Deleuze and Kant's Critical Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis considers the status of Deleuze as a Kantian, and as such committed both to the critical destiny of philosophy, and the contestation of the sense of this destiny. The focus of Deleuze's reading of Kant is an active conception of thought: the fundamental elements of thought are will and value rather than being or the concept. In the development of this idea we can note a progressive 'tapering' of the foundational instance of thought, in three stages: from the speculative field of being to the practical field of reason; from the intellectual category of the concept to the problematic category of the Idea; from the teleological notion of the organism to the aesthetic notion of the singular. Within each stage we can perceive a polemic between the two terms: it is in each case a question of the 'sufficient reason' of thought, its conditions of the actuality beyond its possibility. The highest expression of our reason, for Kant, is neither theoretical nor utilitarian, but moral: the realisation of our lawful freedom. For Deleuze, on the other hand, the ultimate secret of our freedom and thus all of our thought is to be found rather in the realm of the aesthetic.