translate you into a much more humble language, the language of epistemology, the language from which I could extract a scientific reflection which bears now on quite a few

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years and quite a few experiences. Of course, these two domains do not completely overlap, and at certain points I lost my footing. But from the questions which have been posed I have also understood why I lost my footing, for there were precise allusions to philosophical domains that I have no knowledge of. But that being said, I think that almost all that you have said can be translated into the language of modern epistemology and I think in effect that this project you have pursued to give philosophical concepts a genetic bearing, a progressive or evolutionary [evolutive] bearing, this sort of internal differenciation allowing them to adapt to the domain of science and the domain of history, to the domain of biology also in admitting that this domain is more evolved than that of the science of matter that dominates us to the present day, I think that this project is very interesting and that you have contributed an advance. M. G. Bouligand: I would simply like to make a small remark in relation to the “contaminated samples” raised by Mme Prenant. I recall that for the mathematician, such samples are counter-examples. A researcher who, in good faith, examines a theme, draws from it a prospective view, in accordance with given examples which “induce him” towards a claimed “theorem q”. A colleague that he consults soon puts it to the test of a “counter-example”. Whence, for the prospector, a “psychological shock”, sometimes brutal, but quickly dominated by the one who ultimately calculates the implications of the case which he set aside “for practical reasons” in the first instance, by considering them “strange”! A frequent phenomenon in fact: this is what happens when tentatives are made around a point h of a surface S—with normal vertical in h—in order to justify a “minimum of side” in h under these hypotheses: all verticals encounter S in a single point; in addition, the minimum would be produced in h for all lines from S, obtained as the intersection of S and an arbitrary vertical plane containing the h vertical. The return to a clear view of things is sometimes difficult: it is a matter, in effect, starting from more or less subjective impressions, of rediscovering what fully accords with logical rigour. M. J. Merleau-Ponty: You spoke at several points in your presentation of spatio-temporal dynamisms and it is obvious that this plays a very important role, which I think I have partly understood. However, and no doubt this can be done, it would be pertinent to distinguish what is spatial and what is temporal in these dynamisms. The comparison of two of the

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images that you used makes me think that it would perhaps be important to clarify this point. You used the image of lightning; I don’t know if you found it in Leibniz or if you discovered it on your own, it doesn’t matter. But it is clear that in this case we are dealing with what you call the intensive, which would in this case be the potential. We are dealing with an instantaneous and purely spatial dispersion. We have the movement of electrical charges, the sound wave, etc. You then took the image of the embryo; but it is evident that in this case, the temporal aspect is closely associated with the spatial aspect, the differentiation in time being ordered as rigorously as in space. So I would like to know if you have any detail to add on this point, for, in the end, my thought is this: I found, and was not very surprised to find, a certain Bergsonian resonance in your presentation, but lightning, precisely, is not Bergsonian at all, because in Bergson there is no rupture of time, or at least I do not see any. M. G. Deleuze: Your question is very important. It would be necessary to distinguish what belongs to space and what belongs to time in these dynamisms, and in each case the particular space-time combination. Each time an Idea actualises itself, there is a space and a time of actualisation. The combinations are certainly variable. On the one hand, if it is true that an Idea has two aspects, differential relations and singular points, the time of actualisation refers to the first, the space of actualisation to the second. On the other hand, if we consider the two aspects of the actual, qualities and extensions, the qualities result above all from the time of actualisation: the specificity of qualities is to endure, and to endure just time enough for an intensive system to maintain and communicate its constitutive differences. As for extensions, they result, for their part, from the space of actualisation or from the movement by which the singularities incarnate themselves. We can see well in biology how differential rhythms determine the organisation of the body and its temporal specification. M. J. Merleau-Ponty: In relation to this question, I think of an image that you did not use in your presentation, the image of lineage. In a paper that you gave on Proust a few years ago, you spoke of lineage, the two lineages which emerge from the great hermaphrodite, etc...

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Couldn’t this image have also been suitable in your paper today? M. G. Deleuze: Yes, dynamisms determine “lineages” in this very way. I spoke today of abstract lines, and of the ground from which these lines emerged. M. Beaufret: I would like to ask a question, but not on the presentation itself, on one of Deleuze’s replies to M. de Gandillac, the last one. At the end of your dialogue Apollo and Dionysos were raised, and it ended with this: the opposition is unsurmountable. Did I understand this correctly? M. G. Deleuze: Yes, I think so. M. Beaufret: Then I will pose the question: by whom? to what point? How? where? when? By whom can it be surmounted? I suppose or I feel that... M. G. Deleuze: By whom could it be surmounted? Surely not by Dionysos himself, who has no interest in doing so. Dionysos ensures that what is distinct remains obscure. He has no reason and no advantage, he cannot bear the idea of reconciliation. He cannot bear the clear-and-distinct. He has taken the distinct for himself and he desires that this distinct be forever obscure. It’s his own will, I suppose... But who wants to surmount this opposition? I can well see that the dream of a reconciliation of the clear and the distinct can only be explained from the side of clarity. It is Apollo who wants to surmount the opposition. It is he who elicits the reconciliation of the clear and the distinct, and it is he who inspires the artisan of this reconciliation: the tragic artist. I come back to M. de Gandillac’s theme, there are several instants. The tragic is the effort of reconciliation, which necessarily comes from Apollo. But in Dionysus there is always something which withdraws and repudiates, something which wants to maintain the obscurity of the distinct... M. Beaufret: I think we satisfy ourselves a little quickly with this DionysusApollo opposition, which, certainly, appears very clear-cut in the Birth of Tragedy. But it seems to me more and more that there is a third character, if I may say, who appears in Nietzsche and who he tends more and more to name Alcyon. I don’t know what he is doing, but what strikes me is

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that this Alkyonische, as he says, who is more and more the sky of Nice, is like a dimension which is neither precisely identified with the Dionysian dimension nor the Apollonian dimension. And at the end of Beyond Good and Evil he speaks of his encounter with Dionysos and says that the god replied to him “with his Alcyonian smile”. I wondered what exactly the “Alcyonian smile” of Dionysos meant? This is why, in any case, I think that Nietzsche is perhaps more reticent than you have been. I think that it is a late discovery. M. G. Deleuze: Certainly, the significance of Alcyon remains a great problem in Nietzsche’s last writings. R. P. Breton: The question: what is?, certainly, does not get me very far in the discovery of the essence or the idea. But it seems to me to have an indispensable regulative function. It opens a space of research which only those questions with a heuristic function—Who? how? etc.—can fill. Far from being able to be a substitute for it, these questions thus seem to me to require it. They constitute the indispensable mediation. It is in order to answer the question what is? that I ask myself the other questions. The two types of questions are thus heterogenous and complementary. Moreover, these questions seem to me to be grounded in a prior idea of the “thing”, an idea which already responds, in a global way, to the question what is? They presuppose a “larval” subject which deploys itself in an interval of realisation, made concrete by the spatio-temporal dynamisms. As such, in virtue of what has been called the conversion of substance into subject, essence is less what is already there than a to ti en einai (what is to be). Hegel will speak in this regard of a Bestimmtheit which becomes Bestimmung. The determination of the thing would be the past of its “dramatisation”. Esse sequitur operari (instead of operari sequitur esse). Traditional ontology would only be the logical approximation of an ontogeny, whose centre would be the causa sui or else the Auqupostaton Proclus speaks of. By situating your reflections within this ontological horizon, I am not claiming to diminish either their interest or their scope. I am trying to better understand them. There is in any case a prior question. To what exactly does your method of dramatisation apply? In what precise horizon of reality do you pose the “topical” questions of Quis? of quomodo? etc. Do these only have a sense in the world of men? Or else do they apply

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to the “things” of common or scientific experience? Spatio-temporal dynamisms are objects of research in dynamic psychology and in microphysics. What relations of analogy are there between these spatiotemporal dynamisms which are so different? Can we imagine a process of differenciation as reconnecting them? M. G. Deleuze: I am not sure that the two types of question can be reconciled. You say that the question: What is? precedes and directs the posing of the others. And that inversely these others allow us to give an answer to it. Is there not rather cause to fear that, if we begin with What is?, we may no longer be able to get to the other questions? The question: What is? prejudices the result of the enquiry, it presupposes that the answer is given in the simplicity of an essence, even if it belongs to this simple essence to duplicate or contradict itself, etc. One remains in the abstract movement, one can no longer rejoin the real movement, the one which traverses a multiplicity as such. The two types of question seem to me to imply methods which are not reconcilable. For example, when Nietzsche asks who, or from what point of view, instead of “what”, he does not claim to complete the question what is? but to denounce the form of this question and all the possible responses to this question. When I ask what is? I assume that there is an essence behind appearances, or at least something ultimate behind the masks. The other type of questions, on the contrary, always discovers other masks behind a mask, displacements behind every place, other “cases” contained within a case. You emphasise in a profound way the presence of a temporal operation in the to ti en einai. But it seems to me that this operation, in Aristotle, does not depend on the question What is?, but on the contrary on the question who?, which Aristotle uses in order to express all of his anti-Platonism. to ti on, is “who is?” (or rather “who, the being?”). You ask me what is the scope of dramatisation. Is it solely psychological or anthropological? I think that man has no privilege there. In any case, it is the unconscious which dramatises. All sorts of repetitions and resonances intervene between physical, biological and psychical dynamisms. Perhaps the difference between these dynamisms comes first of all from the order of the Idea which actualises itself. A determination of these orders of Ideas would be necessary.

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M. Philonenko: I would like to ask M. Deleuze for a clarification. You asserted to us that in the movement of actualisation, differential elements had no sensible figure, no function, no conceptual signification (which in fact seems strictly anti-Leibnizian to me, if I can express it in this way, since Leibniz accords a conceptual signification to the differential precisely because it possesses no “figure”: but that is not in any case the problem which interests me). To support your thesis, however, you alluded to the post-Kantians, in the plural. This thus implied not only a reference to Hegel, but also to Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer even. Perhaps even to Nietzsche, if you like... I would like you to clarify first of all which of the post-Kantians you were thinking of more particularly. M. G. Deleuze: You ask me who I was thinking of: obviously of Maimon and of certain aspects of Novalis. M. Philonenko: And the differential of consciousness? M. G. Deleuze: That’s right... M. Philonenko: In effect, a part of your paper seemed to me to be inspired by Maimon’s work. This clarification is important, then, for the notion of the differential of consciousness, in Maimon, is fundamental, and, in many respects, the spatio-temporal dynamisms such as you have described them, evoke to an amazing extent Maimon’s differential of consciousness. In other words, at the level of representation we have, in a certain way, integrations; but there is a sub-representative level, as you have attempted to show, and this is precisely the level on which the differential possesses a genetic significance, at least in Maimon’s view. I thus wanted this first clarification in order to properly situate the debate. However, and this is very interesting to me, in Maimon the notion of differential, which is attached to the genetic operation of the transcendental imagination, is a sceptical principle, a principle which leads us to consider the real to be illusory. To the very extent, in effect, that the root of spatio-temporal dynamisms is sub-representative, we have, Maimon says, no criterion at all. And that means two things: in the first place, we cannot discern what is produced by us and what is produced by the object; in the second place, we cannot

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distinguish what is produced logically and what is not. What remains is simply the results of the sub-representative genesis of the transcendental imagination. It is thus necessary, according to Maimon, to develop a dialectic of the transcendental imagination, or, if you prefer, a dialectic of the synthesis. This would be linked again in a small way—I indeed say small—with Leibniz. Here then is the clarification I ask of you: what is the role of illusion (or of the illusory) in the movement of differential elements? M. G. Deleuze: For me, none. M. Philonenko: And what is it which thus allows you to say none. M. G. Deleuze: You say to me: for Maimon there is an illusion. I understand you entirely, but my aim was not to explain Maimon. If you ask me: what is the role of illusion in the schema that you are proposing?, I reply: none. For it seems to me that we have the means to penetrate into the realm of the subrepresentative, to reach right into the root of spatiotemporal dynamisms, into the Ideas which actualise themselves in them: ideal elements and events, relations and singularities, are perfectly determinable. The illusion only appears afterwards, on the side of the constituted extensions and the qualities which fill these extensions. M. Philonenko: So the illusion only appears in the constituted? M. G. Deleuze: That’s right. In summary, we do not have the same conception of the unconscious as Leibniz or Maimon. Freud has come in between. There is thus a displacement of the illusion... M. Philonenko: But—for I intend to remain on the plane of logic and even of transcendental logic, without getting involved in psychology—if you place all illusion on the side of the constituted, without admitting an illusion in the genesis, in the constitution, aren’t you then at bottom returning (although you wanted to avoid it) to Plato for whom precisely constitution, understood from the point of view of the Idea, in so far as it can be understood, is always truthful, veridical?

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M. G. Deleuze: Yes, perhaps. M. Philonenko: In such a way that in the final instance on the side of specification and multiplicity we experience the same truth as in Plato, and we would have the same idea of the true, I mean: the simplicity of the true always equal to itself in the totality of its production? M. G. Deleuze: It would not be that Plato. If we think of the Plato of the last dialectic, where the Ideas are a little like multiplicities which must be traversed by the questions How? How much? In what case?, then yes, everything that I am saying seems to me in effect to be Platonic. If it is on the contrary a matter of a Plato who subscribes to a simplicity of the essence or an ipseity of the Idea, then no. M. Jean Wahl: If nobody else wishes to speak, I think it remains for me only to thank M. Deleuze very much and all those who were good enough to take part in the discussion.

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Deleuze: 1953 Instincts et Institutions: textes choisis et présentées par G. Deleuze (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1953). English translation: “Introduction”, Thesis Appendix 3. 1953 Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). First edition 1953. English translation: Empiricism and subjectivity: an essay on Hume's theory of human nature, translated and with an introduction by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 1954 Review of Jean Hyppolite’s Logique et Existence, in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, vol. 144 (1954), pp. 147-160. English translation: “Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logique et Existence”, appendix to Logic and Existence, Jean Hyppolite, trans. L. Lawlor and A. Sen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). 1956 “La conception de la différence chez Bergson”, Les Etudes Bergsoniennes IV (1956), pp. 77-112. English translation: “Bergson’s conception of difference”, trans. Melissa McMahon, in John Mullarkey (ed), The New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). 1962 Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). English translation: Nietzsche and philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone Press, 1983). 1963 La philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994). First edition 1963. English translation: Kant's critical philosophy: the doctrine of the faculties (with new Preface by Deleuze), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1984). 1963 “L’idée de genèse dans l’esthétique de Kant”, in Revue d’Esthétique, vol. 16, no. 2 (April-June 1963), pp. 113-136. English translation: “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”, trans. Daniel W. Smith, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 5, no. 3 (December 2000), pp. 57-70. th

1966 Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994 (5 edition)).

English translation: Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 1967 “Méthode de Dramatisation”, in Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, vol. LXII (1967), pp. 89-118. English translation: “The Method of Dramatisation”, Thesis Appendix 1. 1968 Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). First edition 1968. English translation: Difference and repetition, trans. Paul Patton (with new Preface by Deleuze), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 1969 Logique du sens (Paris: Les Édition de Minuit, 1969). English translation: The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: The Athlone Press, 1990) 1972 “Hume”, in François Chatelêt (ed), Histoire de la Philosophie 4—Les Lumières: le XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Librairie Hachette), p. 67. 1972 “A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?” in François Chatelêt, ed., Histoire de la philosophie tome 8: Le XXe Siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1972). English translation: “How do we recognise structuralism?”, trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles Stivale, appendix in Charles Stivale, The Two-Fold thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations (New York; London: Guilford Press, 1998). 1972 (with Félix Guattari) L’Anti-oedipe: capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 1977 (third augmented edition) Proust et les signes, third edition with contributions from Guattari (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). English translation: Proust and signs: the complete text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 1977 Dialogues (with Claire Parnet), (Paris: Flammarion, 1996 augmented edition). English translation: Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). th

st

th

th

1978 Gilles Deleuze, 4 lessons on Kant, 14 March, 21 March, 28 March, 4 April, (French and English (trans. Melissa McMahon) available at http://www.webdeleuze.com/). th

1980 Deleuze, Seminar on Leibniz, 20 May (French only, available at http://www.webdeleuze.com/). 1980 (with Félix Guattari) Milles Plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 1982-3 Seminar on Kant & Foucault, (c. 1982-83, exact date indeterminate) (http://www.webdeleuze.com/). 1983 Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1983). English translation: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986). 1985 Cinéma 2: l’image-temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 1986 Foucault (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: Foucault, translated and edited by Seán Hand (London: Athlone, 1988). 1988 Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988). English translation: The fold: Leibniz and the baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 1990

Pourparlers, 1972-1990 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: Negotiations, 1972-1990, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

1991 Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994). 1993 Critique et Clinique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). English translation: Essays critical and clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c1997). 1995 Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: une vie…”, in Philosophie no. 47, September 1995, special issue on Deleuze, pp. 3-7. English translation: Reproduced in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

Kant: 1763 Versuch, den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (Königsberg, bey Johann Jacob Kanter). English translation: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, in Cambridge Edition I, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, trans. and ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge; New York; Port Chester; Melbourne; Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 1770 De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (dissertation, Königsberg, Regiomonti, Stanno regiae aulicae et academicae typographae).

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PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY English translation: On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (Inaugural Dissertation), in Cambridge Edition I, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, trans. and ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge; New York; Port Chester; Melbourne; Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 1781 & 1787 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga verlegts Johann Friedrich Hartknoch & Riga bei Johann Friedrich Hartknoch). English translation: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990). 1783 Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (bey Johann Friedrich Hartknoch). English translation: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come forward as science (with Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason), trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 1784 “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?”, in Berlinische Monatsschrift, vol. IV (12 December), pp. 481-94. th

English translation: “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”, Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge; New York; Port Chester; Melbourne; Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 1786 “Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?”, in Berlinische Monatsschrift, vol. 8 (October), pp. 304-330. English translation: “What is orientation in thinking?”, in Hans Reiss (ed) Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge; New York; Port Chester; Melbourne; Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 1788 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Riga, Johann Friedrich Hartknoch). English translation: Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 1790 Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin und Libau, bey Lagarde und Friederich). English translation: Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). 1793 “Uber den Gemeinspruch: Das Mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis”, in Berlinische Monatsschrift, vol. 23, pp. 20184. English translation: “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’”, Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge; New York; Port Chester; Melbourne; Sydney: Cambridge University Press 1991). 1796 “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Tone Philosophie”, in Berlinische Monatsschrift, vol. 27, pp. 387-426.

in

der

English translation: “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy”, in Peter Fenves (ed) Raising the Tone of Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 1798 Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Königsberg, bey Friedrich Nicolovius). English translation: Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, trans. M. J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

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