4 - Deleuze and Kant

Summary

How are things determined to be what they are? Kant’s answer to this question defines transcendental idealism, and forms the core of Deleuze’s lifelong fascination with Kant. He criticizes Kant for reducing determination to the external application of concepts to the given. Yet what preoccupies Deleuze is a deeper account of determination in Kant: the determination of the being of the self (“I am”) by its own thinking activity (“I think”). Because this determination happens in time, the being that is determined is different from the being that is determinable. The latter, by definition, is not thought and cannot be thought, and yet it is precisely what is to be thought. Here is what, above all, fascinates Deleuze about Kant: the very act in which the I thinks its own being requires that being to squirm out of thought’s reach. Through its thinking activity the I generates difference from its being, indicating that the being of thought is both what must be thought and what cannot be thought.

The difference of thought from its being recurs throughout Deleuze’s writings on Kant. An early version of it appears in Empiricism and Subjectivity (ES 111); in an essay of the following year, Deleuze speaks of Kant in terms of “the difference internal to the Being which thinks itself” (DI 17, translation modified). It is a rich presence in Difference and Repetition (DR 58, 85–86, 276), in the essay “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy” (ECC 27–35, cf. KCP vii–xiii), and in his 1978 lectures. Finally, this difference is evoked in terms of the plane of immanence:

Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside – that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility of the impossible. Thus Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.

(WP 59–60)