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First Moment of the Encounter: The Sentiendum Imperceptible Encounters Given Deleuze’s account of recognition and good and common sense, the criteria he must meet to avoid these assumptions are daunting. With respect to recognition, Deleuze must avoid assuming a cross-modal or harmonious exercise of the faculties. With respect to common sense, Deleuze must avoid assuming the unspecified form of the subject and the object. Finally, with respect to good sense, he must avoid assuming an empirical distribution of selves and objects based on the living present or the synthesis of habitus. It is for this reason that Deleuze opposes a violence of the senses to that of recognition and a discordant exercise of the faculties to that of the harmonious use of the faculties. Later we shall determine just how it is possible to distinguish among the faculties, but for the moment I will focus here on this discordant use of the faculties. This violence or force which forces us to think has the triple role of calling into question the conservative structure of the living present or habitus, of introducing a difference into thought, and of engendering thought within thought. For thought is essentially rare and is incapable of engendering itself. If thought must be engendered within thought, this is because the subject, formed from syntheses of habitus, is powerless to begin thinking on its own because the subject always only recognizes itself in its attempt to think. For this reason it is necessary that something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived. The sensible is referred to an object which may not only be experienced other than by 4 92 93 F i r s t M o m e n t o f t h e E n c o u n t e r sense, but may itself be attained by other faculties. It therefore presupposes the exercise of the other faculties in a common sense. The object of encounter, on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense . . . It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible [insensible]. It is imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition —in other words, from the point of view of an empirical exercise of the senses in which sensibility grasps only that which also could be grasped by other faculties, and is related with the context of a common sense to an object which also must be apprehended by other faculties. (DR 139–40) Transcendental empiricism is an empiricism insofar as it must rely on the force of an encounter to engender thought. Here it is not the object of the encounter that is important. The aim is not to represent the object, or to draw a sensation from the object. Rather, the object of the encounter is the occasion of thought, but not that which is to be thought. It is in this respect that transcendental empiricism diverges from classical empiricism in that its object is that which is, in a certain sense, imperceptible. In order to understand why this is so, we must recall that qualities are produced through the first synthesis of time or habitus. Insofar as the notion of a quality implies homogeneity, identity, sameness, and insofar as time without synthesis implies nothing but an ever-flowing flux of differences, quality must be a product of the first synthesis of time. If this is the case, then it is because the concept of quality involves identity, an individuation, which requires a leap beyond the given in duration. To think quality is to think the one that insists in the many. It is not to think this red here, but redness as a common quality of many red thises. In contrast to...

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