Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Translator's Note
- Author's Foreword
- Introduction: Can Empiricism Have a Transcendental Aspect?
- PART I EMPIRICISM/TRANSCENDENTALISM
- PART II FROM PHENOMENON TO EVENT
- PART III DELEUZE'S TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM
- 6 The Paradoxical Nature of Difference
- 7 Virtuality of Concepts
- 8 Subjectivity and Immanence
- Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here? Lines of Flight
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Paradoxical Nature of Difference
from PART III - DELEUZE'S TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Translator's Note
- Author's Foreword
- Introduction: Can Empiricism Have a Transcendental Aspect?
- PART I EMPIRICISM/TRANSCENDENTALISM
- PART II FROM PHENOMENON TO EVENT
- PART III DELEUZE'S TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM
- 6 The Paradoxical Nature of Difference
- 7 Virtuality of Concepts
- 8 Subjectivity and Immanence
- Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here? Lines of Flight
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In any case, difference in itself appears to exclude any relation between different and different which would allow it to be thought. It seems that it can become thinkable only when tamed.
(Deleuze 1994: 262)With the philosophy of difference, rationality as such once again goes on trial. In its appeal to Nietzsche, this philosophy promises a critique of reason that doesn't hold back, even with respect to Enlightenment foundations. So one might suspect that a radical critique of reason ceases to be reasonable: it has to cut off the branch on which it sits. Will it therefore speculate on the ‘Dionysian event’, on the ‘abyss of Being’? Jürgen Habermas, who declares Nietzsche to be the ‘hub’ of postmodern ways of thinking, sets the course of the polemic:
With Nietzsche, the criticism of modernity dispenses for the first time with its retention of an emancipatory content. Subject-centred reason is confronted with reason's absolute other. And as a counterauthority to reason, Nietzsche appeals to experiences that are displaced back into the archaic realm – experiences of self-disclosure of a decentred subjectivity, liberated from all constraints of cognition and purposive activity, all imperatives of utility and morality. A ‘break-up of the principle of individuation’ becomes the escape route from modernity.
(Habermas 1990: 94)Surely no one will dispute that Nietzsche plays an essential role in the advent of post-structuralism. But it is worth asking why Habermas relates Nietzsche's critique of Romanticism only to Richard Wagner and his religious ideals, and not to Schopenhauer's metaphysics (‘the principle of individuation’). This emphasis is strategically motivated: Habermas wants to interpret Nietzsche's aversion to romantic reconciliation as his final farewell to modernity and its potential for freedom. Ignored is the fact that his genealogy of truth also undermines the will to nothingness, to romantic indifference or to the ‘absolute other’. Deleuze, as one of the few who demonstrate Nietzsche's philosophical relevance in France, clearly distinguishes between the romantic-Dionysian indifference of the Birth of Tragedy and the later conception of difference in the doctrine of the Will to Power. ‘That groundlessness should lack differences, when in fact it swarms with them, is the ultimate […] illusion’ (Deleuze 1994: 277).
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- Information
- Gilles Deleuze's Transcendental EmpiricismFrom Tradition to Difference, pp. 157 - 164Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016