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ABSTRACT
Commentators have claimed that the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze converge upon a spatial field of sensation which is prior to representation. This essay will contest these readings by showing that, for Deleuze, the pre-representational spatial field of intensity is fundamentally split from thought. This “gap” between sensation and thought is, for Deleuze, fundamentally temporal, in that thought is continually open and passive to being violated and transformed by the sensible and the sensible is continually being pushed beyond itself by a certain kind of thought. This violent exchange across the gap between thought and sensibility is found, by Deleuze, in Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, Kant's aesthetics imply a non-conceptual “ground” shared by both thought and sensibility. By contrasting these two readings of Kant's aesthetics, this paper reveals the basic divergence between the philosophies of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.
Notes
1 William Desmond, Art, Origins, and Otherness, 74.
2 Carbone, La Visibilité (my translation throughout), 169.
3 Jules Vuillemin, L’Héritage, 14. Deleuze is explicit about his debt to Vuillemin's work on the Kantian heritage. Cf. references to Vuillemin in Deleuze's book on Kant, Kant's Critical Philosophy, 77 n1, and in a letter of 1964 to Alain Vinson (“Lettre á Alain Vinson”).
4 The basic contours developed in this argument also apply more broadly to Deleuze's relationship with Heidegger and Husserl.
5 We follow Fink's exposition of Husserl in summarizing the phenomenological reduction.
6 The world is the universal unity of regions that are subject to acts of meaning-bestowal based on worldly concepts.
7 Fink, The Phenomenological Philosophy, 133.
8 Ibid., 129.
9 Ibid., 95.
10 Ibid., 94–95, 124, 130–32.
11 Ibid., 92.
12 Derrida, Heidegger, 12.
13 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 311.
14 Fink, The Phenomenological Philosophy, 134.
15 Ibid., 121.
16 Ibid., 135.
17 Ibid., 121–24.
18 Other key confusions surround the worldly and non-worldly concepts of constitution and meaning.
19 Ibid., 135–36
20 Ibid., 133.
21 Ibid., 100.
22 Ibid., 122.
23 Ibid., 134.
24 Ibid., 136.
25 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense, 59.
26 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxxi.
27 Carbone, La Visibilité, 153.
28 Carbone, La Visibilité, 160.
29 Carbone, 163.
30 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 73.
31 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 56.
32 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ 371.
33 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 57. Cf. on this point also Carbone, La Visibilité, 153.
34 Merleau-Ponty, Signs. 29.
35 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 245–46.
36 Ibid., 245.
37 Ibid., 227.
38 Fenves, Late Kant, 172–73.
39 Henry Somers-Hall, Hegel, Deleuze, 113–14. Somers-Hall claims that because of the similarity between “invisibility” and the Idea, “Merleau-Ponty's analysis is an ontological analysis, and […] this ontology is fundamentally compatible with Deleuze's” (112).
40 The ontological similarity lies in the notion of the “intensive field” (Hegel, Deleuze, 116, 111).
41 Lawlor, 29.
42 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Everywhere and Nowhere,’ 148–49.
43 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 212; cf. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 146–48.
44 Derrida, On Touching, 208.
45 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 147, emphasis added.
46 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 213.
47 Ibid., 255–56, emphasis added.
48 Derrida, On Touching, 213.
49 Ibid., 208.
50 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 245, cited in Derrida, On Touching, 214, emphasis added.
51 Derrida, On Touching, 187.
52 Ibid., 190.
53 Ibid., 190.
54 Ibid., 194.
55 Ibid., 193.
56 Deleuze, Foucault, 110.
57 The Visible, 263.
58 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 151. The cohesion here is “the cohesion of the parts of my body, or the cohesion of my body with the world” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 152).
59 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 5:314/192.
60 As Makkreel summarizes this “other nature”, “the imagination attains a completion [of nature] that remains tied to the sensible realm itself”, unlike rational ideas which transcend the sensible (Makkreel, 124).
61 ‘The Idea of Genesis,’ 67.
62 Makkreel, 124.
63 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §53, 5:326, 203–4.
64 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 5:315/193. Strictly, the inexpressible representations and sensations which are combined with a concept cause the imagination to spread itself over those related representations, and it is this spread of inexpressible representations and sensations is the aesthetic idea. Lyotard describes these implications and connections as the ‘“excess or replacement” of the aesthetic Idea as adding “expression” and “material” to the concept “that exceeds [the object's] determination by understanding”. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons, 65.
65 Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, 54. Deleuze is discussing beauty in nature here, but it will also apply to judgements of beauty in art, if that art is the expression of aesthetic ideas.
66 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 5:315/193.
67 Cf. Fenevres, The Late Kant, 172–73.
68 Deleuze, ‘The Idea of Genesis,’ 71.
69 Rudolf Makkreel confirms and summarizes this reading when he writes that “thinking, which is a function of reason, is here occasioned by an excess of intuitive content that cannot be contained within the concepts of the understanding” (Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation, 121).
70 Makreel, 121, 130.
71 Lyotard, Lessons, 69.
72 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §41, 5:321/198.
73 This “splitting” of the a priori conditions is precisely the aspect of Kant which Deleuze sees in Foucault, and it influences his reading of Kant's aesthetics. Prior to Kant, there was always a reduction of the spatio-temporal to some transcendent principle, whether rationalist (an entity or value) or empiricist (an empirical principle). The theme of “bringing time into thought”, which Deleuze sees as central to post-Kantian philosophy, begins with precisely this splitting of the forms of space–time and understanding.
74 Deleuze, Cours de M. Deleuze sur l’analytique des concepts dans La critique de la raison pure de Kant, 23.
75 Cours, 23. As opposed to merely the “fact” that “I am”, which Descartes would have posed.
76 Cours, 23.
77 Cours, 22.
78 DR, 86.
79 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, B 427, 456.
80 Cours, 24.
81 Ibid., xii. Although Deleuze does not explicitly mention aesthetic ideas here, it is genius to which he refers when he talks of “certain phenomena which come to define the beautiful”.
82 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §49, 5: 318/196.
83 Ibid.
84 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §50, 5:320/197.
85 Ibid., 5:318/196. Deleuze sees this creation not merely as a supplement to ordinary time, but also “the source of time” (Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, xiii).
86 Ibid., §49, 5:318/196.
87 Ibid., §49, 5:318/196.
88 Hyppolite, 18, 10, 19.
89 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche, 58.
90 ‘The Idea of Genesis’, 67. Deleuze uses the phrase “society of creators” when he discusses, with Kantian resonances, the genius at the end of his book on Bergson. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, 111.
91 Critique of Pure Reason, A 363/423.
92 Lyotard, Lessons, 66.
93 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible, 264. In a similar vein, Olkowski has criticized Merleau-Ponty from a Deleuzian perspective for his inability to account for affective becoming due to his focus on spatiality (Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze, 85).
94 Derrida, Heidegger, 36–37.
95 Somers-Hall, 113–14.
96 Somers-Hall, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, 173. Somers-Hall does admit that Deleuze has a critique of phenomenology, but he fails to address Deleuze's critique of phenomenology in an adequate way. Given Somers-Hall's identification of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty on the problem of the intensive field, it suggests that more needs to be said to establish the proximity implied between the two (Somers Hall, Hegel, Deleuze and the Critique of Representation, 245).
97 Somers-Hall, 224.
98 Lawlor, 29.
99 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?, 38, 48.
100 Bell, The Problem of Difference, 202.
101 The relationship of the Kantian genius to Deleuze's Nietzscheanism is suggested by Melissa McMahon; cf. McMahon, 166.