Romantic Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze is regularly inscribed in a Kantian and post-Kantian lineage: Daniel Smith, for example, acknowledges the pivotal role of Salomon Maimon for Deleuze and even pits him as a twentieth-century Kant (2012b, particularly 65-9; 2012a, 107; 2020, 35);¹ Marc Rölli, too, pushes the Kantian reading and Daniela Voss further elaborates on the Kant-Maimon-nexus (Rölli 2003 and 2016; Voss 2013a and 2013b); and Levi Bryant, Christian Kerslake, and Henry Somers-Hall all read Deleuze as a post-Kantian philosopher, whether primarily in conversation with Kant (Bryant 2008; Kerslake 2009) or Hegel (Somers-Hall 2012). It is no surprise, then, that in 2015 Craig Lundy and Voss devoted an entire collection of essays to Deleuze's indebtedness to the post-Kantians. But while they are happy to point out a number of "points of resonance" between Deleuze's thought and that of nineteenth-century German philosophy in their introduction to the volume, they maintain that Deleuze is "certainly not a post-Kantian thinker in the manner of German Idealism and Romanticism" (Lundy and Voss 2015, 4). Similarly, Voss vehemently insists on "what radically differentiates Deleuze" from his nineteenth-century predecessors in her monograph (Voss 2013a, 11). Indeed, such insistence is standard practice in Deleuze scholarship: That Deleuze draws on and grapples with problems Kant and the post-Kantians bequeathed to philosophy without being a full-fledged idealist let alone romantic is a widely shared sentiment among Deleuze scholars. Joshua Ramey and Kerslake are two of the very few who explicitly acknowledge the "romantic dimensions" of Deleuze's thought, even if only in passing (Ramey 2012, 221; Kerslake 2007, 119; Kerslake 2009, 10, 21). And while John Sellars suggested that Deleuze might be "continu[ing] the Romantic project" (1999, 23) already as early as 1999, he also clarified that this only holds true to the extent that Deleuze turns to the Stoics to do so—the essay's ultimate interest is in Deleuze's stoicism rather than his romanticism. To the best of my knowledge, Matija Jelača is alone in explicitly pressing a decidedly romantic reading of Deleuze: "Deleuze's critique of discursive reason," he writes, "and his appeal to intuitive knowledge, on the one hand, coupled with the strong alliance he has forged with art and aesthetics, on the other, reveal him as a direct successor to the philosophical legacy of early Romanticism" (Jelača 2014, 94). This article takes up Jelača's characterization of Deleuze and places him squarely in the romantic tradition.

Here is a rough sketch of this tradition: The romantics synthesized Platonic idealism with Spinozist monism and expressionism, and advocated the priority of intuitive over discursive reason. Following Plato, the romantics posited a realm of real ideas. With Spinoza, they immanentized this realm so that ideas became this-worldly expressive matrices rather than otherworldly blueprints—a conceptualization that Iain Hamilton Grant aptly summarizes as "a one-world physics capable of the Idea" (2008, xi). Crucially, these re-ontologized ideas were not accessible by means of discursive reason—the romantics were very much Kantians in this respect. For the romantics, rather than discursive, the royal road of access was fundamentally aesthetic. "Intellectual intuition" is their name for this kind of aesthetic access. F. W. J. Schelling famously maintained that "the aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition become objective" (Schelling 1978, 229) and Friedrich Schlegel quipped that "intellectual intuition is the categorical imperative of theory" (Schlegel 1967, Athenaeum Fragment 76, 176/170; translation modified).² The doctrine of intellectual intuition is thus at the heart of the romantic project.

Deleuze follows the romantics in his own blend of Platonism and Spinozism, and just as for the romantics, for him, too, aesthetics becomes "the apodictic discipline" (Deleuze 2004c, 68). In this vein, one might even maintain that Deleuze's repeated assertions that his books are to be read like novels (Deleuze 2004c, xix; 2004d, x) and his invitation, as Robert Hurley suggests, to "read with a different attitude," namely "the way one attends to poetry" (Hurley 1988, iii), are made in the spirit of romanticism and Schlegel's call for a...