<<TRANSMATHOME

III         Deleuze’s Escape Route

The interconnections amongst the faculties and across the three Critiques produce a ‘véritable système de permutations (complete system of permutations’, at once both static and creative, which distributes amongst itself the immanent problem of its own construction.[24] This latter point is of importance: Deleuze’s reading of Kant is not comparative - his interest is not in whether Kant produces a more theoretically consistent epistemology than another philosopher, or in how apposite his practical philosophy is to the late twentieth century, but in what is immanent to the production of Kantian philosophy. So there are no (or very few) accusations of unjustified assumptions, Scholastic hangovers or claims that some other thinker has generated more satisfying solutions to problems with which Kant deals: nor does Deleuze engage in corrective analyses, suggesting “improvements” to Kant’s thought in order to rectify apparent inconsistencies. There are ‘pas d’idées justes, juste des idées (no correct ideas, just ideas)’, some of which are illusions, but none of which are wrong.[25] The little Kant book begins with Kant’s own definition of philosophy, as ‘the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human reason’ .[26] And Deleuze reads the system of faculties within these terms; but through the additive effect of the marks he makes and the selection and connection of elements which, unhinged, elude these ends, he removes the thought of a faculty system from its contained place within a subject, and opens it up to the world. This is the beginnings of an assemblage, or desiring-machine. Whilst he calls the  book a book on an enemy, Deleuze is neither destructive nor aggressive, but camouflaged, disengaging the Kantian machine from common sense in the process of analyzing its production as such.

The problems of critique are production and the real, synthesis and sense, and the transcendental method concerns how, rather than what, or in which direction, to think: not how one must, or how it is possible to think, but what are the conditions of a genealogy of thinking; how does practice mobilize theory, through walls, outside departments, beyond institutions and into the streets? How does theory diagram practice, transforming its potential directions? Because Deleuze understands the transcendental in a rigorously critical manner, it does not function as a conditioning presupposition; as will be seen more clearly in a later chapter, it becomes an abstract machine, evacuated of structure and immanent to the production of the concrete, a genetic rather than conditioning element. This is the route that Deleuze takes, connecting the marks and gaps in Kant and using the machine he constructs to undo common sense and depart from the direction of good sense, his language changing as the system produces its own escape lines, becoming less academic, faster, more dense as it picks up speed, until in L’Anti-Oedipe his practice escapes philosophical theory and builds a different, strange machine. But I am running ahead of the problem of this chapter.

 ‘[I]l’y a des Idées qui parcourent toutes les facultés, n’étant l’objet d’aucune en particulier (there are Ideas which traverse all the faculties, but are the object of none in particular)’; Ideas which ‘vont de la sensibilité à la pensée, et de la pensée à la sensibilité (go from sensibility to thought and from thought to sensibility)’.[27] But pass not through theory, practice, or their completion in an Image of thought. It is this problem, of thought as the superior or transcendental exercise of sense,  the practice of sense, rather than its theoretical description, which Deleuze pursues, and the remainder of this chapter explores further aspects of Kant’s writing which support his claim that sense is the real discovery of transcendental philosophy.

The system of faculties, Deleuze argues, points towards a transcendental empiricism implicit in Kant, the discovery of sense as a transcendental faculty being radically incommensurate with the general logic of the understanding. Kant betrays this discovery on three counts at least. Firstly, through the convergence of knowledge into a form of common sense; secondly, by directing thought teleologically, complementing common sense with good sense; and lastly by installing a form of conditioning which dictates that problems are understood in terms of the possibility of their solution. These components - an emphasis on the network or system of faculties, the problem of the vector of thought, and the discovery of sense as the properly transcendental element - are at the basis of Deleuze’s relation with Kant.