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====== Bryant L, Diference and Givenness (2008) ======

Deleuze's Transcendental  Empiricism and the Ontology of  Immanence 

Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by
which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse.\\
-Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

This is a book onDeleuze. In particular, it is a book on Deleuze's metaphysics
which makes no reference to his ethics, politics, or aesthetics. It is not
a book on Deleuze and Guattari. Nor is it a book on Bume, Spinoza,
Nietzsche, or Bergson. I do not seek to demonstrate that Deleuze is really
a Bergsonian vitalist in disguise. Nor do I seek to show how Deleuze is
really a thinker of active and passive forces. I do not, above all, seek to
make any comment on Deleuze's collaborative works with Guattari and
how these might represent departures or continuations of his earlier
work. In fact, in order to adequately engage in such a project it would
first be necessary to do something similar to what I am attempting here.
Rather, the present volume seeks to speak simply and in an informed
way about what Deleuze means by "transcendental empiricism" in his
two early masterpieces Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense.

In what follows I seek to demonstrate that Deleuze's transcenden
tal empiricism attempts to overcome the opposition between concepts
and intuitions, noesis and aisthesis, that has characterized most of the
history of philosophy and which arises from the assumption of a finite
subj ect whose receptivity is conceived of as passive. In executing this
proj ect I have also sought to determine how Deleuze is able to avoid fall
ing into criticisms of being a speculative dogmatist and how the subject
must be rethought in its relationship to being. Contrary, then, to the
somewhat standard picture of Deleuze, which treats his ontology as an
empiricism, I have sought to present a hyper-rationalist version of his
thought, contextualizing it in terms of debates that surround classical
rationalism but also German idealism as exemplified in the figures of
Kant and Salomon Maimon. This has not been out of a desire to present
yet another "monstrous" version of Deleuze, but because the problemat
ics surrounding German idealism and rationalism struck me as closest
to those governing Deleuze's proj ect of a transcendental empiricism
and seemed to best explain his engagement with differential calculus
that is so often ignored in treatments of Deleuze's thought. In short, if
Deleuze is able to depart from the philosophy of representation charac
terized by the primacy of the concept, then this is because he discovers
ntelligibility in the aesthetic itself, i n the very fabric of the given, in
the form of the differentials of perception. Deleuze does not so much
give us a way of mediating the relation between the universal and the
particular, but dispenses with the problem altogether. In this connec
tion, I am able to provide a justification of his project that need make
no reference to a politics or ethics based on a preference for differ
ence over identity. Deleuze's ethics and politics follow-rightly-from
his ontology, not the reverse. Deleuze thinks of himself as having solved
a very traditional and central problem in the history of philosophy and
proceeds to draw the consequences of this solution. I leave it to my read
ers to decide whether emphasizing Deleuze's debt to thinkers such as
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Maimon does not prove more illuminat
ing to his text than a discussion of his thought that relies heavily on his
debt to English empiricism.

It might seem strange to emphasize that this is a book on Deleuze
when this can be clearly discerned from the very title of the book. How
ever, given the standard image of Deleuze, it is imperative that I do so.
Too often it is assumed that the names "Deleuze" and "Deleuze and
Guattari" are identical and can be used interchangeably.1 The question
of whether or not significant transformations take place in the encoun
ter of these two individuals is not even raised. This constitutes a be
trayal of the singularity of Deleuze's thought as well as that of Deleuze
and Guattari. Moreover, Deleuze insists that continuous multiplicities
change in kind when divided. We might claim equally that they change
in kind when new dimensions are added to them. To simply equate
"Deleuze" with "Deleuze and Guattari" is to ignore this fundamental
principle belonging to a logic-of multiplicities. Unable to adequately
deal with such complex issues in the space of a single essay, I thus opted
to restrict myself to Deleuze's thought.

By contrast, as a rejoinder one might object to treating the name
of Deleuze as a unity, pointing out that the various texts by him alone
. display very different styles and concerns. However, as I hope to show in
the course of this book, this argument falls prey to what I will later call the
empiricist fallacy in that it individuates that which belongs to Deleuze by
the empirical texts marked by his name and not by what belongs to De- .
leuze's style. Deleuze himself was fond of pointing out that events are not)
individuated by the individuals that belong to them, but rather that indi
viduals are individuated by the events that befall them. In this connection
I am entirely in agreement with Badiou's claim that "Deleuze arrives at
conceptual productions that I would unhesitatingly qualify as monotonous,
composing a very particular regime of emphasis or almost infinite repeti
tion of a limited repertoire of concepts, as well as a virtuosic variation of
names, under which what is thought remains essentially identical."

While Deleuze's language may change from text to text, one is
nonetheless able to discern a distinct structure at work throughout his
thought. Given this, I have not hesitated to emphasize some of his works
to the detriment of others, for the very simple reason that it would be
redundant and unnecessary to cite each instance in which a particular
concept occurs. Thus, for instance, if I was able to find adequate textual
support for a particular concept in Difference and Repetition, then I felt
no obligation to discuss the concept as presented in Nietzsche and Phi
losophy. Since the aim of my proj ect is philosophical and not historical,
I do not feel my account of Deleuze's thought suffers from this strategy.
Moreover, by emphasizing some texts of Deleuze's over others, I was
able to suggest another picture of his proj ect than the standard one that
portrays him as a Nietzschean anarcho-desiring machine fighting reac
tive forces of ressentiment and bad conscience. Consequently, I attempt
to read Deleuze as he himself read other thinkers. I ask what problems
informed Deleuze's thought and seek to determine how these problems
necessitated the construction of particular concepts.

There is also a tendency to attribute anything D deuze had to say
about another thinker or artist to his own position. While it is undeni
able that Deleuze is deeply indebted to all the thinkers and artists he
wrote on (including Kant) , it is strange to assume that the works expli
cating his own philosophy consist of handy summations of what he had
already written about other philosophers. Rather, we must be careful to
determine whether what appears in one of Deleuze's studies of other
philosophers repeats itself in the works articulating his own philosophy.
We cannot assume that the contents of Deleuze's studies are identical
to his independent philosophical works. As Deleuze says of his work in
Difference and Repetition:

>There is a great difference between writing history of philosophy and writing philosophy. In the one case, we study the arrows or the tools of a great thinker, the trophies and the prey, the continents discovered. In the other case, we trim our own arrows, or gather those which seem to us the finest in order to try to send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical but relatively small. We try to speak in our own name only to learn that a proper name designates no more than the outcome of a body of work-in other words, the concepts discovered, on the condition that we were able to express these and imbue them with life using all the possibilities of language. 

Discussions of Deleuze have not attended enough to the manner in
which he trimmed his arrows. The idea of trimming one's arrows also
suggests the idea of selection, of discernment between what one takes
up and carries into the future and what is left behind. As brilliant and
clear as Deleuze's discussion of Nietzsche's reactive forces may be, this
does not merit us ascribing it to him if it does not appear in those works
where Deleuze articulates his own philosophy. Similarly in the case of
Bergson. I suspect that much of this practice has arisen due to the sheer
obscurity and difficulty of Deleuze's own works, but this makes it no
more justifiable.

To be sure, throughout this book I find ample opportunity to refer
to Deleuze's works in the history of philosophy and aesthetics. However,
in doing so I gave myself two simple rules. First, whenever reference is
made to one of Deleuze's commentaries on an artist, art form, or an
other philosopher, then it must be possible to demonstrate in fact or in
principle that Deleuze employs precisely these same terms and concepts
in his own independent works. Second, whenever there is a divergence
among concepts between Deleuze's own work and the conceptual work
Deleuze attributes to another, then there must either be a tacit critique
or divergence between Deleuze's proj ect and that of the other think
er. In this way I have hoped to discover a singularity of Deleuze's own
thought, marking his divergence from the history of philosophy that he
grapples with and constructs for himself.
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