A few words about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism
Gilles Deleuze often said during the Différence et répétition and Logique du sens period that his philosophy could be called transcendental empiricism. This strange oxymoron resurfaced at the end of his life in Immanence : une vie ? and looks like a unexpected "collision of concepts"1. The question I want to ask today is at the same time simple and complicated: what is transcendental empiricism?
The expression "transcendental empiricism" sends us back to Hume, Kant and Bergson – Deleuze's first loves as shows his bibliography: Empirisme et Subjectivité (1953) a monograph about David Hume, Henri Bergson. Mémoire et vie (1957) a collection of texts by Bergson and La philosophie critique de Kant (1963). Anne Sauvagnargues expresses perfectly the deleuzian movement of transcendental empiricism:
… with the transcendental, Deleuze takes up the Kantian initiative of a critique of thought, and in turn assigns it the role of inspecting its areas of chronic weakness, that transcendental illusion he calls the image of thought. Transcendental empiricism consists of a clinic of thought, which seeks to guarantee an empiricism purged of the illusions of transcendence, by exposing the operative modes of thought, which account for its inventiveness but also its conformism.2
To put it in simple words, transcendental empiricism is a kind of superior empiricism: Deleuze tries an elevation to the transcendent of empiricist logic. I think it's pretty clear as soon as in Différence et répétition:
In truth, empiricism becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference, that the phenomenon lights up, is explained as a sign, that movement is produced as an ‘effect’. The intense world of differences, in which qualities find their reason and the sensible, its being, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.3
We can sense in this quote that there is already something of Logique du Sens. And perhaps more important, Deleuze clearly puts the different processes of difference at the center of his philosophy: difference is our way to experience the sensible. Saying that, for Deleuze, difference is the foundation of experience is just stating the obvious, because everything begins to exist and signify only through difference.
In making 'transcendental empiricism' his, Deleuze creates a bidirectional dependency between transcendentalism and empiricism – which looks like the old Kantian gesture trying to settle the dispute between rationalists and empiricists – a practice of thought as important as the thought of practice which guarantees both a purer empiricism (an empiricism emptied of all forms of representation) and an awareness of the distortions induced by thought processes through this clinical approach of thinking, deeply anchoring difference in every aspects of our practical and intellectual experience.
Sauvagnargues, A. (2009). Deleuze: L’empirisme transcendantal (1re ed), Presses universitaires de France, p. 8, my translation.
Ibid.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, p. 56-57. Modified translation.