[PDF][PDF] Deleuze and post-Kantian thought: method, ideas and aesthetics

C Lundy, D Voss - 2015 - irep.ntu.ac.uk
C Lundy, D Voss
2015irep.ntu.ac.uk
Without doubt, Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism constituted a major event in
philosophy–one that continues to be actualised in multifarious ways today. It has provided
the terms of reference and inspiration for several philosophical traditions, most notably
German Idealism and Romanticism, but also various currents across the spectrum of
contemporary philosophy. 1 In the work of Gilles Deleuze, Kant's presence is pronounced.
Despite Deleuze's famous remark that his book on Kant's critical philosophy was intended …
Without doubt, Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism constituted a major event in philosophy–one that continues to be actualised in multifarious ways today. It has provided the terms of reference and inspiration for several philosophical traditions, most notably German Idealism and Romanticism, but also various currents across the spectrum of contemporary philosophy. 1 In the work of Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s presence is pronounced. Despite Deleuze’s famous remark that his book on Kant’s critical philosophy was intended ‘as a book about an enemy’, 2 this proclaimed hostility towards Kant rather proves that he regarded Kant as an important ‘intercessor’3 whose concepts could be made to work in a new problematic setting. In fact, Deleuze expresses a kind of involuntary admiration for Kant:‘there functions a sort of thinking machine, a sort of creation of concepts that is absolutely frightening’. 4 And in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze compares Kant to ‘a great explorer’since he is ‘the one who discovers the prodigious domain of the transcendental’. 5 Kant’s transcendental philosophy meant turning away from metaphysical projects of grounding philosophy on transcendent principles and values; it replaces the concept of essence with the concept of sense or appearance and the search for the conditions of appearances;
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