Experience, time, and the subject: Deleuze's transformation of Kant's critical philosophy issue 2010

EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

by Anupa Batra B.S., Bradley University, 1994 M.Ed., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996 M.A., Boston College, 1999

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy in the Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale August 2010

UMI Number: 3426647

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DISSERTATION APPROVAL EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

By Anupa Batra

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Ph.D. in the field of Philosophy

Approved by: Dr. Sara Beardsworth, Chair Dr. Douglas Anderson Dr. Ryan Netzley Dr. Kenneth Stikkers Dr. Stephen Tyman Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale June 8, 2010

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Anupa Batra, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Philosophy, presented on June 8, 2010, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: EXPERIENCE, TIME, AND THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE’S TRANSFORMATION OF KANT’S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Sara Beardsworth The aim of this thesis is to show that Deleuze develops a new conception of experience. I do so by showing the roots of this new conception in a transformation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant is central to Deleuze’s project because Deleuze finds in Kant the idea that the justification for truth is internal to the relation of subject and object. Since the internal relation is vital to Deleuze’s notion of experience, his project is formed as the problem of transcendental conditioning, as was Kant’s. However, Deleuze argues that Kant did not take the critique far enough since he was able to examine claims to truth but not the idea of truth itself. Deleuze’s notion of experience is developed in and through his attempt to overcome this problem. I show that Deleuze transforms Kant by rethinking four key notions. First, Deleuze reconceives the notion of the system of experience. He argues that Kant’s notion of the system of experience closes off experience so that nothing genuinely new could occur. For Deleuze, experience does not form a single system but, instead, there are multiple systems of experience and they arise from within experience. In addition, new systems of experience can occur for Deleuze. Second, he rethinks the notion of the transcendental conditions of experience such that they condition experience but arise from within experience. Experience can always be opened up in a new way. Moreover, since experience can occur in a genuinely new way, the subject must be able to be transformed

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as well. Third, then, he also rethinks the notion of the subject. For Deleuze, we cannot begin with a subject that is self-identical. He provides an account for the production of the subject. The transcendental conditions of experience belong to experience itself, not the subject. The subject and the object of knowledge are produced together when a system of experience opens up. As a result, the subject and object are necessarily in relation and, for this reason, the object can always in principle be known by the subject. Fourth, although Deleuze relies on Kant’s conception of time to explain the subject’s relation to itself, he transforms both the subject’s self-relation and the conception of time. In Kant the subject simply cannot know itself as it is, but only as it is given to itself. Deleuze’s subject, which also cannot know itself, can nonetheless genuinely be transformed and become different from itself. The transformation of the subject occurs at the moment that a new field of experience is opened up. In conclusion, Deleuze shows that new experience can always occur.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................i INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 – On the Centrality of the Kantian Critical Philosophy for Deleuze ...... 13 CHAPTER 2 – The Notion of System .......................................................................... 57 CHAPTER 3 – The Production of a System of Experience ....................................... 104 CHAPTER 4 – The Subject and Time ........................................................................ 147 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 195 VITA

..................................................................................................................... 199

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1 INTRODUCTION This thesis claims that for Deleuze philosophy is the task of overcoming the hindrance to thought represented by what he calls “the dogmatic image of thought,” in order to free thought to create new concepts and new kinds of life. I argue for the importance in his endeavor of Deleuze’s relation to Kant. This project is an interpretation of Difference and Repetition,1 which is acknowledged as Deleuze’s major work on Kant. It will show the intelligibility of Deleuze’s concept of thinking by demonstrating its roots in a transformation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. A further objective is to contribute, thereby, to making Deleuze’s philosophy accessible to a more general philosophical audience. Deleuze argues that the dogmatic image of thought represents a tendency that occurs in philosophy itself, and for this reason we need a new conception of philosophy that includes within it the self-critical relation. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had conceived of the critical philosophy precisely for this purpose.2 Reason examines its own limits in order to avoid overstepping them. If philosophy is to have a critical relation to itself it must reflexively ask the question of what philosophy is. Metaphysics in the sense of a critical self-examination is therefore the most immediate task of philosophy. However, Deleuze finds that the Kantian critical philosophy, too, falls into the dogmatic image and therefore represents the hindrance to thought. For Deleuze, we must understand how thinking has been hindered and how it must now be conceived. I claim

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Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994); page 86. Hereafter cited as DR followed by the page number. 2 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A158/B197. Hereafter cited as CPR followed by the page number in the A edition and B editions.

2 that Deleuze’s project is carried through as a critical transformation of Kant’s critical philosophy and his new conception of thinking is the result. Deleuze reserves the term “experience” for this new conception since conceptual thought will have to be understood as occurring in and through experience, not apart from it. I argue that Kant is central to Deleuze’s project because he finds in Kant the idea that the justification for truth is internal to the relation of thought and its object. In other words, thought and its object are understood as being in an essential relationship. Since this relation is vital to Deleuze’s notion of experience, his project is formed as the problem of transcendental conditioning, as was Kant’s. However, Deleuze also argues that Kant did not take the critique far enough since he was able to examine claims to truth but not the idea of truth itself. For Deleuze, Kant’s dogmatism is represented in his theory of transcendental Ideas, which express the relation between the transcendental conditions of experience and empirical experience. In Kant the relation is one of simple correspondence. Deleuze retains but transforms the Ideas, thereby transforming the idea of transcendental conditioning. This enables him, in turn, to account for how we can think what is new. According to Deleuze, Kant’s shortcoming lies in his method. In seeking the transcendental conditions of experience, he simply traced back from the end result, knowledge, to its conditions. As a result, experience can only occur as recognition for Kant: the subsumption of particulars under given universals. For Deleuze, in contrast, recognition is itself grounded in a more profound act of thinking. I show that what allows Deleuze to account for thinking the new is that he draws the transcendental conditions from the process of learning, not from the end result. Deleuze argues that

3 experience begins from problems, and Kant’s theory of Ideas provides him with a way of developing his own conception of problems. Ideas, or transcendental problems, pose a systematic field and thereby open up knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge of empirical objects or, in other words, empirical inquiry. There is knowledge only insofar as empirical objects appear as the solution to a transcendental problem. Recognition occurs at this level of empirical inquiry. But experience, for Deleuze, is the opening up of the systematic field of empirical inquiry. Problems therefore represent the only transcendental conditions of experience for Deleuze. Ideas function both epistemologically and ontologically in Deleuze. They account both for the fact that objects can be known and for the being of these objects. I then show how Deleuze accounts for the production of a system of experience once it has opened up. The objects that belong to a system are produced internally to the system through a process of individuation. Kant had, of course, used the forms of space and time to account for the difference between individuals. In contrast, Deleuze argues that space and time do not serve to explain individual difference but must themselves be explained. Thus Deleuze gives an account of the production of space and time. The spatiotemporality of individuals is the result of the process of individuation. In this way, Deleuze avoids the problem Kant could not seem to resolve: showing how intuition could come into relation with concepts. The end result of the production of a system of experience is objects that can be recognized and known conceptually. Deleuze’s account of experience forces us to reconsider the question of the subject. Since experience is essentially experience of the new, for Deleuze, the subject is itself transformed through experience. In other words, a self-identical subject could not

4 withstand experience. Deleuze develops his idea of the subject out of a tension he discovers in Kant. For Kant, the subject’s relation to itself occurs as the relation between the transcendental and empirical subject, and time is the form in which this relation occurs. Deleuze argues that the subject’s relation to itself is static in Kant since the empirical subject corresponds exactly with the transcendental subject. In Deleuze, in contrast, the transcendental conditions can never be brought into complete resolution with the empirical (that is to say, with what is conditioned). The subject’s relation to itself is therefore always in the process of occurring and is never complete. Since time is the form of the relation between the transcendental and empirical subject, it is understood by Deleuze as the form of change itself, and as the condition of the transformation of the subject. Experience is only possible for Deleuze because it can be temporally differentiated. The transformation of the subject occurs at the moment that a field of empirical inquiry opens up. Moreover, the subject can always be transformed anew since experience can never be complete. Chapter 1 presents Deleuze’s relation to the Kantian conception of critique. I show that in a range of texts—from Difference and Repetition to Nietzsche and Philosophy and selected seminars on Kant and Leibniz—Deleuze is arguing that the question of truth is not the primary question for philosophy since it depends on sense or meaning.3 The more fundamental question of sense cannot be asked at the empirical level and requires the move to the transcendental level. I am therefore claiming that Deleuze is primarily interested in the Kantian critical philosophy because it is the discovery of the transcendental. With the notion of the transcendental, Kant is able to conceive of internal 3

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as NP followed by the page number.

5 critique. Internal critique is grounded in the idea that the relationship between knowledge and the objects of knowledge is internal. As a result, we can understand how truth, the agreement of knowledge with its object, occurs internally to this relation, in contrast to the idea that truth is justified by something external to the relation. This makes it possible to critique claims to truth. Deleuze proposes to advance the idea of internal critique not only in order to understand truth as internal but also to explain how the relation by which truth is justified comes to be generated internally. From this, we will be able to understand how the new arises internally, from within experience. As a result, we can examine when thought is hindered and falls into dogmatism. My major argument in chapter 1 is that, according to Deleuze, internal critique in Kant is made possible by the theory of the transcendental Ideas of reason, discussed by Kant in the “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic: The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason” and “Transcendental Doctrine of Method: The Architectonic of Pure Reason” in the Critique of Pure Reason. There are three Ideas that are important here: God, World, and Self. Their significance lies not in the content of these Ideas but in their manner of functioning and their role in experience. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues that what is interesting is the regulative functioning of the Ideas, the fact that they are “problematizing.” The Ideas postulate that what we find empirically forms a complete system, that it is completely ordered, and that this is due to order imposed transcendentally. Since the object of the Ideas is the complete system, which is not empirically given but must be represented, the Ideas serve to draw together empirical inquiries that would otherwise remain fragmented. In other words, they provide meaning otherwise lacking to particular empirical cases. Without the Ideas, empirical particulars

6 would remain fragmented and indifferent to one another. Thanks to the Ideas, the object of knowledge does not occur apart from the concept by which it can be known. The Ideas thereby open up the field of inquiry and, through them, we can examine the field of inquiry itself. I make clear in this chapter that Deleuze’s general criticism of Kant is that he, too, falls into dogmatism. Deleuze’s reason for this criticism has to do with Kant’s method for seeking the transcendental conditions of experience. In claiming that Kant simply traced from the end result, knowledge, back to its conditions (the transcendental concepts of the understanding), Deleuze is arguing that Kant treats experience as though it were hypothetical instead of real. The result of his method is that the conditions of experience are static and unchanging. They are simply conditions of possibility and they remain external to what they condition. Experience occurs when the transcendental concepts of the understanding enter into relation with the empirical, yet, because these conditions are static for Kant, experience can only occur as recognition: knowledge, an empirical case of cognition, occurs when the manifold of intuition is recognized as a particular case of a universal concept. Since the Ideas express the way in which the transcendental concepts of the understanding relate to the empirical, they represent Kant’s dogmatism. The relation is one of simple correspondence. The Ideas therefore bring the empirical and these transcendental conditions (the categories of the understanding) into complete resolution. In other words, in Kant, experience is closed off through the Ideas and must be understood as forming a totality. Chapter 2 shows that Deleuze’s own conception of experience arises in and through his transformation of central notions of Kant’s critical philosophy. For both Kant and

7 Deleuze, the meaning of objects is only possible because experience forms a system. In Kant all of experience forms a single system, which can be conceived through the Ideas of reason. Difference and Repetition reconceives the relation between the system and what lies beyond it, the indeterminate, thereby transforming the notion of system. For Deleuze, there are multiple systems and they arise from what is indeterminate. This is because, for him, a system is not the totality of experience. A system is only experience insofar as it is ordered by one particular Idea. The notion of the Idea is transformed as well, such that it indicates one aspect of experience that becomes extracted from it, by which experience is then found to be systematically ordered. Once a system of experience has opened up, the production of the diversity of individual cases of objects follows. These cases are meaningful and are distinguished according to the order of that particular system. In this way, the transcendental conditions of experience themselves account for the systematization of experience and for the diversity of cases that occur within it. For Deleuze, experience can never be resolved into a totality, that is to say, into a single Idea or set of Ideas, because it cannot be determined in advance what new Ideas can occur. I go on to show that, since transcendental conditions emerge from experience or, in other words, objects of experience, these objects are not completely ordered. In Kant something is an object only insofar as it has exactly one meaning, which is found by identifying the object in the system within which its meaning arises. Since this is not the case for Deleuze, he does not refer to objects as empirical but instead claims they are

8 always partly “virtual” and partly “actual.”4 Transcendental conditions, or Ideas, arise from experience as problems because the meaning of the object can come into question through tensions within it that are virtual and, in this way, the source of meaning also becomes a question. The object then becomes reoriented in accordance with its new meaning, as a solution to the problem that had arisen from it. It is transformed through its reorientation. The term “actual” reflects the fact that the object has become a solution. Deleuze continues to use the term empirical only in regard to knowledge of the empirical object in Kant’s sense. Yet, for Deleuze, knowledge is knowledge of the object insofar as it is the solution to a problem. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on how the individuals or empirical cases that comprise a system are produced once the system has opened up. Deleuze argues that the forms of space and time cannot be used to explain the difference between empirical cases, as Kant had done. For Deleuze, empirical cases can only be explained as arising through the process of individuation. Individuals come to have spatiotemporality through this process. He uses the term “intensity,” which is taken from physics and biology, to develop this account. For him, intensity is an internal difference in that it does not occur between two units that are already distinct but, instead, occurs within a singular thing and creates a difference within it. The notion of intensity takes us from the Idea to the production of individuals within a system of experience. This chapter also explains how experience occurs for a human subject. I show that the process of learning, and hence experience, begins because the transcendental does not completely overlap with the empirical. It begins when a sign appears to us as a shock. 4

Deleuze develops the notions of the virtual and actual in Chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition and in the essay, “The Actual and the Virtual” in Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (New York: Columbia University Press), 2002.

9 The sign is emitted in the rupture of a virtual tension of an object. The ambiguous status of the sign reflects the complex relation between the transcendental and empirical: the sign is not empirically known but it appears within empirical experience precisely as that which is outside of ordered experience. I argue that during the shock there is a disorganization of experience, which entails an undoing of the transcendental order by which experience had been structured meaningfully up to that point. No particular meaningful object can be thought since meaning itself has arisen as a question. In other words, during the shock there is nothing empirical since experience has not yet been ordered by transcendental conditions. As experience organizes itself, there is a corresponding activity occurring within the unconscious of the subject. The subject can only learn insofar as she is willing to engage with a particular external element, such as water when learning to swim. Once the system has been produced, the subject is able to use concepts to refer to the stable cases of the system. Concepts occur at the empirical level of the organization of experience, for Deleuze, as they express the kinds of empirical cases that occur. At this stage, the subject is able, once again, to recognize objects or cases around her. Chapter 4 turns to the question of the subject. On this question Deleuze both maintains the internal relation of the subject with the object that he finds in Kant and addresses problems he finds in the Kantian conception of the subject.5 The central complaint that Deleuze makes of Kant is that he simply attributed the conditions of 5

Deleuze’s criticisms of the Kantian subject are scattered through a number of texts: the second, third, and forth chapters of Difference and Repetition, “Preface: On the Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy,” and several seminars on Kant dated 14 March 1978, 21 March 1978, and 28 March 1978, and the 20 May 1980 seminar on Leibniz. Gilles Deleuze, “Preface: On the Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy” in Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

10 experience to the subject. This, of course, allowed Kant to successfully argue that the relation of subject and object is an internal one. However, Kant did not show why these conditions come to belong to the subject. Deleuze solves this problem by arguing that the subject is produced anew along with a system of experience. Since there is no subject prior to the objects it knows, the relation between them will be a necessary and internal one. The chapter shows how the subject is produced in experience for Deleuze. In Kant every representation of the subject must become part of the inner state of the subject. Since time is the form of inner intuition, any change in the subject or in the subject’s experience is given in time. Thus the subject in Kant can only know itself in time. Deleuze takes his cue from Kant in making time central to understanding the identity of the subject. However, for Deleuze, time is not merely a subjective condition. It is a condition of experience itself and, as a result, we can have not only a transformation in the subject’s representation but a transformation in the subject as well. I therefore show how Deleuze’s conception of the subject arises from Kant’s. Deleuze claims that since the transcendental conditions correspond exactly with the empirical for Kant, the subject’s relation to itself is in fact static and reduced to the instant. His criticism of Kant on this point is that the subject can never change or be new but always remains the same. Deleuze agrees with Kant that the subject’s relation to itself is temporal but, since new transcendental conditions can always arise from experience for Deleuze, the subject’s relation to itself is always in the process of occurring and is never complete. In this sense, the subject is always fractured and never identical to itself. For Deleuze, then, the subject genuinely changes. Time is the form of change because the subject comes into relation with itself and becomes different from itself through time.

11 Kant’s “Transcendental Deduction” provides three syntheses by which experience occurs: the synthesis of apprehension in an intuition, the synthesis of reproduction in imagination, and the synthesis of recognition in a concept. These also show how the subject synthesizes experience in time since, in the first synthesis, the manifold of sensibility is synthesized in a single moment, in the second the multiplicity of representations is synthesized across time, and in the third the multiplicity of representations is synthesized by subordinating them to a concept. Deleuze argues that Kant simply presumes the form of time, and that an account of time must be given. To this end, he sets out three passive syntheses of time, which serve to account for the synthesis of time itself: the synthesis of the living present, the synthesis of the past and foundation of time, and the groundless form of time. The first synthesis gives us the continuity of ordinary clock time. The second synthesis gives us the absolute past of ordinary time, and it explains why ordinary time appears to have no beginning. The third synthesis gives us the institution of ordinary time. For Deleuze, each system of experience has its own temporality or its own order of ordinary time. The third synthesis, I argue, is the key to understanding time as the form of experience in Deleuze and so the constitution of the subject in experience. The opening up of a new system is only possible because experience can be temporally differentiated. In other words, experience only occurs as temporal disruption. The introduction of transcendental differentiation constitutes a break in experience, and it is only in this break that a new system and its order of time can occur, as well as the subject of that system. Thus, chapter 4 will show that Deleuze’s novel conception of time allows him to conceive of the subject as always open to transformation and to conceive of experience as always able to occur in a new

12 way. Together, the four chapters will show how Deleuze transforms the notion of transcendental conditioning such that conditions are understood as arising from within experience. That is to say, Deleuze accounts for the opening up of experience and transforming of experience internally, from within experience. The overall objective of the dissertation is to demonstrate that Deleuze’s philosophy articulates a post-critical metaphysics. I will show that his conception of philosophy retains the critical relation that philosophy has with itself, following Kant. In addition, Deleuze retains the idea that the subject and object have an internal relation. Moreover, his critique of Kant transforms the notion of transcendental conditioning so that it accounts not only for our knowledge but also for the being or reality of things. As the dissertation will show, this is not a return to a precritical metaphysics. Rather, as I will articulate in the conclusion, Deleuze’s metaphysics opens up the “sphere of immanence.”

13 CHAPTER 1 THE CENTRALITY OF THE KANTIAN CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY FOR DELEUZE INTRODUCTION My thesis claims that Deleuze develops a new conception of experience. I argue that this new conception must be understood as developing out of Kant’s critical philosophy. This chapter examines what Deleuze finds so vitally important in Kant: the idea that the relation of thought and object is an internal not an external one. With Kant, it is no longer the case that thought tries to grasp objects that appear according to laws beyond us, like divine laws we cannot know. Instead, objects appear for thought only because thought structures experience a priori. The internal relation of thought and object means that we can grasp the laws by which objects appear to us. I argue that the internal relation of thought and object is important for Deleuze because it allows him to develop a conception of thought whose task is not simply to grasp an object correctly, but to grasp what allows objects to appear. Deleuze’s purpose is to rectify the fact that philosophy has traditionally conceived of thinking as “representational.” The idea that thought is representational is grounded in the claim that thought simply represents what is real, and thinking is equated with making true or correct judgments. Deleuze’s criticism is that the idea that thought is primarily representational is a narrow conception of thought. Simply being able to make true statements does not mean there is possession of knowledge in a genuine sense. I will show that Deleuze’s own conception of experience is intended to be a richer conception of thinking. According to Deleuze, thinking is not simply the correct application of concepts. Instead, it is what occurs in the production of concepts. In this sense, thinking is inherently thinking what is new.

14 In order to develop the idea of the internal relation of thought and object, Deleuze must turn to the idea of system in Kant. This chapter works out the connection between the internal relation and system in Kant. In order for an object, a particular case, or a judgment to be meaningful for thought, whether the judgment is true or false, it must occur in relation to a system. If knowledge did not form a system and were merely an aggregate, that is to say, if it were merely a collection of fragments with no unifying laws, it would mean that the principles of knowledge lay outside of thought. In other words, if knowledge in Kant did not form a system, the relation of thought and object could not be internal. The transcendental Ideas of reason are what make the system possible. Thus in order to develop the idea of the internal relation Deleuze must turn to Kant’s theory of Ideas. The Ideas allow us to conceive of experience as forming a whole. For this reason, according to Deleuze, they make it possible for us to examine not only the truth or falsity of judgments but also meaning, on which truth and falsity depend. Meaning only arises through the system and, therefore, the Ideas allow us to see how meaning arises.6 However, Deleuze finds that Kant’s project is not sufficient for philosophy to be truly critical. The critical philosophy was supposed to free thought from the authority of what is transcendent to thought and to legitimize what it can know on its own grounds. I will show that, for Deleuze, Kant’s shortcoming was due to his method. Kant presupposed what would count as pure knowledge–mathematics and geometry, and then determined the transcendental conditions by simply tracing back from these. The problem is that Kant discovers conditions that are merely static and are simply part of the structure of

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I will therefore return to the question of meaning in section 3 below, after the discussion of the transcendental ideas in section 2.

15 thought. As a result, knowledge can only occur as recognition: correctly subsuming what is given in intuition under a concept. Deleuze considers this to be dogmatism because thought can do no more than identify what is given as a particular case of what is already known in the form of concepts. He argues that thought is still not free with Kant because it is now subject to the demands of reason. Thought is no longer subject to an authority beyond itself but it serves only to legitimize what is already known. For Deleuze, we must have a broader conception of thought that allows us to see how we produce the concepts by which we know something. Examining Deleuze’s criticism of Kant will allow us to see the problems Deleuze must overcome in developing his own conception of experience, which I will turn to in Chapter 2. 1. KANT'S CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY Kant’s project must be understood in relation to the philosophical atmosphere at that time, as a response to it. In developing Deleuze’s relation with Kant, Christian Kerslake provides an excellent interpretation of the motivation behind Kant’s project in his article, “Kant, Deleuze, and Metacritique.”7 Kerslake argues that Kant perceived that intellectual intuition is impossible for human thought. For finite rational beings there can be no immediate, intellectual knowledge of things in themselves since they must appear as spatial and temporal. Nor do we have divine intuition since we cannot produce the object that we think in intuition. Our intuition is passive in that an object must be given to us. Since God must be understood as infinite and since knowledge of the infinite could only occur directly and immediately, the loss of intellectual intuition amounts to the speculative death of God. Knowledge of God is impossible for humans. This is 7

Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLII (2004), pp. 481-508.

16 understood as a crisis in thought since the relation between thought and being can no longer be understood as direct and immediate. A chasm is opened up between thought and being because of the passivity of our intuition. We do not even know if thought has any relation to objects. Therefore in order to claim that knowledge is possible, it must first be shown that a relation between thought and being does, indeed, occur through the chasm. Kant’s work is aimed at determining what relation human thought has with being and, thus, what we can legitimately know. For Kant, the crisis in thought meant that we could not presume the existence of an independent object causing sensation. Kant’s critical philosophy is distinct from both rationalism and empiricism in this regard. The latter function under the presumption that thought comes into relation with an object that is independent of it. The way in which the Kantian philosophy is situated in relation to rationalism and empiricism is important for Deleuze. It seems to be his concern in the seminar of 20 May 1980 on Leibniz, which is devoted to a comparison of Leibniz and Kant on the ideas of the finite and infinite. He argues that one reason for Kant’s success in rethinking the relation of thought and being is that he begins from the idea of the finite. In Deleuze’s view, the rationalists began thinking from the infinite. For this reason, finitude was conceived as occurring only as a consequence of the limitation of the infinite. According to the Leibnizian view, the model of finite human knowledge is divine knowledge, of which our knowledge is only an imperfect version. Divine and human knowledge differ only in degree not in kind. The accuracy of human knowledge is evaluated in reference to divine knowledge (the criterion for its truth), that is to say, in how close it comes to the latter. In other words, human knowledge has legitimacy only in relation to infinite divine knowledge. When

17 human knowledge is understood through its difference from divine knowledge, the objects of knowledge must be things in themselves, not simply what they are for us. For the Leibnizian, what appears to the senses can only be considered distorted in comparison to the objects of divine knowledge, which are essences of things. Deleuze suggests that before Kant the subject is understood in the history of philosophy as having a fundamental defect. It is as a result of this defect that things appear as they do to the subject. The sensible element of finite knowledge is the result of our imperfection and limitation, of our not being God, and it is sensibility that prevents us from having knowledge to the same degree as the divine. The sensible is not anything positive and, for this reason, our concepts of space and time are entirely conceptual even though they are perceived through the senses. We arrive at these concepts by abstraction, so they are objective and not a priori. On this view, our sensible cognitions are the same in kind as our intellectual cognitions, just less clear and distinct. When something appears to us, it is the occasion to try to know it, to try to get to its essence. Deleuze claims that the motivation behind Plato’s epistemology, to take one case, is to find a way to overcome our infirmity, on account of which we experience mere appearance, in order to get to essence. Although we try to get to what the object is apart from its relation to us, we can never succeed. This is only possible for the subject whose intuition is not limited by sensibility. Deleuze’s aim in characterizing Kant’s project as established in the finite human condition is to bring our attention to the fact that the critical philosophy does not begin from the assumption that human knowledge is a flawed and imperfect version of another kind, divine knowledge. We could only consider human knowledge flawed if there were

18 an object it could not get to, an object which was not graspable for it because of its finite nature. Kant reinterprets sense intuition as a unique kind of intuition rather than as a flawed and limited version of intellectual intuition. Since our intuition is passive, finite human knowledge cannot be compared to knowledge that is possible through another kind of intuition. In other words, Kant examines human knowledge on its own terms, not in reference to divine knowledge. The contribution of sensible intuition is therefore considered something positive. In the seminar on Kant dated 14 March 1978 Deleuze makes the argument that, with Kant, appearance in intuition is not to be interpreted as a distortion of a true object, but as the appearing of the object itself. In other words, the subject is no longer understood to be defective and instead is constitutive of the appearing of objects. The appearance cannot legitimately be contrasted with a so-called true object or essence. The notion of appearance implies that something can be an object only under certain conditions –space and time. These are subjective and in us since they are the conditions under which anything can come into relation with the subject. Space and time are not conceptual and abstracted from objects but, instead, the forms of sensible intuition. Whatever falls outside of the limits of these conditions can never be an object for us. Kant thereby critically restricts theoretical knowledge to possible objects, that is to say, to appearances only. Since essence, in the Platonic sense, cannot come into relation with us in principle, it is not a possible object of knowledge. In other words, with Kant, the object is not something independent of the subject, whose essence the subject simply grasps correctly or incorrectly. As I said earlier, the problem Kant feels he must address is how a relation between thought and being could occur. As Kerslake argues, “thought is cast adrift” in having no

19 direct relation to the object and in having to rely on intuition that is passive.8 However, it is the passivity of intuition that also makes it possible for Kant to transform the relation of thought and being. The object is no longer understood as something independent of thought, but instead there is an object only insofar as something appears in sensible intuition. In sum, the relation becomes internalized. What is given in intuition is taken as object. Kerslake argues that it is the Kantian ‘as’ that is central to the Copernican turn.9 There is no object apart from the fact that the subject organizes sensation into an object. Empirically, we know objects because what is given in sensation is taken as an instantiation of a concept and thereby as an object. Thus the categories of the understanding, which give us the concept of an object in general, must apply to whatever is given in sensation. It is only because we passively receive something in intuition that it can be organized. In other words, with Kant, thought does not simply seek to reveal what is out there. This kind of direct relation is impossible. We can no longer presume that being is ordered prior to its coming into relation with thought. The ordering of being occurs when sensation is taken as an object because sensation is taken as a part of the ordered system. Therefore, while it had previously been understood that the relation of thought was with what already had order, with Kant the relation of thought is with what thought itself organizes into an object. As said, the relation between thought and object must be understood as an internal one. In other words, the critical restriction of objects of knowledge to appearances allows us to understand the object and knowledge as fundamentally related. The conditions of the former are also the conditions of the latter. This relation is given as the axiomatic

8 9

Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique,” p. 493. Ibid., p. 498.

20 claim: “The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects [Gegenstände] of experience.”10 In Deleuze’s view the entire Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to establishing this principle and, thereby, to establishing the internal relation of thought and being. He thinks that the internalization of the relation is the creative moment of the critical philosophy. Its significance is not only epistemological but also ontological Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the determination)…It amounts to the discovery of Difference…no longer in the form of an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes an a priori relation between thought and being.11 Thought and being are brought about together in Kant because there is nothing, no being, until there is organization. Just to be clear, for Kant this “nothing” is what is transcendentally negated. In other words, for Kant we cannot claim anything is, in a positive sense, without the ordering structure of thought. The internal relation of thought and being makes the self-reflective moment of the critical philosophy possible. Since we can interpret what we are able to know as something positive, we can understand human knowledge on its own terms and for what it actually is, rather than in relation to some other kind of knowledge. That is to say, we can ask the question, what are the structures of reason that make possible what we are, in fact, able to know? When we properly understand the structures of reason, we can determine what kind of object we can know, 10

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A158/B197. Hereafter cited as CPR followed by the page number in the A edition and B edition. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994); page 86. Hereafter cited as DR followed by the page number.

21 in principle: the object to which we have the right (the question de jure that Kant is so concerned with). As a point of comparison, we can examine what the relation of thought and being is for empiricism and rationalism. In Kant’s Critical Philosophy Deleuze makes the point that while empiricism and rationalism are opposed to each other in certain essential respects, they both require a final harmony of subject with object.12 For the empiricists, the object of knowledge can be reduced to its sensual aspect, while the claim of rationalism is that objects are, at bottom, purely conceptual. In both cases, however, the mind simply conforms to the object in knowing it, and therefore their relationship is external. The object has an identity independent of the knowledge of it. Knowledge is simply the agreement of mind with object, and the relation between the order of ideas and the order of things is simply correspondence. Neither empiricism nor rationalism is able to explain the agreement of a correct idea with the object. Neither is able to explain truth. Something external and transcendent must be invoked to legitimate and guarantee the correspondence, that is to say, God. Since the relation is external and is legitimated by what is beyond the possibility of human knowledge, the correspondence of idea and object cannot be understood in principle. Since the relation is internal for Kant, knowledge and its objects are necessarily related. It is the necessity that the relation carries that makes Kant revolutionary. As a result of this necessity, the critical philosophy is able to achieve a kind of certainty that is impossible for empiricism or rationalism. For Kant, the empirical identity of the object is not independent of the possible knowledge of it, since the transcendental conditions are 12

Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11-14. Hereafter cited in the text as KCP, followed by the page number.

22 the same for both (empirically, of course, the object could be unknown or incorrectly known). Deleuze expresses it in this way: Kant “[substitutes] the principle of a necessary submission of object to subject for the idea of a harmony between subject and object (final accord)” (KCP 14). The principle by which the object submits to the subject is the principle of possible experience. The agreement of a correct idea with the object is not just correspondence and can be understood because their relation is internal. As a result, truth occurs internally to the relationship of knowledge and the objects proper to it. Critically restricted theoretical knowledge contains its own validity. We are able to make necessary and universal judgments about experience, about objects, only because they are our own representations, because the conditions for objects are subjective. The empirical laws we discover in experience derive their necessity from the pure laws of the understanding, without which experience would not be possible. In fact, we discover such laws only because the understanding prescribes laws a priori to experience. We can then gather these empirical laws into a science such as physics. These laws hold with necessity and universality because they apply only to our own representations. We have the expectation of consistency and of order: that whatever will come will fit in with the order we have already seen. In fact, we always assume our experience is consistent with what we already know. Since all empirical laws derive their necessity from the pure laws of the understanding, theoretical knowledge itself provides the grounds by which to judge whether a particular judgment is true or false. Theoretical knowledge, as conceived by Kant, contains its own criterion of truth. Moreover, the internal relationship of thought and being makes the critical selfexamination of philosophy possible because it allows the critique of claims to truth to

23 occur. As we said above, Kant shows that theoretically restricted knowledge has the right to possible objects of knowledge. It has this right because it has a necessary relation to its object. Therefore the judgment of true or false can apply only to knowledge of possible objects. (Whatever is not a possible object is simply off-limits for theoretical knowledge.) Kant shows that in order for the relation of thought and being to occur, thought must take what is given in a particular way. We get to the foundation of truth because, through an examination of our faculties, we can determine how thought must take what is given. Since truth is nominally defined as the agreement of knowledge with its object, here the question is to determine if knowledge is in agreement with how something must be taken as object. A judgment is considered true if that is how, empirically, an object must appear to us because of the way the understanding necessarily functions. For Kant, since we can understand the basis on which a judgment is true or false, we are able to critique any claim to truth. This is revolutionary since, before Kant, the justification of the truth of a judgment was external, and therefore we could not possess the criteria by which to distinguish between the true and the false. Kant’s critical philosophy is self-reflective because of the internal relation of thought and object. However, the internal relation of thought and being that is proposed by Kant requires the idea of the totality of experience. By itself, a single judgment is a fragment. It requires a broader context, or system, since a judgment can only be meaningful through its relation to other judgments and to the system. When the relation of thought and being was understood as external, the judgment was presumed to occur in relation to a broader context that was transcendent. It was understood as transcendent since, of course, experience as a whole was beyond the scope of finite thought and could not be grasped

24 by it. Deleuze is interested in how Kant responds to this issue. He provides a discussion of it in his seminar on Kant dated 14 March 1978. Kant emphasizes that knowledge consists of universal and necessary claims, which are universal and necessary only because they apply to experience as a whole. Therefore we need the idea of the totality of experience. However, since experience only gives us the particular and contingent, a posteriori claims will only be particular and contingent. We can never form the idea of the totality of experience when we consider experience empirically. We are always led to make another addition because experience is fundamentally fragmented. Empirically we can never know if the next case will not be the exception: maybe the sun won’t rise tomorrow. Thus the idea of the totality of experience is only possible a priori, through the Ideas. Even though we never have experience of the totality of experience, we still have an idea of it. In this way, the Ideas provide a way of understanding the system of experience as being internal and, thus, the internal relation of thought and object is possible only through them. 2. THE THEORY OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant defines the Ideas in general in Book I of the “Transcendental Dialectic” entitled “The Concepts of Pure Reason.” An Idea is a concept of an object that transcends possible experience. We can think these objects but never know them. Although there is an indefinite number of Ideas, Kant focuses on three in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Ideas of God, Self, and World. The Ideas are derived from the activity of reason, which takes as its object the judgments of the understanding. In other words, the understanding takes the manifold of intuition as its object, while reason takes the concepts of the understanding as its object. The distinction between the

25 categories (the pure concepts of the understanding) and the transcendental Ideas (the pure concepts of reason) is important: the former relate to possible objects of experience while the latter relate to the totality of possible experience. Reason seeks the condition that makes each particular judgment possible, that is to say, the more general condition of which a particular judgment is a singular case. Reason proceeds by inference from a conditioned given to its conditions. There are three kinds of syllogistic inference reason draws, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive. Therefore there are three ways in which reason seeks to bring particular judgments into relation with other judgments. In this way, reason situates particular judgments within a broader context. Reason seeks the condition of particular judgments because in general it is driven to seek systematic unity. In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method: The Architectonic of Pure Reason” Kant describes reason as architectonic in nature. Through its systematizing activity, reason tries to give the manifold knowledge of the understanding an a priori unity (which is unlike any unity that can be accomplished through the understanding). As said above, for Kant knowledge cannot occur as a mere aggregate of fragments but must be understood as an organized unity. Reason seeks the totality of conditions through its systematizing activity and thereby pursues unconditioned unity, or the Ideas. The transcendental Ideas of reason are derived from the three kinds of syllogistic inference. We get the indefinite series of causes through use of the hypothetical syllogism. The Idea of the World is the totality of this series. We get the Idea of God, which is the total community of excluded parts, from the disjunctive syllogism. From the categorical syllogism, we get the Idea of the Self, the subject that can never itself be predicated of anything. Together, these three Ideas represent the totality of conditions of experience. Reason can never actually reach

26 the unity of the Ideas, yet they condition its activity. Since reason is systematizing by nature, the Ideas represent the endpoint of its systematization or the complete system of knowledge. Essentially the entire Critique of Pure Reason is dedicated to explaining how knowledge forms a system. The demonstration of the principle, “the conditions of possible objects is also the conditions of possible experience,” is given in the entire critique. Kant deploys the idea of schematism, the concepts of reflection, and the transcendental Ideas of reason to this end. Deleuze does not disregard these other ways of conceiving of system. For example, he provides his own version of schematism in chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition. However, he places a special emphasis on the Ideas of reason. What is unique about Deleuze’s reading is that for him the Ideas represent the relation between possible objects and possible experience in an exemplary way. Deleuze identifies three crucial aspects of Kant’s Ideas. “Ideas, therefore, present three moments: undetermined with regard to their object, determinable with regard to objects of experience, and bearing the idea of an infinite determination with regard to concepts of the understanding” (DR 169).13 These allow us to see how, for Deleuze, the Ideas postulate that what we empirically find is completely ordered according to transcendental conditions, i.e., that there is harmony between the order we find empirically and the order imposed transcendentally. Although this harmony is brought about by means of several mechanisms, the important thing for Deleuze is that it can only be conceived through the Ideas. The first aspect, that the Ideas are undetermined, reflects the fact that they have an ambiguous status for Kant. Deleuze generally uses the term ‘problematic’ to refer to this 13

The same discussion is found at KCP 21.

27 ambiguous status. The object of the Ideas, the complete system, would, in a sense, follow from the total application of the transcendental concepts of the understanding. In fact, however, it must be presupposed in order for the concepts to apply at all. In other words, the Ideas must be presupposed in order for knowledge to be possible, but their object, the complete system, does not exist, nor is it required to exist. Deleuze frequently expresses this idea by saying that the Ideas are problems to which there is no solution. In Kant the goal of the complete system (the ideal focus or horizon) is outside the bounds of experience and, because of this, Kant is careful to say that the concepts of the understanding do not in reality proceed to that goal. In other words, the goal of the unity of conceptual knowledge is transcendent to experience. The complete system of knowledge cannot be given to us in experience. Kant distinguishes the constitutive use of the Ideas from their regulative use because the object of the Ideas is transcendent. We are restricted from their constitutive use because when we seek their object in experience, reason falls into transcendental illusions particular to it: paralogisms, antinomies, and impossible proofs. In the “Appendix to the Dialectic: The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason” Kant explains that their proper function is their regulative use. It is in this way that the Ideas are necessary for experience. In their regulative use the Ideas guide the concepts of the understanding. Even though we can never know whether the complete system does, in fact, exist, in order for our judgments to be meaningful we must presuppose that it does. Deleuze is particularly interested in the regulative use of the Ideas. Kant sometimes uses the term “problematic” to describe the status of the Ideas when they are used regulatively, but more often he uses the term “undetermined.” Deleuze picks up the term “problematic” and uses it almost exclusively. According to

28 Deleuze: “Kant never ceased to remind us that Ideas are essentially ‘problematic’. Conversely, problems are Ideas” (DR 168). In developing his interpretation of the problematic Ideas Deleuze will go on to draw some further distinctions that Kant himself would not recognize. We will examine them later but, for the moment, we can simply say that the fact that the Ideas are problematic means there can be no “solution” within experience. In other words, the object of the Ideas cannot be given in experience. In the end, this first aspect of Kant’s ideas, that they are problematic, is the only one Deleuze will retain in his own conception of transcendental Ideas. Deleuze identifies a second and third aspect of the Ideas. Only by means of these two aspects can the Ideas represent that what we empirically find forms a complete system. He discusses the second aspect of the Ideas, that they are determinable with regard to objects of experience, most clearly in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (KCP 20).14 The second aspect represents the content to which our concepts would apply. In order for knowledge to be possible, the content of phenomena must correspond to the Ideas. In other words, the content of phenomena cannot show a radical diversity. If there were no resemblance at all in the content, we could not detect the slightest similarity. In other words, the second aspect of the Ideas represents something essential about what we find empirically, that it can take on order. The third aspect of the Ideas is that they represent the ideal of the complete application of the concepts of the understanding. This aspect represents the idea that the concepts can be applied in such a way that they organize what is given to completion. In the “Appendix to the Dialectic: The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason” 14

The core of the discussion occurs in DR as well, at p. 169.

29 Kant explains how the Ideas function in regard to the concepts. Concepts are arranged on lines that converge on an ideal focus outside of experience or within a horizon that embraces all concepts. The Ideas are these focus points or horizons. The Ideas are not to be used constitutively, but in their regulative use they order the concepts of the understanding. In this way, the Ideas direct the activity of the understanding toward a particular goal. The Ideas serve to give the concepts the greatest possible unity and the greatest possible extension. In chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues that without the activity of reason, and hence the Ideas that condition the activity of reason, the understanding could never by itself constitute knowledge. “The understanding by itself would remain entangled in its separate and divided procedures, a prisoner of partial empirical enquiries or researches in regard to this or that object” (DR 168). It would remain lost in its own private activity, yielding only fragments. Deleuze’s point is that the understanding, by itself, is unable to grasp the significance of its own activity. Since the understanding cannot organize itself to stage inquiries, it has no driving force of its own to pursue knowledge. The idea of the complete system necessarily carries with it the imperative to completely solve or explicate the problem of the system. In other words, their problematic status provides the Ideas with directing force (i.e. that the understanding must be directed toward explicating the system). In this way, Deleuze points out, the concepts of the understanding only find the ground of their full experimental use in relation to the Ideas. Thanks to the Ideas, the concepts form an organized unity, not merely an aggregate of fragments. Together, the second and third aspects of the Ideas express the harmony of the content of phenomena and the form (the application of the concepts of the understanding). It is only possible for our concepts to

30 apply to what is given if what is empirically given follows the same principles as our concepts. The Ideas make the internal relation of subject and object possible because together they represent the harmony of the empirical and transcendental. However, this harmony can only be postulated since it could occur only as the complete system of knowledge, which is outside of experience. The Ideas allow us to conceive of the system of knowledge, and they have a problematic or undetermined status because the complete system is only postulated. If the order we find in experience were given to experience transcendently (rather than occurring transcendentally), that is to say, if the relation of subject and object were external, we could never be sure experience was systematic. With Kant, everything as it is given empirically is understood as already being within the system. In other words, everything we empirically find is, in principle, knowable without exception because the transcendental conditions apply to everything that can be known. Deleuze finds that the function carried out by transcendental Ideas in Kant is pivotal in the internal production of the system. He focuses on the Ideas for this reason. 3. THE ISSUE OF MEANING We return now to the issue of truth in the critical philosophy, an issue I took up above, prior to the discussion of the transcendental Ideas. Since truth occurs internally to the relation of the subject and object, the conditions of its validity are also internal to the relation. In this way, the justification for truth, that is to say, the reason why something is true can be understood through the relation. As we saw, the justification for truth is not external to the relation, as with empiricism and rationalism, but internal to that relation. As a result, the critical philosophy is able to respond to dogmatism by examining claims to truth. What is novel about Deleuze’s interpretation of Kant is his claim that truth is

31 grounded in meaning. Before the determination can be made that a judgment is true or false, the judgment must be seen as meaningful. For example, the statement that the sky is purple is false but still meaningful. It is not nonsense. Truth simply expresses the fact that the subject and object are in agreement. Something is true or false only in relation to meaning. In fact, we can only say the statement above is false because it is meaningful. As a result, Deleuze places priority on meaning. We must understand how meaning arises. Since truth is dependent on meaning, truth can be understood as arising internally in the relation of subject and object only insofar as meaning is understood as being internal to the relation as well. In Deleuze’s view, Kant’s account of the internal relation of subject and object makes it possible for us to understand how meaning arises. Meaning only arises along with the system of experience. For this reason, we can adequately address the question of meaning only at this point, after our discussion of the Ideas, since they make it possible to examine the system of experience. Particular empirical cases or objects can have meaning only through their relation to each other: they must not be indifferent to each other. In other words, a particular empirical case is significant precisely in that it is distinguished from others and that it is not like the others. Empirical cases can be compared with one another. The significance of an empirical case lies in the fact that it does not form an indistinguishable mass with other cases. Cases are distinguished qua empirical cases. In Kant, the categories form the criteria or the basis on which something is carved out as an empirical case and is thereby individuated. The relations the cases have with one another are due to the nature of the categories. In other words, since objects have certain characteristics qua objects, these characteristics determine how they are related. For example, since cause is one

32 criterion, a particular object can be understood as a distinct empirical case because it has a different cause than other cases. Multiple empirical cases are related as cause and effect of each other. To be defined as an empirical case at all is to be distinguished according to these criteria. There are multiple empirical cases, which are distinguishable because they form different representations or expressions of the categories. In other words, particular objects are variations on the form of object itself. They are meaningful precisely because they are distinguished in terms of these criteria. In fact, they can be known as individuals on the basis of these criteria because their differences occur in terms of these criteria. An individual is considered distinct from others in the characteristics that make it an empirical case (although it may also be distinct in other, inessential ways). In other words, we never know the form of object itself. We only know particular objects. Therefore the meaning or sense of a particular empirical case is given as its own particular cause, the unity it has, its coming to be and ceasing to be, etc. All of these characteristics are derived from the categories and are different from those of other empirical cases. Thanks to the categories, an empirical case is immediately in relation to other cases. Ultimately, however, the relation that empirical cases have with one another is only made possible by the Ideas. Each empirical case becomes differentiated from others and individuated into a singular case through the categories. However, with the categories alone we would only get a collection of individual cases that were not in relation with each other. We could not know the meaning of an individual case from this. We can only conceive of the collection of individual cases together as a system through the Ideas because the object of the Ideas is the whole of possible experience. The relations that

33 individual cases have with one another depend on the complete system. The individual cases only arise in relation to the complete system and derive their significance from it. The Ideas allow us to see the categories in relation to the whole of possible experience, as the distinguishing factors of the whole, by which the whole is divided into empirical cases. It is by means of these factors that empirical cases are understood as being part of the organized unity. Empirical cases are meaningful only because they can be situated within the whole. In this way, the Ideas allow us to conceive of each empirical case in relation to other cases. Each empirical case has a meaning in relation to the whole of possible experience from which it arises. We can only conceive of the relation between the particular judgment and the whole by means of the Ideas because we can never have an idea of the whole empirically. It is in relation to this point that Deleuze claims that truth never occurs in isolation and that a true statement never stands alone apart from its context, except when arbitrarily detached and employed as an example (DR 154). His point is that meaning only occurs in the relation of a particular case, such as a particular statement, to its context. For example, a sentence is only meaningful in relation to a language. Language, taken as a whole, forms a system. Meaning arises from the relations between sounds and between words. Meaning is not found in the case considered by itself because it can only occur in a system. A word is meaningful only because of its relation to the language in which it occurs. For this reason, Deleuze’s concern is not with the similarity and differences between cases, but with the fact that an empirical case is a solution to a problem which presents a context. This brings us back to the self-reflexive nature of the Kantian philosophy. The Kantian philosophy provides us with a way to understand meaning as arising internally to

34 experience. Each case is meaningful simply by virtue of being an empirical case since it carries with it its relation to the whole of possible experience, as the latter is represented by the Ideas. Deleuze in fact takes up the theory of transcendental Ideas because it allows him to understand how meaning arises internally. His seminar on Kant dated 14 March 1978 argues that the question of transcendental conditioning is really the question of meaning or sense. We no longer ask ourselves if there is something behind the appearance. Deleuze argues that now, with Kant, we ask a different question: “Something appears, tell me what it signifies or, and this amounts to the same thing, tell me what its condition is.” And later: “Since Kant we spontaneously think in terms of the relation apparition/conditions of the apparition, or apparition/sense of what appears, and no longer in terms of essence/appearance.” The question of transcendental conditioning is the question of how something comes to be object qua object. This is also the question of how something comes to be meaningful. Deleuze can equate these two, transcendental conditioning and meaning, because meaning always arises from the totality of experience, which is given by the totality of conditions. The Ideas make it possible to conceive of the totality of the conditions of experience. For the relation of subject and object to be truly internal, the meaning or sense of the object must arise from within the relation as well. The conditions of the object are the conditions by which it is meaningful to us, that is to say, the conditions by which it becomes an object at all. It is meaningful within the framework set by the conditions. In other words, it becomes demarcated as an object only in relation to the system that would follow from the conditions. The theory of Ideas allows us to understand how the complete system is postulated with every empirical cognition that takes place. For this reason, in Kant an object is always a priori

35 meaningful. Something can only be an object insofar as it has meaning. We are able to understand the source of meaning, which is the system or framework, through the consideration of the Ideas. For Deleuze, the idea of legislation in Kant can therefore be understood in terms of the issue of meaning. Kant argues that philosophy, understood in the critical sense, is legislative. In the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” he makes the point that the idea of legislation is found in the reason of every human being, which takes on this role when it prescribes in regard to systematic unity (CPR A839/B867). Reason judges what is true or not and, in this way, persuades us to seek the truth. In this way, we are not subject to anything external to reason. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze argues that the legislative character of the Kantian philosophy is the essence of its Copernican revolution and, in this way, critique is opposed to dogmatic and theological subjection.15 According to Deleuze, the legislative character of reason depends on the fact that meaning arises internally to the relation of subject and object. Reason legislates because it can grasp the foundation of meaning. Philosophy, in Kant’s sense, is thus the examination of the system of knowledge and of the foundation of meaning. A distinction is made between what is included in the system and what is outside of it, between what is considered meaningful and what is not. In Kant’s terms, we can say that this is the distinction between what is transcendentally affirmed and what is transcendentally negated. This distinction serves as the foundation of the system of knowledge. Philosophy is legislative because it grasps the distinction and, thereby, the foundation of the system.

15

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 92. Hereafter cited as NP followed by the page number.

36 It is important to note that for Deleuze this distinction must be understood as a distinction of value. He argues that only what is selected and included is valued. It is considered meaningful and important. Whatever is excluded is irrelevant by definition. According to Deleuze, then, philosophy is legislative because it is creative of values. In this way, he reinterprets the idea of legislation in Kant. We are able to say that the distinction between important and unimportant is created because it arises through philosophy’s own method. In other words, this creation is not some sort of voluntaristic act. Rather, philosophy provides the ground for the distinction. The philosopher does not merely take on the function of legislating in addition to doing philosophy. Instead, the point is “that the philosopher, as philosopher, is not a sage, that the philosopher, as philosopher, ceases to obey, that he replaces the old wisdom by command, that he destroys the old values and creates new ones, that the whole of science is legislative in this sense” (NP 92). Philosophy’s legislative character is essential to it. Deleuze claims that with the Kantian philosophy there is a shift in how the distinction between what is important and unimportant is understood to arise. With Kant, philosophy no longer relies on something external to provide this distinction, to which it then subordinates itself. Philosophy is now self-reflective and is able to grasp the source of meaning of judgments. Since philosophy provides the distinction between what is important and unimportant, it provides its own ground. As a result, philosophy can critique any claim to the authority of truth. The legislative character of philosophy in Kant is particularly important for Deleuze. However, he argues that Kant betrayed his discovery. The critical philosophy was supposed to make the reasoning human independent of the dogmatism of external authority, since reason was thought to be self-governing and

37 independent of political interests, cultural traditions, and individual desires. However, Deleuze finds that Kant’s idea of philosophy does not actually give us the autonomy it promised. 4. KANT'S DOGMATISM

Deleuze’s view is that, in the end, Kant’s conception of thinking is too narrow. Knowledge for Kant is merely recognition: correctly subsuming intuition under a concept. According to Deleuze, this is the most mundane conception of thinking. While it is true that the act of recognition occurs often enough in our daily life, it depends on a more profound kind of thinking. It is thinking in the latter sense that gives us the production of concepts. In contrast, the model of recognition cannot account for how we could know anything new. According to Kant’s account of knowledge, anything new would simply be beyond the categories and would register as nonsense for the subject. Deleuze’s criticism is that if we take recognition as the model of thinking in general, we are unable to grasp those acts of thinking that are not recognition. Using this model fosters the expectation that we should only be interested in recognition, not in knowing anything new. These other acts of thinking cannot be considered legitimate under the model of recognition. The model of recognition perpetuates prejudices about what thinking is and denies those cases in which someone does not think in same way or is not able to recognize the truths “everybody” recognizes. As a result, this model does not even permit a critical stance. In what follows, I show in detail why Deleuze thinks Kant has a narrow conception of thinking and what is restrictive about Kant’s view. Deleuze claims that Kant’s dogmatism follows from the method he employed. His point is that Kant’s method amounts to explaining thought simply by explaining how its

38 end-product, knowledge, is possible. He argues that Kant begins from what he claims we actually know, and he then attempts to explain how this is possible. In other words, he traces back from the end result, empirical knowledge, to its conditions. This amounts to tracing the transcendental from the empirical (DR 143). Generally, this is considered by most commentators to be the exemplary case of the method of transcendental conditioning and, for this reason, Deleuze stands out in his criticism. Kant’s concern is to justify the validity of knowledge by showing that thinking can legitimately get to knowledge. The Critique of Pure Reason is structured in such a way as to answer this question. Kant begins his project by purifying what he will examine of any particular claims to truth (that is to say, empirical claims) in order to examine pure knowledge. In this way, he intends to bring all claims to knowledge under critique. Pure knowledge consists of synthetic a priori judgments. Kant goes on to claim that mathematics and geometry qualify as pure knowledge since these fields do, indeed, consist of synthetic a priori judgments. For Kant, the existence of these fields of knowledge is evidence that we are capable of having knowledge. The guiding question of the Critique of Pure Reason is, therefore, how are these judgments possible? Kant finds that synthetic a priori judgments are only possible by means of certain concepts, which are the transcendental concepts. With his discovery of the transcendental concepts, he claims to have found the concepts according to which thinking must occur. Deleuze’s objection is that Kant presumes this kind of knowledge to be the goal of thinking. We must remember that Deleuze is not denying the importance of these concepts. We do, indeed, use these concepts as we go about our ordinary lives. However, his point is that thinking functions in this way only when we are in the mode of ordinary recognition. Thinking in Kant to

39 be defined solely in terms of producing this end-product. Deleuze says that Kant begins by presupposing thought’s desired end, synthetic a priori judgments, rather than asking what thinking seeks. In this way, Kant closes the door to acts of thinking that may not be directed toward recognition. Deleuze argues that Kant’s approach of tracing transcendental conditions from the empirical follows a more general pattern of tracing problems from solutions. In chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition he explains how this pattern tends to turn up in the history of philosophy, including as early as Aristotle (DR 157-158). Deleuze says that philosophers have often thought of solutions as being expressed by propositions. The problem is then traced from that proposition and rearranged into a question. In other words, the question is traced from a giveable or possible response. Deleuze says that the question is a kind of “neutralized double” of the pre-existing proposition that serves as a response (DR 156). It merely doubles the proposition that is seen as the solution without adding anything new to it. The result is that we come to think that questions are asked only under the condition that the answer is given, in principle. “What time is it? – You who have a watch or are close to a clock. When was Caesar born? – You who know Roman history” (DR 157). Deleuze’s point is that such questions are anemic and do not provoke genuine thinking. In the first example, the question presupposes that everyone schedules her or his days hour to hour. They do not ask anything new or demand real thought. Deleuze’s criticism of such tracing of problems (and questions, which express problems) from solutions is that it leads us to believe that problems are given to us ready-made. Deleuze likens this condition to that of a student who is only given problems to solve by the teacher and does not learn to construct problems. An educational system that is set up in

40 this way does not yield students who truly think. The difficulty of thinking is reduced to producing certain solutions. “We are led to believe that the activity of thinking…begins only with the search for solutions” (DR 158). Deleuze’s point is that this method gives us only a mundane conception of thinking. In the case of Kant the concern is not simply with any proposition but specifically with synthetic a priori judgments. In rearranging this into a question, Kant asks how such judgments are possible. For Kant, then, thinking is said to take place whenever we make synthetic a priori judgments (or a posteriori judgments about objects). Deleuze’s objection is that when we are simply looking for a solution, when we make a judgment, we are not necessarily thinking because there is already a framework in place in which these are the solutions. This is a framework that everyone is presumed to recognize. Here, Deleuze would agree with Nietzsche when he asks, why would we want to make a priori synthetic judgments? Who does it serve? According to Deleuze, we must critically examine the implications of equating thinking with recognition. The danger of claiming that the exemplary form of thinking is recognition is that it supports established values at the most fundamental level of thinking (DR 136). This comes at the expense of what might be marginalized or might break with the established values. In any case, Kant does not take up the question of what would lead to the production of the transcendental concepts in the first place, or what would lead to experience being structured in this way. Deleuze argues that when we begin our inquiry by looking at solutions, the emphasis is on showing that what constitutes the solution cannot not be. As a result, we are prevented from asking why this particular solution occurs (DR 160). In other words, we are unable to ask the question of its genesis, which has to do with the problem to which it is the solution. Thus, the more

41 important issue is not learning which solutions are true or false, but which problems are true or false, which are well-constituted or not. Deleuze argues that problems are never simply given. Thinking, for Deleuze, has essentially to do with the production of problems, not simply with knowing solutions to problems. However, in his view Kant did attempt to examine problems themselves, to a certain degree. “More than anyone, however, Kant wanted to apply the test of truth and falsehood to problems and questions: he even defined Critique in these terms” (DR 161). In other words, Deleuze thinks that Kant did, to an extent, conceive of problems as not simply given but something we have to consider on their own terms. Deleuze is, of course, referring to the Kantian Ideas as problems since they drive the activity of reason. Kant distinguishes between false problems, which lead reason into transcendental illusion, and true problems, which have the positive function of making it possible for reason to draw judgments together. However, Deleuze says, Kant still defined the truth of the problem in terms of the possibility of finding a solution, even though for him it was transcendental possibility (DR 161). In other words, his criticism is that Kant defined the Ideas in such a way that they determine in advance what will count as knowledge. Insofar as the faculties function under the guidance of reason in the domain of speculative knowledge, only judgments that are consistent with the system of knowledge are possible. Even if we leave aside the question of whether the presuppositions of Kant’s method are illegitimate, Deleuze argues that other difficulties occur because of his method. Kant asks, what kind of thought does empirical knowledge depend on or presuppose? The answer is the transcendental concepts. For this reason, the form of experience can only

42 be static, since knowledge (or judgments) is only the end product of a process. The transcendental concepts or categories give us the fixed ways in which the understanding can synthesize intuition, and they cannot change or be transformed. Kant must presume the categories are simply given since he cannot give an account for how they might arise. The nature of the categories is independent of intuition and of the process by which they come into relation with intuition. The categories, taken together, give us an order that is completely external to, and outside of, what is ordered, outside of time and space. This order is indifferent to spatial and temporal differences. The post-Kantians, beginning with Salomon Maimon and including Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, are known for criticizing Kant for being unable to explain how the categories and intuition come into relation.16 Deleuze takes up this criticism as well, frequently referring to the issue by saying that the conditions in Kant are external to what they condition. His point is that conditions are independent of what they condition and remain unchanged by the process of conditioning, which gives us experience. Kant attempts to account for how we pass from the conditions to the end result, in order to justify that the conditions necessarily take us to empirical knowledge. However, he is considered unsuccessful by Deleuze and other post-Kantians. Kant is unable to explain why intuition does, indeed, correspond to the categories such that experience is possible. In fact, since the categories are external to intuition, we cannot even know if experience is in fact ordered by them. Deleuze argues in Kant’s Critical Philosophy that, in effect, Kant is still dealing with the problem of the relation of subject and object. As we said earlier, empiricism and

16

In his book The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Frederick Beiser argues that it was Maimon’s critique of the gap between the understanding and sensibility in Kant, and hence of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, that provoked the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

43 rationalism were criticized, according to Deleuze, for relying on something transcendent to the relation of subject and object in order to justify it. This is the problem the critical philosophy was supposed to overcome. Yet Kant’s problem of categories and intuition is just another incarnation of the problem. “In Kant, the problem of the relation of subject and object tends to be internalized; it becomes the problem of a relation between subjective faculties which differ in nature (receptive sensibility and active understanding)” (KCP 14). To show how intuitions and concepts, the faculties of sensibility and of the understanding, come into relation, Kant appeals to the schematism of the imagination, which applies a priori to the forms of sensibility in accordance with concepts. However, this only shifts the problem further along since the imagination and the understanding differ in nature and their relation must now be explained. In his lecture on Leibniz, dated 20 May 1980, Deleuze argues that, in the end, Kant can only argue that the conditioned (empirical knowledge, which is the end result) agrees with the conditions (the categories) because of the harmony of our faculties. However, Kant is unable to account for why the faculties are in harmony and must simply presuppose it. In other words, he can only postulate their agreement and, like the rationalists and empiricists he wants to surpass, he too turns to the idea of a transcendent and benevolent God to guarantee the agreement. In the end, Deleuze argues, he can no more account for the relation of the subject and object than could empiricism or rationalism. Although he goes a certain extent toward giving an internal account of the relation of subject and object, Kant ultimately fails. Deleuze gives us another criticism of Kant’s method. The conditions of experience are merely conditions of possibility because they are static. Deleuze claims it is as

44 though these possibilities already exist, ready-made and prior to experience. What is real, that is to say, experience, then simply occurs as the selection of one of the possibilities. The possibilities are interchangeable in the sense that none has priority over the other. In other words, there is no essential difference between possibilities such that one of them would tend toward experience. There is nothing internal to any possibility itself that would lead to experience. The realization of one of the possibilities occurs only through the limitation or negation of the other possibilities. In this way, the difference between possibilities is given externally to them, only through their realization. For this reason, Deleuze argues that difference is understood to be outside of but indifferent to the concept, where the concept is understood as giving us the essence of something. What does not exist is understood as already possible. The only difference between the possible and the real is one of brute existence (DR 211). To account for the occurrence of the real, Kant can only argue that all of the possibilities are already there for whatever might occur. However, the problem of the relation of subject to object is simply pushed back, so that we must account for how the conditions of experience arise. Kant’s account is not an account of experience as it actually occurs since he is unable to solve this problem. Experience can only have a restricted sense for Kant because the conditions of experience are static and external to what is conditioned, to intuition. Experience or empirical knowledge is explained as occurring through the synthesis of the diversity of intuition according to certain kinds of unity, found in the transcendental concepts of the understanding. An intuition is taken as a particular case of a universal concept because intuition must conform to the categories. The categories taken together give us the form

45 of the object, which is the general kind or form of experience we can have. Therefore, when we actually have experience, it is always simply a particular case of this general form. Transcendentally, we possess all possibilities, and experience occurs as the selection of one. This is why, for Kant, experience can only occur as recognition. Knowledge consists of correctly matching intuition with the concept, that is to say, of merely identifying which possibility was actualized in experience. The transcendental conditions that Kant discovers only make possible what we already know. Whatever we can experience has already been accounted for transcendentally. There can be no experience outside of this. In other words, the transcendental form of experience restricts experience so that only what agrees with that form can be known in experience. Deleuze criticizes this idea of form. “Form will never inspire anything but conformities” (DR 134). In principle, form precludes whatever does not agree with the form. With form, that is to say, with static conditions, it is impossible to know anything that does not agree with the form. Experience occurs in the application of the form. For Kant, it is as though the content of phenomena is simply given to be informed, and knowledge occurs when we correctly match the form to the content. The only obstacle to thinking is the incorrect application of the transcendental concepts, which leads to incorrect judgments. For this reason, Deleuze claims that Kant is only concerned about the most banal kind of error. In contrast, Deleuze thinks there are more profound difficulties that confront thought. I will discuss these difficulties further, in section 4 of chapter 3, after developing Deleuze’s conception of thinking. Kant sets out to show that the ordered nature of experience does not come simply from experience being given as ordered but from its coming to be ordered. However, in so

46 doing, he claims to have discovered the way in which finite thought must organize what is given to it. In other words, Deleuze objects that Kant ascribes natural properties to thought rather than asking what occurs in the process of thinking. For Kant, experience only comes to be ordered as it does because the nature of thought requires that what is given in sense intuition must be taken as a spatiotemporal object. To this end, Kant examines the faculties and shows that the understanding, imagination, memory, and reason must play specific roles. Together these form the structure of thought, which is to say, the transcendental subject. However, Kant does not answer the question, what causes thought to be structured in this way, so that it takes what is given as spatiotemporal object? Iain Mackenzie examines this problem in terms of the presumptions with which Kant begins the critical philosophy.17 For him, Kant’s dogmatism is due to the fact that the critical philosophy fails to bring everything under critique. He argues that in the end, “reason remains, at least partially, beyond the reach of criticism.”18 In other words, Kant brings all particular claims to truth under critique but since he ascribed natural qualities to reason he does not bring reason, which serves as the ground of truth, under critique. Kant presumes thought has a given nature but does not show how it arises. As the result of this presumption, thought is subject to “truth” just as it is for empiricism and rationalism. Kant simply offers a different account of this. Rather than thought aligning itself with experience in a truthful way (as empiricism and rationalism must claim), thought must experience objects as it does because of its nature. Along with the nature of thought, truth is given as well for Kant, in the way that thought must experience objects. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze argues that, for Kant,

17 18

Iain Mackenzie, The Idea of Pure Critique (New York: Continuum Press, 2004). Ibid., p. 17.

47 thought formally possesses the true as a priori concepts. It needs only to apply these concepts correctly in order to possess the true in reality. Thought is simply presumed to function in this way. Thus, what Kant discovers is the order to which thought is subject. Deleuze’s critique of truth must be understood as directed at truth in this sense. He says that Kant has essentially defined the nature of thought in terms of its alignment with truth. “We are told that the thinker as thinker wants and loves truth…that it is therefore sufficient to think “truly” or “really” in order to think with truth (sincere nature of the truth, universally shared good sense)” (NP 103). However, it is not love of truth that leads to thinking, Deleuze will argue, but difficulty and uneasiness because thought must be awakened from its natural stupor (DR 139). The issue of truth is really the issue of the nature of thought and its relation to being. Earlier we said that Kant’s project in the critical philosophy is his response to the crisis in thought resulting from the loss of the possibility of intellectual intuition. Kerslake argues that Deleuze’s criticism of Kant is that he did not fully appreciate the magnitude of the crisis.19 Kant saw that a gap had opened up between thought and being but he moved too quickly to close the gap. In other words, Kant continues to maintain that the relation of thought and being is one of affinity, that is to say, a relation of truth in the sense outlined above. In tracing the conditions of experience from the end result, Kant presumes that thought naturally reaches truth and that it is in its nature to form true judgments. Kant argues that experience can only occur on the condition that what is given is taken by thought and ordered in a certain way as an object that is part of the system of knowledge. However, the problem is that Kant simply ascribes this to the nature of thought. Instead of examining the fact that the ordered nature of experience can no longer be understood as 19

Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique, ” p. 493.

48 simply given but must be the result of a process, Kant avoids the problem by showing that experience can only occur if it is ordered in this particular way. As a result, in principle there can be nothing knowable outside of the parameters given by the system. Although Deleuze does not use the term “totalizing,” this term captures his concerns because his criticism is that Kant’s system of knowledge presumes that everything that can be experienced must fall under this organization. In addition, Deleuze argues that the effects of this account of knowledge might not be significant when considering it as a speculative model, since it means only that the way in which knowledge is acquired has been understood correctly or incorrectly. Yet it has serious consequences when we consider the practical applications of this theory because it can be used to demand conformity to established values. Since we all have reason, that is to say, because we all have the transcendental concepts, we can demand that everyone recognize the same truths (DR 135-136). 5. THE IDEAS AS REPRESENTATIVE OF KANT'S DOGMATISM I have just said that Kant’s notion of experience is a narrow one. Deleuze describes it as dogmatic because knowledge is merely recognition, that is to say, the application of categories one already possesses. We have also seen why Deleuze finds the theory of transcendental Ideas important in Kant’s account of experience. Experience can only occur in the relation of transcendental and empirical, and the Ideas represent this relation. For Deleuze the Ideas represent the system of knowledge in an exemplary way. As a result, we can also examine how Kant’s dogmatism is exhibited in his theory of Ideas. There is the question of the status of the Ideas themselves. Earlier, I described their three aspects. First, the Ideas are problematic since their object cannot be given in experience.

49 As I said earlier, it is the problematic aspect of the Ideas that Deleuze finds so promising and, in fact, this is the only aspect of the Ideas he will retain. Second, the Ideas express that the content of phenomena tend toward complete unity. This is the empirical component. Third, the Ideas express the complete application of the concepts of the understanding: the transcendental component. Deleuze argues that the second and thirds aspects must be abandoned. Daniel W. Smith has argued that Deleuze’s theory of Ideas, which occurs in Difference and Repetition, is primarily developed in relation to Kant’s theory of transcendental Ideas, and he has shown why Deleuze is critical of Kant’s Ideas.20 Smith argues that Deleuze’s main criticism is that although the Ideas have a problematic objective unity, the second and third moments remain extrinsic to each other. On the one hand, the Ideas can legislate directly over the concepts of the understanding since they are our own representations. On the other hand, according to Deleuze, the fact that the content of phenomena corresponds to the Ideas of reason means that the relation is not a necessary subjection but can only be postulated (KCP 20). Since the concepts of the understanding and the content of phenomena are extrinsic to each other, they could not come into relation by themselves without the Ideas bringing them into relation. There is nothing internal to each that refers to the other. For that reason, in Smith’s reading, Deleuze believed Kant had failed to provide an immanent conception of Ideas (KCP 48). In order to bring them into relation, the complete system that the Ideas represent must be presumed. Experience can only be accounted for by relying on something outside of

20

Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality,” Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), p. 29-56.

50 experience. Kant thereby undermines his entire project of providing an internal relation of subject and object since the relation is conditioned by something transcendent. Besides the criticism that the Ideas are not truly immanent to experience, Deleuze argues that there is a problem with the fact of presumption. In drawing inferences, reason, which is the faculty of Ideas, says “everything happens as if….” In other words, Kant treats experience as though it were hypothetical: only if we presume the objects of experience tend toward the unity of nature are our empirical cognitions are meaningful. We can only have knowledge under the condition that we act as if the complete system could be given. In Kant the Ideas can only serve as problems, that is to say, supply the directing force to explicate the problem of the system of knowledge, if their object is presupposed. This is because the two moments of the Ideas, which represent the concepts of the understanding and the content of phenomena, are external to each other. The result is that experience becomes entirely hypothetical in Kant and is not real. We never know for sure if, indeed, our empirical cognitions are meaningful. Deleuze argues that this procedure of beginning from the hypothetical betrays the real movement of thought (DR 197). The hypothetical character of experience is reflected in Kant’s theory of Ideas. The fact that the Ideas are problematic means there can be no “solution” within experience or, in other words, their object cannot be given in experience: the system of experience cannot be given in experience. Yet, in Kant the Ideas are problematic only because they cannot be given in experience. According to Deleuze, they are not truly problematic in themselves because they still represent an existing unity—it is now merely transcendent to experience. There is a solution to the Ideas in Kant but it is one that cannot occur within experience. Thus, Deleuze says that their problematic character is

51 not real for Kant. For Deleuze, it will have to be the case that there is no solution at all to the Ideas: there will have to be no existing unity, either in or outside of experience, only a kind of difference. In this way, Deleuze will argue that unity is not foundational for experience, but difference, as this occurs in problems. Therefore, even though Deleuze retains the problematic aspect of the Ideas, he rethinks the notion of the problem. For Deleuze, the Ideas must be immanent to experience in order to be truly problematic. In this way, their problematic character will be something real within experience. In addition to the concerns outlined above, there is the question of what the relation of the transcendental and empirical is like. The transcendental (the categories of the understanding) and the empirical are external to each other. As a result, their relation can only occur as simple correspondence. It can only occur as the complete overlapping of the transcendental concepts and the empirical. The complete correspondence forms the system of knowledge in Kant. In postulating a complete system, which is their object, the Ideas postulate that there can be nothing outside of it. In this way, the Ideas guide the application of the categories to what is given empirically. Under their guidance, the categories of the understanding impose a specific set of relations on what is given empirically. As a result experience can only be understood as being ordered according to a set of principles. The Ideas represent the complete relation of the categories of the understanding and of what is given in intuition. They determine a priori what kind of relations can occur in the empirical and, thereby, formally limit what can be known. Only certain relations within the empirical are considered meaningful and significant: relations that determine what can be considered an empirical case. As a result, what is given is simply “located” within the system. According to the Ideas, the system is

52 understood as already having a place for every possible object. Rather than explaining how something becomes an empirical object for us, the Ideas close off what can be an object for us. They provide the parameters within which something must fall in order to become an object for experience. Whatever is outside of these parameters can never be an object of knowledge and can only be considered meaningless. In this way, knowledge is simply the filling in of the system. In sum, the Ideas allow us to see that experience can only occur as recognition. Kant’s account of experience therefore presumes the kind of relation thought can have with its object. This is because, while he succeeds in bringing all truth claims under critique, he cannot bring the idea of truth itself under critique. Thought finds the same order and the same meaning everywhere: the meaning that is founded on the categories. Kant presumes that meaning can only occur in this way, that only meaning in this sense is possible. It would be more accurate to say, therefore, that with Kant thought is presumed to have an affinity for truth understood only in this sense. Smith has argued that a criticism that Deleuze levels at Kant is that he cannot examine the idea of truth because he does not ask the question of the genesis of the system of categories, which is the foundation of truth in his philosophy.21 In other words, Kant’s idea of truth is dogmatic because it presumes meaning that it occurs by means of the categories as its foundation. This foundation itself is beyond examination. Thought only recognizes objects as particular cases of what is “already known,” i.e. what it possesses as categories. It therefore finds only confirmation of what is already known. Everything encountered in space and time is understood only in its relation to the system. The particularity (the time and space) of the case is irrelevant precisely because it is the same 21

Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality.”

53 organization that occurs everywhere and every time. Kant’s account of the system is totalizing because nothing can occur empirically (that is to say, be an object) that does not “fit” into the system (and therefore into this system). Central to the idea of system in Kant is therefore the claim that it accounts for everything. Since it is the Ideas of reason that make possible the system of knowledge on which meaning depends, we can locate the totalizing character of the system in the theory of Ideas. CONCLUSION We can now comprehend, in relation to his treatment of Kant, Deleuze’s intention of articulating a conception of experience that does not simply account for the relation of subject and object but includes within itself the opening up of a field of experience for the subject such that something new can be thought. For Deleuze, philosophy must be reconceived to include within it the self-critical relation. I have shown that he thinks that the question of how something new can be thought can only be answered in terms of the internal relation of subject and object. It is for this reason that Deleuze turned to Kant’s critical philosophy. With Kant we see that the fact the relation is internal implies something is knowable only insofar as it appears for, or comes into relation with, the subject rather than having an identity apart from or external to the subject. This makes it possible to determine the conditions under which something is knowable or can be an object of experience. Kant explained the internal relation by saying that the subject is constitutive in the appearing of the object. In other words, what Kant claims to have discovered is that philosophy can understand the principle by which objects must conform to the subject, that is to say, the principle by which they are objects in the first place.

54 We have equally seen that Deleuze criticizes this explanation because by attributing the conditions of experience to the transcendental subject, Kant simply pushes the question back to another level. Deleuze will therefore retain the internal relation of subject and object but will find another way to account for it. The importance of the internal relation, according to Deleuze, is that meaning can be explained through it. Deleuze finds in Kant that the object arises for the subject only insofar as it is meaningful—there is no object apart from the meaning it has. In other words, meaning occurs along with the object. However, Kant simply accounted for meaning by claiming that reason is structured such that thinking occurs by concepts, that is to say, that thought is conceptual. Again, the problem for Deleuze is that Kant’s account presumes the nature of the subject. In Deleuze’s view, we must instead understand conceptual thought as arising within experience, not simply begin with the presumption that it is a capacity we possess. The internal relation of subject and object is therefore vital to Deleuze’s notion of experience, and he must find a way to account for it such that both subject and object arise in experience. I have shown that Deleuze argues that the internal relation of thought and object in Kant is made possible by the idea that experience forms a system. The notion of system that Kant develops is that it is given to the subject as an Idea only, since the complete system of knowledge cannot be given in experience. However, Deleuze thinks there are certain problems with Kant’s conception of the system: Deleuze criticizes the method by which Kant uses to explain knowledge and, hence, the method by which he arrives as his notion of the system of experience. In addition, Kant cannot explain how concepts and intuition come into relation or, in other words, the conditions of experience are external

55 to what they condition. Also, Deleuze finds that the system of knowledge is static, and that Kant does not give an account of its genesis. However, the major problem is that the system is a closed one. Even though the complete system of experience can never be given in experience, there is a unity of the system. Even though we can learn new things in an empirical sense, their significance is only possible because of the system of knowledge. New things can occur only insofar as they conform to the principles of the Kantian system: Deleuze’s objection is that these are not new in a genuine sense. In other words, Kant’s notion of the system accounts for how meaning occurs internally to the relation of subject and object, but meaning does not arise, strictly speaking, because the system does not itself arise. Insofar as something is an object, it simply is meaningful already, so to speak. While Kant’s account of the conditions of possible experience does, indeed, explain why objects are already meaningful, it prevents the possibility, a priori, for anything to occur that might be grounded in principles other than those derived from the categories of the understanding. In this sense, Kant’s notion of system is totalizing. Nothing can occur that is unexpected. Deleuze himself takes the notion of system from Kant in order to account for the internal relation of subject and object. He wants to retain the fact that it accounts for the relation between objects and the relation between judgments such that they are not just fragments. However, the notion of system will have to be transformed in Deleuze so that it is not totalizing. In developing his own notion of system Deleuze will retain the theory of transcendental Ideas but transform them. For Deleuze, they are essentially problems and, as in Kant, they express the relation of thought and the object. Deleuze will, however, use the notion of the Ideas to show how the relation is generated and a domain of

56 knowledge is opened up. According to him, there can be an internal relation of thought and object only insofar as the subject and object are generated together. Smith has argued that Deleuze’s primary question is that of the genesis of experience and I will be following him in this.22 Kant was able to give an account of experience that is internal to the relation of subject and object only by presuming that thought has a natural structure. As a result of this presumption, Kant remains with the question of the conditioning of experience and, in Deleuze’s words, is unable to pose the question of its genesis. In the end, although Kant is able to show that truth and meaning can be understood as occurring internally to the relation of subject and object, he cannot show how truth is produced. That is to say, Kant was unable to critically examine the a priori concepts as the foundation of truth. By answering the question of the genesis of experience Deleuze will be able to account for the production of meaning and, thereby, the foundation of truth. According to Deleuze, in presupposing the nature of thought Kant presupposed that thought had a natural inclination or affinity for knowledge. Deleuze will argue that, rather than a relation of affinity with being, thought’s relation with being is one of malevolence. In other words, the opening up of a system of knowledge occurs only as a violent event. In chapter 2, I will show how Deleuze reconceives the notion of system, while chapter 3 will show why the opening up of a system is violent.

22

”Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality.”

57 CHAPTER 2 THE NOTION OF SYSTEM INTRODUCTION This chapter will show how Deleuze’s notion of system is developed out of Kant’s. We have seen in chapter 1 that Deleuze wants to develop an account of experience in which the subject and object are related to each other in an internal way. In such a relation the object does not occur independently of the possible knowledge of it, but, rather, thought and object are essentially related. The task of thinking, then, is not simply to grasp an object correctly but to grasp the conditions by which it occurs, thereby grasping the object in relation to what makes it meaningful. For this reason, Deleuze must examine experience at the transcendental level, by discovering its transcendental conditions. Moreover, since the internal relation of thought and object can be achieved only if experience occurs as a system, the notion of system is crucial to Deleuze’s account of experience. In fact, for him, experience can only be opened up as a system. - It is only insofar as a system is opened up that there can be objects that can be known and concepts by which to know them. For Deleuze, this is not merely of logical importance. It is not just that knowledge is opened up as a system so that we can know objects but that objects in their reality are opened up through a system. By reality, then, we do not mean an objective reality that occurs independently of the subject. There is no “objective reality” in this sense for either Kant or Deleuze. Deleuze finds certain problems with Kant’s notion of system. The central issue is that he believes the Kantian system is closed off, since it delineates in advance what can be a possible object of experience. The notions of the determinable and the indeterminate and

58 their relation are crucial here since they tell us about the limit or boundary of the system. For Kant, the system of knowledge includes within itself whatever can be a possible object of experience, which can be given as the idea of the determinable. Kant does not only claim to account for every possible object of experience. Whatever falls outside of certain limits simply can never be an object at all. The determinable and, therefore, the system of knowledge, are simply demarcated from what is indeterminate, which simply cannot be known. This gives us a static notion of system. In contrast, for Deleuze, a single system cannot account for all of knowledge. For this reason, he must transform the relation of the determinable and the indeterminate, so that it is not fixed and unchanging. In tracing these notions from Kant through their development in Deleuze, I will be able to show how Deleuze resolves the problem of the system that he sees in Kant and thereby develops his own notion of the system. Deleuze uses the term “transcendental difference” (also referred to as “internal difference”) to indicate the difference or relation between the determinable and the indeterminate. Transcendental difference is a transcendental event. Deleuze is perhaps best known for being a philosopher of difference, in the sense of transcendental difference, and we will see how it comes into play here in his notion of the systems of experience. He uses the theory of Ideas to articulate the notion of transcendental difference. Thus, in Deleuze, the Idea no longer has the sense it does for Kant. I must therefore show how the Ideas function in Kant, and then in Deleuze. We will then be able to see how the Ideas are important for Deleuze’s notion of system in a way that parallels yet greatly differs from Kant. Deleuze maintains the problematizing aspect of the Ideas. However, for him, Ideas arise from within experience. This would, of course,

59 make no sense in the Kantian framework since Ideas are transcendent to experience. In that framework we can conceive of an Idea but its unity lies outside of experience. Deleuze disconnects the Ideas from the subject. They are not merely problems for reason but problems within experience itself. The Ideas will now function ontologically. Kant could do no more than circumscribe the system of experience, that is to say, draw the boundary of the system of knowledge. We will see, in contrast, that Deleuze argues that the drawing of the limit of a system is the event by which the system arises. This event is the occurrence of transcendental difference or of an Idea. I will also need to develop the idea of “external difference” in Deleuze, also referred to as “diversity.” That is to say, the objects of a system can be described as different from one another in an external way. The central issue is that in Kant space and time are the forms of diversity and are subjective. Since Deleuze’s account of experience is not grounded in the transcendental subject, he argues that external difference (that is to say, diversity) is dependent on and arises from transcendental difference. Deleuze must transform a number of Kant’s concepts in order to accommodate the changes in the notion of the systems of experience and the metaphysics. For Deleuze, there are transcendental structures of experience but they do not belong to the subject. Instead, they occur within experience itself. In addition, transcendental structures are static for Kant but are not for Deleuze. Deleuze must include this dynamic character within his account. He sometimes uses the term “transcendental” to make it clear that his concern is with conditions of experience. To a certain extent, his conditions can be said to be a priori in Kant’s sense. They are prior to organized experience but they are not independent of experience as Kant’s conditions are. Deleuze introduces the terms

60 “virtual” and “actual” to account for these conditions. The relation of the virtual and actual is analogous, in some ways, to that of the transcendental and empirical in Kant. However, virtual conditions occur within experience whereas Kant’s transcendental conditions are prior to experience. The language of the virtual and actual will allow Deleuze to give an account of how new systems arise within experience. I begin by examining the notions of the determinable and the indeterminate in Kant, showing precisely what Deleuze criticizes here. In this way, we will see how the system is related to and demarcated from the indeterminate in Deleuze. 1. NOUMENA AND THE LIMIT OF KNOWLEDGE IN KANT

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant seeks to examine what we can legitimately know. To this end, he examines the transcendental conditions of knowledge. He argues that we cannot simply concern ourselves with whatever can possibly exist, apart from how it must necessarily come into being in space and time. Accordingly, he restricts knowledge to what can be a possible object of experience. This is expressed through the terms transcendental negation and transcendental affirmation in Kant. A transcendental negation…signifies not-being in itself, and is opposed to transcendental affirmation, which is something the very concept of which in itself expresses a being. Transcendental affirmation is therefore entitled reality, because through it alone, and so far only as it reaches, are objects something (things). (CPR A574/B602) Transcendental affirmation gives us reality or being. It means that we take what appears to us in sensible intuition as something positive, as actually existing, and not as the distortion of an essence. Since the sensible is not a limitation of our knowledge, but,

61 rather an element of it, our relation to things is not merely rational or logical. Transcendental affirmation means that we can only know an object in relation to its conditions of appearing, and so to the forms of intuition, not in relation to what it would be for an infinite intellect. Nothing can be an object for us independently of its relation to us. According to Kant, when we distinguish the mode in which we intuit objects as appearances (phenomena) from their nature as it belongs to them in themselves apart from how they appear, we imply the idea of noumena (CPR B306-307). Since we can conceive of the conditions of the appearing of objects, we can conceive of phenomena as forming a whole or a system. Since reason legislates that knowledge must form a system, the limits of possible knowledge are determined a priori (CPR A833/B861). The fact that the system of knowledge has a limit means there can be arbitrary additions. If knowledge merely formed an aggregate, not a system, there would be no limits. What is important here is the notion of limit. The keystone of the critical philosophy is that we can know the limit of knowledge. As a result of reason’s critical activity, we can divide objects into noumena and phenomena. Whatever occur within the limit of possible experience are phenomena and can be objects of knowledge. The field of phenomena necessarily implies a space of indeterminacy beyond its limit. Whatever falls outside that limit is transcendentally negated. Transcendental negation signifies what is not real or what is indeterminate. However, we can form a concept of what is transcendentally negated. Noumena are thought as objects merely through the understanding not as they are given to sense. In other words, for Kant we form concepts of noumena when we conceive of the idea of things as they are in themselves apart from how they appear. Concepts of noumena are

62 indeterminate and, therefore, noumena cannot be said to be in a positive sense. “If the objective reality of a concept cannot be in any way known, while yet the concept contains no contradiction and also at the same time is connected with other modes of knowledge that involve given concepts which it serves to limit, I entitle that concept problematic” (CPR B310). Kant uses the terms “problematic” and “indeterminate” to mean simply that knowledge of the object is not possible. In other words, reason determines the limit of possible objects of experience, and whatever is beyond that limit is described by Kant as indeterminate or problematic. We cannot presume there is nothing outside the limit of experience, nor can we say anything determinate about it. Noumena cannot be subject to a priori laws, which only apply to possible experience. For this reason, our knowledge cannot extend to them. As said earlier, the relation of thought and object is internal here because all phenomena are subject to a priori laws, which we can grasp. However, noumena have no assignable positive meaning (CPR A287/B343). Since the understanding can extend farther than sensibility, intuition is tempted to claim to have an object to which the understanding can apply. However, the understanding must restrict intuition from claiming to have an object in these cases. Concepts of noumena can only be used negatively. They can only legitimately be understood as indeterminate, concepts to which we can give no content, and not as a determinate concept that can actually be known in a purely intelligible manner. They serve to remind us to not extend our presumption to knowledge beyond the limits of possible knowledge. In other words, noumena indicate only that our sensibility is limited. With Kant, there can only be an idea of the indeterminate and unknowable, in distinction from what is determinable, because knowledge is restricted to objects that

63 appear to us and does not extend to what they are in themselves. This makes it possible to determine the transcendental conditions of experience and, thereby, to know the limit of possible experience. What is interesting for Deleuze is the idea that in knowing the limit of possible experience, we are led to form a concept of what is outside the limit, what is indeterminate. For Deleuze, what is indeterminate does not appear and therefore cannot be known. So far he is in agreement with Kant. However, for Deleuze, it makes no sense to speak of objects in themselves apart from their appearing. The indeterminate is not something in itself, as it is for Kant. The difference between them can be understood in terms of how they understand the limit of the field of phenomena and, hence, how they understand the relation of this field to the indeterminate space beyond its limit. For Kant there is a space of indeterminacy because we know nothing about intuition other than our sensible kind. “The concept of the noumenon is, therefore, not the concept of an object, but is a problem unavoidably bound up with the limitation of our sensibility—the problem, namely, as to whether there may not be objects entirely disengaged from any such kind of intuition” (CPR A287/B344). In other words, for Kant the field of phenomena has this necessary relation to a space of indeterminacy for the subject. Only by taking into account how something must come into being in space and time, by considering how it appears, can we think of something that is determinable, something that can be a possible object of experience. What appears in space and time comes into relation with us. What is important to Kant is that it must come into relation with the subject in order to be determinable, in order to be an object. For Kant, we can imagine another kind of subject for which knowledge would not depend on the appearing of the object. In contrast, for Deleuze, experience simply is the occurrence of the relation

64 of the subject to what appears. His account is ontological rather than subjective (transcendentally subjective). Outside of the field in which a particular kind of object is given, an object has no coherence or unity. In other words, the appearing of the object is precisely what makes it an object. We could also say that there is an object for Deleuze only insofar as something comes into relation with the subject. However, this is not the case for Kant. There is no interaction between the field of phenomena and the indeterminate space beyond its limit. Phenomena are simply demarcated from what is indeterminate. We have the idea of indeterminate existence because we can think, logically, of what can possibly exist. However, we cannot know indeterminate existence, what does not appear in space and time. For Deleuze, however, there must be more of a relation between the field of phenomena and the indeterminate since the determinable occurs through its distinction from undetermined existence. Kant’s notion of the undetermined becomes, for Deleuze, the two notions: undetermined existence and the problematic. Deleuze is much more interested in the latter. In Deleuze the problematic occurs as that which distinguishes itself from the indeterminate or, in other words, as the boundary of the determinable in relation to indeterminate existence. In Kant these notions are not distinct and refer to the same thing: the noumenon is indeterminate existence. This is because the spheres of phenomena (the determinable) and noumena do not change. In other words, since the determinable is delimited by the range of the concept for Kant, undetermined existence is simply outside the boundary of what is determinable. The boundary statically marks the distinction. For Deleuze, on the other hand, what is determinable arises from the indeterminate, so the boundary functions in a different way. The formation of the

65 boundary is the formation of the determinable as a system. The problematic is bound up in its own way with the limitation of what is knowable. It is the problem of how to conceive of the limitation of the knowable or what is outside it. For both Kant and Deleuze, concepts can only be applied to what is determinable, to objects of knowledge. For Deleuze, it is certainly true that it is not possible to have a concept of the problematic, since concepts arise only secondarily to what is problematic. However, this is not the defining characteristic of the problematic for Deleuze. Instead, what defines the problematic is that it becomes determinable. As long as we are considering what is outside the limit of the determinable, no concept can apply. Deleuze differs from Kant in the way he defines the undetermined: the undetermined is that which has not yet ceased being indifferent. The undetermined is what we can say nothing about, neither that it is knowable nor that it is unknowable. 2. THE SYSTEMATIZING ACTIVITY OF REASON AND THE IDEAS IN KANT The transcendental Ideas of reason are unlike other noumena. Similar to concepts of other noumena, we can never have knowledge of them. However, the Ideas are the only noumena that are not simply situated outside the limit of knowledge. Instead, they are necessary for producing the limit of the system of knowledge and, in this way, for the production of the system of knowledge. In other words, the Ideas are necessary in helping us acquire knowledge. For this reason, Deleuze considers them truly problematic. For Deleuze, a problem is not just what has indeterminate status, as for Kant, but what causes the delimitation of what is determinate from what is outside that limit. What is problematic overcomes indeterminacy and produces a system. Deleuze develops this thought from Kantian reason, which is systematizing by nature. For Kant,

66 reason systematizes knowledge by means of the Ideas of God, Soul, and World. Thus, Deleuze’s notion of the problem is modeled on Kant’s Ideas of reason. In what follows, I will show how Deleuze can interpret Kant’s Ideas as functioning between the indeterminate and the determinable understood as the system of knowledge. As the condition of reason’s systematizing activity, the Ideas represent the activity of reason in general. Therefore we must examine the systematizing activity of reason to understand the function of the Ideas. In the Transcendental Dialectic, when Kant is explaining the function of reason, he argues that we could derive a particular proposition from experience by means of the understanding alone (CPR A322/B378). For example, the proposition “Caius is mortal” could be derived simply through experience of the person named Caius. However, the understanding alone can only give us what is particular and contingent, never anything universal and necessary about experience. We only get a description of experience, so to speak. The proposition would not be considered knowledge in the proper sense because it would not have the weight of the universal and necessary, which can only be provided by appeal to a principle. A proposition can never be raised to the level of knowledge because the understanding cannot bring it into relation with the totality of possible experience. Through the understanding alone we can know that a proposition is true but not why it is true. The understanding cannot view concepts as being in relation (beyond the most immediate inference) and, therefore, cannot constitute knowledge on its own. Knowledge is only possible through the activity of reason because reason projects systematic unity. Reason seeks to bring concepts into relation through inference. It tries to find a second concept that conditions the attribution of the first concept to an object.

67 Through inference reason tries to find the conditions under which the proposition occurs according to a universal rule. Deleuze characterizes this activity as the posing of problems and describes reason as the faculty of posing problems. Reason asks, by what other concept is the first concept known, or by appeal to what principle is it maintained? Reason poses a problem when it asks what makes that proposition true. It tries to bring the proposition or case into relation with the universal so that it does not remain merely partial. By itself, the proposition is never universal, only partial, because by itself experience gives us only what is contingent and partial. The problem orients the proposition in terms of something universal and necessary. When it has received orientation in this way, it is a solution, according to Deleuze. Only through reason can we say something universal and necessary because reason brings the proposition in relation with the whole of possible experience, which has the status of a problem. Deleuze describes the Idea or problem as universal: “Only the Idea or problem is universal. It is not the solution which lends its generality to the problem, but the problem which lends its universality to the solution” (DR 162). The point is that it is through its relation to the Idea that a proposition is no longer merely particular and contingent.23 The proposition receives universality in the form of an appeal to a principle and therefore from its relation to the system. As a result, the proposition is understood as a particular case of a universal rule. In our example, since all men are mortal and Caius is a man, Caius must necessarily be mortal. It is only because the proposition is seen as part of a systematic unity that it can appeal to a universal and necessary principle. Only this is

23

Deleuze points to this as one source of transcendental illusion. Once we know how a proposition appeals to the universality of the problem by means of a principle, that is to say, how it is a solution, it becomes possible to “forget” the actual source and to think that it is the proposition that primarily possesses universality.

68 knowledge in the proper sense because it allows us to assert the proposition through its appeal to the necessity of a principle. For Deleuze, the proposition is considered knowledge insofar as it can be understood how it forms a solution, which is to say, how it is ordered or oriented by the problem. The proposition is understood as a solution because it contributes to the completion of the system of knowledge. The proposition tells us something universal and necessary about experience. Only through reason, not merely through the understanding, can we say something happens necessarily, since the idea of necessity cannot be given in experience. By examining the activity of reason, we can characterize Ideas or problems in general. The Ideas represent the positive, systematizing activity of reason, rather than its critical or negative function. Unlike other noumena, the Ideas are truly problematic, in Deleuze’s view, because they condition the systematizing activity of reason and thereby provide order to experience. Kantian Ideas are problems since their object, the complete system of knowledge, is not given. The object of the Ideas is a problem in the sense that it represents a process. It demands that this process be undertaken, and the result of the process is the organization of empirical cases. The system of knowledge is a problem because it demands solutions: it demands that empirical cases be ordered in such a way that they contribute to the completion of the system of knowledge. Reason is driven to draw propositions into relation in such a way that they contribute to the completion of the system. It is driven to orient propositions in this way. “These concepts of reason are not derived from nature; on the contrary, we interrogate nature in accordance with these ideas” (CPR A645/B673). By means of Ideas, reason can demand answers or solutions of experience. This drives reason to seek the principles by which propositions can be

69 understood as universal and necessary. The defining characteristic of problems is therefore that they carry force and demand something of experience. They demand solutions. Let us return briefly to the issue of the indeterminate and the determinable. Deleuze claims that through the Kantian Ideas we can conceive, in general, of the difference between the determinable and what is indeterminate. For Deleuze, the idea of the determinable is the idea of a field or system. It is the entire domain of objects to which a set of determinations can apply. Hence it is the domain that is systematically determinable in that particular way. This is a distinction that is made within experience. We only have the idea of the determinable insofar as we can conceive of a system. Therefore the Ideas, which make the delimitation of a system possible, also allow us to conceive of the determinable in its distinction from what is indeterminate. Deleuze argues that this must be understood as an internal difference, which opens up the system of knowledge. There must be a limit drawn around the system. A system is understood as that which is delimited from what is indeterminate. 3. DELEUZE’S THEORY OF IDEAS: TRANSCENDENTAL DIFFERENCE Kant’s theory of Ideas allows Deleuze to develop his own notion of the problem. We have seen that the defining characteristic of the Idea is that it is a problem that forces experience to become ordered. It forces a process to occur. The Ideas lead to viewing empirical propositions in a certain way. For Kant, when reason posits the Ideas, reason is driven to do something. However, for Kant, these are problems for reason. In other words, they only have a logical function. On the other hand, since problems exist for experience itself for Deleuze, they function ontologically.

70 For Deleuze, the Idea is an instability: elements are extracted from experience and brought into a new relation. This relation is unstable for empirical experience but arises from what is given within experience. Deleuze also uses the term “differential”, symbolized in mathematics as dx/dy, to refer to the Idea. This symbol is taken from the differential calculus and represents the slope of a line, where y=mx + b. “dx” indicates an infinitely small change in x, and “dy” indicates an infinitely small change in y. Thus Deleuze uses the differential symbol to mean that the relation between x and y are prior to and, in fact, constitutive of the elements x and y. The key is that the Deleuzian Idea must result in ordered experience. “If the differentials [or problem] disappear in the result [or solution], this is to the extent that the problem-instance differs in kind from the solution-instance; it is the movement by which the solutions necessarily come to conceal the problem” (DR 177-178). The empirical cases arise from the Idea because they stabilize or solve the instability, and their order and meaning arise in and through their stabilization of the problem. For this reason, the instability as such never occurs in experience. It is covered over or stabilized immediately. For Deleuze, a problem forces experience to become ordered. Order can never simply be found in empirical experience nor is it imposed on experience by the subject, as it is in Kant. For Deleuze, the order of experience is the result of the problem. The last quote also indicates that we are able to conceive of a problem only by extracting pure, ideal elements occurring in experience, around which empirical cases have come to be arranged. In other words, even though the problem is unstable for experience, it can still be an object of thought. (The distinction between knowledge, which concerns experience, and thought is important here, and parallels Kant’s distinction between knowledge and the critical activity of reason.) Ideas

71 occur in experience but they can never themselves be experienced. Since we can only experience their results or products, Ideas or problems must be characterized as transcendental. What we have brought into view is that although, for both Kant and Deleuze, experience is drawn together by means of an organizing or ordering principle, an Idea, they disagree on how the organization occurs. Deleuze argues that organization arises from within experience, or is immanent to experience, rather than being imposed from without, as in Kant. For Kant, the object of the Ideas is a completely organized system and empirical cases are meaningful and ordered because they are presumed to fit into that system. The objects of the Ideas are transcendent to experience, but when used regulatively the Ideas function immanently. Thus, we are prohibited from their transcendent use: from seeking their object. The Kantian Ideas can only direct knowledge and act as a horizon and focus for concepts insofar as they form a unity outside of experience. In other words, since their transcendence is still vital for experience, they do not provide us with an account of experience that is fully immanent. Since the Ideas order experience in a transcendent way, the resulting organization is only hypothetical. For Kant, a solution has the force of a principle only if the complete system is presumed to exist. If the complete system exists, it would explain in a necessary way why these empirical cases occur as they do. The Idea of unity only serves the method of knowledge and is not constitutive of its content. What is given is understood as merely the content that takes on the order provided by the Idea of the complete system. However, we can never know if the complete system actually exists and, therefore, if the order we find in nature is real. Yet empirical cases do, in fact, exist and the Kantian

72 Ideas cannot account for this. Deleuze argues that this problem can only be addressed if Ideas are understood as occurring within experience. The answer, for him, is that Ideas must be fully immanent to experience. Although he describes the Ideas as both transcendent and immanent (DR 163), they are never transcendent in Kant’s sense. They are transcendent because their objects are pure or universal elements that are extracted from experience, which always occurs as an impure mixture. In this sense, the elements and their relations can also be described as ideal (although not ideal in the sense that they are only objects of thought.) For Deleuze, the elements and their relations can be described as immanent because they are incarnated in the actual relations of solutions. The Ideas are to be found nowhere but in experience itself (DR 163). The Deleuzian Ideas never form a unity outside of experience, as do the objects of Kant’s Ideas. Even though it does not form a unity, the Deleuzian problem is able to act on experience because it is extracted from experience itself. For Deleuze, Ideas are problems in themselves. They are not problems merely from the viewpoint of empirical knowledge. To be sure, Ideas are not determinable in the same way as an empirical proposition is. Deleuze is concerned to show that the Ideas have their own consistency, not merely the consistency of what is transcendent to experience. However, they certainly do not function in merely a hypothetical way, as they do in Kant, but actually open up an ordered system from within experience. Since the Ideas are involved in delimiting the domain of experience for both Kant and Deleuze, the difference between them is a question of the role the Ideas play. For Kant, the Ideas are static conditions of experience. They are indeterminate because their object is transcendent to experience. The limit of possible experience merely marks the system

73 off from what is outside of it. Deleuze argues that, for Kant, Ideas can only be considered indeterminate from the viewpoint of empirical knowledge, and by its standards. In other words, for Kant it is only from the viewpoint of empirical knowledge that they are problems at all. In themselves the Ideas form a unity. It is we who cannot know this. Christian Kerslake points out that, for Deleuze, Ideas are not indeterminate, but fully determined as problems.24 In Deleuze an Idea is a movement or becoming since it is the arising of the distinction of what is determinable, or what is in relation, from what is indeterminate or indifferent. In other words, the Deleuzian Idea occurs as a movement from what is indeterminate. This difference between the determinable and the indeterminate is transcendental. Hence Deleuze also refers to the Idea as transcendental difference and sometimes as internal difference. The Idea is the limit of experience and is productive of a system of experience. Deleuze begins his first chapter of Difference and Repetition with a brief discussion of the indeterminate ground from which determination arises: Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved – but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows. The indeterminate is completely indifferent, but such floating determinations are no less indifferent to each other. Is difference intermediate between these two extremes? Or is it not rather the only extreme,

24

Christian Kerslake, “The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence” in Radical Philosophy, vol. 113, May-Jun 2002, pp. 10-23.

74 the only moment of presence and precision? Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such (DR 28). His characterization of indeterminacy is ontological. As we said earlier, what is indeterminate for Deleuze is not simply what cannot appear to us and, therefore, a characterization of what the object is apart from its appearing. The appearing of the object is the object. Indeterminacy is that state in which objects cannot occur. His notion of transcendental difference (simply referred to as ‘difference’ above) allows him to give an account of the appearing of objects. The Idea is a movement or event in the sense that it is the coming into relation of elements that were indifferent to each other and not in relation. In this way, the Idea is purely a relation. By coming into relation, these elements become extracted from the flux of the indeterminate. In other words, they can be understood as discrete elements only because they have come into relation. The relation occurs as a problem that produces or opens up a system. Since elements are now in relation, they can be understood as different from rather than indifferent to each other. In other words, elements are in relation with each other because of their difference from each other. The articulation of an Idea, that is to say, the event by which its constitutive elements are distinguished and, thereby, brought into relation, is what Deleuze calls “differentiation.” (This is spelled with a “t”. Later, I will discuss the process of differenciation, spelled with a “c.”) To be clear, transcendental difference acts on what is indeterminate. In other words, the movement from the indeterminate to the determinate is transcendental difference itself. Deleuze describes two aspects of indifference in the quote above, but both are abstractions since, properly speaking, there could be neither finite, distinct determinations

75 nor absence of such determinations. These determinations would not be able to maintain their distinction so that, in fact, there could be no determinations. There would only be a fluid movement. (Later, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze will describe this movement as occurring at infinite speeds.)25 However, for the sake of trying to understand how difference emerges from the state of indifference or indeterminacy, if we consider the second aspect of indifference that Deleuze describes, the white nothingness, we can see that transcendental difference overcomes the indifference of the unconnected, floating determinations. Transcendental difference must be understood as the establishment of the connection or relation of determinations. In this sense transcendental difference is also a synthesis. Deleuze argues that the difference “between” two things is empirical and the resulting determinations are extrinsic. This empirical or external difference requires as its transcendental condition the difference by which they can be considered two different things. In other words, transcendental difference does not occur between two things. “However, instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it” (DR 28). Since transcendental difference establishes the relation between elements, so that they are no longer indifferent to one another, it distinguishes itself from its ground of indifference. In this sense, difference must occur as unilateral distinction. It is distinguished from its ground as partial and incomplete. Something of the ground arises to distinguish itself from the ground. Transcendental difference forms the reason (or cause) for why certain elements stand out, as their principle of selection. In this way transcendental difference is the difference between

25

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Hereafter cited as WP followed by the page number.

76 what stands out and what cannot be differentiated. Selection is partial in principle since what is selected is only a portion. Transcendental difference forms the reason why this aspect emerges and does not blend into the nothingness of indeterminacy. The act of emerging from the undifferentiated and indeterminate ground makes “determinations” no longer indifferent to each other. (Obviously they can only be considered “determinations” once they are no longer indifferent to each other. Thus, there could never be unconnected determinations.)26 It is in this regard that Deleuze can agree with Heidegger’s description of the ontological difference, which he quotes in Difference and Repetition, even though they disagree in a number of other ways: “Difference must be articulation and connection in itself” (DR 117). 4. A SYSTEM AND ITS RELATION TO OTHER SYSTEMS On the ground of the difference between what stands out and what goes unnoticed, what stands out can be considered on its own, as a system or field. To be clear, this difference is transcendental since it opens up an empirical field of experience but cannot itself be experienced. Once the field is opened up, its relations can be determined and explored. There can only be an ordered field on the ground that ‘determinations’ relevant to it are first of all not indifferent to each other. The determinable defines what is given for thought, in respect of which thought can predicate determinations. Transcendental difference can also be described as a filter by which something stands out from the undifferentiated ground from which it arises. As a result, other particular determinations (if they could be considered as such) can continue to remain indifferent to one another

26

We must keep in mind that for Deleuze, we can only think of determinations as unconnected, and this only in retrospect, since there can be no unconnected determinations in experience. Again, the distinction between thought and experience is important here.

77 and effectively be “ignored” or “forgotten” in this way. Transcendental difference is a filter in the sense that it selects certain determinations. It forms the means of their selection by bringing them into relation. A system is opened up on the basis of the selection established by the relation. In other words, the basis of the system is formed by a principle or set of principles that can be given to the way in which the elements are in relation. Based on how the Idea, and thereby the system, arises for Deleuze, an Idea only synthesizes a portion rather than some kind of whole. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze also uses the term “sieve” to describe the relation of a system to that from which it arises. A particular system acts as a sieve because it is a selecting. Therefore experience by its very nature is incomplete, prejudiced, and partial rather than complete and impartial. The condition of a system of experience is the event of becoming partial: difference or selection. For this reason, no Idea or set of Ideas can exhaust experience for Deleuze. Since no system occurs as a completed system in Kant’s sense, there is no single system that incorporates and thereby accounts for everything. Deleuze later calls them planes, which better reflects the fact that they are not closed off as a system might be. There are many systems and Ideas. When he articulates what Ideas arise from, he characterizes the latter only as the unground or groundless. To articulate this unground would require grasping the whole, which consists of the indifference from which difference arises. There can be no articulation of the whole. In fact there is no whole. It would be incorrect to say that the indeterminate exists as a whole, precisely because it is not. However, if we were to describe it as existing, we would say it exists only as selfdiffering. Because of this Deleuze refers to it as the “unground” or the “groundless” (DR 67). It can only be understood as that from which determination arises and which

78 dissolves all determination. Therefore we are not justified in speaking of everything that can be extracted, since all possible determinations do not pre-exist their selection. They only become determinations through their selection. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze does not develop the notion of the unground very much, reserving his emphasis for the transcendental difference that arises from it. In Difference and Repetition transcendental difference is being, a point I will develop in the next section. However, the notion of unground continues to be important and is developed further in Deleuze’s work. Later it becomes the notion of chaosmos, which is mentioned in Difference and Repetition but occurs in greater frequency in What is Philosophy? (DR 199). The totality of the systems and that from which they arise is “thus a formless ungrounded chaos” (DR 69). In Deleuze’s view the development of a particular science or other field of study occurs on the basis of an initial discovery of a system. The development is the exploitation of all of the possibilities opened up by that discovery. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze argues that the philosophies of Plato, Kant, and Descartes all form different systems or planes that are based on initial discoveries that were exploited and developed (WP 29-32). The concepts within each of the systems are only meaningful in the context of their respective systems. Thus the Cartesian cogito cannot be directly compared with the Kantian cogito without bringing in other concepts. In this sense the concepts of different planes are not comparable. “The fact that Kant ‘criticizes’ Descartes means only that he sets up a plane and constructs a problem that could not be occupied or completed by the Cartesian cogito” (WP 32). In other words, “criticism” is not an accurate characterization of what Kant did. It would be better to say that he

79 opened up a new plane or system. A new system can only be opened up by examining the objects (or concepts) of an already existing system and by seeing a new problem that can be drawn out of what is presupposed, out of tendencies within that system. All of the objects of a system fit together, often like a puzzle, and together they enact the tendencies of the system. The new system will come from seeing something about a previously existing system, as a whole, qua system. However, since the Kantian cogito can be compared to the Cartesian in a certain way, the two planes do, indeed, have a relationship. There are many systems of experience, and they interact, but each applies to experience completely. “But the domains are distributive and cannot be added” (DR 241). All of the systems together will not give us a totality because experience can never be exhausted. However, all of the various systems intersect with each other at certain points and thereby interact as well. We can also say that every system or plane implies every other one: in order to properly understand the meaning of the Kantian cogito, we are taken to the Cartesian cogito and, hence, the plane formed by Descartes’ philosophy. These planes imply each other because they can interact: We can, for example, bring the Kantian cogito in relation to the Cartesian cogito, and compare them. In this way, the objects or concepts of a particular system refer to objects and concepts of all other planes. 5. TRANSCENDENTAL DIFFERENCE AND BEING It is helpful to understand Deleuze’s notion of transcendental difference in relation to discussions of being. Deleuze provides us with a way to understand the fact that empirical cases or entities are or have being. The question is: what does it mean to say that something has being? As I said in the discussion on transcendental affirmation above, Kant’s critical restriction of knowledge also had the effect of restricting the

80 concept of being. Only what is affirmed transcendentally can be said to be. Kant’s philosophy is important to Deleuze not only epistemologically but also metaphysically. In Deleuze there is a new conception of being, too. As for Kant, the indeterminate cannot be said to be in the positive sense. Indeterminacy is a kind of nothingness, the nothingness of indifference or incoherence. Deleuze also refers to it as chaos. In contrast, transcendental difference must be understood as being. Daniel W. Smith has argued that in Difference and Repetition Deleuze must be understood to be participating in the debate about being as it is revived by Heidegger and to be offering his own solution to the problem of ontological difference.27 Heidegger argues that throughout the history of Western thought we have failed to think the difference between being and beings (or entities). We have only conceived of being in terms of beings, as simply the highest being. We should note that Deleuze believes that Heidegger was unsuccessful in developing his conception of being: “But does he [Heidegger] effectuate the conversion after which univocal Being belongs only to difference and, in this sense, revolves around being?…It would seem not…” (DR 66). According to Smith, the reason is that Heidegger was unwilling or unable to push the ontological difference to its conclusion.28 Thus Deleuze sees himself as truly developing this conception. Smith argues that Deleuze returns to the Scholastics and retrieves the concept of “univocity” with which to develop his conception of being. In the Scholastics’ debate concerning the nature of being, three terms designated the ways of solving the problem: equivocity, univocity, and analogy. Smith’s discussion centers on the point that Deleuze 27

Daniel W. Smith, “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence,” in Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 167-183. 28 Ibid., p. 169.

81 argues for an ontology that is immanent and univocal rather than equivocal or analogical. If being were equivocal, it would mean that being is said of beings in several senses and there is no common measure. Two beings, such as God and human are in two different manners and so cannot be compared. Smith’s point is that being as equivocity was rejected by the Scholastics because it denied order in the cosmos. If being were analogical, it would mean that beings can be compared in their being. God and humans are in analogical ways. However, both analogy and equivocity allow for a hierarchy among beings, according to the way in which they are (that is to say, the way in which they possess being). Deleuze claims to be following in the footsteps of Spinoza in arguing that there is no order or hierarchy among beings and that there is only a kind of anarchy of beings. “In an immanent ontology, Being necessarily becomes univocal: not only is Being equal in itself, it is equally and immediately present in all beings, without mediation or intermediary.”29 The relation between univocity and immanence is important in understanding Deleuze’s conception of being. Deleuze is arguing for a conception of being that is common to all entities or beings. In a sense, being is common in Aristotle, for example. Being is the highest concept in Aristotle, while the categories are the different senses in which being is said of beings. The problem with this, Smith points out, is that being comes to have only the sense of an empty universal and, in addition, cannot account for what constitutes the individuality of beings. To say being is an “empty universal” means that being is the most general or universal concept in that it is predicated of every single entity. “We have no difficulty in understanding that Being, even if it is absolutely common, is nevertheless not a genus” (DR 35). For Deleuze, being is not abstract but concrete. He often characterizes the Idea 29

Ibid., p. 174.

82 as a concrete universal to make this point. In other words, being is not simply the broadest class under which all entities fall. Being is common to all beings in the sense that everything is in the same way. Smith claims that with his notion of univocal being, Deleuze is able to account for the difference between individual beings while maintaining that being is present in the same way in all individual beings. On the other hand, Aristotle can only attribute the principle of individuation to some element of fully constituted individual entities. “An equivocal or analogical concept of Being, in other words, can only grasp that which is univocal in beings”.30 What is univocal about individual beings can be given as the categories. In other words, only what is universal about an individual can be grasped, while that which individualizes the individual cannot. For Aristotle, being is related to the categories (the most general concepts and the highest genera) equivocally, while the categories are related univocally to the species that fall under it. However, for a univocal ontology like Deleuze’s, Smith points out, there can be no categories. The difference between individuals cannot be qualitative (or difference in essence) but only quantitative, the degree to which they realize being. In Deleuze being must be understood as transcendental difference. Insofar as every Idea-problem in Deleuze is transcendental difference, it is being. What is interesting for us here, however, is that if being is understood as the opening up of a system, we can see both how being is not merely an empty universal and how the individuality of beings or empirical entities can be accounted for. All empirical objects equally have as their basis the relation to system in which they arise and to which they belong. The individuality of each empirical case is constituted as offering a different solution to the problem of the 30

Ibid., p. 177.

83 system in relation to which it arises, and individuals differ in the degree to which they express or solve the problem. In this way, being is not understood as an abstract universal under which empirical cases fall as particulars through resemblance. Rather, every empirical case is equally a solution and thereby equally is (or equally has being). There is only one kind of being for all empirical beings. Another difference among empirical objects is the different systems to which they are in relation. From an empirical perspective, being is nothing (that is to say, no-thing) or, alternatively, (non)-being or ?being (DR 64, 202, 205). Being is not in the way that we say that an empirical entity is. As Smith argues, being must be understood as having the reality of the problematic for Deleuze.31 6. EXTERNAL DIFFERENCE OR DIVERSITY Thus far we have been examining Deleuze notion of transcendental or internal difference. However, he also offers the notion of external difference, which is interchangeable with the term “diversity” or “manifold.” External difference is the difference between empirical entities. We can also say that a “diversity” of entities are given within a system. His account of diversity is meant to address a problem he sees in Kant’s account of diversity. We can think of Kant as beginning from the point that experience does, indeed, consist of diversity. The question is: how can we account for this diversity? For Kant, it is owed to the fact that the forms of intuition, space and time, are themselves pure a priori diversity. Since the forms of intuition are diversity, whatever presents itself to us within those forms will also be diversity. For him, the diversity of space and time cannot be reduced to the conceptual. In contrast, the

31

Ibid., p. 179.

84 rationalists do, indeed, claim that spatiotemporal determinations are reducible to conceptual ones. Spatiotemporal determinations only seem to be distinct from conceptual ones because of our limitations. However, for Kant, spatiotemporal determinations provide us with distinct information about objects and they can be grasped only through intuition. Thus there can be multiple cases that occur in various points in space and time but fall under a single concept. The idea that spatiotemporal difference is different in kind from conceptual difference is important in Kant. Deleuze wants to retain the idea that spatiotemporal determinations provide us with unique information but also to overcome the problem of having two completely different kinds of determinations.32 We can understand Deleuze as offering two criticisms of Kant. One is that Kant simply attributes the forms of diversity to the subject. He deduces the forms of external difference (difference between two empirical things) as the forms of intuition (space and time) and attributes them to the subject. According to Deleuze, Kant was right in seeing that space and time do not belong to objects apart from the relation to the subject, but argues that neither do they belong to the subject, as Kant claims. For Kant, we can only grasp an object through sensible intuition. It comes into relation with us if it appears in space and time: this is the significance of space and time. In other words, for him, the transcendental subject is the condition for experience. For Deleuze, too, sensible intuition is the faculty by which we grasp something external to us. However, space and time do not belong to subjectivity but are produced instead when a system of experience is opened up. The transcendental conditions of experience are to be found in experience itself, not in the subject. Thus space and time belong to objects of experience (not to 32

Smith argues that Deleuze follows in the path of Salomon Maimon in solving the problem of the difference between spatiotemporal determinations and conceptual determinations. Essentially Maimon takes the route of the rationalists.

85 objects apart from their ability to be known by a subject). In addition, space and time are not forms of diversity for Deleuze. For him, we must consider external difference independently from the question of space and time. The second criticism is that Kant cannot account for how the forms of intuition and the understanding, or spatiotemporal determinations and conceptual determinations, come into relation. Concept and intuition have separate sources and knowledge occurs when conceptual determinations come to be synthesized with spatiotemporal determinations. This is how the empirical comes to be in relation with the transcendental and tells us about the relation of diversity to the system: how it is organized in it. According to Deleuze, the problem of two different kinds of determinations is actually just a symptom of the real problem: that Kant provided a principle of experience that was merely conditioning not genetic. Kant took for granted the sphere of the determinable, which is the ground of meaning, in that he presumed its existence and did not show how it arises. From there, he only gave conditions of the system, which are the categories of the understanding. Since the system as a whole makes meaning possible, the source of meaning is simply given with the sphere of the determinable that Kant presumes. He only needs then to account for the diversity of empirical cases which take on meaning. In this way, he treats form (concept) as occurring separately from content (intuition) that takes on form. In other words, he accounts for empirical cases and the system separately and then tries to bring them together. However, he fails to provide a convincing account for how intuition and concepts come together. The significance of this problem, in regard to the issue of meaning, is that Kant cannot truly explain why these particulars express this meaning. In contrast, Deleuze will demonstrate that individuals arise only insofar as

86 they express a certain meaning—in other words, how a meaningful individual arises. He will argue that an individual arises out of necessity, in order to express a certain meaning. For both Kant and Deleuze, the diversity of empirical cases (external differences) must be understood as being in relation with transcendental difference or internal difference (the latter being the determinable insofar as it is bounded off from the indeterminate, to use Kant’s language). Deleuze’s point is that external difference cannot stand on its own—yet, this is precisely what Kant tries to claim. In other words, for Deleuze, there can be no form of external difference. In attributing the forms of intuition to the subject, Kant only shows that the subject is capable of distinguishing between empirical objects, but not how the distinction among objects actually occurs. In other words, Kant only shows that the diversity of intuition corresponds with categories, that is to say, with the system of experience. He does not show the grounds by which this diversity is produced in the system. Deleuze explains why Kant has been criticized by Maimon, Fichte, and others for this: “With regard to such a principle of internal difference or determination they [Kant’s critics] demanded grounds not only for the synthesis but for the reproduction of diversity in the synthesis as such” (NP 52). Kant is not justified in treating the forms of intuition separately from the categories (i.e. from the conditions of the system). Empirical cases must embody meaning. This is as much true for Deleuze as for Kant. However, for Kant an object embodies exactly one meaning. Since his account of empirical diversity is given independently of his account of internal difference, by which the system is opened up, the consequence is that the object must be fully expressive of meaning, that is to say, of its conditions, with nothing in reserve. The transcendental and

87 empirical, or concept and intuition, must correspond exactly. In this way the object of experience reflects the fact that experience occurs as the complete expression of the determinable. In the synthesis of intuition according to the categories, the empirical object comes to be meaningful by locating it within the system, by determining what place it has in the system. The object is understood as occupying a place in the system. Experience can only be ordered in one way, and for this reason objects have only a single meaning. In fact, for Kant, something is an object insofar as it is the embodiment of a single meaning. According to Deleuze, overcoming the problems requires a genetic principle to account for the production of the system. The account of the diversity of empirical objects must be given through the account of internal difference from which it arises. Unlike Kant, Deleuze thinks that diversity cannot be accounted for separately from the genesis of the system. Thus space and time cannot be forms of diversity. He claims that the external difference between empirical cases (that is to say, different empirical cases) arises from the opening of the field itself. In other words, he seeks to show that empirical diversity arises from the internal difference of the system. The key is that Deleuze takes the selecting activity of transcendental difference, which gives us the sphere of the determinable, as the ground of experience. In contrast, Kant took the result of this activity as forming a unity and as grounding experience. Since a system of experience, for Deleuze, is partial by definition, it does not capture all of experience. Thus, meaning is also necessarily partial. There can be no diversity, or difference between things, unless the criterion by which they can be individual things is first selected as the defining criterion. Therefore empirical diversity can only be produced as a result of the selecting

88 activity that results from the production of the determinable. Before that, there are no criteria by which to mark an individual as individual. This is why the particular cases of any system refer endlessly to each other, and not to anything outside the system, that is to say, not to a totality beyond that. The external differences are specific to the system, since they arise from it, and therefore cannot be understood apart from it. In other words, it is only known as diversity in light of the system in which those differences are meaningful. Deleuze begins chapter 5 with the following statement: “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse” (DR 222). There are different sets of external differences for different systems. Thus we can only know the diversity of empirical cases in light of the transcendental difference by which the system is opened up. It is for this reason that Deleuze emphasizes the act of individuation over the types of individuals (or species) that are produced. In Deleuze a system is driven to create individuals. The production of individuals must be understood as a tendency of the system itself. Therefore the process of individuation plays an important role in the production of the system for Deleuze, something I will examine below in the first section of chapter 3. When Kant considers external difference on its own, as the forms of intuition, he does so only by abstraction. The external differences are meaningless if considered on their own. By themselves, they are without their proper context. They would give us only partial inquiries but not the field that orientates them. Deleuze does not disagree that empirical cases are spatiotemporal. Rather, his point is that space and time are not forms that belong to the subject and that condition diversity. Insofar as we understand them as forms internal to the subject, they have already been given or conditioned by the

89 determinable. Space and time do not account for diversity since they themselves must be accounted for. Cases do not simply occur in space and time that is already there. The production of the determinable is the opening up of a field, a theater of spatiotemporal diversity. Empirical cases themselves measure out the distances between each other. These distances, which together comprise space that can be considered abstractly, are created as a result of each case individuating itself. Therefore space and time can only be considered on their own once they have been measured out by empirical cases occupying the field. I will develop Deleuze’s account of the construction of space in section 2 of chapter 3. What is important to see is that for Deleuze space does not condition empirical diversity. Empirical cases are indeed externally different from one another, that is to say, different in space and time. However, their difference from each other is made possible by their relation to the field to which they belong. The relation of empirical cases to meaning is therefore more complex in Deleuze than in Kant. Like Kant, he must also show that empirical particulars come to embody meaning. For both, the meaning of an object reflects the fact that the object is ordered according to the principles of the system. Thus, for Kant, as we have shown, the diversity given in intuition is not meaningful until it is synthesized according to the categories. However, for Deleuze it is not so much that empirical cases come to embody meaning. Prior to the opening of the system, there are no individuals, properly speaking. Therefore he does not need to account for why individuals are meaningful: the fact that they come to be individualized implies that they are, in principle, meaningful. Individuals occur for the system. The process of individuation has its own importance, in contrast to Kant, where they are simply the realization of possibilities. The process of

90 individuation is independent of the process by which a system is opened up, and has its own logic. In a sense, one can say that empirical cases do not have exactly one meaning. Since each case occurs in light of a system that is opened up by selection and since selection implies something that is not selected, each case carries with it other “determinations” that were not selected. These are precisely not known, or can be characterized as inessential. These “determinations” have not come into relation with anything else, so they continue to move at infinite speeds. In other words, they are not determinations, properly speaking, since they have not been differentiated from the chaos. Since no system of experience captures all of experience, an empirical object can never be simply the materialization of a single meaning. Now, the object does, indeed, completely express the meaning derived from that particular system. However, as we discussed earlier, each system of experience refers to or implies every other system. This relationship of implication is carried on to every object of every system. Thus, while an object expresses meaning it also complicates the transcendental in a new way, retaining something in reserve. In this reserve an object implicates other “determinations” that have not yet ceased being indifferent to one another but could come into tension and, thereby, be selected. In this way, the empirical object has a certain relationship to the system in which it occurs and, equally, has a relationship to all other systems of experience. Thus, in a sense, the object is not completely ordered for Deleuze. We must be clear that for him objects of experience can change in an empirical sense just as they can for Kant. It is more accurate to say that for Deleuze we can understand change in an empirical way by noting static extrinsic changes and calculating the changes

91 according to the extrinsic measurements of space and time. In contrast to Kant, Deleuze argues that the object is like the stable state reached by a process. What we recognize as objects are objects only because they are at a stable point, or at equilibrium. He would argue that, for Kant, knowledge of an object is limited to only its static features. The Deleuzian object can be seen to resemble the Kantian object if we consider only its static, geometric properties. However, to understand the changes in these properties in a more profound way, we would need to understand the constituting processes of the object, since these give rise to its static properties. These processes are transcendental since they are not themselves experienced but are, instead, the condition of experience. To be clear, we cannot know these constituting processes since there can only be knowledge of the result of the process: the stable and discrete object. We can only model the processes using tools like calculus. Therefore the object is understood to occur as it does because of its own tendencies, the tendencies of its constituting processes. An object is not primarily something with a unity that exists in a space that serves as container for it. Instead, its unity occurs alongside and as an effect of its parts, which are the constituting processes. In other words, the external characteristics tell us less about an object for Deleuze than do the features of its constituting processes. Since Deleuze speaks of objects that change in a way that is not merely empirical, he must transform Kant’s language of the transcendental and empirical into that of the virtual and the actual, as we will now show. 7. THE VIRTUAL AND THE ACTUAL Insofar as it is stable and can be described with static properties, the object is actual. Insofar as we consider its constituting processes, the object is virtual. Constitutive

92 processes are virtual because they are not themselves experienced but are, instead, the conditions for the objects that are experienced. For Deleuze, every object of experience is always both partially virtual and partially actual. “Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension” (DR 209). In contrast, for Kant, every object as object is fully empirical. In Deleuze, since the virtual is part of experience and is fully real, it is not real in the same way as the actual. The virtual can be understood as the creative processes that is part of every object. All constitutive processes occur as instability or disequilibrium and tend to move toward a stable state. These processes occur by the bringing together of elements into unstable relations or tensions. Deleuze uses the term differential to express the virtual. The differential gives the pure relationship between two processes and in this way expresses the point of change or transformation. The relation is objectively unstable because it cannot maintain itself. The actual object can be understood as an external form that is generated spontaneously by these processes. The constituting process produces the actual around it to contain it, to stabilize it. In this way, an actual object tends to cover over the creative activity that produces it. The actual is a sort of flattening of the instability of the virtual, a flattening which is possible only on the surface and, in this way, the actual is polarized on a single plane. In other words, the actual is created as a dimension or as space. “For difference, to be explicated is to be cancelled or to dispel the inequality which constitutes it” (DR 228). On that plane, and only on it, the actual cancels out the instability of the virtual that is its condition. However, the creative activity continues to exist. In its virtual part an object implicates the system of which it is a part. This is the

93 reason that, even though the actual object covers over the virtual instability that produces it, the system continues to exist as the virtual part of the object. Even while the virtual inequality cancels itself in actual objects, it remains implicated in the object and in itself. It is for this reason that an object’s equilibrium or stability can be disrupted. This only occurs when the object comes into relation with another object. It is important to note that, for Deleuze, it is precisely the change itself, expressed in the differential, that we cannot experience. Instead we only experience the result of it, which is the actual. Since all objects, for Deleuze, are partly virtual, we can examine the virtual on its own to determine its nature. It is for this reason that he claims that the virtual always exists on its own plane. We can study the virtual features of an object, using mathematical modeling, for example. A science like that only allows us to theorize about virtual features. But in ordinary experience the virtual features become apparent or become known only by paying attention to how the object changes. In other words, we need to examine how the virtual comes into play in ordinary experience. For Deleuze, the virtual must be understood as part of experience itself, not simply a condition of it. It is for this reason that he describes lived experience as absolutely abstract. For example, an expert woodcrafter will have developed this kind of experiential knowledge. He or she will not know the biochemistry of wood and why it has the texture it does. The virtual features only become apparent when the object approaches a critical point. In other words, when examining experience, virtual features only become apparent at the point of destruction or transformation, especially if we examine the different ways in which something can be transformed. At these critical points the object is no longer in a stable state, no longer at

94 equilibrium. The virtual features of the wood only become apparent, are forced to become apparent, in the interaction with the woodworker. However, let us return to Deleuze’s use of mathematics to describe the virtual. The purpose is to understand the tendencies of processes that compose the object, and it is interesting to note that Deleuze’s notion of the virtual allows us to examine these processes on their own. One notion Deleuze focuses on from mathematics is “singularity.” For Deleuze, singularities are properties of the constituting processes. They are the points of transformation that define a certain kind of process. For example, every person has a point at which she breaks down in tears, boils over in anger, or dissolves into giggles. To take another example, a physical object has a freezing point when it becomes a solid, and a melting point when it becomes a liquid. These features can seem abstract and universal but they occur generally for a certain kind of object because of the processes that constitute it. The features are particular to their respective processes. However, they do not guide the processes in a transcendent way, only marking the critical points of the processes and of their interrelations. Since we can examine the virtual on its own, Deleuze describes features like singularities as having their own life. Whether they become actualized or not, they continue to exist because they always remain features of that object’s constituting processes. It is important to note that we can never experience or empirically know the constitutive processes that comprise the virtual. They can only be given as an Idea to thought. The virtual is completely real, but not in the way the actual is real. As we have seen, Deleuze describes Ideas as problematic, taking this up from Kant and, in fact, this is

95 the only component of the latter’s transcendental Ideas that he retains.33 In Kant the Ideas are necessary for empirical experience but cannot themselves be experienced. The proper “object” of the Idea is the problem, which transcends experience, not an object of experience. Although only an object of experience can actually have unity, for Kant the Ideas still have a kind of unity since they posit the unity of our empirical knowledge. Kerslake points out that what is important for Deleuze is that it is only from the perspective of empirical experience that the object of the Idea appears as unity. In other words, the projection of unity onto the Ideas only occurs from the perspective of empirical knowledge.34 Kerslake argues, then, that Deleuze can be seen as radicalizing Kant’s notion of Ideas by conceiving them not from the perspective of empirical knowledge but in themselves the “object” of the Idea is not unity but difference, and it has its own consistency. “Problems are always dialectical: the dialectic has no other sense, nor do problems have any other sense. What is mathematical (or physical, biological, psychical or sociological) are the solutions” (DR 179). Ideas can only be understood as bringing (elements) into relation. Since Ideas in themselves are problematic, they are not transcendent to experience in Deleuze. We have said that, for him, the virtual can be understood as the constituting processes of objects. These processes can be described as problematic because they do not have the unity of the actual. In experience the virtual occurs as lines of tension or instability. They indicate that the object can be taken in a different way. The key is that its parts relate in a way that is not possible for the actual, a way that cannot be reconciled into a unity. We can only grasp the virtual through thought, as an Idea, by conceiving the pure relation. 33

Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas” in Deleuze and Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 43-61. 34 Christian Kerslake, “The Vertigo of Philosophy,” p.18.

96 However, what is thought is not a totality or unity, as in Kant, but difference. What Kant’s and Deleuze’s conceptions of Ideas have in common is that, for both, the Ideas pose something that cannot come together as a unity in experience. More importantly, however, for both the Ideas are regulative. For Kant, the Ideas direct us to seek the next cause in the series, thereby extending our knowledge. For Deleuze, the Ideas produce empirical cases, as solutions, and produce concepts by which knowledge occurs. An important criticism of Deleuze has recently emerged in Peter Hallward’s Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.35 Hallward’s central criticism is that Deleuze must be understood as devaluing actual existence in favor of an otherworldly dimension (the virtual). The key to understanding Hallward’s criticism is the relation of the virtual and actual. Hallward characterizes the relation as one of the activity of creating (the virtual) and the creatural confinement of that activity (the actual). Self-identical creatures or objects are therefore treated as though they are merely containers for that activity. Hallward describes the actual object as an “unavoidable obstacle” to the creative movement.36 He does make clear that he understands that the virtual and actual cannot be understood separately, interpreting Deleuze’s project as an attempt to free the creating spark within us. “The destiny of the creature…is simply to invent the means of emptying or dissolving itself so as to impose the least possible limitation upon the creating that sustains it.”37 John Protevi has recently claimed that Hallward is guilty of interpreting Deleuze’s virtual and actual as a simple duality, even

35

Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Continuum Press: New York, 2006). 36 Ibid., p. 30. 37 Ibid., p. 29.

97 though Hallward takes pains to avoid this.38 The actual cannot be considered passive in relation to the virtual that creates it because the actual is a dimension of that creating activity, the virtual. In the introduction of Difference and Repetition Deleuze characterizes identity (or solidity) as a mere optical effect (DR xix). His point is that the solidity of the identity of the creature (or any object) is misleading. The actual cannot be understood as an obstacle to creative activity because the idea that the actual is an encasing is the illusion. This is both an ontological and epistemological issue. The ontological issue is that there is no solidity to destroy or anything from which to free the creative spark. However, the actual appears to be something separate from the virtual. The surface (the actual) is completely part of the object: it is simply the inside (the virtual, constitutive processes) limiting itself. It is at least clear that the relation of the virtual and actual is complex. Since, for Deleuze, transcendental conditions (the virtual conditions) do not belong to the subject (given that there is no transcendental subject) but to experience as such, the opening up of a new field will occur in experience itself. It will be opened up within the objects of experience. To be clear, the new field will not come from the object in itself, as it would for the empiricist, but from the object of experience. However, these conditions arise from the virtual portion of the object not the actual. Deleuze does not develop this part of his theory in much detail in Difference and Repetition but it is implied in the theory of experience he builds up there. He also provides hints of how new conditions arise, mostly in chapter 5, “Assymetrical Synthesis of the Sensible.” It is absolutely vital for Deleuze that new conditions arise from experience since, without this, his theory is reduced to

38

John Protevi, “Review of Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu (2007).

98 Kant’s theory of transcendental conditioning. Deleuze’s virtual would be no different than Kant’s possible (i.e. the concept in Kant). It is useful to consider Deleuze’s statement that the conditions of experience are no broader than what they condition (DR 285). In a sense the process of actualization occurs as the complete expenditure of virtual conditions. For example, the virtual conditions of water, which includes the virtual relations therein, cause water to boil when it comes into relation to heat, when the water reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit. At the point at which the water starts boiling, those particular virtual conditions have, in a sense, expended themselves in creating the actual state of boiling water. In this way, virtual conditions are no broader than what they condition. However, in another sense, virtual conditions continue to exist. “The virtual intensity is only cancelled outside itself, in extensity, but remains implicated within itself” (DR 240). Virtual conditions continue to exist in the way that the boiling point of water continues to remain the point at which water boils even when a particular pot of water reaches the boiling point. In this way, virtual conditions can connect and come into relation with other virtual relations and be transformed. It is important to keep in mind that the actual does not result from the limitation of pre-existing possibility. However, in order to understand how the conditions of experience arise, we must always look to what was previously experienced. We would have to understand the object itself, that is to say, its constitutive processes, in order to determine what would result in change in that object. These processes determine how the object is able to interact with other objects, how it will affect and be affected by them. Therefore new conditions do not arise from the actual, or the static features of the object.

99 Deleuze proposes the virtual/actual couple in order to replace the possible/real relation. For this reason, he takes great pains to argue that the virtual is not like the possible. The most explicit discussion of the virtual occurs in Chapter 4, where he compares the virtual/actual relation to the possible/real (DR 208-214). In Deleuze’s reading of Kant, the possible and the real have equal status but the real simply occurs as the selection of one of the possibilities that falls under a concept. (This is the process of ‘realization.’) However, there is no conceptual difference between the possibilities that would account for why a particular one is selected. “What difference can there be between the existent and the non-existent if the non-existent is already possible, already included in the concept and having all the characteristics that the concept confers upon it as possibility? Existence is the same as but outside the concept” (DR 211). In Kant, all of the possibilities can equally be selected. The real or empirical object is recognized simply as embodying one of the possibilities and, because of this the real simply resembles the possible, according to Deleuze. The existence of something can only be explained as brute eruption. Existence is supposed to occur in space and time. Spatiotemporality indicates which of the possibilities was selected, but since space and time are simply given, they do not help to explain why that particular possibility was selected: that is to say, spatiotemporality does not help explain why that one was selected. Therefore we know that the one that will be selected to exist will occur as spatiotemporal but we do not know the reason why that particular one will, in fact, be selected. In other words, understanding the space and time of an object is not connected to its reason for selection. It is for this reason that Deleuze claims that space and time are indifferent to the production of an object (DR 211). The point is that the possible/real relation in Kant

100 cannot account for real existence. For Kant, the conditions of experience determine beforehand what is possible in experience. Even though we genuinely discover the empirical laws of nature, they derive their necessity from a priori conditions because the goal of the complete system of knowledge is already given. Empirical laws are not given beforehand, yet only what is consistent with the transcendental logic of Kant’s conditions, and therefore with the totality of Nature, will be an empirical law. In this way, in Kant’s system, every single possibility is accounted for. As a result, realization of possibility is not the creation of anything new. For Deleuze, possibility cannot be calculated as it can for Kant. The calculation of possibility could never explain why only certain ones, in fact, occur. The virtual/actual couple is meant to replace the possible/real couple in such a way as to explain the existence of each thing. An object comes into existence through the process of actualization. “In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of a pre-existing possibility” (DR 212).39 Actualization is genuine creation because the actual does not resemble the virtual for Deleuze as the real resembles the possible in Kant. CONCLUSION In developing an account of experience that allows for something genuinely new to occur, Deleuze has to reconceive the notion of the system. The problem he finds in respect of the system of experience in Kant is that in his attempt to account for the system, Kant limits what can be an object of experience. Kant uses the idea of possible objects of experience to delineate the boundary of the system. Kant is criticized for being interested only in showing what the limit of experience is, in drawing the boundary of

39

The process of differenciation will be discussed in section 4 of chapter 3.

101 possible experience, without showing how the limit arises. Deleuze locates this problem in Kant’s conception of the system of experience. I have shown in this chapter that Deleuze offers a new conception of the system. The key is that Deleuze reconceives the limit of the system. He argues that the boundary of a system of experience arises in and through the formation of a system. Thus his concern is with the genesis of systems of experience. This chapter has argued for the importance of Deleuze’s reconfiguration of the relation of what is indeterminate to the determinable, that is to say, to the sphere of a system of experience. The limit of a system is at issue here. In Kant the determinable (the entirety of possible objects) is simply marked off from what is indeterminate. In other words, all that can be said with Kant is that the determinable is distinguishable from the indeterminate. In this way Kant does, indeed, establish the sphere of possible experience. However, he only succeeds in marking off what can be known from what cannot. In contrast, for Deleuze, the relation between the determinable and indeterminate is a genetic one. What is determinable arises from the indeterminate. Deleuze takes the transcendental Ideas from Kant but now they are the foundation of what is determinable. As in Kant an Idea can be thought but never known because it is the condition for experience. In Kant the indeterminate is simply what cannot be a possible object of experience for us. It might be knowable for a subject with a different kind of intuition. In contrast, for Deleuze, the indeterminate has no unity or consistency for any subject. It simply cannot be an object. In order for anything determinable to arise from the indeterminate, it must first acquire consistency. The Deleuzian Idea allows us to understand how a framework of relations can arise, and thereby a framework in which

102 consistency can occur. Objects can then occur within that framework. Thus, for Deleuze, a determinable field or system can only arise from what is indeterminate. The emphasis must be placed on the differentiating movement by which the determinable field arises. By rethinking the notions of the indeterminate and the determinable and of their relation, Deleuze is able to show the genesis of a determinable field. In other words, something new can arise as a determinable field. Another important consequence of Deleuze’s account is that there is no single system that encompasses all of experience for the finite human subject. A system applies fully to a certain cross-section of experience and, thus, it fully organizes experience in a particular way. However, it does not preclude the organization of experience in other, non-overlapping ways. In Deleuze’s account, no system occurs as a closed system. The relation of a system to what is outside of it differs from Kant. It is always possible for a new Idea to occur because new elements and relations can always arise. Hence, it is always possible for a new field of experience to occur. Ideas serve as transcendental conditions for Deleuze, yet he has to transform Kant’s language. The notions of transcendental and empirical become the virtual and the actual. In developing their relation, he also shows how the relation of a system and what is beyond it is transformed. The indeterminate for Deleuze is like a bottomless reservoir that cannot be exhausted and offers the possibility of endless creativity. When a new system opens up it in no way diminishes the indeterminate. Thus creativity is purely a positive movement in Deleuze, with no negativity: it is a movement that occurs out of excess. Once we account for the opening up of a system of experience, we can then consider the objects that populate the system. It is important to note that transcendental

103 or internal difference is primary, for Deleuze. For Kant, spatiotemporal difference was simply a different kind of difference than conceptual difference. Deleuze disagrees with him on this point. Spatiotemporal difference becomes incorporated into individual difference. In other words, the difference between individuals is not that one thing has a different spatiotemporal determination than another. All external difference is really individual difference, which is dependent on and arises from transcendental difference. The crucial point is that the opening up of a system, which occurs through transcendental difference, must be explained before external difference is explained. What is necessary at this point is an account of individual difference. This was not something Kant required since his account of the forms of space and time made individual objects possible. If we examine how individual difference occurs in Deleuze, and its relation to space and time, we will have an account not only of the opening up of a system of experience but also of the production of the individuals that constitute that system. Individuation will be the subject of chapter 3.

104 CHAPTER 3 THE PRODUCTION OF A SYSTEM OF EXPERIENCE INTRODUCTION Chapter 2 has shown how Deleuze has transformed the notion of system taken from Kant. Deleuze provides an account, lacking in Kant, of how a new system of experience is generated. A system arises from the indeterminate, a movement we can conceive of by means of an Idea. In addition, there are multiple systems for Deleuze, all of which interact with each other but do not thereby form a whole when taken together. It is now necessary to show how the individual empirical cases or objects occur in a system. I will show that Deleuze can account for the production of individuals such that they are produced internally to the system that is opened up. In other words, it must be the case that the occurrence of the Idea or the opening up of the system itself gives rise to individuals that compose the system. If this cannot be shown, Deleuze has not truly given an account in which the conditions by which experience is ordered arise from within experience itself. The production of the system occurs as the production of spatiotemporal individuals, which is equally the production of knowable objects. Once again, for Deleuze the relation between subject and object is an internal one. In other words, the objects produced are also the objects that can be known to the subject. Kant’s explanation for this was, of course, that the conditions for possible objects belonged to the transcendental subject. In contrast, in Deleuze’s account, the conditions are found in experience itself, giving rise to objects that can, in principle, be fully known. In Deleuze the problem of empirical cases is the problem of individuation. As shown in chapter 2, unlike Kant Deleuze cannot rely on the forms of space and time to explain the

105 differences between empirical cases. Instead, individuals arise through a process whose nature will be shown in this chapter. The spatiotemporality of individuals is a result of this process. The notion of “intensity” is central to Deleuze’s account. For him, it is intensity that takes us from the relations and elements of the Idea to the production of individuals. In other words, an Idea gives rise to intensity such that a progressive movement of development occurs. Thus intensity is more fundamental than spatiotemporality for Deleuze and in fact gives rise to the latter. Intensity is individualizing. Individuals are produced insofar as they have spatiotemporality. This chapter will therefore show the relation of intensity to the Idea and how intensity gives us the individuals of a system. In addition, it will show how space and time are opened up and how they occur within the process of individuation. In section 4 I will examine a system of experience from the perspective of the subject. That is to say, once I have considered the notion of intensity in its role in the production of a system, I will examine intensity in the way it is experienced by the subject and in its significance for the subject. I will show how a system is opened up for a subject. In order to accomplish this I must first introduce the terms “differentiation” (spelled with a “t”) and “differenciation” (spelled with a “c”), which are important for Deleuze in that they allow him to account for the progressive development of a system of experience. This language is important because it provides Deleuze with the means to show how an Idea arises within experience—something Kant could not do and did not have the language to do. The term “differentiation” indicates the development of an Idea: the elements and their relations that, together, constitute an Idea. Once there is an Idea the system can be produced for the subject. Deleuze uses the term “differenciation” to

106 indicate the movement by which distinct objects are produced in the system. As I have said above, for Deleuze there is no subject prior to the opening up of experience. In other words, there is no transcendental subject as there is in Kant. I will show that certain developments in the subject correspond to the opening up of experience. A full account of the subject is essential to Deleuze’s account of experience and will be given in chapter 4. Here my concern is simply to discuss what is necessary for demonstrating how the opening up and production of a system occur for the subject. 1. PRODUCTION OF A SYSTEM: THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION The most extensive interpretation of the account of individuation in Deleuze has been given by Manuel DeLanda in his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.40 DeLanda is primarily concerned to show how recent research in mathematics and the natural sciences can account for the processes that would be required for individuation to occur as Deleuze conceives of it. More recently, Alberto Toscano has taken up the question of individuation in The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze.41 While Toscano also turns to the sciences to some extent, his aim is to bring Deleuze into relation with the history of philosophy on the question of individuation. He argues that certain philosophical notions, such as cause and essence to take just two examples, are transformed as a result of Deleuze’s theory of individuation. In what follows I try to show how the systematic field of experience is produced in and through the production of individuals, bringing in the works of DeLanda and Toscano insofar as they help in developing this account.

40

Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum Press: New York, 2002). Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2006). 41

107 We have said that Ideas are the opening up of a systematic field. However, the production of the field only occurs as the actualization of the Idea. The Idea continues to exist but not in the same way as what is actual. Its existence has the character of virtuality. To explain how actualization occurs, Deleuze introduces the concept of intensity. He uses the terms intensity and intensive difference interchangeably because, for him, intensity is a kind of difference. We have said that Ideas are composed of virtual elements and their differential relations. Insofar as they are in the Idea, these elements coexist. Elements coexist in the Idea because they are reciprocally related and because they have no existence apart from their relations. The differential is the symbol for the reciprocal relation. However, the elements can come into other relations in which they do not coexist. These relations occur as intensities. In other words, an intensity is this new kind of relation between elements. “Intensities are implicated multiplicities, ‘implexes’, made up of relations between asymmetrical elements which direct the course of the actualization of Ideas and determine the cases of solution for problems” (DR 244). Intensity brings the elements into asymmetrical relations, whereas in Ideas the elements are in reciprocal relations. In a sense, intensity expresses the Idea in a new way since it brings its composing elements into a new relation. “The aesthetic of intensities thus develops each of its moments in correspondence with the dialectic of Ideas: the power of intensity (depth) is grounded in the potentiality of the Idea” (DR 244). Intensity follows directly from the Idea. We should note that Deleuze often characterizes Ideas and intensive differences in similar ways. For example, he uses “power” to describe both. The reason for this is their close connection. Ideas are virtual, while it is intensity that takes from the virtual to the actual. In other words, intensity occurs during actualization

108 but is not itself actual. Intensity arises from the Idea as a new kind of relation between elements that compose the Idea. Deleuze relies heavily on the concept of intensity to give an account of the production of the system and thereby the production of individuals. This account occurs for the most part in chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition, in which this concept figures heavily. The concept of intensity occurs in the context of discussions of physics and biology, which make up a large part of that chapter. It is helpful to remember that Deleuze is attempting to give a philosophical account of reality as we experience it. Since physics and biology study that same reality, Deleuze utilizes the discoveries made in these fields to conceptualize the problem of experience. The concept of intensity is taken from physics, primarily thermodynamics, which is the study of the movement of energy and matter in systems. DeLanda provides an excellent introductory discussion of the concept, indicating the crucial difference between intensive and extensive properties of a system. Intensive properties are those that are continuous and do not change if the quantity of matter changes. Examples include temperature, pressure, and density. In other words, intensive properties cannot simply be added together. On the other hand, extensive properties can be divided and added in a simple way and do, indeed, change according to the quantity of matter. Mass and total volume are examples of extensive properties. However, DeLanda points out that there is a more important way of understanding the difference since qualities like color would be considered intensive properties according to this explanation. Rather than varying according to the quantity of matter, intensive properties like temperature average when brought together. For example, when two bodies of different temperatures come into contact, the final temperature will be the

109 average of the two. “Differences in thermodynamic intensities are capable of driving a process of equilibration in a population of molecules, a process in which these differences will tend to average themselves.”42 The key is that intensive properties are differences that spontaneously drive movements of matter or energy. In this way, intensive differences act as a driving force of change. The direction of change is always toward equilibrium, which cancels the difference. In this way, systems always tend toward stabilization. Deleuze is interested in the concept of intensity because it describes a particular kind of difference that produces change. “Difference is the sufficient reason of change only to the extent that the change tends to negate difference” (DR 223). In addition, intensity tends to cancel itself through the change it produces. For Deleuze, intensity is a transcendental condition and cannot be empirically known. What we know, or experience, is the change that it produces. By and large, what we know as actual objects are at equilibrium, which means that the intensive differences that produced them have been cancelled. Deleuze argues that this gives rise to a kind of transcendental physical illusion (DR 228). Since intensity disappears under the extensive properties it produces, we fall under the illusion that extensive properties are the cause rather than merely the product. In this way, we mistakenly give extensive properties a greater importance than they really have. We tend to think that the existence of an object or system can be explained by its extensive properties rather than its intensive ones. Deleuze argues that it is a physical illusion because it is not merely due to the structure of knowledge, but, rather, reality organizes itself in this way. Toscano claims that Deleuze must be understood as rethinking the notion of cause. According to Toscano, the traditional idea of cause implies that the cause is an extensive or actual object just as is 42

Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 60.

110 the effect. However, in Deleuze’s account, where the production of a system follows from an Idea, or production occurs as the passage from virtual to actual, a different conception of cause is at work. Deleuze himself generally tends to use the term “sufficient reason” rather than cause. For him, intensity can be considered a system by itself since each intensive difference drives a process and, thereby, sets up the poles between which the movement of matter or energy occurs. Intensity is also the means by which individuation occurs, since individuals are produced in and through the system that unfolds from the Idea. Beyond the discussions of physics and biology, Chapter 5 of Difference and Repetition also relies on the work of Gilbert Simondon to develop the account of individuation. A brief review of Simondon’s L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Individuation Through the Notions of Form and Information), published as “On Gilbert Simondon” in Desert Islands, is somewhat more explicit on how the use of Simondon fits into Deleuze’s project.43 For Deleuze, there are individuals only through a process of becoming individual. What is prior to individuals must be more than individual, or a surplus of reality. For Deleuze, being is not the individual but what exists prior to the individual. “However, on this view, individuation is no longer coextensive with being; it must represent a moment, which is neither all of being nor its first moment.”44 Deleuze generally refers to this state before there are individuals as the “field of individuation.” It is in accounting for the system at this point that Deleuze turns to Simondon. Toscano, devotes a chapter of his book to developing the relation between Simondon and Deleuze. He argues that what is important here is to understand what exists before there are 43

Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974), translated by Mike Taormina and edited by David Lapoujade (Semiotext(e): Cambridge, MA, 3003). 44 Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” p. 86.

111 individuals. He shows how Deleuze and others (Simondon, and Whitehead and Pierce to a lesser extent) attempt to develop an account of individuation that does not begin with individuals and simply extrapolate from them to their constituting processes. “With regard to the processes of individuation themselves, the concepts designed to express them must be operational or relational concepts that do not rest on the predetermined properties of constituted individuals.”45 This point is important for us here in understanding the relation of the individual to what it arises from. Deleuze uses Simondon’s concept of the “metastable” to explain what the field of individuation is like. This state of being consists of different levels or dimensions of reality that are not integrated together and do not form a whole. These dimensions coexist and do not interact in this state. If they were to interact, they could not exist together because they are incompatible with each other. Deleuze also takes the term “disparate” from Simondon, which indicates the incompatibility of these levels or dimensions. The key feature of the metastable system for Deleuze is that it is a state of difference or dissymmetry such that this difference exists in it as potential energy. Deleuze sees himself as generalizing Simondon’s concept of the metastable system since, for Deleuze, each intensity can be described as a system of dissymmetry or difference that has potential energy. In other words, for Deleuze, “intensity” simply connotes this state of potential energy. It is helpful to note that in the Idea the dimensions or levels are not yet in a state of dissymmetry. It is in intensity that they are brought into this tension. “Like the metastable system, an intensive quantum is the structure (not yet the synthesis) of heterogeneity.”46 The synthesis is the cancellation of intensity. In other words, what

45 46

Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production, p. 14. Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” p. 87.

112 Deleuze refers to as intensity is the state before the movement by which it will be cancelled has been produced. Deleuze also uses the term “singularity,” which he says corresponds to each potential. Singularities simply occur as features of preindividual systems. Individuation arises from this condition only by resolving this incompatibility or difference of dimensions. It begins by establishing communication between these realities. (“Internal resonance,” another term from Simondon, is a primitive mode of communication.) Communication is the beginning of the movement by which the difference is cancelled or resolved. The movement by which it is cancelled is also the synthesizing of intensity. Ultimately individuation solves the problem of the incompatibility of dimensions of reality “by organizing a new dimension in which they form a unique whole at a higher level (analogous to the perception of depth that emerges from retinal images).”47 In the end the actual or complete individuals, whether they are physical objects, biological organisms, or human subjects, are characterized by these new dimensions which have resolved their constituting intensities. To highlight the fact that this process of individuation occurs as a movement of production, not of limitation, Deleuze describes each reconciliation or solution that occurs as an affirmation and says that it only appears limited or suffering from lack when cut off from its movement of actualization (DR 207). In other words, the synthesis of intensity only occurs in and through the creation of a new dimension, which is positive because it occurs not by reduction of pregiven possibilities but as the creation of something new. The new dimensions are created by actualizing or synthesizing the potential energies. It will be by means of these new dimensions that we will be able to grasp determined and actual objects. This new dimension is like a surface created by 47

Ibid., p. 87-88.

113 intensive difference. “Difference pursues its subterranean life while its image reflected by the surface is scattered. Moreover, it is in the nature of that image, but only that image, to be scattered, just as it is in the nature of the surface to cancel difference, but only on the surface” (DR 240). It is on this new dimension created by intensity, the surface, and only on it, that intensity is cancelled. In itself, intensive difference is not cancelled but continues to exist. In addition to the fact that intensity cannot be divided as extensive properties can, Deleuze also explains that intensity is not indivisible in the way that quality is (DR 237). Intensity cannot be divided without changing its nature as a quality can. Neither is it a homogenous quantity (DR 237). He uses the example of temperature again. Since temperature is not a homogenous quantity it is not made up of other temperatures added together. Temperature is already a difference and is not made up of differences of the same order (that is to say, other temperatures) but implies, instead, series of heterogeneous terms (DR 237). Intensive difference is always made up of, or implies, differences of different orders, while extensive difference is made up of differences of the same order, which is why it does not change in nature when divided. In this way, intensive difference brings the coexisting elements and relations of the Idea into a new relation: they are made to occur in orders that are made up of each other. “Every intensity is E-E’, where E itself refers to an e-e’, and e to ε-ε’ etc.: each intensity is already a coupling (in which each element of the couple refers in turn to couples of elements of another order), thereby revealing the properly qualitative content of quantity” (DR 222). The reason for this is that each division of intensity is a change in kind. In other words, intensity can, indeed, be divided, but only by producing a new intensity.

114 Toscano explains that what is interesting here is that every division of intensity occurs as a new event of individuation and leads to a new system. In a sense, different orders are imbedded in one other. Deleuze uses the term “implication” to describe this state of intensity. In other words, these orders are brought together in a particular kind of relation through intensity. Even if an intensity is not divided according to each order, these orders continue to exist by virtue of their implication by the intensity. Deleuze also says that intensity implicates other intensities. Intensities are related to one another in this way. What makes them different is the portion they express clearly. It is important to note, then, that intensity is an internal kind of difference. It does not serve to distinguish two things, which would presuppose that each has an identity prior to their distinction. Intensity differentiates itself from itself. Individuation is a complex event and occurs by means of many intensities that are related to one another. However, it is helpful to understand how a single intensity, taken by itself, is synthesized to produce the organizing and individuating dimension. As we recall, the Idea can be described as a differential of the type dy/dx. Daniel W. Smith argues that Deleuze develops the concept of the differential from Leibniz and Maimon.48 The idea is taken from the differential calculus. Deleuze uses the differential because the Idea occurs as the reciprocal relation between elements and it is only through their relation to each other that these elements can be said to exist. The operation of differentiation gives us this relation. Now, the synthesis of intensity can be described using the integration of the differential relation, like the operation in calculus. In calculus the process of finding the value of an integral is called integration. Through integration 48

Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze on Leibniz: Difference, Continuity, and the Calculus” in Current Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, edited by Stephen Daniel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 127-147.

115 we get the value for an area or a volume of a complex figure. In this sense integration gives us the figure as a whole. The important point is that in calculus differentiation and integration are inverse operations since differentiation gives us the boundary of the figure by giving us the relation between variables. These operations have the same relationship in Deleuze. Each integration or synthesis produces something new. “The differential relation signifies nothing concrete in relation to what it is derived from, that is, in relation to x or y, but it signifies something else concrete, names a z, which is something new, and this is how it assures the passage to limits.”49 In this way, what is produced, z, does not resemble its conditions, dx and dy. This is the operation of integration in the sense used in calculus. As Smith explains, differential analysis allows us to understand how infinitely small relations can occur. When the differential relation is integrated it produces infinitely small changes. In this way intensity can be synthesized along a continuum, thereby producing individuals that differ externally from each other by infinitely small amounts or, in other words, which form a continuum of external difference. Intensive difference simply occurs when the relation occurs. However, it is the synthesis of intensity that is the performance of that relation, producing each case of z. In this way, intensity is individuating because it gives us each individual case of z. Z is the new dimension that is produced through intensity. DeLanda says that the new dimension created can be understood as an equilibrium structure.50 In fact all extensive properties of an actual individual are produced during the synthesis of intensity as additional and stabilizing dimensions. Insofar as the individual is defined by these stabilizing dimensions, it is a solution to a problem.

49 50

Ibid., p. 140. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 60.

116 We can examine more closely what occurs during the process of individuation for Deleuze. Toscano argues that for Simondon the individual must be understood not merely as the result of the process of individuation but equally as the site or theater of individuation.51 Deleuze maintains this same conception of the individual. The individual is not the agent but the theater of individuation. The individual is produced as the differences of intensity play themselves out and resolve themselves. As a result of this, during its formation, the individual undergoes the most extreme movements and torsions. Deleuze turns to embryology to understand the field of the individuation. “There are ‘things’ that only an embryo can do, movements that it alone can undertake or even withstand (for example, the anterior member of the tortoise undergoes a relative displacement of 180 degrees, while the neck involves the forward slippage of a variable number of proto-vertebrae). The destiny and achievement of the embryo is to live the unlivable, to sustain forced movements of a scope that would break any skeleton or tear ligaments” (DR 215). Deleuze also calls this the larval subject since it is not yet an actual individual. These movements are produced as the syntheses of intensities. They are experiences of intensity since there is a subject (that is to say, a larval subject) who undergoes these experiences as it is progressively generated and becomes a fully complete individual. It is not just animals or humans that occur as larval subjects but whatever undergoes a synthesis of this kind. “There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established, whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions somewhere” (DR 78). Wherever there is synthesis or contraction, there is a larval subject undergoing the contraction. We should note that since the subject is produced through the synthesis of intensity, the subject carries with it 51

Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production, p. 149-150.

117 all of the orders implicated in that intensity. This part of the individual or subject can continue to participate in the Idea from which the intensity arises. 2. THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND TIME To return to the movements that are the syntheses of intensity, it is important to note that Deleuze also calls these movements spatiotemporal dynamisms because they carve out a characteristic space and time as they occur. This space and time cannot be distinguished from the space and time it takes for these movements to occur. In other words, there is no space before a space is opened up. The time is how long it takes for the intensive difference to be nullified, to be completely synthesized. An egg (or other site of individuation) forms a space in the sense that there are linkages or connections between points or intensities. The connections and movements are not relations that can be explained using Euclidean geometry. For this reason, Deleuze utilizes concepts from Riemannian geometry and topological space. DeLanda attempts to develop arguments for these points, which remain rather cryptic in Deleuze. The relations between intensive processes are not rigid Euclidean relations of distance and length, etc. but topological connections.52 De Landa argues that these relations or linkages between intensities become progressively more fixed as the individual becomes an actual entity so that distances between them are unchanging and can be measured metrically.53 It is only in the end, when intensive differences have been discharged and have reached equilibrium, that the site has spatial and temporal characteristics that can be described using Euclidean relations. DeLanda argues that individuals as actual entities cannot be understood as put together in an assembly-line procedure, but only as produced in a more fluid way. As a 52 53

Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, p. 56. Ibid., p. 52.

118 result, the completed individual is less adaptable and more rigid than its embryonic counterpart. We get completed individuals insofar as the systematic field comes to be progressively developed. For Deleuze, then, we cannot begin with space and time as a priori forms, as Kant does, for whom the form of space is characterized by its geometrical extension. In the “Anticipations of Perception” Kant had argued that intensity is the matter that fills extended space. However, according to Smith, Deleuze follows Hermann Cohen and Salomon Maimon on the following point: Space must first be produced through intensive difference.54 The reason is that space as pure intuition is a continuum and extensive difference could never account for a continuum. No matter how much an extensive quantity is divided, there are always discrete individuals. In other words, extensive difference presupposes individuals. Only intensity can produce a continuous difference. Kant defines intensity as the degree or amount of a quality or condition beginning from zero.55 For Deleuze, intensity is also individuating because each magnitude is apprehended as a unity and cannot be taken and added as parts of a whole. It is something only insofar as it is a difference from zero. Deleuze considers this an important point. Intensity begins from zero, not from unity. In other words, unity does not have to be presupposed. Each difference from zero can form a unity, or individual. We get a continuum because what is important is the magnitude in relation to zero, and that each is apprehended or synthesized as a unity. Since intensity gives us a continuum of difference, it gives us differences of degree and of kind.

54 55

Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” p. 36. CPR B208.

119 Deleuze says that intensive difference gives a rule of production and serves to replace the notion of schema in Kant. In Kant knowledge is only possible if we can subsume the object, or the appearance, under the concept. However, appearances are spatiotemporal while concepts are universals. The question is how two very different kinds of things can have any relation. Kant lays out the schematism in order to respond to the problem of how the spatiotemporal diversity of intuition can correspond to the concept. “The schema of sensible concepts, such as of figures in space, is a product and, as it were, a monogram, of pure a priori imagination, through which, and in accordance with which, images themselves first become possible” (CPR A142/B181). In Kant the faculty of the imagination bridges the gap between intuition and concept. Deleuze says that Kant’s schema is like a Euclidean notion and simply occurs ‘between’ the concept and intuition, both of which must be presupposed (DR 174). His notion of the spatiotemporal dynamism attempts to replace the notion of schema. Deleuze uses the example of the straight line: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. “In this sense, the mathematician Houël remarked that the shortest distance is not a Euclidean notion at all, but an Archimedean one, more physical than mathematical; that it was inseparable from a method of exhaustion, and that it served less to determine the straight line than to determine the length of a curve by means of the straight line – ‘integral calculus performed unknowingly’” (DR 174). What Deleuze means in referring to the method of exhaustion is that the rule of production provides a step-by-step process. The synthesis of intensity induces a movement through infinitely small increments and gives direction to them. The rule of production does not give the object by reference to an alreadyconstituted space, but, instead, a whole set of mechanisms unfolds from the synthesis of

120 intensities by which the object is incrementally produced. “It is intensity which dramatizes. It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatio-temporal dynamisms” (DR 245). In other words, intensity is expressed in the movements by which a space and time is incrementally carved out. It is the larval subject that experiences these spatiotemporal dynamisms. 3. FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ON THE INDIVIDUAL The embryonic or larval subject proceeds to the completed individual. The intensities composing the larval subject reach stable states such that we can say that it is individual, since, prior to that, there is only an event or a movement occurring. In other words, the completed individual is both actual and virtual, whereas the larval subject occurs only in the passage from the virtual to the actual. The individual comes about through the stabilization of the larval subject, and it is the individual in this sense that can be the subject of perception and for whom experience can occur anew. The subject will be the topic of consideration in chapter 4. However, we must first examine what it means to say that the individual is both actual and virtual, since it is through the relation of these aspects that experience can occur for the subject. Each individual, in the process of its constitution, occurs as the imbedding of a virtual “half” and an actual “half” (DR 280). Insofar as it is a solution to a problem, an individual is the actualization of the problem in one, particular way. However, this one solution does not exhaust the problem or completely express it. The individual, as a solution, virtually implicates the entire system to which it is a solution. Thus, the individual continues to have a relation to the entire Idea. “What is complete is only the ideal [or virtual] part of the object, which participates with other parts of objects in the

121 Idea (other relations, other singular points), but never constitutes an integral whole” (DR 209). Even though certain relations or singularities are not actualized in the object or individual, these relations and singularities still exist for the object or individual, but virtually. By means of its relation to the Idea, the individual has a virtual relation to all other individuals that occur from the Idea or in that system. In addition to the relation to the Idea from which it follows, the individual also has a relation to other Ideas. In order to see this, we must examine the relation that any particular Idea has to other Ideas. Every Idea “interacts” with other Ideas. Insofar as an Idea is the marking off what is determinable from the indeterminate, the Idea continues to have a relation with what is indeterminate, by its exclusion. As a result, any particular Idea has a relation to other Ideas, which is to say, to other ways of marking off and, thereby, making something determinable. “In a certain sense all Ideas coexist, but they do so at points, on the edges, and under glimmerings which never have the uniformity of a natural light. On each occasion, obscurities and zones of shadow correspond to their distinction” (DR 187). An Idea, by definition, occurs by bringing something to the forefront in making it determinable. Each Idea orders all of experience, but in its own way. Ideas cannot exist together on the same plane, since each Idea institutes its own plane. In a reference to Descartes, Deleuze says Ideas do not coexist in the sense of the uniformity of a natural light because they do not all occur together equally. Therefore we do not say Ideas are actually in relation, yet, they do have a certain kind of relation. Deleuze describes their relation as “perplication”. Since the Idea occurs in relation to other Ideas, the virtual half of the individual consists not only of the Idea in relation to which it is a solution, but also of other Ideas that are perplicated by the first Idea. These

122 will appear at the edge of the individual’s experience, so to speak, because at the center of its experience are the Ideas by which it occurs as an individual, to which it is a solution. Of course the Ideas are not all perplicated in an equal way but, rather, in an order according to how far removed they are from the Ideas to which the individual is a solution or to what degree they are perplicated. Deleuze describes an individual’s virtual half as its “zone” or “fringe” of indetermination (DR 257-258). Thus the virtual half of an individual is composed of the virtual existence of all Ideas, in their particular state of existence, the state of perplication. However, from another perspective, the virtual half of an individual can be described in terms of singularities and other virtual events. Deleuze also says that the fringe of indetermination is the fluid character of individuality itself. It is this aspect that allows the individual to be open to and to genuinely interact with what is around it. The individual is more open to coming into relation with something the nearer the Idea of that relation is in perplication within the individual’s virtual half. Deleuze also uses the concept of perspective to explain the relation of the virtual and actual. This is a notion he takes from Leibniz, transforming it for his own purposes (DR 47-48). In Leibniz monads express the entire world but are distinguished from each other in that each expresses a different portion clearly and the rest obscurely. Their perspective is determined by the portion they express clearly. In turning to Leibniz on this point, Deleuze also reacts to Descartes and his criteria of the clear and distinct (DR 213 and 146). According to Deleuze, the Cartesian model presupposes the mind’s affinity with the true, which is represented by the idea of innateness, and we only need a method to insure knowledge. If an idea appears clear and distinct, it is true. Knowledge occurs in

123 direct proportion to the Idea: the clearer the Idea, the clearer the knowledge. The Cartesian model of knowledge has sameness or identity at its foundation. Deleuze suggests that the “clear” must be split from the “distinct.” The result is the concept of perspective. For Deleuze, individuals or real entities are characterized by their perspective. The Idea, taken by itself, can be described as obscure and distinct, while the individual that occurs as its solution is clear and confused. Insofar as a portion is expressed clearly, the rest must be expressed confusedly. The actual half of the individual is its “clear zone” in relation to its virtual half, which remains obscure. In other words, the individual occurs in inverse proportion to the Idea, rather than in direct proportion as in the Cartesian model. The individual does not occur as a reflection or faithful representation of the problem or Idea, which would make its relation to the Idea one of direct proportion. Instead, the individual occurs in and through its perspective on the Idea. This reflects the fact that, for Deleuze, an individual only occurs in and through the fact that it is a response, so to speak, to an Idea-problem. In the production of the system from the Idea perspective is produced during the synthesis of each intensity. As we said earlier, each intensity is composed of different orders, which are implicated within the intensity. These orders of differences become actual only if intensity is divided along that particular line. Otherwise, these orders continue to exist virtually. In other words, the intensity expresses the entire system, or Idea, but obscurely. The perspective of an individual occurs as the part of it that is actual in contrast to what is virtual. However, it is important to remember that there can be no clear zone or actual half without its relation to what is confused or virtual. “This would be again to neglect the indissolubility of the clear and the confused. It would be to forget

124 that the clear is confused by itself, in so far as it is clear” (DR 254). Something is actual only insofar as it carries the Idea with it and carries its relation to the Idea with it. What is actualized is what is clearly expressed by the individual, while the virtual is expressed confusedly. The production of perspective occurs through intensity in that it expresses clearly the order of difference along which it is actually divided, while expressing the implicated orders of differences confusedly. The virtual half of the individual, or what it expresses confusedly, is what Deleuze also calls the unconscious of an individual (although, of course, this term is only used in relation to one kind of individual, the human). The individual expresses clearly only the portion that is synthesized. In other words, the individual does not represent the Idea in an impartial or unbiased way (i.e. apart from a particular perspective). In fact, for Deleuze, there can be an actual individual only insofar it is perspectival.56 For Leibniz, there is no world apart from the monads that express the world. In the concept of perspective Deleuze follows Leibniz on this point to a certain extent, claiming that there is no system of experience outside of the individuals that occur as solutions to the problem (DR 163). However, while for Leibniz monads express the same world, for Deleuze, in contrast, individuals express divergent worlds. “Each series tells a story: not different points of view on the same story, like the different points of view on the town we find in Leibniz, but completely distinct stories which unfold simultaneously. The basic series are divergent: not relatively, in the sense that one could retrace one’s path and find a point of convergence, but absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos” (DR

56

Daniel W. Smith expresses this point succinctly: “Subjectivity is (rather than simply has) an incomplete, prejudiced, and partial perception” in “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” p. 38.

125 123). For Leibniz, there are different points of view or perspectives but one single world. However, for Deleuze, perspectives cannot be reconciled to form a single story or world. These stories or series do, indeed, refer to each other, and they even intersect in places, but they do not form one unified story. The chaos Deleuze describes is due to the relation of the Ideas to each other, and that they cannot be brought together additively and do not form a unifying plane. To compare, in Kant there is a point on which experience converges, even though it transcends possible experience and can only be given as the Idea of Nature. We have examined the relations that Deleuze uses to account for the production of each system. “The trinity complication-explication-implication accounts for the totality of the system – in other words, the chaos which contains all, the divergent series which lead out and back in, and the differentiator which relates them one to another. Each series explicates or develops itself, but in its difference from the other series which it implicates and which implicate it, which it envelops and which envelop it; in this chaos which complicates everything” (DR 123-124). These complex relations, complication, implication, and explication, give us different series and make it possible for each system to be in relation to others without forming a unity. They account for the different perspectives of individuals and for the relation they have to each other. The totality, or chaos, referred to above must be understood as excess. The diverging worlds exceed the unity of a single world in which the stories of individuals might converge. Ideas and intensities coexist, but this coexistence must be understood as a kind of excess. We could examine each system opened up by an Idea and see that it operates or functions only through its excess (DR 115). For example, if we take the system of language, it is clear

126 that this system cannot be exhausted by all of the books ever written. It will always be possible to write something genuinely new. In other words, an individual case of the system is not produced by depleting the system. The individual we get by means of an intensity can implicate and be in relation with many different systems. Even though all intensities implicate each other, they do not therefore express the same world. In other words, we could not “add” together all of the possible systems into a single whole. There is no totality from which they draw or which they form when added together. In other words, experience comes to be organized in genuinely different ways that cannot be reconciled. I have tried to show that, for Deleuze, the individual is structured in such a way that it is capable of being transformed. As a result of this, experience can occur for it. No individual is “solid” or closed off because it has a fringe of indetermination. The individual is not a seamless unit. It is from the individual’s fringe of indetermination or virtual half that a new Idea can occur and a new system can be opened up. However, it is important to note that experience will occur only when it is forced to occur. In other words, things will continue to make sense in an ordinary way, according to our ordinary empirical judgments so long as nothing happens that disturbs this. An individual’s ordinary experience will be disrupted when it is confronted by something unrecognizable. The distortion of the individual’s empirical experience will necessarily be sensible, and it will appear as a sign. A sign is intensive difference, but from the perspective of the sensibility of the subject. The sign will appear precisely as something unrecognizable, as something that is not meaningful according to any system of meaning available to the subject. Sensibility tries to grasp it but cannot because the sign appears purely as a

127 difference or movement. In other words, the sign occurs as the transcendental condition of sensibility for the subject because it cannot be grasped through the empirical exercise of sensibility. It is important to note that what is given as a sign is another individual. In this way, experience begins only when the individual, the subject, comes into relation with another individual, whether the second individual is an object, a piece of music, or another person. This other individual can only be sensed. When the two individuals come into relation, the intensities that comprise their virtual halves can lead to the formation of new relations, and thus a new Idea. In other words, when sensation tries to grasp the sign, it forces thought to occur and to pose a problem or Idea. This is the process of learning, and Deleuze contrasts learning with the possession of knowledge. “Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems” (DR 192). In other words, learning can only occur through the encounter between two individuals. In a sense, the other individual is the one we confront. However, Deleuze also says there is an a priori Other (DR 260). The relation with another individual is only possible because, first of all, each individual has a virtual half that allows it to be transformed. “In every psychic system there is a swarm of possibilities around reality, but our possibles are always Others” (DR 260). Each system can be transformed because it implicates other intensities. Each possible transformation is an Other, which expresses a world. In other words, the Other is part of the structure of the individual. “That the Other should not, properly speaking, be anyone, neither you nor I, signifies that it is a structure which

128 is implemented only by variable terms in a different perceptual world – me for you in yours, you for me in mine” (DR 281). Since the encounter with the other depends on chance, Deleuze says there is only involuntary thought. Deleuze criticizes what he calls hypothetical truths because the new Idea that is opened up does not simply exist as a possibility prior to the encounter. We only think when an encounter with another forces us to think (DR 139). The new Idea that is opened up transforms both individuals but to different degrees. This is only possible because both individuals have a virtual half. Experience can occur for the subject in that a new system of meaning can open up for it, which can appear as a new kind of engagement with things or as a new set of practices. Insofar as a new system opens up, the subject undergoes the experience. In other words, the subject is passive, or a larval subject, and not the agent in relation to the opening up of experience. However, since the subject occurs in relation to many Ideas, not all of which are directly related to the Idea which has opened up, the subject retains its identity in terms of these other Ideas. As we said above, experience begins with the Idea. However, since there is not yet an individual until there are syntheses of intensities, and since an Idea can only be grasped in thought by the individual, any relation of the individual to the Idea can only occur “after” the system is already produced. In other words, the individual can only think the Idea retrospectively. This is why Deleuze says thought must follow the path of experience in reverse (DR 282). In What is Philosophy?, too, Deleuze says that thought works backwards, in contrast to science, which works in a forward direction. Thus far, I have been showing how a system is produced for Deleuze. As my concern here is the question of experience, it is important to show, too, how the production of a

129 system is experienced by the subject. From our discussions up to this point, it is clear that the issue of the subject is a complex one. As I have said, I will be developing Deleuze’s notion of the subject in greater depth in chapter 4, but raising this issue earlier is unavoidable. The main reason is that for Deleuze the subject is produced in experience, in the opening up of a system. I have briefly discussed the larval subject, which is not a fully-formed subject or, rather, it is not the subject that we mean when using the term in its everyday sense. In what follows, I will be showing what the production of the system is like for a fully formed subject. 4. THE EXPERIENCE OF THE OPENING UP AND PRODUCTION OF A SYSTEM It is important for us to see here how a system of experience is opened up for a subject. Ordinarily, for Deleuze, our relationship to objects is simply one of recognition. It is the sphere of established knowledge. However, this relationship can be disrupted. Deleuze argues that experience always begins with sensibility. “It is true that on the path which leads to that which is to be thought, all begins with sensibility” (DR 144). Something appears to sensibility that is disturbingly unfamiliar and unexpected. We know it does not make sense in the way we had thought. It is not recognizable and therefore not an object but a “sign.” “The contingently imperceptible, that which is too small or too far for the empirical exercise of our senses, stands opposed to an essentially imperceptible which is indistinguishable from that which can be sensed only from the point of view of a transcendental exercise” (DR 140-1). A sign is unrecognizable in principle and not merely misrecognized empirically. We can only recognize what it conditions, a stable object, not the event of becoming itself, which is the condition. A sign is precisely not meaningful because it occurs outside of any previously known

130 system of meaning. However, signs are given off by an object of experience when they become distorted and reveal a virtual characteristic that was not apparent because of the previous conditions. Since the sign is something that exceeds empirical experience, we can say that in Deleuze the transcendental does not completely overlap with the empirical but, instead, exceeds it. We can also use Deleuze’s language of virtual and actual, recalling that every object is partly virtual and partly actual. Thus conditions arise from within experience but they appear as what exceeds any particular system of experience. Smith has argued that the sign in Deleuze must be understood as intensity.57 Distortions of the object must occur as intensive change, not change in spatiotemporal relations, since the change is sensible but not recognizable. Only a recognizable object could have spatiotemporal determinations. Deleuze expresses an interest in sensory distortions achieved in pharmacodynamic experiences and physical experiences like vertigo because they are experiences of signs (DR 237). The distortion of the object is not due to the problem to which the object is an object, that is, the field to which it belongs as object. In a sense the virtual tension is “alongside” the object. Signs are the hints we get in empirical experience of the constituting processes of the object and, thus, of the system to which it belongs and of the other systems which are in its periphery. Signs are always encountered unexpectedly and often as a shock. For example, if it is my first time swimming, obviously I expect to be in the water. But the signs I encounter are still unexpected—the visual aspects, the sounds, the physical sensations, etc. The appearing of the sign, of an intensity, means something has come into relation with us. In this example the relation is between myself and the water. The opening up of a system cannot begin from the subject alone since there is no subject with regard to the new 57

Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation,” p. 36.

131 system of experience that has yet to open up. It can occur only when the subject comes into relation with something else. This relation can only be given to the subject as something sensible. Signs, too, are given off when two (or more) individuals come into relation. A sign is precisely something sensible, not something given to thought, since intensities are never given to thought. Again, experience can only begin anew from something sensible, not from a concept, for example, since concepts belong to the subject alone. We can understand how things proceed for the subject in terms of the other faculties. Deleuze offers his own theory of faculties, not so much to establish such a doctrine, but to show what its requirements would be. He is arguing against Kant on this point, for whom the faculties function in harmony around a recognizable object. For Deleuze, in contrast, the faculties could only be connected through a kind of discord. “Rather than all the faculties converging and contributing to a common project of recognizing an object, we see divergent projects in which, with regard to what concerns it essentially, each faculty is in the presence of that which is its ‘own’” (DR 141). Each faculty is forced to grasp that which it cannot empirically grasp but which belongs uniquely to it. Thus each faculty is taken to its limit, in the transcendental sense, and this is what Deleuze calls the transcendental form of the faculty. He claims that the transcendental form of each faculty is both the dissolution of the faculty in the empirical sense and what gives rise to the faculty. In this way, each faculty must be forced into existence. An example is the faculty of memory. Transcendental memory “grasps that which from the outset can only be recalled, even the first time: not a contingent past, but the being of the past as such and the past of every time” (DR 140). Each faculty is brought into existence when it strives

132 to grasp what only it can grasp: the transcendental object of the faculty. As I said above, experience begins with sensibility. When intensive difference is given to sensibility, sensibility is taken to its transcendental limit.58 It is not the common object that is communicated between the faculties, as it is for Kant, but, rather, the violence when each faculty undergoes its dissolution. This violence is communicated to and awakes another faculty. In each case, it is a form of difference unique to the faculty that awakens it. For sensibility, it is intensive difference; for imagination, it is disparity in the phantasm; for thought, it is the differential, and so on (DR 145). These forms of difference are given off by an Idea. “[We] reserve the name of Ideas not for pure cogitanda but rather for those instances which go from sensibility to thought and from thought to sensibility, capable of engendering in each case, according to their own order, the limit- or transcendent-object of each faculty” (DR 146). Ideas, then, belong to no one faculty, but to all faculties. For my purpose here, which is to show why Deleuze is critical of Kant’s theory of faculties, we do not need to develop Deleuze’s own theory of the faculties in detail. It is important only to underline that experience necessarily begins with sensibility, and then leads to thought. There can be systems of sensibility, like the system of color or a system of music. However, in order to understand a system, it must be grasped by thought. This is the reason for my focus on the faculty of thought. Deleuze himself privileges thought over the other faculties. As with the other faculties, thought only occurs when it is forced to occur, by a violence done to it. “There is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more

58

Thus, intensity is not the anticipation of perception as it is for Kant, but the transcendental object of sensibility (DR 237).

133 absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world. Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy” (DR 139). In fact, Deleuze says that by itself thought would only remain within possibility. We are only forced to think because thought is taken to its transcendental limit at which it is unable to think, unable to recognize and understand what occurred. Deleuze also says that the transcendental limit of thought is a kind of stupidity, and for this reason he describes stupidity as a transcendental problem (DR 151). The transcendental limit is also the condition for the faculty. Deleuze emphasizes this point by saying that difficulty is not a de facto state of affairs but a de jure structure of thought, and here we can think of stupidity and difficulty together (DR 147). Stupidity is not merely making an error since error is merely empirical. We recall from chapter 1, above, that Deleuze criticizes philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Kant who, he claims, presume that the nature of thought is to think or that we (we who possess the capacity for thought) tend naturally to think. In contrast, Deleuze argues that the natural state is not thinking, which is why thought only occurs when it is forced to occur. The real problem facing thought is how to engender thought, how to bring it into existence, and stupidity has to do with this. We note here that all experience begins contingently, for Deleuze, not because of the nature of the subject. The relation of thought and the subject with what is external to it is what is important. Thought cannot remain closed off within itself. Although its disturbance is violent it is only this disturbance that can lead to thinking. It becomes important to inquire with Deleuze: who is it that thinks? It cannot be the one who is satisfied and has good will. This person is merely complacent. Only the one

134 filled with ill will and who is unable to recognize what everyone else recognizes will think. Since thought does not occur naturally, it is not moved of its own accord. The problem is to induce thought. Deleuze uses an example from Proust to answer the question of who thinks. It is the jealous man under the pressure of his lover’s lies who is forced to search for truth. This person searches for truth because he is forced to search. There is a dissatisfaction or uneasiness that accompanies all thinking. Deleuze uses the term “learning” to indicate what goes on for the subject when a new system of experience is opened up. “Learning is the appropriate name for the subjective acts carried out when one is confronted with the objecticity [sic] of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge designates only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions” (DR 164). Deleuze uses the term “objecticity” indicate that problem is not subjective, but not simply objective either because it does not occur independently of a subject. He argues that there can no be method for learning (that is to say, no method in the Cartesian sense of determining, a priori, how reason should be used in order to achieve knowledge. We cannot predict what encounters will lead someone to learn. The only training is a kind of violent training, for which Deleuze reserves the term “culture.” He also frequently says that the real model for learning is apprenticeship. “An apprentice is someone who constitutes and occupies practical or speculative problems as such” (DR 164). If we return to the example of swimming, Deleuze says that we only learn by bringing together the distinctive points of our body with that of the water to form a problematic field. Thus learning is not merely a cognitive act but requires an engagement with the elements of something else. Deleuze also says

135 that the apprenticeship is really to signs.59 For example, someone who wants to become a craftsman of wood must become sensitive to the signs given off by the wood: how it responds when cut with the grain or against it; the difference in sound when healthy wood is cut as opposed to unhealthy wood, etc. However, we can examine the period of time during which the constitution of a system takes place. This is a strange period of time. Deleuze describes a paradoxical point that can occur during this period of time in which the constitution of the system is taking place. As an example, Deleuze uses a wellknown test in psychology involving a monkey who is supposed to find food in boxes of one color amidst boxes of various colors. “There comes a paradoxical period during which the number of ‘errors’ diminishes even though the monkey does not yet possess ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ of a solution in each case” (DR 164). In the example above, which is simplistic to be sure, the organizing principle is that there is a connection between the color of the boxes and food. The monkey does not at first grasp that color is a meaningful and relevant factor. During the constitution of a system, there are not yet individual, empirical cases—in this example, the empirical cases are individual boxes defined by their color and whether there is food or not. The organizing principle determines the distinct possibilities that can occur in the system. In a sense the subject can only experience fleeting sensations during the period in which the system is being constituted. In Proust & Signs, Deleuze takes up the phenomenon of wasted time. “We never know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content” (PS 22). When one 59

Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, translated by Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Hereafter cited as PS followed by the page number.

136 is learning something, like differential calculus or a language or philosophy, she may have a period of time in which nothing appears to be occurring. It may seem that learning is, in fact, not taking place. Deleuze’s interpretation is that this period of time is, in fact, extremely important. This is the period of time before the system has opened up. We can imagine that during this period the subject is struggling and things are not “making sense.” The subject does not yet grasp the Idea-problem that provides the context for any fact she has “learned.” This is a critical time since the Idea might not be synthesized at all. Moreover, the length of this period of time cannot be predicted and will vary from person to person. Deleuze describes the experience of teachers and how the more serious problem with which students struggle is not making false or erroneous judgments or statements but making nonsensical statements, mistaking banalities for profundities, and posing problems badly. They are unable to distinguish the important from the unimportant. These important points are the virtual events of a particular field, for example the boiling point of a liquid (as opposed to the other ordinary points of increasing temperature) or the point at which y approaches infinity (as opposed to the ordinary points where x and y are mostly in a linear relation). The students have not yet synthesized the Idea-problem and the system has not yet opened up. This can be characterized as wasted time because it seems there is no movement forward. It appears to be a time in which nothing is happening, that is to say, nothing productive. The new system of experience can only open up through the engagement of the subject with an other. Signs will be given off in this engagement but it cannot be predicted when and which sign will lead to the synthesis of an Idea and, thereby, the opening up of the system.

137 In a sense the subject is not present when a new system of experience is opened up. “‘Learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind” (DR 165). We can think of the unconscious for Deleuze as the space where subjectivity will occur. We can also think of the unconscious as the space in which the new system of experience opens up. (We must be careful with the use of the word “space,” however, since a system opens up a space that the empirical cases mark out, as we said earlier.) For this reason, a new system cannot be opened up simply by learning some objective content, which can only be done consciously. We could think here of someone who is an expert woodworker or an expert swimmer. These two people might characterize their work as occurring “instinctively” and without conscious decision on their part. For Deleuze, this is evidence that learning truly occurs through the unconscious and that even knowledge is not abstract and disconnected but occurs only within the engagement of the subject and the constituted field. Knowledge only appears to be disconnected from the engagement because it is the result. The subject cannot use the concepts it already possesses to learn this new system since these concepts are not relevant. No concept it possesses could truly be applicable in a field that is new. A system of experience can only open up insofar as the subject is opened up as well. If we consider the monkey again, its paradoxical period must be an unconscious one. We can associate the usage of concepts and recognition by means of concepts with the conscious and, in a parallel way, associate what goes on prior to the production of concepts with the unconscious. Thus, the subject, insofar as it is conscious, will experience objects as always already ordered within the system. In other words, the subject cannot point to some kind of progressive development of the system. The

138 conscious subject arrives “late” on the scene, so to speak. It is clear that the subject cannot simply make the choice to synthesize an Idea and open up a new system of experience if, by choice, we mean conscious choice. Hence, for Deleuze encounters can only occur by chance. To be clear, a new system of experience may or may not open up upon the appearance of a sign. If it does it occurs as the transcendental reorganization of experience. This takes place through transcendental differentiation, spelled with a “t,” along the line of the tension that was brought to the forefront by the sign. Transcendental differentiation occurs in two manners. The first is a single disruption of the field of experience, which does not happen gradually but all at once like a flash of lightning. To give an illustration, the Idea of color introduces a single difference: that between what is colored and what is indifferent to color. The second aspect of transcendental differentiation is the plurality implied by the first, and is the differentiation of the elements relevant to that plurality. Moreover, through their articulation, the elements are also brought into relation. For Deleuze, color is not a concept as it is for Kant, since red, blue, and green cannot be understood as types of colors but only as dimensions of color itself, or the way in which color is a pluralization. The difference between what is colored and what is not remains, and the pluralization of color occurs only within what is colored. By means of transcendental differentiation, experience will become organized according to the differences that erupt within it. The transcendental Idea includes the elements of the difference and their relation. The elements of an Idea can also come into relation such that intensive differences are formed. Transcendental differentiation, then, is the development or occurrence of the Idea. Neither an Idea nor the intensive differences that

139 may arise from it occurs empirically but instead opens up the systematic field of empirical inquiry. In other words, the Idea leads to the production of a system consisting of empirical cases. Thus transcendental differentiation cannot be known. Deleuze places a premium on the activity of thinking since thinking is truly creative. The question now is, what is thinking for him? It is not simply an application of a concept that one already possesses. I have already said that that is merely recognition. Nor is it the “assimilation of some objective content” (PS 22). Earlier I said that the distinction between truth and meaning is important for Deleuze. We can say here that thinking for Deleuze is not simply grasping truth, but, rather grasping the principle on which meaning depends. To think is to grasp a problem or Idea, that is to say, to synthesize a transcendental difference into a problem, and to grasp the meaning that arises from the problem-Idea. The great thinkers are those who are sensitive enough to see a difference that others do not, and who are able to synthesize it into a system. Deleuze also associates thinking with posing questions because there is a connection between problems and questions, he claims. There are certain questions that express the Idea-problem but, in contrast to Plato, for example, these are never questions of essence. In fact he claims that they are questions of the inessential. These questions can be asked only by tracing back from cases to the pattern that accounts for their differences. The questions would make it possible to grasp what brings certain empirical cases together. Thus, to think is to be able to pose questions and to be able to distinguish the important and interesting questions from those which are not. “More than anyone, however, Kant wanted to apply the test of truth and falsehood to problems and questions” (DR 161). We see that Deleuze believes that the ability to examine and judge problems, and not merely

140 propositions, must be made the distinguishing feature of philosophy—something he claims Kant attempted but was unable to do. We have seen that Deleuze contrasts error with stupidity. For him, stupidity is a transcendental problem in that it is inherent to the structure of thought itself. On the other hand, error occurs merely at the level of recognition. Stupidity is the inability to see a relevant difference. It does not entail making errors, but, rather, mistakes uninteresting problems for interesting or important ones. It is to receive a sign and to be unable to grasp its significance and, thus, to be unable to open up a system of experience. However, since stupidity is a structure of thought, it has a positive sense too. When thought is taken to its transcendental limit, one is unable to think, to see things meaningfully according to the concepts of the given framework. Only at this point can something new be thought. Thus stupidity is a necessary point—the point at which thinking can really begin. It therefore occupies an ambivalent position for Deleuze. If we return to the explanation of how experience occurs for the subject, we have said that a new system of experience opens up through transcendental differentiation. Once the system has opened up, the system itself is produced through the actualization or explication of the Idea. Deleuze refers to this process as differenciation, spelled with a “c.” Both logically and ontologically, transcendental differentiation (with a “t”) must occur prior to differenciation (with a “c”). However, in regard to the order in which they are experienced, they may seem practically indistinguishable. The Idea introduces an inequality, which allows a system to be opened up. The creation of the system is like the creation of a surface on which the inequality is stabilized or dispelled, while continuing to exist underneath. The systematic field is experience as it is empirically found to be

141 ordered according to the aspect brought to the forefront as the Idea. The transcendental Idea forms a system of meaning and the empirical field expends itself through the articulation of empirical differences, which are the incarnation of meaning. Therefore empirical differences are different in kind from the transcendental difference and articulate it on a new level. To return to our example of the Idea of color, we see objects everywhere, each having one definite color, but nowhere do we see the event of indifferent white separating itself out into the plurality of colors. In other words, we see objects as already having color because our empirical experience is already systematically ordered according to color. Empirical cases are only constituted as such because of their relation to the system that provides them with meaning, and are united through their relation to the Idea. Even though empirical cases express meaning, they can never fully consume or exhaust it. In other words, the Idea qua meaning and source of meaning remains distinct from what incarnates meaning. In fact it is essential that the inequality of the Idea continues to exist since it is must continue to provide the force or compulsion for each empirical case. A different example would be straight and curly hair. We can note their virtual characteristics. These would be the result of the physicochemical composition, such as various proteins. The empirical characteristic of curly hair is the result of particular chemical bonds that occur. That particular chemical bond is always present as a possibility when those particular physico-chemical compounds occur. In addition, the empirical characteristic of curly hair does not consume the virtual characteristic. In fact that particular chemical bond must continue to be present— otherwise the hair would become straight. The Idea continues to exist underneath, even while empirical cases populate the surface.

142 Once the system has been produced it can be developed and explored. Concepts occur at this empirical level of the organization of experience, for they express the kinds of empirical cases that occur and indicate their relation to the systematic field. Empirical objects can be investigated and known on the basis of concepts.60 As with Kant, here, too, empirical cases are the objects of recognition. Once there is a system there can occur individuals that have a kind of coherence even if they are not fully understood. A system allows for certain distinctions to occur, which demarcate individuals. For example, a socio-political system can open up the space for certain political positions, even if they have yet to be understood. Positions like x and y and the alliance between the Evangelical Christians and the neo-conservatives are only possible within the system of liberal democracy as it occurs in the United States in the twenty-first century, and are meaningless outside of that system. In addition, the subjects of the system can interact with the system. Those who are working within the system are not simply producing the empirical cases that belong to the system, nor are these cases producing themselves. For example, once the system of Newtonian space and time was opened up, it was developed to its limit. Scientists work within that system, developing all of its implications. In a way, this can appear to be the most productive stage since the principles of the system are just carried forth and taken as far as they can be taken. However, it is really the opening up of a system that is the creative moment for Deleuze. The subject can, again, return to the mode of recognition. However, even though we can speak of a system of experience that has already been developed, it does not mean the

60

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze famously describes philosophy as the creation of concepts, and this might seem incongruous with what I have said above. However, insofar as a new concept is created, it occurs within a new plane or system. Thus, a concept can be a point at which a new plane intersects with a previous. Creation, then, must still be understood primarily as the occurrence of a new plane or system.

143 subject cannot still interrogate the problem-Idea and, in this way, revitalize the creative moment. “Hence that form of writing which is nothing but the question ‘what is writing?’, or that sensibility which is nothing but the question what is it to sense?’, or that thought which asks ‘what does it mean to think?’. These give rise to the greatest monotonies and the greatest weaknesses or a new-found common sense in the absence of the genius of the Idea, but also to the most powerful ‘repetitions’, the most prodigious inventions in the para-sense when the Idea emerges in all its violence” (DR 195). Thus the true literary geniuses, for example, continue to ask the question ‘what is writing?’ in creative ways, repeating in a creative way. There is no answer, that is to say, empirical response or solution, that can complete the question once and for all, since the problem always continues to rumble underneath. In contrast to the geniuses, the banal writers are always stuck in the mode of recognition, only able to see things in the framework that is already given. We can, again, relate this to the problem of stupidity. It is a kind of stupidity to only see things in the mode of recognition and to fail to repeat the problem in a profound way. However, we are prone to stupidity and to continue in the mode of recognition out of a kind of inertia. CONCLUSION I have shown in his chapter how Deleuze accounts for the production of a system of experience. Kant’s account of the possibility of empirical or individual cases was no longer adequate after the limit of a system of experience had been transformed by Deleuze. He argued that it was necessary to show how a system arises, which required showing how the individual cases arise as well. The key is that there is a progressive development of a system and the individual cases that belong to it. We saw in chapter 1

144 that Deleuze criticizes Kant because he cannot show how intuition could come into relation with the categories of the understanding. Since intuition makes possible the spatiotemporality of objects and, hence, their individuality, this is essentially the problem of whether the empirical cases can be said to belong necessarily to the system of experience. In other words, Kant could not explain why the conditioned (the empirical cases) agrees with the conditions for knowledge (the categories). However, Deleuze avoids this problem by showing that empirical or individual cases are progressively produced as the system develops. The opening up of a system occurs only as part of a movement that leads to fully developed individuals. It is no longer a matter of accounting for how we can know a set of empirical cases since there are no empirical cases apart from the system to which they belong. As we have seen, Deleuze uses the notion of intensity to explain how we go from the Idea to the production of individuals. For Deleuze, intensity is a kind of difference in that it is a kind of relation. With this notion, then, he furthers develop his idea that all identity is secondary and arises from difference. Identity does not occur as a mediator in any way. Not only does a system open up through difference (that is to say, transcendental difference), but its development also occurs through a system of differences. The individual has a kind of stability or identity, yet is still open to engagement with other systems and, thus, to transformation. For Deleuze, only where there is difference can creation and transformation occur, while identity denotes what is essentially settled, predictable, and established. Thus anything with self-identity only occurs as the result of the movement of difference. In a sense, then, identity is dead. However, the transformative power of difference continues to exist within things. As a result, every

145 individual is open to and can interact with everything else. Thus Deleuze’s world is one in which a creative and transformative power exists within everything, underneath the surface and, thus, creativity can occur within any situation and from any individual. Hitherto I have been developing Deleuze’s metaphysical account of the opening up of a system and the production of individuals within that system. However, all of this occurs for a subject. It is essential to return to this perspective, for only the subject is capable of thinking and doing philosophy. The subject cannot experience the opening up of a system and the organization of experience that leads to discrete individuals or objects and to the concepts by which they are known. Instead, it undergoes experiences of distortion as a system is opened up and becomes organized. The subject can only experience and know what has stability and an identity. It can only think and, hence, grasp an Idea in retrospect. Thinking for Deleuze is a movement backward. Once the system has been produced, experience occurs in essentially the same way as it does for Kant: experience occurs as recognition. For Kant, of course, recognition is the exemplary kind of experience, in regard to speculative knowledge. On the other hand, for Deleuze the experience of recognition is the least interesting, being simply the end result of a creative process. Indeed, the speculative areas of human experience, such as science, must be regarded as creative processes in Deleuze, akin to art in many ways and not merely the discovery of truth. As I have said, the subject for Deleuze occurs within the opening up and production of a system. Thus it does not initiate this creative process but takes part in it. We need to examine what it means to say that there is no subject prior to the opening of a system. In addition, the opening up of a system is a harrowing experience for the subject, and we

146 need to see why this is the case. I said above that the subject cannot simply choose to open up a new system. For Deleuze, free choice occurs secondarily, a point that will need to be developed further in the next chapter. In sum, we have yet to understand the way in which the subject participates in the opening and production of a system of experience. This is the subject of chapter 4.

147 CHAPTER 4 THE SUBJECT AND TIME INTRODUCTION In chapters 2 and 3 I have shown what experience is for Deleuze: experience occurs only insofar as a new system of experience opens up. As long as there is no new system of experience, the subject merely continues to recognize objects according to the framework already known to it. For Kant, in contrast, anything new in experience must already be accounted for within the subject’s framework. As I have said above, Deleuze claims that real novelty is therefore not possible for Kant. A system can only be new if the subject is transformed in and through the institution of the new system. Thus Deleuze’s account of experience requires a subject that is open rather than closed off. In other words, his account of experience cannot simply begin with the identity of the subject since the selfidentical subject, on which Kant’s account of experience was grounded, could not withstand experience. In this chapter I will show how the subject is constituted (or transformed) in the opening up of the system of experience, for Deleuze. In addition, the subject must have some sort of identity, even if it is open, and this identity must be shown to arise secondarily to its transformation or becoming. We have already briefly examined the openness of the subject in Deleuze. In chapter 3, I said that for Deleuze, no subject can be completely closed off since every subject has a zone of indetermination. It is from within this zone that new conditions of experience can arise. In Kant, essentially, the subject is closed off because while it can come into relation with objects (or individuals) that are external to it, this relation can only occur so

148 long as it is consistent with the framework the subject possesses. In this chapter I will show how the subject is opened up when a new system of experience arises. Our development of Deleuze’s conception of the subject requires an explanation of the relation between the subject and the object or, in other words, how the subject can know objects. The Copernican-like revolution of the critical philosophy, that is to say, the internal relation of subject and object, was possible for Kant only because he conceived of the subject as passively receiving what is given to it in intuition. In other words, Kant accounts for the internal relation by focusing entirely on the subject. For Deleuze, too, the relation of subject and object is a necessary one. However, he argues for it in a different way. He argues that the subject is produced along with the objects that it can know. He sees himself as radicalizing the passivity of the subject that he finds in Kant. This chapter will show the way in which the subject is passive for Deleuze, and how this allows him to argue that the relation of the subject and object is necessary and internal. I introduce the terms “capacity” and “interest” into Deleuze’s account of the subject.61 I use the notion of “interest” to explain how the subject can be predisposed to the opening up of a new system of experience, while I use “capacity” to explain how the subject becomes capable of receiving objects that are given to it and, thus, to come into relation with these objects. In going into further detail on Deleuze’s conception of the subject, we will show the subject’s relation to its world and how this interaction is no longer what it is in Kant.

61

I am giving an emphasis to the term “capacity” that is not found in Deleuze. Deleuze seems to use “capacity” in a negative sense only. I remain true to the way in which Deleuze uses the term, but I extend its use because it allows me to describe a particular aspect of the subject. The term “interest” is one Deleuze does not use, but that I am introducing. It seems to me Deleuze’s account requires an explanation of how a subject is predisposed to new encounters with other individuals, and thus to the opening of a new system of experience. I am using the term “interest” in order to do provide such an explanation.

149 The notion of time is significant for Kant’s subject. In this chapter I will also show how Deleuze criticizes Kant’s conception of time, and how his own conception develops as a result of this criticism. In brief, for Kant experience is possible because it always is the subject’s experience. Every representation of the subject must become part of the inner state of the subject. Any change in the subject or in the experience of the subject is brought about by conditions internal to the subject. This condition is time. As a result, the subject can only know itself in time, and its identity is continually being forged in time. Deleuze takes his cue from Kant and the discussion of time is as important for understanding the identity of the subject in Deleuze as it is in Kant. However, the subject’s relation to itself becomes transformed, just as the conception of time does. This chapter will therefore show how the subject’s relation to itself is negotiated by Deleuze. In addition, he must be understood as providing an account of the constitution of time, whose existence Kant simply presumes. In Deleuze’s view, time and its passage are produced spontaneously and passively by means of three syntheses, described in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, which is titled “Repetition for Itself.” The first synthesis is the synthesis of the living present. The second is the synthesis of memory or pure past. The third is the synthesis of the pure or empty form of time. Deleuze places the greatest emphasis on the third synthesis. In the first and second syntheses the ordinary subject maintains its identity. It is in the third synthesis that we get the transformation of the subject. I will show how the subject undergoes this transformation and why this transformation is essentially a temporal event for Deleuze. Furthermore, for Deleuze the opening up of experience is also temporal. In other words,

150 the third synthesis of time also gives us the opening up of a new system of experience. Thus time comes to be independent of the subject in Deleuze. 1. DELEUZE'S CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN SUBJECT Deleuze argues, once again, that there are philosophical problems with Kant’s conception of the subject. Kant’s account of experience rests on his notion of the transcendental subject. The pure forms of intuition and the categories are mapped onto the transcendental subject. The transcendental subject, then, is the condition of experience and, of course, also the condition of empirical subjectivity. The transcendental subject belongs to no one in particular and, instead, conditions every empirical subject. In the end the ultimate condition of experience is the unity of apperception, which makes synthesis possible. The subject’s experience occurs as synthesis insofar as every judgment made by the subject’s faculty of understanding is a synthesis. Deleuze’s criticism is that Kant simply presupposed the unity of the transcendental subject as the condition of experience, without giving an account of it. This gives us another way in which Kant had not taken the critical philosophy far enough in Deleuze’s view. Kant did not bring the unity of the subject into question. Thus Deleuze views himself as rectifying this problem and taking the project of the critical philosophy to its logical conclusion in regard to the subject. In addition, since Kant simply presupposes the unity of the subject, the subject never truly changes. In contrast, because the subject in Deleuze does not function as the ultimate condition of experience, as the transcendental unity of apperception does in Kant, its relation to experience differs. The subject genuinely changes and is transformed.

151 In addition, Deleuze attends to the necessity of new experiences being integrated with the subject, such that experience always occurs as my experience. This, too, is made possible by the transcendental unity of apperception in Kant. The integration of the subject occurs continually through inner intuition in that the subject is given to itself in the form of time. Kant points to a paradox that arises from this: I cannot experience myself as I am, only as I appear to myself. Insofar as the subject synthesizes experience, it is active. However, insofar as the subject must receive something in intuition, it is passive. The subject is both active and passive, and there is a question as to how these come together. The subject cannot know itself insofar as it is active but only insofar as it is given passively to itself in time. Deleuze focuses on this paradox, developing and interpreting it in a novel way for his own project. His account of the integration of new experience with the subject will differ markedly from Kant’s. Deleuze nonetheless thought that Kant’s account of the subject was an innovation over that of Descartes. The relation of Kant to Descartes is useful for highlighting the evolution of the conception of the subject in going from rationalism to the critical philosophy. I will therefore begin with Deleuze’s interpretation of Descartes. 2. THE CARTESIAN SUBJECT Descartes provides a certain conception of the subject in order to explain experience. Every act of thought (that is to say, every act of perception, imagination, doubt, etc.) must be accompanied by self-consciousness. For him, self-consciousness always occurs along with consciousness. Thus self-consciousness holds our experience together because it occurs in every moment of experience. In each act of thinking I am also aware that I am the one thinking. In fact, according to the Meditations, self-consciousness is the most

152 certain thing we can know and thereby grounds the certainty of the rest of our knowledge. For Descartes, self-consciousness occurs as an act, just like the act of perception, for example. This is important in several ways. First, there is no element of passivity in the subject for Descartes. We must actively seek meaning because objects are not meaningful for us (in contrast to Kant, for whom objects, simply insofar as they are objects, are meaningful). Second, change, or the experience of something new, is brought about by what is external to the subject and to experience (rather than in terms of conditions internal to experience, as for Kant). With Descartes, change is registered as what is different in relation to or by comparison with what is out there: or the essence of the thing apart from the subject. It does not first have to be synthesized by the subject, which is to say, although it must be brought together with what was the case previously, this only occurs secondarily. This takes us to the third point: there is a gap between the subject and what is external to it. This idea of a gap will be important in comparison to Kant, and equally takes us into a consideration of time. Time in Descartes is understood as occurring or flowing externally to the subject. Experience occurs from moment to moment. The subject occurs in time like an object. Time is the measure of movement. As we have said, for Descartes, in thinking something the subject also thereby thinks itself. We can conclude from this that the subject’s relation to itself is one of immediacy and is not temporal. In other words, for Descartes, I am fully present to myself. The formula ‘I think, therefore I am’ means that in the act of being conscious of myself I know myself as I truly am. There is no aspect of myself to which I do not have access. I fully enact what I am. In this sense, the gap is not within the subject, but, rather, between the subject and what is external to it. The subject is a

153 substance like any other (although, of course, it is thinking substance, not extended substance). For Descartes, then, I have an experience of the I with every thought I have, since the I accompanies every thought. According to Kant, Descartes treated self-consciousness (or the I) as an object of experience because it occurs within experience like any other object. Descartes claimed he was describing what kind of object the subject is (it is a thinking thing), whereas Kant says that we can only know that I am, not what I am. As a result, Kant considered Descartes’ notion of self-consciousness to be merely empirical selfconsciousness. 3. THE KANTIAN SUBJECT In Kant experience only occurs in the way it does because of the structure of the subject. Anything that occurs in experience can be understood in terms of its conditions, which belong to the transcendental structure of the subject. Thus, with Kant, the notion of the subject is transformed. The subject is not a substance but the form of experience. It is not a thing like other objects in experience but the condition of experience. Deleuze finds it significant that there is an element of passivity in the subject in Kant. Experience occurs in such a way that whatever appears in space and time is given to the empirical subject as already meaningful. The term “already” is important here because it indicates that the empirical subject is passive in relation to the structuring of experience. Whatever the empirical subject encounters, it is as though the structuring of experience has already occurred for it. Things are meaningful for us. In other words, it is not that there is a meaningful world, simply in an objective sense, but that there is a meaningful world for the subject as subject. The subject is divided between activity and passivity. The

154 empirical subject can only passively receive what is given in space and time. In order to know anything, there must be some content given in the form of space and time. Insofar as experience is already organized for it, the subject is the empirical subject. For Kant, time and space do not belong to objects but are, instead, forms of experience and transcendentally subjective. Space is the form in which we intuit what is in external relation to us, while time is the form in which we intuit what is given internally, that is to say, the form in which our own representations are given to us. However, time is actually the more universal form of intuition. “But since all representations, whether they have for their objects outer things or not, belong, in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state; and since this inner state stands under the formal condition of inner intuition, and so belongs to time, time is an a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever” (CPR A34/B50). In other words, in order for an object to be known to us, its representation must become part of our inner state. In this way, every representation will occur for the subject as a modification in the inner state, and can only be given in time. The issue of time necessarily arises here because the subject can only represent itself to itself in time. Kant lays out three syntheses of time to explain how representations are brought into temporal relation. In the first, apprehension, a perception is grasped in an instant. The second, reproduction, recreates former perceptions so that they occur as a succession. Finally, in recognition, all of those perceptions are gathered into a single representation. For Kant, each of these syntheses occurs in different faculties: intuition, the imagination, and the understanding. These syntheses are used to explain how we can have temporal representations. In other words, we can see how something extended in space becomes a temporal representation for the subject. All

155 representations necessarily appear in time and stand in time-relations. As a result of this, the subject can itself be determined in time. The subject is also active because it unifies or synthesizes what is given to it by means of the categories of the understanding. The source of this activity is the transcendental unity of apperception or transcendental self-consciousness. Kant talks about selfconsciousness in two ways. We have moments in which we experience the act of selfreflection. Kant calls this empirical self-consciousness since it occurs in experience (that is to say, in time). However, what is more significant is transcendental selfconsciousness. In the Transcendental Deduction (B) Kant lays out the argument that there must be a transcendental unity of apperception or pure self-consciousness that is the ground of the unity of the subject. This pure apperception generates the representation ‘I think,’ which is capable of accompanying all other representations. Apperception is an act of pure spontaneity. All representations can be seen as belonging to a single selfconsciousness because they are accompanied by the representation ‘I think.’ Experience is only possible if it is continually unified and taken as belonging to a unified self. Transcendental self-consciousness binds our experience together and unites it. Thus transcendental apperception must be atemporal and pure unity since time occurs as diversity. It is a condition of experience, and therefore cannot be an object of experience. Kant argues that Descartes only considered self-consciousness in the empirical sense and used this notion to unify our experience. Because the subject is both active and passive in Kant we speak of it in two ways, as transcendental and empirical subject, or as I and self. Deleuze’s discussions of Kant frequently use the French Je and moi in this way, to connote the active and passive

156 aspects of the subject. He argues that the subject in Kant is divided within itself. Kant himself notes that its self-relation is a paradoxical one in §24 of Transcendental Deduction (B): “This is a suitable place for explaining the paradox which must have been obvious to everyone in our exposition of the form of inner sense (§6): namely, that this sense represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected, and this would seem to be contradictory, since we should then have to be in a passive relation [of active affection] to ourselves” (CPR B153). The empirical subject cannot know itself as active and atemporal, that is to say, as transcendental subject, because this activity cannot be given to it in time. The subject can only know itself as phenomenon or appearance. On this point Deleuze says that the passive, empirical subject can only represent the activity of the transcendental subject rather than enact it, and that it lives it like an other within itself (DR 87). The subject appears to itself as passive. The point is that the subject’s relation to itself cannot be one of immediacy as it is in Descartes. In other words, in Descartes, this relation is instantaneous, so to speak, or, more precisely, outside of time. On the other hand, in Kant, the subject is divided from itself in time. The two aspects of the subject do, indeed, come into relation to form a single subject through the synthesizing activity of the I and because the changing inner state of the empirical subject is the content of that synthesis. However, in Kant this relation is delayed or is temporal. Kant has Descartes in mind when he says that we can only know that we are, not what we are (CPR B157). In other words, we can form a concept of ourselves but no content can be given to us through intuition. We cannot be fully present to ourselves.

157 This point is critical for Deleuze: that the subject in Kant is divided from itself but is yet one subject. “Time signifies a fault or fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution” (DR 86). Since the subject must passively intuit what is given, the subject’s experience becomes circumscribed by its own activity. The correlation between the subject’s passivity and activity ensures its necessary relation with its objects of knowledge. It gives the subject’s knowledge necessity. The world as it appears passively to the empirical subject will necessarily be organized. Deleuze also speaks of this correlation as a kind of identity, more specifically as a synthetic identity rather than an analytic identity. “Specifically, what founds the identity of things that are though is the identity of the thinking subject…Thus the first principle is not that A is A, but that ego equals ego…It is a synthetic identity because ego equals ego marks the identity of the ego that thinks itself as the condition of all that appears in space and time, and the ego that appears in space and time itself” (Seminar on Leibniz, 20/05/1980, 12). Deleuze claims that it is Kant’s conception of the subject’s relation to itself, the fact that it is not immediate but occurs as a gap, that allows Kant to argue that the object must submit to the subject, that the faculty of knowledge in the subject is legislative. In this way, the relation of subject and object is a necessary one. In Deleuze, too, the relation is a necessary one, but he accounts for it in another way. We have said that in Descartes there is a gap between the subject and what is external to it. In Kant the gap becomes interiorized within the subject because any change that the subject experiences will not be in relation to some kind of essence of the object (to the

158 thing-in-itself), but, rather, in relation to the categories by which the subject organizes experience. In Kant change can only occur by way of the subject’s relation to itself. Change is brought about by conditions internal to the subject because something must be given to the subject in the forms of space and time. Since these forms belong to the subject, a new experience is really a change in the subject. Any change or any new experience occurs as the subject’s relation to itself because the conditions by which something is given is internal to the subject (the receptivity of the subject) and the condition by which it is synthesized and experienced (the activity of the I) is also internal. We could equally say that the gap is between what is unsynthesized and what is synthesized: the subject insofar as it is constituting what is given as something new, the transcendental subject, and the one seeing it as change, the empirical subject. Something must simply be given to the subject before it can be synthesized by the subject. The two moments are both internal to the subject. Since change can only occur as the subject’s relation to itself, in the subject knowing itself there is a gap or delay in the subject. Deleuze therefore says that, with Kant, time becomes internal to the subject. The subject experiences things as always already organized and, therefore, the ordering of experience occurs outside of time. In other words, the unity of transcendental selfconsciousness and the categories occur outside of time. However, since these are transcendental conditions, it is not some time in the past that experience was organized. In fact, we can distinguish between past, present, and future only because experience is already organized according to those categories. Deleuze says that our experience occurs in splitting into past, present, and future, but the I is constantly carrying out a synthesis of time. “‘Form of interiority’ means not only that time is internal to us, but that our

159 interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end” (KCP ix). However, since the transcendental conditions in Kant are a priori, that is to say, are prior to experience, they remain “before” experience in an absolute way. For Deleuze, this will become more ambiguous. Therefore, even though Deleuze expresses his appreciation in Kant’s Critical Philosophy for the notion that time is internal to the subject, he does not think Kant goes far enough. As we have seen, in Kant change can only occur as the subject’s relation to itself and, for this reason, there is a gap or delay in the subject. However, in the end Deleuze will argue that in fact there can be no genuine change or new experience for Kant since nothing that is beyond the parameters of the categories can be given to the subject. For this reason, the gap in the Kantian subject cannot be a true gap. To be sure, the transcendental I of apperception and the empirical subject occur as separate moments. However, since transcendental conditions correspond exactly with the empirical for Kant, the subject’s relation to itself or, in other words, the identity of the subject always remains the same. Whenever experience occurs what is given simply aligns itself with or merely falls under these conditions since these conditions are simply presupposed as the structure of the subject. Kant limits in advance what can be given to the subject. There is no possibility for anything to be given that falls outside of the parameters of those conditions. The subject, insofar as it is the subject, is self-identical and organizes the world in only one particular way. Deleuze finds the discovery of passivity important but will take it further. In Kant, of course, we are organizing our own experience–it is simply that we cannot know ourselves

160 insofar as we are organizing it. It appears to the subject that something else is the source of the organization. In other words, it is only the empirical subject that is passive, not the transcendental subject. Deleuze will argue, in contrast, that the subject is not organizing experience at all. In other words, he criticizes Kant for making the synthetic activity of the unity of apperception the ground of experience. Deleuze’s point is that this unity must be presupposed in order for Kant’s account of experience to function. His own account explains how unity and activity arise from an original passivity. For him, there is no need for an original unity in order for synthesis to occur. 4. THE SUBJECT IN DELEUZE Deleuze’s project, like Kant’s, is concerned with the idea of transcendental conditioning. As I showed in chapter 3, Deleuze transforms the notion of the transcendental into the virtual. The reason for this is that the conditions of experience, for Deleuze, are a priori but not outside of experience. They cannot be experienced because they always occur in the state of being covered over. He argues for transcendental or virtual events that belong to no one subject or object in particular. In this way, his transcendental events parallel Kant’s transcendental subject, which belongs to no particular empirical subject. Like Kant’s transcendental subject, the virtual events are outside of time. However, Deleuze argues that the conditions of experience do not belong to the subject either, as they do in Kant. Thus there is no transcendental subject in Deleuze. Instead, the conditions of experience give rise to both the object and the subject. (In Kant the conditions of experience give rise to the object only.) This leads Deleuze to the interesting conclusion that the conditions have a kind of independent existence. Only in this way can Deleuze avoid attributing the conditions to the subject.

161 For Deleuze, the unity of the subject occurs secondarily in that it arises from a more fundamental movement. This can be illustrated by comparison with the boiling point of water. The boiling point is a virtual event or condition for all individual things that are physical. It is fully real and is always a defining characteristic whether a particular pot of water is taken to its boiling point or not. This virtual event becomes actualized when the pot of water is heated to the appropriate degree. A virtual condition or event only becomes actual insofar as a particular individual undergoes that event. These virtual events, then, occur prior to any actual individual: they are prior in the same way that transcendental conditions are prior to the empirical, in Kant. To return to the human subject, for Deleuze, the point at which one breaks down in tears, the point at which one is surprised, the point at which one feels unsure of herself, and so on are virtual events that are prior to any actual human individual, and they are fully real even when they have not been actualized. In chapter 3 we said that the opening up of experience begins only with the sign. The sign can only be sensed, so it occurs within empirical experience for the subject. The sign is only properly grasped insofar as it is not recognized. The fact that the subject cannot recognize the sign, that is to say, cannot subsume what it senses under already existing concepts, indicates that the transcendental and empirical are not in correspondence. At this point, new conditions of experience arise. There is no subject in regard to those particular conditions. In other words, the subject is ruptured or opened up at the point where the new conditions arise. A subject is constituted only where there is an organization of experience, where experience occurs, and, in this way, the subject occurs only in its relation to a particular system of experience. What we consider to be

162 the human subject in the ordinary sense occurs in relation to a number of systems or planes of experience. Therefore its experience can be transformed in a number of ways. Regardless of the direction in which experience occurs, the subject is genuinely transformed. To be clear, the subject is not transformed in relation to the systems that are unaffected (or minimally affected) by the new conditions. As we said earlier, the subject is not genuinely transformed in Kant, so the subject maintains its identity. Kant explains that the subject’s relation to itself occurs through time. Since the subject is transformed in Deleuze, the subject’s relation to itself becomes more complex. This relation must constantly be negotiated since transcendental conditions do not always correspond to the empirical. The subject’s relation to itself is always in the process of occurring and is never complete. Since the subject is never identical to itself, Deleuze says the subject is always fractured. Transcendental conditions are outside of time, yet a subject’s experience is always temporal. The subject’s relation to itself is vitally important because the subject must be able to have new experiences that can then be said to belong to the subject. I will discuss Deleuze’s conception of time and its relation to the subject in section 6 below. Since he criticizes Kant for explaining the subject’s relation to itself by the transcendental unity of apperception, he must account for it in another way. In the end all unity for Deleuze arises passively. In what follows, I discuss the passivity of Deleuze’s subject and how unity is secondary to a more fundamental difference that it arises from. 5. THE PASSIVITY OF THE DELEUZIAN SUBJECT Deleuze is interested in the idea of passivity in Kant’s notion of the empirical subject. Unlike Kant, for him it is not simply that the subject does not know itself insofar as it

163 organizes experience, but that it does not in fact organize experience at all. The reason is that the conditions of experience do not belong to the subject. As a result, Deleuze sees himself as taking the idea of passivity beyond that in Kant. The subject can only be active in relation to a field of experience once the latter has been opened up for it, so the subject as agent is grounded in passivity. Deleuze therefore attempts to account for how the subject is passively constituted in the opening up of experience. For him, the subject is not divided between passivity and activity. In other words, the play between passivity and activity does not occur within the subject as it does in Kant. Instead, this play occurs between the subject and what is external to it. The subject is opened up in and through that play. To understand Deleuze’s view on the passivity of the subject it is important to note that he distinguishes between passivity and receptivity. In fact Deleuze criticizes Kant for defining the empirical subject or passive subject by its receptivity. “On the contrary, we have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for experiencing affections, was only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation-contraction). The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this” (DR 87).62 “Contemplation” and “contraction” are used synonymously with “synthesis” here. Deleuze’s point is that we must explain what makes receptivity possible, which Kant did not do, and that it cannot simply be presumed. Deleuze argues that it is passive synthesis that makes receptivity possible. The problem with Kant’s account, he says, is that Kant interpreted passivity as 62

Deleuze uses “capacity” in a negative sense only, in order to say that we cannot begin by presuming the subject has a capacity for receiving sensation, for example, but must first explain how that capacity arises. Thus, I extend the use of the term. Since the subject must be able to receive the objects that belong to any particular system, there must a new capacity in the subject that is opened up when a new system is opened up for the subject.

164 mere receptivity without synthesis (DR 87). In other words, Deleuze is arguing that receptivity presupposes synthesis. To receive what is given in space and time, for example, Deleuze argues that there must first be a synthesis of time and of space. However, Kant argued that all synthesis occurred actively, while only receptivity could be passive. Deleuze’s point is that synthesis occurs passively first of all. Passive syntheses are transcendental, to use Kantian language, or, in other words, are subrepresentative (DR 84). They are the conditions of representation. If we consider space and time, only once these have been synthesized for the subject can something be given in space and time—an object occupying a certain amount of space and occurring at a particular time. There are also active syntheses for Deleuze, for which the subject is the agent. For example, we might actively remember something from our past. However, these active syntheses are always grounded in passive ones and occur only at the empirical level or the level of representation. We can actively recall something only because the past and memory has already been passively synthesized for us. When passive synthesis occurs, a field of experience is opened up in the subject. This is a new “capacity” of the subject. A capacity can therefore be understood as that which corresponds in the subject to a system or plane of experience. This is not a term Deleuze uses often, but it seems important to me for articulating this issue. “The passive self is not defined simply by receptivity – that is, by means of the capacity to experience sensations – but by virtue of the contractile contemplation which constitutes the organism itself before it constitutes the sensations” (DR 78). Although Deleuze is using the term capacity in a critical sense, we can see that the capacity must be produced first, before any sensations belonging to that capacity can be received. The self or subject is the

165 capacity or synthesis or contraction. As we said above, the subject is constituted passively. In other words, the subject of a particular system of experience is constituted by the opening up of the system, and it is the subject in terms of a particular capacity. Deleuze uses the example of sight. The eye deals with the problem of light. Through the eye the entire system of sight occurs as a capacity for a larger subject, like an animal or human. Only after the capacity for sight has been constituted can we receive sensations within it or, in other words, only then can we see things. We can develop this notion of capacity by examining Kant in a positive way. To recall, we said that Deleuze takes the notion of passivity from Kant, so we may examine what Deleuze thought Kant accomplished with the notion. Kant argued that we cannot know anything in itself but only how it affects us. The subject is necessarily passive insofar as an object affects it. Deleuze retains the idea that we can only know how something affects us. (In Descartes, since there is no distinction between what something is in itself and how it affects or appears to the subject, there is no element of passivity.) We can be active and can know something only insofar as something is given that is knowable–we must consider how it appears for us or, in other words, the conditions under which the object appears. These conditions delimit an area or field. However, this area or field only occurs in relation to the passivity of the subject. Deleuze’s point is that the subject can only be active in relation to this field that was first constituted passively. In other words, the determinations we actively make about objects have relevance in this field only insofar as a sphere has been circumscribed. Outside of their framework determinations are meaningless (and, for this reason, cannot occur outside of their framework). Therefore a capacity occurs only in relation to the passivity of the subject.

166 The way in which the subject is passive indicates the field in which it has a capacity. It also indicates the kind of object that arises in the field. In the end, Kant grounds knowledge in the synthetic activity of transcendental apperception, which unifies the system or capacity, to use Deleuze’s term. Being able to actively make determinations about objects is therefore grounded in transcendental apperception. For Kant, unity must precede any synthesis, for synthesis is not possible without prior unity. As we have said, Deleuze rethinks the notion of synthesis so that it occurs passively first of all, rather than actively, as in Kant. No prior unity is needed for synthesis since synthesis occurs spontaneously. It is a kind of self-gathering. For Deleuze, then, the activity of the subject is grounded in passivity in that it is a consequence of a more fundamental passive synthesis. This allows Deleuze to argue that unity is not the ultimate condition of experience and of the subject, but, rather, unity arises from difference or, in other words, from the movement of synthesizing. I have shown how a capacity arises passively for Deleuze, without unity as its condition. As we said above, the constitution of a capacity is the constitution of a subject. In addition, Deleuze extends this so that there are multiple capacities and systems of experience. The reason he prefers the term “plane” to “system” is precisely because they are open in the sense that they intersect and can therefore interact with each other. In contrast, the system in Kant is closed. This means, of course, that for Deleuze there are subjects occurring within subjects. In fact, Deleuze says that wherever there is a contraction there is a subject, albeit a larval subject. He would say that the human being consists of many subjects even though there is mostly a single one that overarches these.

167 What really defines an individual (whether it is an animal, an inanimate object, or a human) is the way in which it can be affected, or what it can be sensitive to, and what its capacities are. Without a particular capacity, it remains indifferent to things in that particular regard. Therefore a new capacity is a new way of responding or interacting with things external to it, of interacting with the world. A new kind of difference becomes important and the capacity is the ability to synthesize it and to exploit it, to use the difference for oneself (or synthesize it with oneself, which, in any case, is always implied by the idea of synthesis). Only if the difference is synthesized can it be opened up as a system. In other words, the difference has to become important for a subject, who is compelled to respond because its previous responses were inadequate. Things come to a critical point for the subject such that the difference needs to be synthesized. In this sense, this particular system or world belongs to the subject or, more accurately, its synthesis as a world is the subject. “The self does not undergo modification, it is itself a modification – this term designating precisely the difference drawn” (DR 79). The object, which forcibly encounters the subject, is the occasion for the new kind of difference of the world to present itself. This encounter forces the subject to become sensitive to external things in its world in a new way. An object, which is by definition at a stable point, hides its virtual characteristics or differences around which it is organized. When the object is destabilized its virtual characteristics come to the forefront. However, it can only be destabilized when it comes into relation with something else. The object gives off signs which arise from the virtual differences that are part of it, and these signs force us to respond. We can even learn about the virtual differences through our confrontation with an object. In any case, a transformation results from the

168 confrontation. The transformation is always relational, occurring between two poles or elements: first, the capacity that is opened up for the subject and, second, the difference that comes to be synthesized into a system. For example, a human is not affected by the same range of sound as a dog is. Since humans are incapable of responding to that particular range of sound, that range is unimportant, in a certain sense, for humans. In other words, humans do not “inhabit” the same world as dogs in regard to sound. In addition, subjects produce organs of particular modifications or capacities: ears, eyes, nose. A self is the drawing of many differences. A new system is opened up when a new way of being sensitive or a new capacity is produced. The subject inhabits that world by developing a complex range of responses. For example, visual art is a way of inhabiting the world of sight, for the human subject, while music is a way of inhabiting the world of sound. However, human speech is another way of inhabiting the world of sound. I have said in earlier chapters that for Deleuze we only think when we are forced to think, that is to say, when we encounter another individual, whether that individual is a person or an inanimate object, which forces us to think. However, we must be able to explain what makes it possible for the subject to even be open to such an encounter. Such an explanation is not given by Deleuze, but the one I offer here is consistent with Deleuze’s theory of experience. Obviously the subject must be able to be sensitive in certain ways, otherwise it would not even register the encounter with the other. A capacity and a system of experience are only opened up in relation to an interest of the subject. “Interest” is not a term Deleuze uses, but it seems to me to express this issue well. The interest provides the means by which an Idea is selected. We only go into a situation or an encounter with another out of a need or interest (not out of disinterested

169 inquiry or a pure love of knowledge). In other words, the subject must have something at stake or something to gain from the encounter. This interest, of course, arises from a system of experience that is already in place for the subject. To be clear, an interest does not occur consciously. The subject’s interest arises through virtual points within an already existing system. The term “interest” reflects the fact that every individual is able to encounter another via openings or fractures within an already existing system that is part of that individual’s constitution. (We must recall that a new system can only be opened up when two or more elements come into relation.) We can consider the example of swimming. We only learn to swim, Deleuze says, when we are forced to engage with the water (DR 23, 165). We do not learn by watching the movements of the instructor while standing on the sand without getting in the water. The system of swimming is only possible because a human being has certain physical characteristics or virtual points (a certain mass to area ratio which allows for buoyancy, spatial arrangement of arms and legs, etc.) that make it possible for a person to engage with water. These characteristics are insignificant until the occasion arises in which we must come into relation with something with which we can become engaged. In addition, we only come to know which characteristics are relevant retrospectively, when they come into relation with the virtual points of the other element (water, in our example). We must recall that an Idea for Deleuze is a problem around which a system of experience becomes organized. The Idea of swimming, therefore, includes the relevant virtual characteristics of water and of what is necessary for a particular individual to be a swimmer. Interest, then, simply refers to the virtual characteristics that are available to come into play when one entity encounters another. Even though the new system can only arise in relation to previously

170 existing systems, it occurs as something genuinely new. We cannot know in advance which characteristics or virtual points will become important. In fact we cannot even recognize something as a virtual point until the individual to which it belongs comes into relation with another individual. We can now note how the notions of interest and capacity relate to the notion of perspective discussed above in chapter 3. An individual arises only insofar as it has a perspective on a particular system. Perspective indicates the way in which the world is available to the subject. In other words, there is a world only in relation to an interest or perspective, and there is no world that simply exists independently of that. The interest or point of view arises only by selection, which is partial in principle. What is important to note here is that a subject’s perspective arises passively. Since a capacity occurs only in relation to the way in which the subject is passive, a plane of experience or an organized system only occurs in relation to a subject’s constitution and the way in which it is structured. Its particular capacity (or capacities) allows the subject to know a particular kind of object. It is the subject’s passivity that ensures that the relation between it and the object is a necessary one. A particular kind of object can be known in a particular way because only that kind of object can appear within that particular framework. This parallels Kant’s idea of the necessary submission of object to subject. For Kant, we can only know objects of possible experience. There is only a single framework, which forms all of possible experience. On the other hand, Deleuze extends this idea so that the relation of the objects of a particular plane of experience with the subject of that plane is a necessary one. This holds true of each plane

171 or system of experience. As we said before, the relation between the planes is not an additive one. I said in chapter 1 that Deleuze admired the Kantian critical philosophy for its legislative quality. Since Deleuze claims that he is retaining this quality in his own work, we must see how philosophy is legislative for Deleuze. In fact, his conception of philosophy must be able to overcome the problem that the critical philosophy faced: that of falling under the sway of a totalizing force, which was reason in this case. Deleuze might argue that we can only know what we are capable of knowing. If, indeed, we are capable of knowing something (a particular object, for example), the system of experience to which that object belongs will have already opened up for us. If the system to which the object belongs has not opened up, we are not capable of knowing that object. However, within each particular sphere or plane, the subject is the legislator in that the subject gives the laws by which things can be known. Of course we are not legislators in that we consciously issue laws, but neither are we subject to laws beyond ourselves, like that of Nature or of God. In other words, there is no abstract God’s-eye point of view from which to judge which objects can be known. In fact, there is no view that does not occur from within a particular system. Here again, we should recall that every subject is a perspective, for Deleuze. It is our ability to grasp the capacity and system within which we know objects that allows us to critically evaluate the capacity itself, and not merely the object. It is in this sense that we can understand not only truth (whether we grasp the objects correctly) but meaning as well, which is the ground of truth (the capacity or system itself). Provided that it can grasp the conditions or structure of the system of which it is the subject, the subject is master of the system in which it occurs. To be sure,

172 the subject is not master in the sense that it determines what objects can occur. However, it is the subject’s constitution or structure that legislates. As a result, the subject can then also know what makes its determinations meaningful rather than resorting to the idea of an all-powerful being to justify or guarantee its determinations. 6. THE DELEUZIAN SUBJECT AND TIME There is an essential relation between the subject and time. We have said that Kant claims that the subject comes into relation with itself only in the form of time. Thus the issue of time arises because it allows Kant to account for the self-identity of the subject. However, the key is that for Kant the unity of the I is the ground of the subject’s identity, whereas Deleuze argues that we can only begin with the multiplicity of experience. Deleuze must then show how the subject (the I) arises from this. For Kant, it is a condition of experience that the experience belongs to the subject or, in other words, is mine. In contrast, for Deleuze, experience occurs first and then afterward it becomes mine. There is a temporal aspect to Deleuze’s account in regard to what occurs first and what occurs afterward. Just as Kant explained the subject’s relation to itself (its identity) in terms of time, Deleuze too believes this can only be explained in terms of time. However, time is not subjective for Deleuze. He explains this by saying that experience itself occurs in the form of time. When the subject comes into relation with itself or, in other words, becomes identical with itself, it means that a particular system of experience has been produced and that the subject of that system has been produced. As a result, the discussion of time is relevant both to the discussion of a system of experience and to the discussion of the subject of that system.

173 For Deleuze, new conditions of experience arise only when the subject comes into relation with something external to it. Change cannot come from within the subject alone. This is in contrast with Kant, for whom the conditions of experience belong to the transcendental subject. Thus change could only arise from within the subject. In addition, there could be no new conditions of experience for Kant. For Deleuze, in the event of the opening up of a system of experience, the new conditions of experience produce both the system and the subject of that system. In this sense, then, the conditions are also internal to the new subject that has been produced. A new system can only open up because there is a fracture or gap in the subject. This gap is constituted between the time when the subject grasps the sign that exceeds its empirical experience—at this point, the subject is ruptured—and the time when the new system of experience has been produced and the subject can recognize discrete objects with this system. The subject must come into relation with itself, and this can only occur in the form of time—the relation of what went on before the new conditions arose and after the new system was produced. The subject is in relation with itself precisely at the point at which the new system of experience has been completely produced. In this way, the subject is the drawing of a difference, the difference between the way in which experience was ordered before and how it is ordered after. We can now examine how Deleuze gives his account of time in terms of three syntheses. In order to understand the first synthesis, we must see that each system of experience has its own order of empirical time. The objects or cases that belong to that system occur in that empirical order of time. In other words, objects can only be said to be past, present, or future in relation to one another within the context of a particular

174 system of experience. The subject that belongs to that system and that thinks empirically also functions according to that empirical order of time. The present moment of empirical time for a system and for the subject of that system is the same and is constituted in the first synthesis of time. The second synthesis of time explains why empirical time might appear to have no beginning. Once a system of experience has been produced, it appears to have always already been in place. This temporal characteristic, “always already”, is due to the second synthesis of time. For example, once the system of color has been produced, it appears that objects have always already been distinguishable by color. The second synthesis of time provides the pure or absolute past. The system of color does not have a beginning in the sense that an empirical event like a battle has a beginning. Instead, it has a beginning in the sense that it is the institution of an empirical order of time in which there is a passage of empirical time. However, the empirical order of any system of experience has a beginning, according to Deleuze. The empirical order of time is instituted through transcendental time. It is this transcendental time that Deleuze explains as the third synthesis of time. The third synthesis gives us the difference between the time before a particular system of experience opened up and the time after it has opened up. The new system has its own empirical flow of time. As I have said previously, Deleuze argues that genuine change only occurs in the opening up of a new system of experience. When we examine this in terms of time, we can see that change only occurs in the form of time. Thus the third synthesis of time gives us the form in which a new system opens up. In other words, it accounts for the production of the subject of a new order of experience and hence a new

175 order of empirical time. I will now give a more developed account of each of the three syntheses of time. Deleuze says that the account of time must begin with the synthesis of the present because it is the foundation of time. “It is not that the present is a dimension of time: the present alone exists” (DR 76). Deleuze’s first synthesis of time is essentially taken from Hume’s argument that the connection of elements in space and time is due to the association of ideas. I rely on Keith Faulkner’s explanation of the first and second synthesis.63 According to Deleuze: “A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants” (DR 71). Deleuze’s point here is that we have learned from Hume that the relation between instants or elements is not internal and necessary to the elements themselves, but only emerges afterwards from their association by the mind. Therefore the passage of instants does not by itself give us the passage of time. The first instant must be retained and the second instant must occur in relation to the first, thereby producing a change in relation to the first. Insofar as the first instant is retained, there must be a mind or subject in which the change is produced, or which draws a difference. Deleuze also calls this first synthesis the synthesis of “habit” because it gives rise to the expectation that what is to come, the future, will be like what we have already 63

In his book Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2006) Keith Faulkner argues that Deleuze’s account of the three syntheses must be understood first of all as an attempt to rethink Kant’s three syntheses, apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Kant uses these syntheses to show how we can have temporal representations. In Kant these syntheses occur as the activity of two faculties, the imagination and understanding. Faulkner argues that Deleuze offers his alternative of syntheses that occur passively. Faulkner proposes that we must understand Deleuze’s account primarily through the use he makes of Freud and, therefore, gives a reading of Deleuze’s account of time by working through the concepts Deleuze takes from Freud and the ways in which he makes use of them.

176 experienced. In other words, this synthesis explains what, essentially, habit, on which we rely so much in ordinary life, is. We can also think of the close connection between recognition and habit. Objects must simply be recognized as the “same” in order to have a habitual relation with them. According to Faulkner, when we contract a habit, we go beyond the given.64 When we see something happen over and over–for example, the rising of the sun, we transcend what is given by expecting the future occurrence. We expect the sun to rise tomorrow. It is the anticipation as such that is the futural dimension, and what is anticipated is that this case, or contraction, will continue (DR 72). In addition, the mind can postulate a continuous pattern of risings through time. As Faulkner explains, this must be considered a second order impression, which goes beyond sensation. The duration of time we experience is because of these second order impressions.65 Therefore not only is the living present constituted by the first synthesis, but the past and future are also constituted as two asymmetrical dimensions of that present. “To it [the present] belong both the past and the future: the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction” (DR 70-71). It is here, in the empirical present, that we find the empirical subject, the subject of recognition. In Kantian language we can say that the first synthesis gives us the present moment in the empirical sense, or the connection of actual cases. It gives us the continuity of the actual or empirical. Deleuze goes on to argue that the first synthesis cannot stand alone and requires something else to ground it.

64 65

Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10.

177 He turns to Bergson for his account of the second synthesis of time, which he also calls the synthesis of the pure past or of memory. Bergson’s criticism of Hume was that the association of ideas is unable to account for memory. Our experience does not occur only as present but also as the relation of past and present. (It must be kept in mind that when Deleuze uses the term “past” in relation to the second synthesis, he means it in a transcendental sense. He sometimes uses the term “pure past” to emphasize that he is not using the term “past” in the ordinary sense.) A need in the present calls forth memory. Faulkner emphasizes Bergson’s statement that “it is from the present that the appeal to which memory responds comes, and it is from the sensory-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.”66 We always evaluate our present experience in light of our memory. According to Faulkner, the encounter with the sign, with the sensation that we do not recognize, makes the second synthesis of time conspicuous. In such an encounter, something present is unrecognizable because it fails to resemble the past. The encounter forces us to do something, to think and act, and thereby results in the modification of both the past and the present. Not only can the present be modified based on the past, or memory, but memory can be modified or reinterpreted based on the present as well. The past must have a flexible nature since it changes. Memories must be able to be created and recreated. Therefore the encounter with the sign is possible only because the past as a whole must coexist with the present. “Whereas the passive synthesis of habit constitutes the living present in time and makes the past and the future two asymmetrical elements of that present, the passive synthesis of memory constitutes the pure past in time, and makes the former and the present present (thus the present in reproduction and the future in reflection) two asymmetrical elements 66

Ibid., p. 11.

178 of this past as such” (DR 81). By former present Deleuze means the past, of course, or the present moment that is no longer present, while the present present is the present moment that is still the present (and has not yet become past). Deleuze’s point is that the second synthesis occurs as the negotiation of the past and present. “The transcendental passive synthesis bears upon this pure past from the triple point of view of contemporaneity, coexistence and pre-existence” (DR 82). Briefly, Deleuze’s argument is that each present moment must be contemporaneous with the past it was. In addition, all of the past must coexist with the new present. Finally, the pure element of the past in general must pre-exist the passing present (DR 81-2). In his account of the second synthesis of time, Deleuze is concerned to develop in some detail exactly how the relation between past and present occurs. However, I am only concerned here with the general point that the second synthesis gives us not only the pure past but also the conjoining of elements from different dimensions, past and present. We recall that the synthesis of the present is grounded in the second synthesis. The reason is that every habitual response or action must have once been an encounter with something unrecognizable. However, in ordinary, everyday experience we do recognize sensations and our present does resemble the past. Therefore it can seem as though experience only occurs in the present, with no relation to the past. It is for this reason that the living present seems to stand on its own in Deleuze’s analysis of the first synthesis. Considered from the perspective of the second synthesis, however, Deleuze says that the present occurs as a result of the contraction of the pure past at a certain level (DR 83). Thus the first synthesis, the constitution of the present, becomes reinterpreted through the second synthesis. From this perspective, the synthesis of the present occurs

179 as the surface effect of the second synthesis. “The criminal and saint play out the same past but at different levels” (DR 83). In this quote the criminal and saint are figures of the living present. The point is that each plays out the same Idea-problem, or system of experience, in different ways. We could take the example of the economic Idea-problem of capitalism, in which there are many figures, such as the capitalist mogul and the person who deliberately chooses to not be materialistic. They may appear to be very different types but they can only arise from and inhabit the same economic situation with its constituent elements and relations. Their difference lies in the level at which the system in which they occur is contracted. The Idea-problems serves as the pure past, and each figure of the living present continues the whole life, but at a different level. They play out the same story, the story of capitalism. The Idea-problem of capitalism, or system of capitalism, is contemporaneous with, coexists, and preexists each type of figure that occurs in capitalism. The second synthesis can, in a sense, be understood as giving us the relationship between the transcendental and empirical, which occurs as the temporalizing relation between pure past and living present. The transcendental conditions, or Idea-problem, occurs as the pure past in relation to the present. It is helpful here to use the term virtual instead of transcendental because what we have seen from the analysis above on the pure past is that there is a relation between the virtual and actual that is not there between empirical and transcendental. The actual and virtual have a continuous and ongoing relation, whereas the empirical and transcendental do not. In other words, each actual instance (living present) always has a virtual dimension (pure past), which is its condition. Another way to understand this is that the first synthesis gives us the actual or

180 empirical reality, which has its own sense of continuity, the second gives us the relation of the actual and virtual, and the third gives us the virtual itself. The third synthesis of time, which gives us the pure and empty form of time, shows Deleuze’s view that Bergson’s account requires something more. With his account of the third synthesis, Deleuze must be understood as surpassing Bergson. His point is that the second synthesis requires a further grounding and the third synthesis serves to provide this. It can be understood as giving us the virtual itself, what Deleuze sometimes calls the “first.” The third synthesis is the key to understanding time as the form of experience because it is the ultimate ground of the first and second syntheses. The third synthesis occurs as the caesura, or the break, and the two unequal halves are the “before” and “after.” This is a synthesis precisely because they are not brought together into a seamless whole, but, rather, are held together as distinct from each other. The break or caesura is the form in which all experience occurs. In other words, the break gives rise to experience. The living present (the first synthesis of time) and pure past (the second synthesis) are reinterpreted through the third synthesis of time. This means that the arising of the sign and of new conditions occurs within empirical experience as a disruption of it. Time is the form in which experience occurs. The disruption or break that occurs in empirical experience is a temporal disruption, and Deleuze calls it the “caesura.” In Kant, we said, the transcendental conditions occur outside of time or are atemporal. They are not themselves past, but rather past, present, and future are opened up only in relation to them. In Deleuze this becomes more complex. For him, transcendental conditions are outside of time in relation to the field of experience that they open up. They exist on their own plane, which is atemporal, yet they

181 exist within experience. This is a key difference from Kant, for whom transcendental conditions are atemporal in the sense that they do not exist within experience. This, among other reasons, is why Deleuze replaces the idea of transcendental with that of virtual. If we return to examples used earlier, conditions like the boiling and freezing points of a physical material are fully real, but so long as the material is not taken to those points such that they are actualized, these virtual conditions continue to exist in a way that is atemporal. However, new conditions can arise within experience and within the empirical flow of time. At the moment they occur they disrupt the flow of ordinary, empirical time and disrupt the subject. In other words, since they enter into ordinary empirical experience, conditions for Deleuze are more than simply atemporal in the sense that they are for Kant. Time itself is opened up anew. In regard to the new system that the conditions open up, the empirical flow of time can only occur insofar as time is opened up, that is to say, only in terms of a particular system of experience. In other words, empirical time must always be constituted in relation to a particular system of experience. While it is true that for Kant past, present, and future only occur in relation to the subject, they occur once and for all. For Kant, time is simply given as the form of intuition. Faulkner points out that Kant does not explain how time opens up or is constituted, but that Deleuze must be understood to be addressing this lack.67 The consequence of this difference between them is that while, in Kant, time moves into the subject (time becomes subjective, albeit transcendentally subjective), in Deleuze, in contrast, time itself becomes the subject. The pure form of time, or the caesura, produces both a system of experience and the subject of that system.

67

Ibid., p. 3.

182 Deleuze must be therefore understood as providing a new formulation of time. He argues that traditionally time has been understood as simply the measure of movement. “Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding within it. It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time” (DR 88). His point is that traditionally philosophy only considered time in the empirical sense. Empirical time is indeed cardinal in that it simply measures change or movement. Empirical time serves merely to measure some content, in the sense that we say, for example, that events occur in time. In contrast, however, when experience is opened up as temporal disruption, then time is ordinal. This is a more fundamental notion of time and, in this sense, time is the form of change itself. In its more fundamental sense, time does not merely mark the change or coming-into-being of other things. (Fundamentally, all change is coming-into-existence.) Instead, time is the form by which all change occurs. Deleuze says the caesura is the static form of time. It must be static since “the form of change does not change” (DR 89). Since the caesura is a disruption or a break, it can be described as having two unequal sides, alternatively called past and future and “before” and “after”. However, these are not to be understood as empirical determinations, since only an object can occur empirically before or after something else in a system of experience that has already been constituted. The caesura brings about the division of the “before” and the “after” and, in doing so, it draws them together. The caesura can also be described as an “event”, because the opening up of experience is an event. Again, “event” is to be understood in a transcendental sense rather than an empirical one. The caesura occurs only as the institution of a fundamental inequality or

183 when things come out of balance. The selecting of virtual conditions, or an Idea, can only occur as difference or inequality. If we consider the subject in relation to the opening up of experience, it is helpful to note that Deleuze describes this event of disruption as “a unique and tremendous event,” which he says is like the exploding of the sun, throwing oneself in a volcano, or killing God or the father (DR 89). The transcendental event opens up a new world such that things are not meaningful in the way that they were. We can examine the three components of the caesura, the “before,” the moment of the caesura or, in other words, the present, and the “after.” The first component, the “before” can be understood as the moment before transcendental conditioning occurs. “In effect, there is always a time at which the imagined act is supposed ‘too big for me’” (DR 89). It precedes the event. In one sense, the “before” is the agent of the event because new conditions can only arise from appropriate circumstances. Deleuze uses the figures of Oedipus and Hamlet to characterize the agent. Thus, in the “before,” Deleuze says that Oedipus and Hamlet experience the act they are about to carry out as too big for them. At the point of the caesura (and really, there is no “before” until there is a caesura since these are part of the caesura and do not occur according to empirical time), which Deleuze also calls the metamorphosis, there is a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the self. In contrast to what we said above, in another sense, the “before” is not the agent of the event, and the true agent only arises as the “present” or the moment of the caesura. The “present” is the one who kills God or the father. The agent in this sense only occurs as a double because the agent occurs as a sort of alignment. There was no agent “before” because the subject was unequal to the act (or, rather, it was the subject of the previous

184 system of experience from which these new conditions arose). In other words, the seeds of the opening up of experience are not contained in what comes before because it is genuinely new. The “present” only happens as an abrupt shift in experience or a realignment of experience. There is an abrupt reorganization of experience. In pointing to a doubling Deleuze is attempting to capture that point at which the shift occurs. From an empirical perspective, from the perspective of empirical knowledge, we can only say that what is there before the shift is not what is there after. At the moment of the present, however, the subject becomes equal to the event. There is a kind of doubling because the subject of the “before” is the empirical subject and is not constitutive of the new system of experience. The subject of the new system will itself be constituted. The “after” or the future is the other side that occurs in relation to the caesura. “As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth” (DR 89-90). The one who is destroyed is the agent of the act. “What the self has become equal to is the unequal itself” (DR 91). The one that leads up to the opening up of experience cannot retain its identity. In this way, the self is transformed by the event and is no longer the same subject. This is why Deleuze says that it is as though an other acts through me. Deleuze describes the subject that is left in the end as the “plebian” or “the man without a name” (DR 90, 91). The reason is that when the subject is transformed it is necessarily transformed out of its identification with the group of subjects for whom the

185 world was structured in the way that it was up to that point. In principle the transformed subject is nameless in relation to what had become the ordinary way of thinking or of organizing the world. The transformed subject falls outside of any category that had organized the world. The subject is outside of that world and the group of subjects who belong to that world. It has no place in it and no role to play in it. It should be emphasized that at the moment the caesura occurs there is no subject of experience since the agent of experience is not a subject. The subject only passively undergoes experience. Therefore the subject can never grasp the opening up of experience. Instead, it can only grasp the conditions of experience, and even this retrospectively, not during their occurrence. However, as a result of the transcendental event, a new field of inquiry is established. With the production of the new system of experience, the temporality of that system is also instituted. Thus each system has its own empirical or ordinary time. In chapter 3, I showed how a system of experience is produced through individuation. In a sense the individuals that belong to any particular system of experience have their own temporality, as each system has its own temporality. Thus the individuals of the system have a time characteristic to them. For example, the time of an insect is different from the time of an oak tree. This includes how quickly each develops, what is old age for each, etc. Thus in this last stage we have once again a subject who thinks empirically and recognizes objects, but now in accordance with the new order of experience and according to the temporality of this system. What also returns in this stage is the promise that there will be temporal disruption again and that experience will thereby occur once again.

186 CONCLUSION In this chapter I have shown how Deleuze accounts for the subject. Since the notion of experience is transformed in going from Kant to Deleuze, the notion of the subject is necessarily transformed as well. I have shown that experience for Deleuze occurs in the opening up of a systematic field. In Kant the subject is perfectly aligned with the system of knowledge in that the conditions of this system belong to the subject. In Kant the system of knowledge is absolutely comprehensive and totalizing of what can be experienced, as is the Kantian subject. The result is that the Kantian subject cannot withstand experience in Deleuze’s sense. No new system of experience could open up for the Kantian subject. The key difference is that the subject in Deleuze is open and can be transformed, while the Kantian subject is grounded in unity. The Deleuzian subject can, indeed, register it when something beyond a particular system comes into relation with it. In this way, the subject in Deleuze is able to experience something genuinely new. Although Deleuze maintains certain aspects of the Kantian subject, he is forced to reinterpret them. It continues to be true for Deleuze that experience can only occur for a subject. In other words, experience only occurs insofar as there is a subject of experience or, in other words, a subject that belongs to that system of experience. However, while for Kant the transcendental subject is the condition of experience, so that experience is possible only for a subject, for Deleuze there is no transcendental subject. In a sense, then, there is only an empirical subject. The subject is produced along with a system of experience, and so belongs to that particular system of experience. In this way, Deleuze is able to account for the production of the subject, an account he found lacking in Kant.

187 As shown in chapter 1, Deleuze finds the idea of the internal relation of subject and object to be the great discovery of the critical philosophy. This relation remains central to his own account even while it is transformed. The internal relation of subject and object occurs because both the subject and the objects that belong to a particular system of experience are produced together. This chapter has also shown how Deleuze’s account of the subject requires a thinking of time. Deleuze’s conception of time is equally developed in response to Kant’s notion of time. Since experience can only occur insofar as it is my experience, the self-identity of the subject is essential to the account of experience. For Kant, the subject’s selfidentity is possible only in time since the subject can only be given to itself in time. Deleuze believes Kant’s notion of time is revolutionary in that time becomes internal to the subject. However, Deleuze further revolutionizes the notion of time insofar as time comes to be the true agent of experience. Deleuze argues that there are two kinds of time: ordinary, empirical time, which is the time we measure with a clock and a more fundamental sort of time. The ordinary kind of time marks change within a particular system of experience and must be produced, just as the system itself must be produced. In fact the opening up of a system is only possible because experience can be temporally differentiated. For Deleuze, the human subject and every other kind of subject merely undergoes experience. A new system of experience is opened up for a subject only because the subject becomes aligned with the temporal disruption that occurs in experience. These temporal relations have a necessary relation to the subject. Thus these temporal relations do not have an existence independent of the subject (as the empiricist

188 might argue). However, they are not subjective, in the sense that an idealist would argue. Instead, they are produced along with the subject.

189 CONCLUSION The central significance of Deleuze’s philosophy lies in his articulation of a post-critical metaphysics. This dissertation has clarified his project for a wider audience than Deleuze currently has by situating this metaphysics in relation to his conception of experience and showing that the latter is developed in and through a criticism and transformation of Kant’s notion of experience. I have shown that Deleuze’s critical relation to Kant does not simply make an epistemological claim regarding the possibility of objects of experience. It makes a metaphysical claim regarding the conditions for the reality of objects: the transcendental structures of experience as such. Deleuze’s philosophy aims to show why things are what they are. His treatment of this question presents a postcritical metaphysics that he calls the “sphere of immanence.” Thus Deleuze’s metaphysics is not simply a return to metaphysics as it was conceived prior to Kant. Since I have argued at length how Deleuze transforms Kant’s transcendental philosophy, I will conclude with a review of the outcome of this transformation: the import of Deleuze’s philosophy itself. I have drawn out the sphere of immanence by articulating Deleuze’s alteration of Kant’s notion of the transcendental. Deleuze takes up the project of transcendental conditioning because his project is to find the conditions for the real things. Unlike Kant, Deleuze is not inquiring after the conditions for possible objects. In addition to this difference from Kant, since the conditions arise from and occur within experience for Deleuze, they cannot properly be said to be transcendental in the way that Kant uses the term. To capture these differences from Kant’s notion of transcendental, Deleuze devises

190 the notion of the virtual. The transcendental, or virtual, structures of experience are the structures for the being or reality of objects. In articulating this sphere of immanence, Deleuze also surpasses the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal in Kant. When Kant claims that there are no objects independent of the subject, this refers only to objects of knowledge. There are also noumena, for Kant, which cannot be known but must be presumed to exist. In contrast, for Deleuze, there are no existing objects that are independent of their relation to the subject. In other words, when something achieves the coherence that would make it an object, it can in principle be known and is thus in relation with a subject. Thus there can be no noumena for Deleuze. The phenomenal is now all-encompassing. Everything belongs to the sphere of immanence. In addition, Deleuze transforms Kant’s notion of the transcendent. For Kant, God, soul, and world cannot be objects of knowledge since they cannot come into relation with the subject. However, the term transcendent comes to have only an epistemological sense for Deleuze, not a metaphysical sense. There is nothing transcendent, in the metaphysical sense, for Deleuze, for there is nothing outside the sphere of immanence. “Transcendent” then refers to concepts that Deleuze argues are illegitimate. Thus, God, soul and world are all illegitimate concepts, in this sense, for Deleuze because they would occur outside the sphere of immanence. Deleuze also excludes as transcendent the subject and object, in the way that these terms are traditionally used, because these concepts imply an identity that precedes change. Ordinarily, they refer to the elements that form the foundation of experience: Experience is said to occur in the relation of subject and object. According to this view, if subject and object do change, this change is

191 considered secondary to the identity they possess. Deleuze considers this kind of identity to be a fiction. He does use the terms subject and object, but for him subject and object arise from more primary elements, and cannot be the foundational elements of experience. As a result, the subject and object can never be closed off to change: in other words, change or becoming is primary, while stability and identity arise secondarily. Experience does not occur in the relation of subject and object but in the relation between transcendental or virtual events. Virtual events are thus the foundation of experience. The sphere of immanence is entirely a sphere of becoming and change. Only what is immanent is real and only what is immanent can be known. What is transcendent must be relegated to the realm of fiction, according to Deleuze. We have found, therefore, that the subject of metaphysics is virtual events. For Deleuze, metaphysics is the study of these events and of the way in which they give rise to all things—to the objects we encounter in our everyday experience, and to human persons. I will return briefly to the relation of virtual events to the human person below. As regards the subject of metaphysics, it is virtual events that make up the transcendental structure of experience. This dissertation has shown virtual events to be the critical events that characterize a particular object in regard to the ways in which it can change and be transformed. These events serve to explain in the most adequate way what something is and why it is what it is. To be clear, Deleuze considers virtual events to be real. Virtual events do not exist in time and space but, instead, they serve to account for objects that occur in space and time. We can conceive of but cannot know or experience virtual events, given that they are the condition of what we know.

192 As we have said, Deleuze’s post-critical metaphysics, the sphere of immanence, is a sphere of becoming. This is because it is grounded in a conception of difference. Difference is the foundation of all that is real, not a notion that grounds becoming apart from it. It must be understood primarily as becoming. To use Kantian language, this is transcendental difference not empirical difference. It is not the difference between two entities whose identities are prior to their relation, but, rather, it is the movement of becoming other. In addition, difference in this sense cannot be experienced since it is the condition of what we experience. Transcendental difference takes the form of virtual events, which are not entities but “slices” of becoming. In this way, even something stable has becoming as its foundation in the form of virtual events. In Deleuze’s conception the thing is always, in principle, open to change and transformation. His metaphysics is therefore a dynamic one in which movement and becoming are the conditions of everything that is seemingly static and unchanging. For these reasons, we may call his post-critical metaphysics a metaphysics of difference. An important implication of a conception of metaphysics in which difference is more fundamental than identity is that it is consistent with pluralities of human identity. To understand what it means to be human requires us to understand the structure of becoming that forms the foundation of the human. A person comes to have a particular identity only when a system of experience has opened up for her. Therefore her identity occurs only in relation to a particular system. In addition, every person can be transformed so that they can take up and inhabit new identities. Thus the identity of a person is not something fixed and static. This does not mean, however, that someone can take up a new identity within the same system—for example, become a black woman

193 when she was a Hispanic woman within the system of racial identity. Instead, she can find that she plays a role or takes on a new identity in a new system, which would occur for her alongside the role of a black woman. The identity of being a black woman would remain unchanged for this woman, so long as the system of racial identity continues to subsist. For Deleuze, what is fundamental to every person is the power to be transformed. Although this dissertation has not concerned itself with the question of personal identity, it is Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference that has significant implications in the ethical and political sphere. The overall aim of this dissertation has been to show that Deleuze offers a new conception of thinking. He adopts from Kant the idea that philosophy has a critical task. When Deleuze finds that Kant fails to conceive of philosophy as truly critical, he rectifies the problem. In Deleuze thinking is not something we naturally do. Rather, it is our inertia that is natural. In other words, most of the time, people are not thinking, according to Deleuze, but just recognizing what is around them. When our relationship to objects, institutions, people, etc. is to simply recognize them, we only understand them according to the framework of meaning that is already in place. With this kind of mental cognition we merely register how things happen to be. Thus, the act of recognition occurs out of inertia, and thinking occurs only when we are forced to come out of our inertia. Deleuze’s view is that the act of thinking is profoundly creative and not merely the continuation, clarification, or support of the framework by which we make sense of the world. In this way he re-conceives what it is to do philosophy. The philosopher does not think in accordance with the framework by which the world is organized, but, rather, against established presuppositions. In this sense, philosophy, as Deleuze says, serves no

194 established power.68 Some person or institution maintains its influence and power so long as the current arrangement of people, wealth, resources, etc. remains as it is. For Deleuze, the work of philosophy is always to think against the time in which one lives, to think against the prejudices that have become established in that time. Thus philosophy’s task is to be sensitive to new systems of experience that can be opened up. In addition, philosophy is creative because it creates new concepts or, in other words, tries to think that which falls outside of established values by means of concepts. To conclude, this study of Deleuze’s transformation of Kant has not only shown the relation of one twentieth-century philosopher to the major European philosopher crossing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has shown how Deleuze raises questions on the reality of objects, on what relation our thought has with these objects, and on the question of the role of philosophy, which are relevant to every time period. It has been my purpose to show that Deleuze has revitalized these questions and opened up new directions in our inquiry into them.

68

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 106.

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199 VITA Graduate School Southern Illinois University Anupa Batra

Date of Birth: February 24, 1973

1215 Seneca St., Apt. 201, Seattle, Washington 98101

[email protected] Bradley University Bachelor of Science, Biology-Premed, May 1994 University of Massachusetts, Amherst Master of Education, Eduction, July 1996 Boston College Master of Arts, Philosophy, May 1999 Special Honors and Awards: Pass with Distinction, Master’s Comprehensive Exam, Boston College, 1998 Morris Doctoral Fellowship, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 1999-2002 Graduate Assistantship, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2002-2004 Dissertation Title: Experience, Time, and the Subject: Deleuze’s Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy Major Professor: Dr. Sara Beardsworth