Deleuze and the Problem of Experience: Transcendental Empiricism

This comprehensive reframing of Gilles Deleuze as a transcendental empiricist delves into his seminal Difference and Repetition to unearth a system that inverts the Kantian worldview. By focusing on Deleuze’s theory of the faculties, we can see how he builds a transcendental system of thought that defies the predictability of empirical experience. The place of experience in the way we understand our relation to the world, to others and to ourselves, is a central theme of modern philosophy. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism points to an unexplored direction in this major philosophical preoccupation. It is a road not taken that, against the tide of his times, rejected the possibility of an immediate contact with being and embraced the possibility of reaching a ‘real’ that lay beneath many layers of mediation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Deleuze neither subscribed to a specific philosophical school nor did he try to establish one. This new understanding of him as a transcendental empiricist not only helps to situate his work in the constellation of twentieth century French philosophers but also helps us to understand a philosopher for whom difference and heterogeneity were central to his own philosophical corpus.

Table of Contents:
1. Difference and Repetition as a Philosophical Problem 2. In Search of the Lost Transcendental 3. Repeat Differently, Differentiate Repeatedly 4. The Birth of Subjectivity out of Temporality 5. To Have Done with the System of Faculties 6. Conclusion: The Cinnabar, The Self and the Transcendental

About the Author :
Dror Yinon is a Lecturer in French philosophy and critical theory at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.

Review :
Yinon’s work is a noteworthy contribution to the Kantian reading of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, providing readers with a lucid and well-argued interpretation that will surely be appreciated by scholars and students alike. Rigorously composed and elegantly written this remarkable study of one of the most groundbreaking and demanding works of twentieth-century European philosophy is required reading for those - scholars and students alike - seeking to engage with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. It offers a convincing and brilliant demonstration of how Deleuze’s project of “transcendental empiricism” transforms and supersedes Kant’s transcendental idealism, and sheds new light on the nature of human experience. There is widespread agreement that Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is among his most significant contributions to philosophy, if not the most significant. There is much less agreement on nature of its contribution, its place in the history of modern European philosophy, or the content of key concepts such as transcendental empiricism. Dror Yinon’s rich and informative book answers these questions by providing a systematic framework for the interpretation of Difference and Repetition and sketching its relation to key figures in postwar French philosophy. He shows how Deleuze reworks the philosophical concept of experience through a critical engagement with Kant’s transcendental idealism and what this implies for our understanding of difference, repetition, time and subjectivity. This remarkable book is essential reading for anyone interested in Deleuze’s philosophy.