Edinburgh University Press Deleuze and Transcendental Empiricism (Plateaus - New Directions in Deleuze Studies)

Positions the strange and paradoxical concept of transcendental empiricism as the key to Deleuze’s work Offers an accessible but erudite introduction to and analysis of Deleuze’s work up to and beyond Difference and Repetition Provides original, scholarly and powerful extensions of Deleuze’s work and the use of transcendental empiricism across a wide span of disciplines including but not limited to the academic Includes a powerful overview of modern French philosophy ‘in the making’ in the middle of the 20th century The work of Deleuze immerses Kantian transcendental criticism into the dissolving bath of a renewed form of empiricism. Anne Sauvagnargues sets out to reconstruct this undertaking, and to analyse the astonishing creation of the concept of transcendental empiricism, which Deleuze pursues from his first monographs in 1953 to Différence et Répétition (1968), engaging in fertile debate and dialogue with the history of philosophy. How does Deleuze use distortion and collage to combine Hume's empiricism, Nietzsche's theory of the sign as force, Bergson's virtuality and multiplicities, Spinoza's modes and Simondon's impersonal individuation to renew Kantian theory of the transcendental? This is the overarching purpose of Sauvagnargues’ investigation, which takes us into the thinker's laboratory in order to grasp philosophy in the making and helps to explain the insistence of the transcendental in all of Deleuze’s work.