by Daniel Smith
14.
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 39: “Deleuze is a marvelous reader of Bergson, who, in my opinion, is his real master, far more than Spinoza, or perhaps even Nietzsche.”
15.
See N 145:
Setting out a plane of immanence, tracing out a field of immanence, is something all the authors I've worked on have done (even Kant—by denouncing the transcendent use of the syntheses, although he sticks to possible experience rather than real experimentation). (translation modified)
Moreover, the central chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy is entitled “Critique”; beneath the explicit “anti-Hegelian” theme of the book there lies a profound engagement with Kant and the post-Kantian tradition in general, and of which Hegel is only a part (see NP 51–2 for Deleuze's comments on the relation between Nietzsche and post-Kantianism).
16.
Deleuze's 1972 essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism” (in DI 170–92) in effect defines structuralism by means of Deleuze's own “post-structuralist” terminology: difference, multiplicity, virtuality, and so on. Deleuze's radical critique of structuralism seems to have been what attracted Lacan to Deleuze's work prior to Anti-Oedipus: “You will see that he [Deleuze] says somewhere that the essence of structuralism, if this word has any meaning … is a blank, a lack in the signifying chain, and that which results from errant objects in the signifying chain” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI: D'un autre à l'autre (1968–1969) (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 134, as cited in François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 188.
17.
14 Mar 1978. Martial Guéroult's book is La Philosophie transcendentale de Salomon Maïmon (Paris: Alcan, 1929). Guéroult's subsequent study, L‘Evolution et la structure de la Doctrine de la Science chez Fichte, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1930), also contains an important discussion of Maimon, and Deleuze relies heavily on both books. Maimon recounted his extraordinary and tragic life in his autobiography, which is available in a truncated English translation: Salomon Maimon: An Autobiography [1888], trans. J. Clark Murray (Champaign-Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2001).
18.
Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790), trans. Nick Midgley, Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman, and Merten Reglitz (London: Continuum, 2010).
19.
Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 151. Five years later, however, after leaving several letters from Maimon unanswered, Kant expressed a certain incomprehension of his project in a letter to Reinhold:
For the past three years or so, age has affected my thinking … I feel an inexplicable difficulty when I try to project myself into other people's ideas, so that I seem unable to grasp anyone else's system and to form a mature judgment of it … This is the reason why I can turn out essays of my own, but, for example, as regards the “improvement” of the critical philosophy by Maimon … I have never really understood what he is after and must leave the reproof to others. (letter to K. L. Reinhold, 28 Mar 1794, 211–12)
The assessment, however, was not limited to Maimon: “I cannot even make Professor Reinhold's work clear to me” (letter to J. S. Beck, 1 Jul 1794, 217).
20.
J. G. Fichte, Briefwechsel, III/2, 282, as cited in the Introduction to Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Corrrespondence, 28.
21.
Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy From Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 286. Beiser's study contains a chapter (285–323) analyzing the main themes of Maimon's thought. His articles “Introduction to Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–24, and “The Context and Problematic of post-Kantian Philosophy,” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 21–34, discuss Maimon's influence on post-Kantian thought. In English, one can also consult: Samuel Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism: The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964); Samuel H. Bergman, The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon, trans. Noah L. Jacobs (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967); and Jan Bransen, The Antinomy of Thought: Maimonian Skepticism and the Relation between Thoughts and Objects (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1991).
22.
Guéroult, Fichte, Vol. 1, 110: “For Maimon, the only untouchable aspect of the critical philosophy was the Copernican spirit of the method: nothing can be advanced that cannot be immediately justified from the viewpoint of the immanent consciousness in which alone the relation of the subject to the object must be determined.”
23.
On immanent critique in Kant, see NP 91; on Deleuze's relation to Kant, see N 145.
24.
Deleuze, for instance, applies this Maimonian formula at various instances to the work of Schelling, Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault, and even Pasolini.
One must not raise oneself to conditions as to conditions of possible experience, but as to conditions of real experience: Schelling had already proposed this aim and defined his philosophy as a superior empiricism. The formula is valid for Bergsonism as well. (DI 36, translation modified)
The Nietzsche and the Kantian conceptions of critique are opposed on five main points: 1. Genetic and plastic principles that give an account of the sense and value of beliefs, interpretations and evaluations rather than transcendental principles which are conditions for so-called facts. (NP 93)
Foucault differs in certain fundamental respects from Kant: the conditions are those of real experience, and not of possible experience. (F 60; the final phrase of this sentence is inadvertently omitted from the English translation)
If it is worth making a philosophical comparison, Pasolini might be called post-Kantian (the conditions of legitimacy are the conditions of reality itself) while Metz and his followers remain Kantians (the falling back of principle upon fact). (TI 286 n8, translation modified)
25.
See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), Vol. 1, Book 2, Section 1, Chapters 2 and 3, 408–80.
26.
Guéroult, in Fichte, Vol. l, 126–7, shows that in Maimon himself the relationship between difference and identity remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between all these positions; our discussion of Maimon here is necessarily simplified.
27.
Maimon seems to have adopted the phrase “coalition system” from Kant himself, who used it in a pejorative sense in the Critique of Practical Reason (Book I, Chapter 1, Theorem II, Remark 1), in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 158, where he accused his contemporaries of adopting “a coalition system of contradictory principles,” rather than attempting to achieve consistency.
28.
See FLB 89 (translation modified):
Even more than Fichte, Salomon Maimon, the first post-Kantian to return to Leibniz, drew out all the consequences of such a psychic automatism of perception: far from perception presupposing an object capable of affecting us, and the conditions under which we would be affectable, the reciprocal determination of differentials (dy/dx) entails the complete determination of the object as perception, and the determinability of space-time as a condition. Beyond the Kantian method of conditioning, Maimon restores an internal subjective genesis.
29.
Deleuze's comment on Nietzsche is equally applicable to himself: “The philosophical learning of an author is not assessed by number of quotations, but by the apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself” (NP 162).
30.
NP 51–2. The footnote refers the reader to Guéroult's book on Maimon, as well as Jules Vuillemin's L'Héritage kantien et la r
évolution copernicienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), which Deleuze cites frequently throughout his early writings.
31.
For Nietzsche's problematization of knowledge and morality, see On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968): “The will to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question” (Essay III, §24, 589); “Let us articulate this new demand: We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values must first be brought into question” (Preface, §6, 456).
32.
Maimonian themes punctuate Deleuze's 1966 Bergsonism. (1) On the genetic method, and the search for conditions of real (and not merely possible) experience, see B 23, 26–8, 96–8 (Bergson's critique of the category of the possible). (2) On the principle of difference, B 91–3, and Deleuze's early article, “Bergson's Conception of Difference,” trans. Melissa McMahon, in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 32–51.
33.
See, for instance, Daniel Breazeale's criticisms in “The Hegel–Nietzsche Problem,” in Nietzsche-Studien 4 (1975), 146–64.
34.
François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 119.
35.
Aristotle, Topics, Book 1, 100a30–100b30, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge (New York: Random House, 1941), 188. See DR 160.
36.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929): An Idea is “a problem to which there is no solution” (319, A328/B384); “if the universal is admitted as problematic only, and is a mere Idea, the particular is certain, but the universality of the rule of which it is a consequence is still a problem” (535, A646/B674). See Deleuze's analysis in DR 168–70.
Essay 5: Pre- and Post-Kantianism
Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real
1.
This paper was originally presented at the conference “Deleuze and Rationalism,” which took place on 16–17 March 2007 at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London.
2.
Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence [1952], trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). This book completes the project Hyppolite began with Genesis and Structure of Hegel's “Phenomenology of Spirit,” trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979), and examines the relation between the phenomenology and the logic. Deleuze wrote an important review of the book in 1954, “Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence,” which is included as appendix to the English translation (191–5).
3.
The paragraphs that follow are a recapitulation, in part, of the reading of Leibniz proposed in Essay 3.
4.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 408.
5.
See Wilfred Sellers, “Meditations Leibniziennes,” in Leibniz: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, ed. R. S. Woolhouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 31. “If the nature of a substance is to account for its individuality, it must account for episodes [events], and not merely the capacities, powers, and dispositions—all, in principle, repeatable—which were traditionally connected with the natures of things.”
6.
Ian Hacking, “What Mathematics Has Done to Some and Only Some Philosophers,” in Proceedings of the British Academy 103 (2000), 83–138: 105.
7.
Leibniz, “On the Radical Origination of Things” [1697], in Leroy E. Loemker, ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1956), 486: “However far you go back to earlier states, you will never find in those states a full reason why there should be any world rather than none, and why it should be as it is.”
8.
Leibniz wrote a short text entitled “Reflections on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Mind” [1702], in Loemker, ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, 554–60, in which he shows that, although there is indeed a universal mind (God), it does not in any way prevent substances from being individual. See Deleuze's commentary in his seminar of 15 Apr 1980.
9.
On Leibniz's derivation of the concept of point of view from the theory of conic sections, see Michel Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (Paris: PUF, 1968), Part 3, “Le point fixe,” 647–712.
10.
See Leibniz, “Monadology” [1714], §57, in Loemker, ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, 648:
Just as the same city viewed from different sides appears to be different and to be, as it were, multiplied in perspectives, so the infinite multitude of simple substances, which seem to be so many different universes, are nevertheless only the perspective of a single universe according to the different points of view of each monad.
11.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard, ed. Austin Farrer (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985).
12.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), §418. Deleuze analyzes this Christian tradition in his two-volume Cinema, where he draws a parallel between the philosophy of Pascal and Kierkegaard and the films of Bresson and Dreyer; see MI 114–16 and TI 176–9. Bresson perhaps even offers a fifth type of mode of existence in his great film Au hasard, Balthazar: the donkey who possesses the innocence of one who cannot choose, but who none the less suffers the effects of the choices or non-choices of humans, which ultimately kill it—one of the most poignant scenes in the history of cinema (see MI 116).
13.
Qu'est-ce que fonder? [What is Grounding?], cours hypokhâgne, at Lycée Louis le Grand, Paris, 1956–7, available at webdeleuze.com.
14.
Although this quotation is from Logic of Sense (LS 176), it summarizes the essential themes of Difference and Repetition.
15.
The limitation of so-called “analytic metaphysics” is its reliance on a logicist, formalist, and set theoretical metaphysics inherited from the nineteenth century. See, for instance, Ted Sider's stated assumption, in Four-Dimensionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), “that modern logic's quantificational apparatus mirrors the structure of reality” (xvi). As Whitehead pointed out, the notion of the variable is itself a derivative of the principle of identity. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1938), 106: “The variable, though undetermined, sustains its identity throughout the arguments.” See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), §512, 227: “Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases”; and §516, 279: “Supposing there were no self-identical ‘A,’ such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics) ….”
16.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36[18], 24: “I take good care not to talk about chemical ‘laws’: that has a moral aftertaste ….” See also EPS 268:
The less we understand the laws of nature, that is, the norms of life, the more we interpret them as orders and prohibitions—to the point where the philosopher must hesitate before using the word “law,” so much does it retain a moral aftertaste: it would be better to speak of “eternal truths.”
Essay 6: Aesthetics
Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality
1.
For Deleuze's formulations of the aesthetic problem, see DR 56–7, 68 and LS 260.
2.
Plato, Republic, VII, 523b. Deleuze appeals to this text in DR
138–42, 236; NP 108, 210 n33); PS 100–1.
3.
See Deleuze's analyses in KCP, esp. 15.
4.
Plato, Republic, 524d; see also Philebus, 24d; Parmenides 154–5; and Theaetetus, 152–5. These paradoxes, known in antiquity as Megarian sorites (“How many grains constitutes a heap?”), are treated in formal logic as “vague predicates.” See Pascal Engel, The Norm of the True (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 199–215. Deleuze treats the theme of becoming in LS 1–3.
5.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 216–17; Erwin Straus, The Primary World of the Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman (New York: Free Press, 1963), 316–31; and Henri Maldiney, Regard parole espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1973), 134–8. For Deleuze's criticisms, see MI 57, FB 37–9, and DR 137.
6.
PS 37–8. Plato, in Deleuze's reading, remains tied to the model of recognition in two ways: in defining the sign as a qualitative contrariety, Plato confused the being of the sensible with a simple sensible being [aistheton], and he related it to an already-existing Idea that merely shifted the operation of recognition to the process of reminiscence. For the critique of Plato, see DR 141–2; for Proust's break with Platonism, see PS 108–15.