Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  The work of art is thus a synthetic unity. But what is the nature of this unity, if the heterogeneous elements it synthesizes have no other relation to each other than sheer difference? The elements brought together by the work of art cannot be said to be fragments of a lost unity or shattered totality; nor can the parts be said to form or prefigure the unity of the work through the course of a logical or dialectical development or an organic evolution. Rather than functioning as their totalizing or unifying principle, the work of art can only be understood as the effect of the multiplicity of the disconnected parts. The work of art produces a unity, but this product is simply a new part that is added alongside the other parts. The artwork neither unifies nor totalizes these parts, but it has an effect on them because it establishes syntheses between elements that in themselves do not communicate, and that retain all their difference in their own dimensions. Art establishes “transversals” between the elements of multiplicities, but without ever reducing their difference to a form of identity or gathering up the multiplicity into a totality. The work of art, as a compound of sensations, is not a unification or totalization of differences, but rather the production of a new difference, and “style” in art always begins with the synthetic relations between heterogeneous differences.42

  Deleuze's aesthetic theory is not a theory of reception, an analytic of the spectator's judgments of a work of art, but a theory of aesthetics written from the point of view of creation. Its guiding question is: What are the conditions for the production of the new? In light of this question, our aim has been to show how Deleuze's philosophy of “difference” overcomes the duality with which aesthetics has been encumbered since Kant. On the one hand, breaking with the model of recognition and common sense, and the image of thought from which they are derived, Deleuze locates the element of sensation, not in a recognizable object but in an encountered sign. The sign constipates the limit-object of sensibility, an intensive product of differential relations; it is intensity, and not the a priori forms of space and time, that constitutes the condition of real, and not merely possible, experience. On the other hand, these genetic principles of sensibility are at the same time the principles of composition of the work of art. The artist uses these intensive syntheses to produce a bloc of sensations, and in turn it is the work of art itself that reveals the nature of these syntheses. In this way, Deleuze's logic of sensation reunites the two dissociated halves of aesthetics: the theory of forms of experience (as “the being of the sensible”) and the work of art as experimentation (as “a pure being of sensation”). “The work of art quits the domain of representation in order to become “experience,” transcendental empiricism or the science of the sensible” (DR 56). If Deleuze's various writings on art are, as he says, “philosophy, nothing but philosophy,” it is precisely because they constitute explorations of, and experimentations within, this transcendental domain of sensibility.

  ESSAY 7

  Dialectics:

  Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas

  O

  ne of Deleuze's primary aims in Difference and Repetition is to present a new theory of Ideas (dialectics) in which Ideas are conceived of as both immanent and differential. What I would like to examine in this essay is the relation between Deleuze's theory of Ideas and the theme of immanence, particularly with regard to the theory of Ideas found in Kant's three critiques.1 In using the term “Idea,” Deleuze is not referring to the common-sense use of the term, or the use to which empiricists like Hume or Locke put it, for whom the word “idea” refers primarily to mental representations. Rather, Deleuze is referring to the concept of the Idea that was first proposed by Plato, and then modified by Kant and Hegel. Plato, Kant, and Hegel are the three great figures in the history of the theory of Ideas, for whom Ideas are as much ontological as epistemological. Deleuze's name can now be added to that list, perhaps, since he has modified the theory of Ideas in a profound and essential manner.

  I will focus on Deleuze's relation to Kant rather than Plato or Hegel, since Deleuze tends to index his own theory of Ideas primarily on Kant. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, Deleuze's critique of Plato's theory of Ideas largely functions as a propaedeutic to his reading of Kant. For Deleuze, Plato created the concept of the Idea in order to provide a criterion to distinguish or “select” between things and their simulacra—for instance, between Socrates (the true philosopher) and the sophists (the simulacral counterfeits). Deleuze criticizes Plato for assigning Ideas a transcendent status, and he thus takes up Plato's project anew in order to rejuvenate it; Ideas, he argues, must be made immanent, and therefore differential. Yet this was already Kant's project; in the fascinating text at the opening of the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant criticizes Plato for assigning to Ideas a “transcendent object,” while at the same time justifying his own appropriation of the Platonic concept of Ideas and giving them a new status.2 On the other hand, if Plato functions as a precursor to Kant with regard to the theory of Ideas, Hegel functions as a rival successor. Despite his reputation, Deleuze is not “against the dialectic.” Although this phrase appears as a chapter title in Nietzsche and Philosophy, being against the dialectic in this book more or less means being against Hegel's particular conception of the dialectic. The crucial chapter in Nietzsche and Philosophy is its central chapter, which is entitled, precisely, “Critique,” indicating that the central focus of the book is Nietzsche's own position within the post-Kantian heritage. Following Kant, both Hegel and Deleuze attempted to create immanent conceptions of the dialectic; but for Hegel's use of contradiction and negation, Deleuze will substitute—as he puts it in his early writings—an appeal to difference and affirmation.3 Deleuze is thus both close to and distant from Hegel: close, in that their projects are similar (developing a post-Kantian dialectic); but distant, in that they pursue this project in divergent manners.

  Although Deleuze's early books are explicitly anti-Hegelian, the manifest anti-Hegelianism of Deleuze's early philosophical writings is sustained by a much deeper engagement with Kant. Following the work of Maimon, among others, the post-Kantians such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel developed Kant's thought in a direction that still found its ground in a principle of identity (Hegel's appeal to the principle of non-contradiction). The strategy of Deleuze's early work was to return to Kant himself, and take up again the problems that generated the post-Kantian tradition, but to develop solutions to those problems that were very different from the solutions that led to Hegel. In his attempt to develop a new theory of Ideas, and a new conception of dialectics, Deleuze would ultimately substitute for the “major” tradition of post-Kantian philosophy—Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—his own “minor” tradition comprised of Maimon, Nietzsche, and Bergson.

  What one finds in Deleuze's philosophy is not a rejection of dialectics, but rather a new concept of the dialectic that breaks with previous conceptions. Aristotle defined dialectics as the art of posing problems as the subject of a syllogism, while analytics gives us the means of resolving the problem by leading the syllogism to its necessary conclusion. Dialectics in general thus concerns the nature of problems, and its concept changes with the notion of the problematic that is associated with it. (Difference and Repetition was originally intended to be a thesis on “the Idea of the problem.”)4 The Socratic and Platonic dialectics have their source in a particular type of problem or form of question: the “What is …?” question. Kant himself, in turn, would later define dialectical Ideas as “problems without solution.”5 But what was missed in these earlier characterizations of the dialectic, Deleuze argues, was the internal or immanent character of the problem as such, “the imperative internal element which decides in the first place its truth or falsity and measures its internal genetic power, that is, the very object of the dialectic or combinatory, the “differential.”6 In what follows, I would like to examine Deleuze's theory of Ideas (as immanent and differential), in a somewhat oblique manner, by comparing it to the theory of Ideas dev
eloped by Kant in his three critiques. From the viewpoint of the theory of Ideas, Difference and Repetition can be read as Deleuze's Critique of Pure Reason, just as Anti-Oedipus can be read as his Critique of Practical Reason (the theory of desire). If the theory of Ideas can be seen as the thread that unites Kant's critical project, Deleuze's own differential and immanent theory of Ideas (the plane of immanence) can similarly be seen as the “rhizome” that gathers together (but does not totalize) the diverse strands of Deleuze's own philosophical project.

  IDEAS IN THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

  Let us begin with the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first critique, Kant distinguishes between three types of concepts: empirical concepts, a priori concepts or categories, and Ideas. Empirical concepts are concepts like “white” and “lily” that give us genuine knowledge. In a judgment of knowledge, such concepts are applied to a multiplicity (or manifold) of sensations; through the imagination I synthesize these perceptions, and in applying a concept to them, I can recognize the object before me (“So it's a white lily”). But Kant also identifies a second type of concept, which are a priori concepts or what Kant, following Aristotle, calls “categories.” Categories are concepts that are applicable, not just to empirical objects such as tables and roses, but to all objects of possible experience. Neither the concept “white” nor the concept “flowers” is a category, since not every object is white, and not all white objects are lilies. But the concept of “cause” is a category, because I cannot conceive of an object that does not have a cause. If an angel were suddenly to appear and hover in the center of a room, our first question would be, “Where did that come from?” since it is part of our concept of any object whatsoever to have been caused by something else. Categories are thus a priori concepts that are applicable to every object of any possible experience. Indeed, Kant's notion of “possible experience” is derived from his notion of the category: it is the categories that define the domain of possible experience.

  Finally, there is a third type of concept in the Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant calls “Ideas” (in a modified Platonic sense). An Idea is the concept of an object that goes beyond or transcends any possible experience. There are various kinds of transcendent concepts: for instance, anytime we speak of something “pure” or “absolute”—for example, the “pure gift” in Derrida, or “absolute zero” in physics, or even (in Kant's example) “pure earth, pure water, pure air”—we are outside the realm of possible experience, since experience presents us with impure mixtures and non-absolutes.7 Although we can think such objects, we can never know them—since, for Kant, knowledge requires the application of a concept to intuitions, and we can never have an intuition of the objects of Ideas. Kant himself, however, famously focuses primarily on three transcendent Ideas, which constitute the three great terminal points of metaphysics: the soul, the world, and God. Each of these Ideas goes beyond any possible experience. There is no object that could correspond to such Ideas; we can never have a “possible experience” of them.

  For example, the Idea of the world (as the totality of what is) has no intuition or perception that could correspond to it. We initially arrive at this Idea through an extension of the category of causality: that is, through the use of the hypothetical syllogism (if A, then B) —if A causes B, and B causes C, and C causes D, and so on. This series constitutes a kind of problem for us. We can continue working through this problem, continuing through the series indefinitely, until we finally reach the “Idea” of the totality of everything that is: the causal nexus of the world, or the Universe. Reason, in other words, can easily construct a concept of the world, but it can never have a perception or intuition of the world. Hence the famous Kantian distinction: we can think the world as if it were an object, but we can never know it. Strictly speaking, the world is not an object of our experience; what we actually know is the problematic of causality, a series of causal relations that we can extend indefinitely. It is this problem, Kant says, that is the true object of the Idea of the world. Hence, we are led into inevitable illusions when we ask questions about the world as if it were an object of experience. For instance: Did the world have a beginning in time, or is it eternal? Does it have boundaries in space, or does it go on forever? These are false questions because they are being asked about an object that does not exist as an object of possible experience. Whenever we think of the world as an object (rather than as the problematic of the series of conditions), we enter into the domain of a false problem, an illusion internal to reason itself. The same holds for our Ideas of the soul and God. In the “Transcendental Dialectic,” the longest section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant analyzes the nature of the logical paradoxes or aporias that Reason is inevitably led into because of these illusions: the paralogisms of the soul, the antinomies of the world, the ideal of God. (One might note here that Jacques Derrida's later philosophy deals almost entirely with the aporetic status of transcendent Ideas such as the pure gift, unconditional forgiveness, the wholly other, and so on.)

  This is why Kant was one of the first philosophers to formulate explicitly the difference between the ancient philosophical themes of transcendence and immanence: “We shall entitle the principles whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience, immanent; and those, on the other hand, which profess to pass beyond these limits, transcendent.”8 But one must add immediately that “transcendent” and “transcendental” are not identical terms, and in fact are opposed to each other.9 The aim of Kant's transcendental project is to discover criteria immanent to the understanding that are capable of distinguishing between two different uses of the syntheses of consciousness: legitimate immanent uses, and illegitimate transcendent uses (the transcendent Ideas). Transcendental philosophy is a philosophy of immanence, and implies a ruthless critique of transcendence (which is why Deleuze, at least on this score, does not hesitate to align himself with Kant's critical philosophy, despite their obvious differences). This is also why Kant can assign to Ideas a legitimate immanent use as well as an illegitimate transcendent use. The immanent use is regulative: Ideas constitute ideal focal points or horizons outside experience that posit the unity of our conceptual knowledge as a problem; they can therefore help regulate the systematization of our scientific knowledge in a purely immanent manner. The illegitimate transcendent use is constitutive: it falsely posits or constitutes an object that supposedly corresponds to the problem. At best, reason can simply postulate a harmony or (in Kant's terminology) an “analogy” between its Ideas and the material objects of experience; reason here is the faculty that says, “Everything happens as if …” (as if there were a world, or a soul, or a God …).

  In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze identifies three components of Kant's concept of the Idea, which can be distinguished from the components of the Platonic Idea.10

  1. First, ideas are indeterminate with regard to their object. Since their object lies outside of any possible experience, it can neither be given nor known, but only represented as a problem. The real object of ideas, in other words, can only be comprehended in a problematic form, as a problem. (The concept of problematics is the only component of Kant's theory of Ideas that Deleuze will adopt without question.)

  2. Second, Ideas are none the less determinable by analogy with the objects of experience (with regard to the content of phenomena), since concepts are capable of comprehending more and more differences on the basis of a properly infinite field of continuity.

  3. Third, Ideas imply a regulative ideal of infinite determination in relation to the concepts of the understanding (or the form of phenomena), since my concepts are capable of comprehending more and more differences on the basis of a properly infinite field of continuity.

  Now, in effect, this is the point where Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition begins—the chapter entitled “Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference.”11 In an important passage, Deleuze defines an Idea as “an internal problematic objective unity of the u
ndetermined, the determinable, and determination.” But, he continues, “perhaps this does not appear sufficiently clearly in Kant.” Why not? Because in Kant,

  two of the three moments [in the concept of the idea] remain as extrinsic characteristics: if Ideas are themselves undetermined [or problematic], they are determinable only in relation to objects of experience, and bear the ideal of determination only in relation to the concepts of the understanding. (DR 170)

  Hence, he concludes, “the ‘critical’ point, the horizon or focal point at which difference qua difference serves to unite, has not yet been assigned” (DR 170). In other words, we have not yet reached a purely immanent conception of Ideas, since it is only a principle of difference that can determine, in a precise manner, the problematic nature of Ideas as such, thereby uniting the three aspects of the Idea (as undetermined, determinable, and reciprocally determined). What Deleuze derives from his reading of the theory of Ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason is essentially a program of his own: to develop a purely immanent theory of Ideas, pushing Kant's own trajectory to its immanent conclusions. Put simply, whereas Kantian ideas are unifying, totalizing, and conditioning (transcendent Ideas), for Deleuze they will become multiple, differential, and genetic (immanent Ideas). The question is: what leads Deleuze to develop his purely immanent theory of Ideas?

  IDEAS IN THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT

  The answer to this question takes us to Kant's third critique, the Critique of Judgment, which in certain respects goes beyond the theory of Ideas developed in the first critique. I would simply like to make three points about Deleuze's relation to the third critique, each of which outlines an agenda that could no doubt be elaborated in more detail.