Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
- DIFFERENT/CIATION
- 2 Real Essences without Essentialism
- 3 Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas
- 4 The Precariousness of Being and Thought in the Philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou
- 5 Counter-Actualisation and the Method of Intuition
- 6 Inconsistencies of Character: David Hume on Sympathy, Intensity and Artifice
- 7 A Fourth Repetition
- LIFE, ETHICS, POLITICS
- EPILOGUE
- List of Contributors
- Index
6 - Inconsistencies of Character: David Hume on Sympathy, Intensity and Artifice
from DIFFERENT/CIATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
- DIFFERENT/CIATION
- 2 Real Essences without Essentialism
- 3 Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas
- 4 The Precariousness of Being and Thought in the Philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou
- 5 Counter-Actualisation and the Method of Intuition
- 6 Inconsistencies of Character: David Hume on Sympathy, Intensity and Artifice
- 7 A Fourth Repetition
- LIFE, ETHICS, POLITICS
- EPILOGUE
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
And therefore it must be our several particular
perceptions, that compose the mind; I say, compose the
mind, not belong to it. The mind is not a substance in which
the perceptions inhere.
Hume, A Treatise of Human NatureThe reader will notice that Gilles Deleuze barely makes an appearance in what follows. This essay is, for all intents and purposes, an essay about David Hume. Yet, this is an admittedly odd reading of Hume; a reading that refuses to engage him on epistemological terms but is, rather, committed to reading Hume as a ‘minor’ literary figure. Of course, Deleuze wrote a book on Hume and his insights on Hume's theories of sensation pepper the gamut of his philosophic oeuvre to the point that Deleuze declares that: ‘[T]he logic of sense is inspired in its entirety by empiricism’ (Deleuze 1990: 20) With this in mind, the following is an attempt to expand on the political implications of what Deleuze, in his Preface to Empiricism and Subjectivity, refers to as our ‘habit of saying I’ when speaking of our selves. The hope, then, is to think of Hume as a swerve, a line of flight oddly postured between Anglo-American and poststructural theories of aesthetics and politics.
I begin with an ending. In the final version of his will, written a few months before his death, Hume makes one last revision to his oeuvre.
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- Deleuze and Philosophy , pp. 85 - 97Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006