In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

152 9 Desiring-Production and Spirit: On Anti-Oedipus and German Idealism John Russon In many respects, Anti-Oedipus, the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is a typical book of German idealist philosophy. Like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Deleuze and Guattari model their work in Anti-Oedipus on the form of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then use the form of Kant’s own project to develop a critique of Kant. I will argue that the critique of Kant in Anti-Oedipus is, in general, successful, but that there remains a fundamental way in which the “schizoanalysis ” that Deleuze and Guattari offer is ultimately unsatisfactory. Specifically , I will argue that Deleuze and Guattari presume the phenomenon of “mineness” without being able to account for it adequately. I will argue in particular that our experience of ourselves must be given to us via an experience of other autonomous self-consciousnesses. At this point, we will see that Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, has anticipated this problem and that it is his account of the dialectic of recognition that satisfactorily carries forward the story of desire laid out in Anti-Oedipus. Kant on Understanding and Reason Kant’s critical project in the Critique of Pure Reason serves two purposes. On the one hand, Kant secures the possibility of objectivity within experience . On the other hand, Kant rules out the possibility of an unconditioned knowledge of things-in-themselves. These two results are both rooted in the same aspect of experience, namely, the categories of subjective synthesis that provide unity to experience. Kant’s epistemology is a kind of phenomenology. Kant argues back- 153 D E S I R I N G - P R O D U C T I O N A N D S P I R I T ward from meanings with which we do in fact engage to the epistemic conditions that must be in place in order for such experiences of meaning to be possible. Kant ends up discovering that there are three essential cognitive powers that must be in play in order for us to have experiences of objects. These are the powers of sensibility, imagination, and understanding , and these powers make meaning possible through effecting, respectively, the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, the synthesis of reproduction in imagination, and the synthesis of recognition in a concept .1 I will discuss each of these briefly. Roughly, Kant’s point is as follows. We must be active in our openness to experience or there would be, between ourselves and our world, no encounter, no being-aware-of. It is only because we pose a specific question to our world—because we look from within a particular framework —that we can experience a world in answer. Experience must begin with a reception, with a being-struck, an intuition. This intuition, however , can only happen to a being that is open to being struck. It is only because we ask, effectively, “Is there something striking us?” that we can be aware of anything. Space and time are the forms of our openness to being struck—we ask, “where?” and “when?” and it is only because these fields of space and time are in principle meaningful to us that we are capable of discerning an impact, capable of intuition, sensitive.2 Thus even at our most passive, we are active—being struck/affected requires a capacity to be affected. Thus, “to sense” is a power, a function of enabling meaning, specifically in the form of intuition. Furthermore, however, our experience has a lasting character and a coherent character. We are not just struck and then struck again and then struck again with no encounter between these experiences. Rather, we experience these intuitions as coordinated with each other, spatially and temporally, in such a way that we experience the significance of one in relation to the experience of another—this one is before that, beside that. This again requires of us that we have an ability. We must be able still to be engaged with the significance of an intuition even as we are no longer —or not yet—actively intuiting it. This power—the power to engage with an absent intuition as if it were present—is the power of imagination .3 An experience of coordination, in which we navigate significances that are not immediately present, rests upon our imaginative power. “To imagine”—the ability to present the absent—is the second constitutive power...

Share