<<TRANSMATHOME

IV        Problem I

In Différence et Répetition, Deleuze writes that what is essential to any problem is ‘the genesis of the act of thought, the operation of the faculties’.[28] A problem, or Idea, is defined not through the possibility of its solution, through a need to provide a correct, or true response to a question, but transcendentally. Understood in terms of the Critique of Pure Reason, this remark suggests that the transcendental as a problem cannot be characterized in terms of the Analytic, since this instances only a solution, the functions of judgement providing a  conceptual framework for a set of propositions true within a given and limited field. The transcendental problem, or Idea is one for ‘which there is no solution’ in advance, no common sense answer, and, according to the limits of knowledge established by Kant, no solution in principle.[29]  Each solution is complete,  but problems are abstract - Deleuze is critical of Kant for naming the Ideas, a move which defines an area or possibility of solution. How else, for example could God, freedom and immortality be solved other than by religion or morality?

Yet whilst a problem cannot be defined in terms of its solutions, just as the concrete practice of theory never resembles the theory itself, nonetheless a problem determines and is inseparable from its solutions; there is thus a paradox. Tracing the outlines of a problem from the instances of its solution and trying to solve paradoxes with a reversible and symmetrical logic falls foul of natural or philosophical illusions, leading to a misunderstanding not only of the sense of an Idea, but also of the nature of the transcendental. One ends up oscillating between two domains, without the two every meeting or interacting. Deleuze takes the transcendental as a serious problem, and is rigorous about the need to understand it in terms of immanence. However, unlike Kant, it is not immanent to reason, but to critique; it becomes the principle of critical practice, the abstract thought of zero presuppositions. This is one reason why, as theory, it is not traceable from its solutions, since solutions are empirical, contextual, temporary, and their discovery feedsback into their conditions and transforms them, as different.

Deleuze’s problems are sense and thought, Ideas inseparable from their solutions, yet not traceable from the instances of these. Problems are given as produced, as empirical and produced as given, immanently, this relation being neither symmetrical nor bilateral, each element being continually displaced and destabilized in a becoming which is not anchored to being. A solution is unilaterally differentiated from its problem: ‘le distingué s’oppose à quelque chose qui ne peut pas s’en distinguer, et qui continue d’épouser ce qui divorce avec lui (something which distinguishes itself - and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it)’.[30]  The paradox of this relation, of a surface rising from itself, folding within itself and involuting, is inseparable from Deleuze’s thought.

Deleuze marries Kant’s insistence on immanence with a Leibnizian system, which he plugs into the crack within the Kantian subject effected through the introduction of time, a sense which fractures general logic.[31]  The Transcendental Aesthetic becomes a problem whose genesis is connected with the unfolding of an infinite plane of immanence, and with material relations which produce rather than presuppose time and space. From Kant, there is the illegitimation of a transcendent determining form and from Leibniz a system whose elements are nested; ‘Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond.’[32] This opens out a radically different Kant, and begins to characterize Deleuze’s critique as a microanalysis of power: of the mechanisms by which signs are inverted, positive to negative or negative to positive: of the slightest deviations from the systematics of reason, which, when connected, escape the damage of law. By marrying systems against reason, and by cutting across Kantian territory, rather than following the lines of its structural organization and the rules of his thought, Deleuze begins to uncover the genesis of the transcendental in sense, imperceptible to the conceptual generalizations to which it is reduced in the Analytic in the first Critique. Rather than functioning as a set of conditioning principles, the transcendental becomes a part added alongside the concrete machine, not as a whole in terms of which the machine can be explained, but as another working element immanent to the empirical, but not definable in its terms.

By connecting critique and the network of the faculties with an open systematics of nested and differential elements not co-ordinated by or subordinated to a centralized subject, the whole assemblage functioning instead as an intensive magnitude modulated through the pure form of time, Deleuze flips Kant onto an intensive synthetic axis, connecting time with the discussion of intensity in the Anticipations of Perception, using only the smallest intervals and differences in Kant’s writings in the creation of an effect which does not leave Kant intact, but opens him up, as a surface of variation and change. It is important not to understanding nesting extensively: each “nest”  is not inside another, in the sense that, by analysis, one could discover and lay out a coherent and total system. Because the system is intensive, each movement changes the relations of all parts,  the distributions and densities of space. Deleuze follows a critical vector which is neither mechanically nor organically structured - that is,  it is neither a system of understanding or an architectonic of reason - but  ‘an unconscious in finite understanding...that Kant will himself be forced to discover when he will hollow out the difference between a determinant and a determinable self’[33]: the problem of time, sense and the thing-in-itself. 

Because Deleuze does not argue relations between the three Critiques, or internal to any one Critique in terms of contradictions or resemblances between them, critique becomes an open system which is ‘merely transformed by the different foldings it receives’, a plastic and mobile space.[34] The transcendental becomes an abstract distributed surface of flows and assemblages rather than a hierarchical edifice enclosed within the bounds of reason, and each Critique becomes an engagement with a reason whose sense constitutes a response or solution to transformations in the abstract space of the transcendental: a machine.

This move is of crucial importance, since it implies infinite variations  generated immanently to a finite open system by intensive elements: a system in continuous displacement. By bringing what is imperceptible and analytically intractable within Kant’s philosophy to its surface and allowing it to function synthetically, by connecting  and interweaving lines and elements from philosophies and philosophers, stealing something from here, something else from there, Deleuze assembles a nuanced, fluid Kant, no longer the stolid moralist and oppressor of difference but unknowing inventor of a problem.

The critical treason in Deleuze’s reading of Kant is double, in two senses. One, chronologically, because although the potential of the transformation is implicated in the early work, it is only in Deleuze’s later writings that the components selected and connections effected interact without reference to their source, critique becoming an impersonal and abstract machinic force, auto-critique, or as it comes to be called in Anti-Oedipus, schizoanalysis. By which time it is as legitimate to claim that Kant has nothing to do with Deleuze as it is to claim that Deleuze has produced a Kant-becoming. And secondly, because Deleuze splits Kant across an unfamiliar axis which connects intensities with differential relations, so drawing the problem of force into the dialectic, and Ideas with individuals, so the latter become solutions to the former.

Again, a paradox, Deleuze’s critique being both immanent to the system of faculties, as an intensive depth, whilst at the same time differentiated from Kant, not as a single line of departure, but through the selection of  tiny intervals, and their connection in a movement which transforms the nature of the conditions, and opens out the potential for a Kant whose problems are not locked into a subject. His concern is not to establish a doctrine of faculties, but to determine its presuppositions and discover its machinery. In the next chapter, the image of recognition which blocks this move will be circumnavigated.