Deleuze And The Immanent Sublime

What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation – a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within. Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way, Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime opens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.

What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation – a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within. Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way, Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime opens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.

One of the terminological constants in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze is the word 'immanence', and it has therefore become a foothold for those wishing to understand exactly what 'Deleuzian philosophy' is. Deleuze's philosophy of immanence is held to be fundamentally characterised by its opposition to all philosophies of 'transcendence'. On that basis, it is widely believed that Deleuze's project is premised on a return to a materialist metaphysics. Christian Kerslake argues that such an interpretation is fundamentally misconceived, and has led to misunderstandings of Deleuze's philosophy, which is rather one of the latest heirs to the post-Kantian tradition of thought about immanence. This will be the first book to assess Deleuze's relationship to Kantian epistemology and post-Kantian philosophy, and will attempt to make Deleuze's philosophy intelligible to students working within that tradition. But it also attempts to reconstruct our image of the post-Kantian tradition, isolating a lineage that takes shape in the work of Schelling and Wronski, and which is developed in the twentieth century by Bergson, Warrain and Deleuze.

Stephen Zepke shows how the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière and the recent Speculative Realism movement.

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness, Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition--as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism. What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology.

Identifies immanence as the original impetus and the driving force behind Deleuze's philosophy In 5 chapters dealing with the status of thought itself, ontology, logic, ethics and aesthetics, de Beistegui reveals how immanence is realised in each of these classical domains of philosophy. Ultimately, he argues, immanence is an infinite task, and transcendence the opposition with which philosophy will always need to reckon.

Over the last twenty years materialist thinkers in the continental tradition have increasingly emphasized the category of immanence. Yet the turn to immanence has not meant the wholesale rejection of the concept of transcendence, but rather its reconfiguration in immanent or materialist terms: an immanent transcendence. Through an engagement with the work of Deleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, Patrice Haynes examines how the notion of immanent transcendence can help articulate a non-reductive materialism by which to rethink politics, ethics and theology in exciting new ways. However, she argues that contrary to what some might expect, immanent accounts of matter and transcendence are ultimately unable to do justice to material finitude. Indeed, Haynes concludes by suggesting that a theistic understanding of divine transcendence offers ways to affirm fully material immanence, thus pointing towards the idea of a theological materialism.

Deleuze's readings of Hume, Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche respond to philosophical critiques of classical and modern empiricism. However, Deleuze's arguments against those critiques - by Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger - consolidate the philosophy of immanence that can be called 'transcendental empiricism'. Marc Rolli offers us a detailed examination of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of transcendental empiricism. He demonstrates that Deleuze takes up and radicalises the empiricist school of thought developing a systematic alternative to the mainstreams of modern continental philosophy.