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254 Thinking of Deleuze today and of his encounters with philosophers of old brings to mind first and foremost his sustained dialogue with Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza. His early work on Hume is practically overlooked, while his fruitful discussion of Leibniz is thought to be too demanding and, therefore, capable of being visited only by the hardiest of his commentators . When it comes to his writings on Kant, with rare exceptions we seem to do what Deleuze warned us against—we take what he said for what he actually did. And, since what Deleuze said about his texts on Kant is that he wrote them with the intention of showing how the system of a “frère-enemi” works, we rarely place these early texts in the context of his others, missing therefore the challenge and the surprise of the realization that Deleuze’s entire work seems to be deployed with the specter of Kant, the brother enemy, peering over Deleuze’s shoulder. Kant becoming Deleuze as Deleuze becomes Kant or rather both of them becoming that which cannot be either one of them—isn’t this the sort of unnatural nuptials that Deleuze stages for the sake of a becoming which would not be the mere preamble to being? This essay has three parts: I begin with a straightforward report on Deleuze’s reading of Kant. I then trace the slidings and the twistings to which Deleuze subjects the Kantian organic body—slidings and twistings which allow him to provide his own work with an architectonic strikingly similar to Kant’s own, with one important exception: This architectonic is now placed in the service of assembling the Deleuzean corpus without organs . The third part of this essay builds upon the first and second parts in an effort to display and elucidate Deleuze’s reasons for his (minor) deconstruction of the history of philosophy and his substitution of it with what he calls “philosophy’s own becoming.” The Art of Begetting Monsters: The Unnatural Nuptials of Deleuze and Kant Constantin Boundas Deleuze Reads Kant Deleuze published a small book on Kant in 1963, under the title La Philosophie critique de Kant: Doctrine des facultés, which did not become available to English readers until 1984.1 In the same year, 1963, he also published in Revue d’Esthétique an important essay, L’Idée de genése dans l’esthétique de Kant, which has only recently become available in English.2 Since then, there have been scattered references to his encounter with Kant (for example, in his letter to Michel Cressole3 and in the 1988 special issue of the Magazine Littéraire dedicated to his work);4 frequent and important rereadings of Kant in Difference and Repetition,5 The Logic of Sense,6 and What is Philosophy ?;7 the strikingly simple and direct introduction to the English translation of his 1963 book on Kant under the title “On Four Poetic Formulas which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy” (KCP vii–xiii); and the 1978 Seminar on Kant held at the Université VIII of Paris, in Saint Dennis, where he taught until his retirement.8 In the early references, one can detect a certain polemic disposition. A passage from his letter to Cressole is typical of this kind of disposition, and I offer it here, in its entirety, for the significance it will assume in our discussion of Deleuze’s complex position in the face of the history of philosophy . My book on Kant is different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy and tried to show how his system works, its various cogs—the tribunal of reason, the legitimate exercise of the faculties (our subjection to these made all the more hypocritical by our being characterized as legislators). But I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) as immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet a monstrous one. It was really important that it be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him say. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.9 This passage reads as if the shiftings, slippings...

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