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There are several reasons why this is a timely endeavor. First, it enables us to understand
Deleuze better. Deleuze never viewed his monographs in the history of philosophy as purely
scholastic exercises. Rather, he studied “the arrows or the tools of a great thinker” in order “to
send them in other directions” (DR, xv). Deleuze utilizes Kantian “arrows and tools” throughout
his philosophy but recasts them to serve new functions. Kantian concepts that Deleuze
appropriates and transforms include critique, the transcendental, faculties of mind, problematic
ideas, common sense, the sublime, the person, and constructivism. One aim of this essay, then, is
to read Deleuze’s commentaries on Kant to gain a new perspective on Deleuze’s political theory.
A second reason to investigate Deleuze and the Kantian problematic is to place Deleuze
into conversation with Anglo-American political theory. A strength of A Thousand Plateaus is
the freshness with which it describes political things. Yet for theorists participating in the Anglo-
American philosophical tradition, Deleuze’s magnus opus may appear wild and
incomprehensible.
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Deleuze does not refer to Hobbes, Locke, or Rawls, nor does he explicitly
focus on questions of freedom, equality, and justice. Unfortunately, Deleuze’s polemics against
the “State model of thought” do not encourage dialogue between Deleuzians and Rawlsians. My
view is that both parties would benefit from talking to one another, particularly over the nature of
freedom. Fortunately, they both speak the lingua franca of the Kantian problematic. A second
aim of this essay, then, is to contribute to the incipient dialogue between Anglo-American and
Continental Kantian political theory.
A third reason this project is valuable is that it supports a promising new interpretation of
the Kantian problematic. Many Kant scholars today maintain that the Kantian problematic is
defined by its doctrines: e.g., transcendental idealism, the categorical imperative, the idea of the
sensus communis, and so forth. Many post-Nietzscheans, accordingly, have an antagonistic
Convention