Transcendental empiricism as discovery of multiplicities and thought-creating activity in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy

Abstract

This research intends to investigate, at first, in which manner Gilles Deleuze's criticism of Emmanuel Kant's faculties doctrine is important to the development of transcendental empiricism concept, and to the new image of thought glimpsed by him. Such criticism inserts itself in a larger criticism of the model of recognition, and, as a last resort, of the tradition of philosophy of representation. In this new image of thought, according to Deleuze, difference should be able to be thought in itself, outside from the limits put by primacy of identity, and also in a way that thought should be an expression of life's affirmative power. Released from sovereignty of the identity in representation, man himself starts to occupy this "empty place" where upon he could think again, since thought is led by involuntary forces, pre-subjective singularities, or "desiring machines" that is, by intensive differences of the univocal being that possess the status of the transcendental principle, from what the multiple faces of experience are produced. Physis and Noûs are the result of the deeper process of affirmation of difference from intensive arrangements of potency in the transcendental domain. The univocal being can be understood, then, as a factory which creates shape and matter as well as a producer of sense and thought. Therefore, it will be researched in which manner historical time is the becoming of multiplicities, remarking the intensive origin of the forces at stake in a given event. In other words, according to Deleuzian interpretation of Nietzsche, the sense of something (human or natural phenomenon) could only be found whether we understand which force seizes it, explores it, dominates it, or expresses itself in it. (AU)