by Daniel Smith
One can discern in this passage several “reactions” on Deleuze's part. There is a reaction against Cartesian dualisms and Hegelian triads, which is as much a personal reaction against his teachers as a philosophical reaction. There is also a reaction against the institutionalization of the history of philosophy in the French university, and in particular the role Heidegger's thought played in it. Deleuze, for instance, never shared Heidegger's or Nietzsche's obsession with the Greeks; no doubt his avowed preference for the Stoics and Lucretius was at least in part a reaction against this Hellenophilia. Finally, there is a reaction against what he calls the “scholasticism” of “the three H's”—Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—which was prevalent after the Liberation. Many French philosophers, such as Levinas, Ricœur, Derrida, and Lyotard—began their careers with books on Husserl. Significantly, Deleuze never wrote directly on any of “the three H's,” though he was obviously immersed in their work, and instead wrote his first book on Hume (Empiricism and Subjectivity, which was published in 1953), as if he wanted to add a fourth “H” of his own to the list.
In fact, Deleuze's decision to write on Hume as a student is an important part of the story of his anti-Hegelianism. English philosophy, led by Bertrand Russell, had already gone through its own reaction against Hegel (at least as represented by Bradley) a full half-century earlier than did the French, but for quite specific reasons. Drawing on the recent developments in logic stemming from the work of Frege and Peano, Russell developed the empiricist theme that relations are external to their terms, which became one of the standard criticisms laid against Hegel (for whom, like Leibniz, relations are internal to their terms). In France, this aspect of Anglo-American philosophy had been taken up by Jean Wahl, whom Deleuze would often cite, in his later writings, with regard to the priority Wahl gave to the conjunction “and” over the copula “is.”8 Throughout his career, Deleuze remained a great admirer of Russell, and was strongly antagonistic to the effects Wittgenstein's work had had on Anglo-American philosophy (ABC W). Writing on Hume, and declaring himself to be an empiricist in the British mold, in other words, was already a direct anti-Hegelian provocation.9 For Hegel, empiricism itself was almost a non-philosophy, because it tried to grasp “this,” “that,” “here,” and “now” in an immediate manner, whereas such indexicals are universals that can never grasp sensible experience in an unmediated way.10 Deleuze dedicated his Hume book to his teacher, Jean Hyppolite—“a sincere and respectful homage,” reads the dedication—and the provocation could hardly have been clearer: the twenty-six-year-old student respectfully presenting to his Hegelian teacher a thesis on the greatness of empiricism.
Indeed, Deleuze's analysis of Hume's empiricism can be read as an explicit challenge to Hegel's characterization of empiricism. The empiricist thesis, in its usual formulation, is that knowledge is derived from experience: that is, the intelligible is derived from the sensible. But Deleuze shows that, for almost every specific idea that Hume analyzes in the Treatise on Human Nature (causality, the world, the self, God), the search for a linear path that would reduce the idea to a corresponding impression leads almost immediately to an impasse. Instead, Hume attempts to unravel a more complex tissue of principles (the principles of human nature: association and passion) that habitually bind together separate impressions in order to produce ideas which are in fact inferences, and which affirm more than is really “given.” In shifting the emphasis to associationism, Deleuze argues, Hume carried empiricism to a higher power; if ideas contain neither more nor less than sensible impressions, it is precisely because relations are exterior and heterogeneous to their terms. The essential distinction in Hume, in other words, is not between impressions and ideas, between the sensible and the intelligible, but rather between two sorts of impressions and ideas: impressions and ideas of terms, and impressions and ideas of relations.11 In Hume, Deleuze argues, the empiricist world was deployed for the first time in its full extension—a conjunctive world of atoms and relations which would not find its complete development until Russell and modern logic. Through Hume, the early Deleuze seemed to have been linking himself to the anti-Hegelian polemics of the early Russell.
None the less, it could be argued that Empiricism and Subjectivity occupies a somewhat marginal position within Deleuze's corpus; Deleuze would eventually turn Hume's empiricism into what he would later come to call a “transcendental empiricism.” This change was effected in the years between the publication of Empiricism and Subjectivity in 1953 and the appearance of Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1962, in which Deleuze's reaction against Hegel appears at its most intense. Deleuze has called this an “eight-year hole” in his life (1953 to 1961), during which he published very little.
I know what I was doing, where and how I lived during those years [he would later say], but I know it almost abstractly, rather as if someone else were relating memories that I believe in but don't really have … That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in th/ese holes that movement takes place. (N 138)
Externally, during these eight years, Deleuze married and had his first child, and moved through a series of temporary academic posts, from the lycée in Orleans to the Sorbonne and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. But a profound “intensive” movement of thought took place as well; Deleuze emerged pursuing a singular philosophical trajectory that would be worked out in a series of monographs on individual figures—Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Proust (1964), Bergson (1966), and Masoch (1967)—that would culminate in Difference and Repetition.
DELEUZE'S METHODOLOGY: THE ROLE OF “BECOMING”
Deleuze's use of the history of philosophy, however, would ultimately have a significance that went beyond the reaction to these early institutional constraints. Deleuze clearly worked out his own “creative” philosophy in the context of his monographs on various figures in the history of philosophy, but the reason he did so, he would later explain, is that, in order to write and think, he needed to work with “intercessors” with whom he could enter into a kind of “becoming” (past philosophers were intercessors of this type, as was Guattari, in the present).12 When reading Deleuze's monographs, as has often been noted, one has the distinct impression of entering a “zone” in which Deleuze's own project and that of the author at hand seem to become indiscernible. They constitute what Deleuze himself calls a “zone of indiscernibility”; on the one hand, there is a becoming-Deleuze of the thinker at hand, as it were; and on the other hand, there is a kind of becoming-Spinoza on Deleuze's part, for instance, or a becoming-Leibniz, a becoming-Bergson, and so on. (This is what Bakhtin called a “free indirect style” of writing.)13
This by now familiar style, however, makes for some acute difficulties of interpretation: Where does Deleuze end and, say, Spinoza begin? Where does an explication become an interpretation, and an interpretation a creation (to use hermeneutical terms which Deleuze avoided)? These are not easy questions; such distinctions are, as Deleuze says, indiscernible. Put crudely: in all Deleuze's readings, one moves from a fairly straightforward “explication” of the thinker at hand, to a more specifically Deleuzian “interpretation,” which often makes use of concepts incorporated from outside thinkers (for instance, Deleuze interprets Spinoza in terms of Duns Scotus's concept of “univocity,” and Leibniz in terms of the mathematical theory of “singularities,” although neither of these terms appears in Spinoza's or Leibniz's texts); and finally, one reaches a kind of “creative” point where Deleuze pushes the thought of the thinker at hand to its “differential” limit, purging it of the three great terminal points of metaphysics (God, World, Self), and thereby uncovering the immanent movement of difference in their thought. This is the point where Deleuze's own “system” would begin. Evaluating where these different points lie is one of the most challenging and difficult tasks in rea
ding Deleuze—precisely because there are no clear-cut points where the transition is made.
Sometimes, however, interpreters have contented themselves with a quite different task: identifying Deleuze with (or distancing him from) certain philosophers in the history of philosophy, separating his “friends” from his “enemies.” For instance, one could easily imagine drawing up the following four lists. The first would be a list of Deleuze's “canonical” philosophers, those to whom he devoted separate monographs: Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz. To this, one could then add a list of secondary names, philosophers Deleuze loves and refers to often, even though he never wrote a separate monograph on them: Lucretius, the Stoics, Duns Scotus, Maimon, Whitehead. Then there would be the list of Deleuze's ostensible enemies, which would include Plato, Kant, and Hegel. And finally, one could identify certain “hidden” thinkers that Deleuze confronts in a fundamental manner, but who are not frequently discussed directly—most notably Heidegger. With these lists in hand, one could begin to debate, for instance, about who Deleuze's “true” master is. Is it “really” Bergson, as Alain Badiou wants to claim?14 Is it Nietzsche? Is it Spinoza? Deleuze's own comments in certain texts (such as the “Letter to Michel Cressole”) tend to encourage this approach; he says he detested Hegelianism, sought a way to overturn Platonism, thought of his study of Kant as “a book on an enemy,” and that his work tends toward “the great Spinoza-Nietzsche identity” (see N 125). But the distinction between Deleuze's friends and enemies, or the identification of Deleuze's “true” masters, is at best a preliminary exercise: necessary, perhaps, but certainly not sufficient. The fact is that Deleuze reads every philosopher in the history of philosophy—friend or enemy—in the same manner, following the same strategy, pushing each thinker, so to speak, to their differential limit. (Indeed, this is a point of affiliation with Hegel; Hegel pushes thought to its point of contradiction, Deleuze to the point of difference.) Deleuze indeed describes his Kant book as “a book on an enemy,” but elsewhere he notes, more accurately, that Kant was one of the great philosophers of immanence, and Deleuze unhesitatingly places himself squarely in the Kantian heritage (even if Kant was unable to push the thought of immanence to its necessary conclusion: that is, to its differential conclusion).15 Conversely, and for the exact same reason, Deleuze often departs from his “friends”. He rejects Bergson's critique of intensity in Time and Free Will; his Leibnizianism is a Leibnizianism minus God; his Spinozism is a Spinozism minus substance; and Spinoza himself defined determination as negation—a position from which Deleuze broke strongly in his earliest work. But this does not mean that Deleuze is “anti-Spinoza” or “anti-Leibniz” or “anti-Bergson”—any more than he is simply “anti-Hegel.” Such characterizations, while not entirely inaccurate, are far too simplistic; they miss the movement and “becoming” of Deleuze's thought, both in itself and in its complex relation to the history of philosophy.
THE POST-KANTIAN TRADITION: THE ROLE OF MAIMON
Why, then, did Deleuze not write directly on Hegel, the philosopher he says he detested, and push him to his differential limit? Jacques Derrida, in his early work, suggested one possible reason for avoiding a direct confrontation with Hegel: it is impossible to oppose Hegel, because opposition is the motor of the Hegelian system, and to oppose Hegel is to become part of the system. This, however, was not an issue for Deleuze, and his early work follows a quite different trajectory than Derrida's, despite certain points of convergence between their work. For instance, one does not find in Deleuze the kind of critique of “binary oppositions” that one finds in Derrida's early work. Nor does one find a concept of “closure” in Deleuze's writings: neither structural closure, since Deleuze from the start defined structures as open and differential (what he called structuralism is what was later termed “post-structuralism”),16 nor the closure of metaphysics, since, far from seeing metaphysics as having exhausted its possibilities, Deleuze frequently dipped into the history of philosophy in order to retrieve, rejuvenate, and transform modes of thought that had been closed off (such as the tradition of univocity inaugurated by Duns Scotus—a trajectory that had been blocked by Christian orthodoxy). Though Derrida and Deleuze both participated in a shared anti-Hegelian reaction, they none the less posed their anti-Hegelian problems in different manners, which in turn led them to pursue quite different philosophical trajectories.
This brings us back, then, to the question of the specificity of Deleuze's anti-Hegelian trajectory. On this score, it would be hard to overemphasize the role played in Deleuze's thought by the eighteenth-century philosopher Salomon Maimon. Maimon is an obscure figure, largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. In France, however, he remains semi-canonical (Martial Guéroult wrote an important book on Maimon), and he exerted an enormous influence on Deleuze, who considered him “a great, great philosopher.”17 Maimon, a contemporary of Kant, was a Polish–Russian Jew who never attended a university, receiving his sole education from the Talmudic tradition while training to be a rabbi. He was exiled (Spinoza-like) from his community because of his unorthodox and radical views, and lived for several years as a wandering beggar, spending much of his time in taverns, and in constant poverty. He was crude, naive, and simple, sometimes embarrassingly outspoken, though he spoke an ad hoc mixture of Hebrew, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Polish that few could understand. Somehow, he made his way to Berlin, and made contact with some of the intelligentsia there (including Mendelssohn, who, as a skilled linguist, was apparently one of the few people who could understand what Maimon was saying). In Berlin, he fell under the spell of Kant's critical philosophy, and wrote a manuscript on it entitled Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.18 In April 1789, Marcus Herz, a old student and friend of Kant's, sent his former teacher a copy of Maimon's manuscript, recommending it to him and hoping it would receive Kant's blessing before publication. Kant, who was sixty-six, in failing health, and eager to finish the third Critique (which would not appear until a year later), was annoyed, and nearly returned the manuscript to Herz unopened. Six weeks later, however, Kant finally wrote back to Herz:
But one glance at the work made me realize its excellence, and that not only had none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Mr. Maimon does, but also very few men possess so much acumen for such deep investigations as he.19
The letter continued with a lengthy reply to two sections of Maimon's manuscript. It was, to say the least, a remarkable turn of events.
But that is not the end of the story. Maimon's book was published, and read by another young philosopher, who was even more impressed than Kant.
My respect for Maimon's talent is limitless [he wrote in a letter to Reinhold]. I firmly believe, and am ready to prove, that through Maimon's work the entire Kantian philosophy, as it is understood by everyone including yourself, is completely overturned … All this he has accomplished without anyone's noticing it and while people even condescend to him. I think that future generations will mock our century bitterly.20
This is from a letter by Fichte, who was dazzled by Maimon's book. Indeed, not only Fichte's philosophy, but the entire post-Kantian tradition—usually marked by the names Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—can be said to have been generated by the critiques Maimon leveled against Kant in the midst of the fervor created by the critical philosophy. As Frederick Beiser says, in his superb study The Fate of Reason, to study Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel without having read Maimon is like studying Kant without having read Hume.21 Deleuze, to be sure, was fully aware of Maimon's role in the post-Kantian tradition, and his strategy in approaching that tradition seems to have been as follows: rather than attacking Hegel directly, he instead went back to Maimon—that is, to the polemics that generated the post-Kantian tradition in the first place—and took them up anew, in his own manner, in order to formulate an alternate solution to those same problematics.
What was it, then, that Kant, Fichte, and Deleuze found so remarkable in Maimon's manuscript? For his part,
Deleuze, at least, seems to have taken up three elements of Maimon's thought in his early work. First, within the context of the critical tradition, Maimon is the great philosopher of immanence.22 Kant conceived of his transcendental philosophy as a purely immanent critique of reason, and in so far as Deleuze conceives of his own philosophy as the construction of a “plane of immanence,” he aligns himself squarely within the critical tradition.23 Maimon's greatness, however, was to have pushed the immanent claims of Kant's philosophy to their logical conclusion; almost all Maimon's critiques of Kant are aimed at eliminating the illegitimate vestiges of transcendence that still remain in Kant, given the presuppositions of a transcendental subject—with which Deleuze himself, of course, will break. (The “thing-in-itself,” for instance, as Jacobi had already argued, is an illegitimate transcendent application of the category of causality.)
