Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence

Preface

Preface This is a book on Deleuze. In particular, it is a book on Deleuze’s metaphysics which makes no reference to his ethics, politics, or aesthetics. It is not a book on Deleuze and Guattari. Nor is it a book on Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, or Bergson. I do not seek to demonstrate that Deleuze is really a Bergsonian vitalist in disguise. Nor do I seek to show how Deleuze is really a thinker of active and passive forces. I do not, above all, seek to make any comment on Deleuze’s collaborative works with Guattari and how these might represent departures or continuations of his earlier work. In fact, in order to adequately engage in such a project it would first be necessary to do something similar to what I am attempting here. Rather, the present volume seeks to speak simply and in an informed way about what Deleuze means by “transcendental empiricism” in his two early masterpieces Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. In what follows I seek to demonstrate that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism attempts to overcome the opposition between concepts and intuitions, noesis and aisthesis, that has characterized most of the history of philosophy and which arises from the assumption of a finite subject whose receptivity is conceived of as passive. In executing this project I have also sought to determine how Deleuze is able to avoid falling into criticisms of being a speculative dogmatist and how the subject must be rethought in its relationship to being. Contrary, then, to the somewhat standard picture of Deleuze, which treats his ontology as an empiricism, I have sought to present a hyper-rationalist version of his thought, contextualizing it in terms of debates that surround classical rationalism but also German idealism as exemplified in the figures of Kant and Salomon Maïmon. This has not been out of a desire to present yet another “monstrous” version of Deleuze, but because the problematics surrounding German idealism and rationalism struck me as closest to those governing Deleuze’s project of a transcendental empiricism and seemed to best explain his engagement with differential calculus that is so often ignored in treatments of Deleuze’s thought. In short, if Deleuze is able to depart from the philosophy of representation characterized by the primacy of the concept, then this is because he discovers ix intelligibility in the aesthetic itself, in the very fabric of the given, in the form of the differentials of perception. Deleuze does not so much give us a way of mediating the relation between the universal and the particular, but dispenses with the problem altogether. In this connection , I am able to provide a justification of his project that need make no reference to a politics or ethics based on a preference for difference over identity. Deleuze’s ethics and politics follow—rightly—from his ontology, not the reverse. Deleuze thinks of himself as having solved a very traditional and central problem in the history of philosophy and proceeds to draw the consequences of this solution. I leave it to my readers to decide whether emphasizing Deleuze’s debt to thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Maïmon does not prove more illuminating to his text than a discussion of his thought that relies heavily on his debt to English empiricism. It might seem strange to emphasize that this is a book on Deleuze when this can be clearly discerned from the very title of the book. However , given the standard image of Deleuze, it is imperative that I do so. Too often it is assumed that the names “Deleuze” and “Deleuze and Guattari” are identical and can be used interchangeably.1 The question of whether or not significant transformations take place in the encounter of these two individuals is not even raised. This constitutes a betrayal of the singularity of Deleuze’s thought as well as that of Deleuze and Guattari. Moreover, Deleuze insists that continuous multiplicities change in kind when divided. We might claim equally that they change in kind when new dimensions are added to them. To simply equate “Deleuze” with “Deleuze and Guattari” is to ignore this fundamental principle belonging to a logic of multiplicities. Unable to adequately deal with such complex issues in the space of a single essay, I thus opted to restrict myself to Deleuze’s thought. By contrast, as a rejoinder one might object to treating the name of Deleuze as a unity, pointing out that the various...