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Introduction
Deleuze read Kant his entire philosophical career. Deleuze’s first book, Empiricism and
Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature (1953), reconstructs and addresses
Kant’s critique of Hume.
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Deleuze’s second book, Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), compares
and contrasts Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of critique.
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Deleuze’s third book is Kant’s
Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (1963). Virtually every other book that
Deleuze wrote in the history of philosophy – including ones on Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and
Leibniz – employs Kantian terminology as well as contains extended passages on Kant.
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Furthermore, Deleuze’s preoccupation with Kant does not abate in those books in which Deleuze
attempts “to do” philosophy. Deleuze’s great contributions to contemporary political theory –
Difference and Repetition (1968), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and What is Philosophy? (1991)
– draw extensively upon Kant even as they contest elements of the Kantian heritage. Deleuze
expresses his ambiguous relationship to Kant – his profound love and contempt – in the opening
remarks to his 1978 lectures on Kant.
We are returning to Kant. May this be an occasion for you to skim, read or re-read
Critique of Pure Reason. There is no doubt that a tremendous event in philosophy
happens with this idea of critique…. It’s an excessive atmosphere, but if one
holds up…, all this northern fog which lands on top of us starts to dissipate, and
underneath there is an amazing architecture. When I said to you that a great
philosopher is…someone who invents concepts, in Kant’s case, in this fog, there
functions a sort of thinking machine, a sort of creation of concepts that is
absolutely frightening. (KST 1.1)
The aim of this essay is to interpret and evaluate Deleuze’s relationship to the Kantian heritage,
or what I call the Kantian problematic.
Convention