Breeding Demons Chapter Two: Losing Face, III Problem II

For Kant, the principle of sufficient reason is a logical relation of grounds to consequences, and whilst it may serve understanding as a formal justification of synthetic connections amongst concepts, it says nothing about the effective genesis of real conditions and relations amongst things - the objective problem of transcendental philosophy. ‘That every thing must have its reason is the transcendental (material [materielle]) principle’, and to move from the logical principle of sufficient reason to the material or transcendental principle as if they occupied the same domain is a critically illegitimate step, confusing the reason for the genesis of things with the logic governing propositions.[28] The principle of sufficient reason rests on the principle of contradiction, a negative condition of analytic judgements, and governs judgements which, given a schematic relation between concepts and intuitions, follow a priori from the pure concepts. Transcendental principles, however, express the real, rather than merely hypothetical or possible conditions of things, and involve both a formal and a material component, to which correspond, subjectively, intuition and sensation. Deleuze, however, has an argument with this distinction, since it applies a difference which belongs properly to understanding rather than to sensibility. Kant divides sensibility into an objective component, intuition, which is necessary for mathematics, and provides content for concepts, and a subjective element, of sensation. In strictly aesthetic terms, in terms of the pure line of time, however, this distinction plays no role. Difference cannot be articulated according to an exclusive disjunction in this manner, Deleuze argues, without subjecting it to transcendent operations. Nor can the transcendental, as an abstract material principle, be articulated in relation to understanding: it must rather be immanent to the production of sensibility, perception, sensation, bodies and passions. He takes the transcendental into the heart of the thing-in-itself, as matter, and in doing so, dissolves its structural containment within the a priori.

The problem to which sensation and intuition correspond is intensity, not as an empirical matter, but as a transcendental principle, and its sufficient reason is a logics of sense -a diagrammatic and material aesthetic. Within the conceptual or formal understanding of time and space, which generalizes over intuition in order to render it commensurate with rational or cardinal divisibility, intensive magnitudes can be anticipated, because the axiom of extension affects not only forms of intuition, but also regulates matter and the dynamics of the real in space. With time and space logical constants integral to the form of generality which rationalizes sense in terms of uniformity, the quality of material forces becomes open to the claim that it too can be anticipated, and moreover, that what is anticipated can in principle not fail to arrive.

Kant defines matter in the following terms: quantitatively, as motion in extended space, along lines between points; qualitatively, as the filling of space through intensive forces - attraction and repulsion -which have a determinate degree (force limited by an a priori point-line system) and, beyond that determinate degree, as infinitely divisible.[30] The infinite divisibility of this “beyond” is where the problem of the real filling space is evacuated to: that which cannot be analyzed to exhaustion or made determinate extension. Theoretically, matter appears as either randomly chaotic (beyond), or dead (determinate). Whilst the space and time of determinate degrees of force and motion is conceptual, the problem of infinite divisibility, as an intensive matter, is transcendental. The line or limit is only theoretical, a beyond of determinacy, of matter already dead, and only theoretically do the two sides of the system, determinate here and infinitely divisible there, sum to unity. The line is conceptually extensive, a limit, but intensively it is a threshold and changes in nature as it changes in degree, rather than delineating a rational succession of states, a modulation and not a mould. ‘[U]ne pure ligne droit (a pure straight line)’ of time is not a successively constructed extension, but a vector tracking the autonomous involutions of a surface without extrinsic given condition.[31] Any limit is thus only relative, and not definitive, marking a penultimate beyond which is not chaos and disorder, but which necessitates modifications in the structures which populate the space within the limit.

The pure form of time is not defined in terms of motion or point, nor space as line or organized plane. Kant says that ‘extension and figure...belong to pure intuition’, but without common sense there is no conceptual definition of either, no image according to which extension and figure are recognizable.[32] In the Aesthetic, intuition is given, not constructed so unhinged from common sense, there is no necessity immanent to time which dictates its functional convergence with Euclidean axioms, nor to forces which dictate their functional convergence with gravity or thermodynamics, nor to material production which forces its functional convergence with mechanism. These are purely contingent solutions, historical answers to questions from consciousness.

In L’anti-oedipe, Deleuze (and Guattari, here) write: ‘ce qui met si longtemps à arrive à la conscience, c’est la nouvelle que la mort de Dieu n’a aucune importance pour l’inconscient’ (what takes so long in coming to consciousness is the news that the death of God makes no difference to the unconscious’).[33] It is understanding this which allows him to travel so efficiently through Kant’s network of faculties, and discard elements which make no difference to the transcendental as an abstract and naked surface on which the diagrammatic solutions of problems immanent to relations of force are recorded, but merely impede its potential solutions by intervening with demands for recognition, with a prior format for recording, an image of thought. In Différence et Répetition, Deleuze begins to diagram an impersonal and unconscious consistency of sense, mapping the forces of thought, the sufficient reason of the sensible: the death of God is as irrelevant here as is his life. The line beyond which is the beyond of representation - and thus +1, the inverse image of representation, stupidity face to face - is dissolved in a threshold or surface which folds into itself, continuously changing in nature and form. What is so intelligent in Deleuze’s reading of Kant is his selection of the elements which express this indifference, even though many do so only negatively: for Deleuze, ‘la négation, c’est l’image renversée de la difference’ (the negative is difference inverted, seen from below)’.[34] The in-between, or middle, or AND logics of machinic or rhizomatic sense which function in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are assembled through the inversion of the negative through difference, rather than through an identity which would restore it to unity, as the single positive term. Demons string variables and sequence connections, and are nothing other than those variables and connections, functioning only through relations and never as the terms related, not recognizing or recognized, exploring a pure straight line of time, a line of flight, without monogram, profile or name.

Within the general field of understanding, the intensive real in experience, ‘is viewed as a cause...[and]...the degree of the reality as cause is then entitled...the moment of gravity’.[35] Viewed as a cause means viewed hypothetically: that is, intensity as an issue for the principles of understanding is not problematic, and any absence of information which could confirm an hypothesis and determine causality is merely a subjective insufficiency in knowledge, and correctible. ‘[N]o misunderstanding is...possible which cannot easily be removed’, since the dynamic or quality of intensive magnitudes presupposes the axioms of extension conducting force potentials and qualities across the striated, linear and punctuated metric of a general and extensively quantified space.[36] What is differentiated from the general is recognized just enough to confirm that it is self-cancelling, given enough time: that it has internalized the control systems appropriate to it, and will apply them, given sufficient time. Aberrations are only ever temporary.

Rational science systematizes connections amongst empirically gathered data according to a coherence of grounds and consequents. The aggregate unities distributed by understanding, in its legitimate use immanent to experience, would not unite into a systematic whole, if Ideas of reason did not provide an ideal focus outside experience for the convergence of concepts of understanding. But this perspective on distribution is subjective: the focus imaginarius regulates for formalism, which is to say, for syllogistic relations, maxims of theoretical reason which have judgements for relations and conceptual representations for their content. For a formal system, it is ‘not the idea in itself, but its use only, that can be either transcendent or immanent’.[38] It is judgement as a tool of the subject - the application of logical principles - that errs. Transcendentally - which is to now to immanent to sense and objective problems, there is no error, because there are no facts, but there are still illusions.

One illusion is that there is an analog between the way understanding functions in the production of the object in general as correlate to subjective unity, unifying diversity within the form of the Same - (common sense recognition, in other words), and the way in which reason

This analog is logical, rather than transcendental, but the transition from theoretical constitution to regulation is void of real relations, since its base is in concepts and generality rather than in singularity and sense. Hypothetically, reason can move from comparative resemblances amongst particular cases in relation to a rule, in order to discover whether these cases follow from the rule; it can then generalize over ‘all particular instances, even to those which are not themselves given’.[40] But problematically, it can’t: there is no way of finding an Idea on the grounds of its general solution, amongst particular cases, since objectively, Ideas interact with sense and the singular logics of bodies, outside the possibility of constituting general conformity. Problematically, there is no universal account of the particular through which to protect its objective status or serve as a general rule for what is not given: there is, in other words, no substitution for a problem, the object of an Idea, whereas there are substitutions for representations, the objects of concepts. The analogy between understanding and reason illegitimately carries substitutability into the Ideas. God, Freedom or Immortality: in Kant, if you pick one, you get all three. But Ideas are singular, and it is as singularities that Deleuze plugs sense into Kantian ideas.

Problems are the abstract grid through which that which forces sense - difference in diversity, a demon or dark precursor - becomes concrete, not in terms of a previously settled model or configuration of faculties, but by becoming unhinged from all models. It is only so that they produce their own superior exercise, or immanent autonomy in relation to intensity, rather than in relation to common sense or the image.

Deleuze’s diagram of Kant draws problems of sense - of intuition and intensity - together with Ideas, but in the process the whole surface of critique is re-wired. In Différence et Répetition he defines transcendental and transcendent:

Disjointed, or unhinged from common sense, nothing legislating their convergence into analogical equilibrium, or, in the good sense formulation, thermodynamic equilibrium, the faculties give no hypothetical solution, only real ones. A faculty becomes the formation of a pipe, a connection in an assemblage or multiplicity, or a leap which snaps the order of Kantian sense, changing its nature and degree, and an Idea a system of connections between these differential genetic elements, a multiplicity or assemblage. A machine which grasps that in the world which concerns it exclusively, without substitution, singular and real.

This is not to say, however, that the transcendent and the transcendental are the same: being indistinguishable from each other does not necessitate their identity. Kant is quite clear that they are not interchangeable terms. A principle which removes limits, ‘or even commands us actually to transgress them, is called transcendent’.[43] They are actual, rather than transcendental principles, and incite the possession of unlimited domains, and their illegitimacy rests in their use of empirical, or actual principles to describe spaces outside the conditions of their generation: that is, they encourage the transfer of a solution from one problem to another, without regard for differences in the variables. This is why, for example, Ideas of reason have no constitutive value for theory, being only regulative in relation to the empirical.

The transcendent is counterposed to immanence, which describes the legitimacy of the transcendental. The transcendental has two senses: there is the transcendental use of the concepts, under the compulsion of reason, as described in chapter one, which produces the concept of an object in general and limits sensibility. This is illegitimate, Kant agrees, but since there are no actual principles informing such errors of judgement ‘not duly curbed by criticism’, because understanding is in this case disconnected from sense, the transcendental use of understanding does not threaten the security of the system.[44] Because there is no empirical incitement to transgression - and it is thus not pathologically or affectively motivated - there is no danger from the transcendental use of understanding. Indeed, as has been seen, it is compelled by reason. The transcendent use of a faculty unhinged from its common sense relations, however, is precisely what the noumenon is designed to preclude: it limits sensibility. It is this sense that Deleuze understands it, as transcendent with regard to established relations, exacerbated by a problem for which these relations cannot articulate a solution. He calls it indistinguishable from the transcendental because it is a movement incited by a singular abstract machine; it is transcendent in relation to extant empirical orders, in that aggravates the limits of that order. In this sense it is related to practice, as a mechanism for moving through walls. It only remains transcendent if it carries the principle of possession - for example - specific to a particular configuration of the faculties across the threshold and over the wall. Because it does not then grasp what is exclusive to both its operation, bringing it into the world, but remains bound by principle outside the operation. It is in this sense that it is transcendental, immanent to the concrete genesis of a solution.

Deleuze calls this brief flash of thought without image ‘schizophrénie du droit (schizophrenia in principle)’ which leads directly to Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capital and Schizophrenia where critique has become schizoanalysis.[46] In Différence et Répetition, he complains that Kant does not follow this moment: moreover, he implies that Kant was aware of it, but chose good sense and a philosophy compliant with common sense. ‘[Q]uitte à compromettre l’appareil conceptuel des trois Critique (at the risk of compromising the conceptual apparatus of the three Critiques)’, he redeems and stabilizes it, civilizing thought and recognizing its image in Law.[47]

The critical project of L’anti-oedipe is explicit: Deleuze and Guattari, referring to Kant, denounce ‘l’usage transcendant des synthèses (transcendent use of syntheses)’ by psychoanalysis, today’s cogitatio universalis.[48] Auto-critique, or schizoanalysis, plays in relation to psychoanalytic Law and myth a rôle parallel to that played by reason in the first Critique in relation to metaphysical dogmas and mystic enthusiasms: both critiques distinguish illegitimate and legitimate syntheses, extract thought from myth and ideology and above all emphasize immanence. Their essential tendency is eliminative and materialist. But one of the factors that differentiates Kantian critique, stilled by the hand of redemption, from auto-critique, is that whilst each invents its own destructions and invests in its own decline, the former does so for the sake of - what it is in the process of destroying - a metaphysics based on theological premises: God is not alive, for Kant, but nonetheless an unconditioned unity continues to operate as a limit, endlessly displaced and internal to the engine of critique, as an axiom of productive synthesis. The system gives to itself with one hand what it takes back with the other. Auto-critique invents in destruction and invests in decline, but not for the sake of - anything.

Kant’s care is evident in his stabilization of the system of faculties at the risk of compromising the machine he has built, and it is the stability disciplined into a system which presents an image, not what escapes it. Deleuze’s positive and sober critique of Kant addresses its instabilities, and it is from these that Anti-Oedipus takes its critical sense (though there are other senses too) fuelled by their refinement in Différence and Repetition. The method is one of the undisciplined micro-analysis of the disciplined microphysics of power.

Noology, as a science of cognition whose principles derive from the Mind rather than from the richness and multiplicity of concrete experience, is a common target of both Kant and Deleuze. At the end of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant cites Plato as ‘the chief of the noologists’, his philosophical error being to intellectualize knowledge and collapse intuition into cognitive functions.[49] Kant’s cure to the intellectualization of knowledge is well known: intuition and cognition become twin stems of knowledge, giving rise to an industry attempting to resolve this disjunction, in intellectual or aesthetic intuition, in God or the State. As has been seen, however, Kant’s cure itself comes under criticism from Deleuze, the force of the explosive moment, of the introduction of time into the subject, being vitiated by its restriction within extension. As has been argued, it is this aspect of Kant from which Deleuze forges the force of his critique, taking the sense of synthesis together with the problem of Ideas and dissolving with consequent resolution the image of thought. Moving the aesthetic away from extension, refusing the division of sensibility into objective and subjective elements, and the postulation of the unity of the thing-in-itself, Deleuze introduces sensibility to problems of force which cannot be reconciled with the image of thought or the conceptual mechanics of the understanding, and initiates a thought of movement which does not belong to objects, but is a kinetics of packs, populations, bodies that are multiplicities without relation to unity.

‘Perds le visage (lose your face)’, Deleuze writes, because it is scarred with ‘les deux maladies de la terre, le couple du despote et du prêtre (the two diseases of the earth, the pair of the despot and the priest)’.[50] Losing image, becoming vague without becoming homogeneous or unclear, speeding and slowing in continuous qualitative transformation, Deleuze is not a destructive writer, but one of camouflage; his tactic is to ‘glisser son corps comme une pièce dans de pareilles machines (slip his body into such machines as one part among the others)’.[51] Philosophy as enculage. To flee, leave, evade are subjects of movement: to flee is to trace a line, but unlike the lines drawn explicitly by Kant, measured extensively through the addition of discrete units, lines of flight exceed the perspective of the image. Each line has its subtleties and nuances, qualities of speed and slowness, and Deleuze is explicit about selecting philosophical components to assemble machines which flee and make weapons of flight at once, rather than those which adopt a position or a stance.

Kant, he declares enemy. As this chapter has shown, Kant is a problem, because he is himself in between, and because of this, open to diverse and contrary deployment. He is not properly enlightened, not properly idealist, not properly romantic, not properly Newtonian, not properly religious. Not only chronologically, Kant is a critical juncture between Spinoza and Nietzsche, the two thinkers who, Deleuze says, released him from his debts and who without doubt (though beyond this thesis) inform his re-writing of critique.

[29].K,III:A143/B183. Kemp Smith’s translation of this passage reads it with a negative: ‘that in the objects which corresponds to sensation is not the transcendental matter...’; This reading supports Allison’s case for drawing an equivalence between the thing-in-itself and the noumenon which collapses their difference. As said above (note 24), it is precisely these differences which Deleuze teases out.

[30].cf. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,