Deleuze's seminal text

Summary

This video explores the early philosophical ideas of Gilles Deleuze, particularly his first intuitions on the concept of repetition. It discusses Deleuze's engagement with Hume's empiricism and Kant's transcendental philosophy, focusing on how Deleuze seeks to reconcile the two through a process of habit formation and repetition. The script also touches on how literature serves as a bridge between mythology and science, offering a unique way to grasp reality. The key idea revolves around understanding essence and reality as effects of creative processes, marking a shift from traditional representation.

Takeaways

• 📚 Theus organized all his works in a catalog with 11 entries towards the end of his career, highlighting a short text on repetition from the 1950s.
• 🔍 This early text foreshadows Deleuze’s concept of repetition, which later culminated in his work 'Difference and Repetition.'
• 🧠 Deleuze was influenced by David Hume's empiricism and aimed to reconcile it with Kant's transcendental philosophy.
• 🎓 Kant argued that perception must be grounded in a transcendental synthesis, whereas Hume's empiricism did not require an a priori synthesis.
• ⏳ Deleuze challenges both Hume and Kant by introducing a process of habit formation or repetition as the basis of experience.
• 🌍 The paradox Deleuze faces is how identities and representations can exist without pre-existing representations to explain them.
• 🏝 Deleuze uses desert islands as a metaphor to explore the relationship between mythology and science, empiricism and rationalism.
• 🖋 Literature, according to Deleuze, attempts to interpret and recreate myths, bridging the gap between mythology and scientific understanding.
• ⚖️ Deleuze introduces the idea of a 'second origin' or 'second birth,' where reality is found not in its original form but in its process of creation and repetition.
• 🌀 This process of repetition leads to Deleuze’s concept of becoming, a key theme in his later works, representing continuous movement and change.

Q & A

What is the significance of the 10th entry in the catalog created by Theus?

The 10th entry in Theus' catalog is significant because it contains a short text from the early 1950s, which outlines his initial concept of repetition. This marks Deleuze's first intuition of the ideas that would later culminate in his seminal work, 'Difference and Repetition'.

How does Deleuze’s early philosophy engage with David Hume’s empiricism?

Deleuze engages with Hume’s empiricism by exploring the synthesis of relations such as contiguity, resemblance, and causality. He discusses how these relations form through the faculty of imagination, but Deleuze also critiques Hume’s view, ultimately seeking a transcendental synthesis similar to Kant's approach.

What is Kant’s critique of Hume’s view on synthesis and subjectivity?

Kant critiques Hume by arguing that the subject’s relationship to the given cannot be merely accidental. Instead, Kant proposes a transcendental synthesis that precedes perception, which grounds the imagination. This pre-individual synthesis is necessary for anything to appear to a subject at all.

How does Deleuze reconcile Hume’s and Kant’s perspectives in his early work?

Deleuze tries to reconcile Hume and Kant by maintaining Hume’s view that the subject emerges through habitual processes in the given, while also accepting Kant’s notion of transcendental synthesis. He replaces the universal transcendental subject with a process of habit formation that explains how identities are formed.

What is the paradox of representation that Deleuze addresses?

The paradox of representation lies in the difficulty of explaining how identities, which must be recognized as representations, can be understood without pre-existing representations. Deleuze addresses this by moving beyond traditional representation, seeking to explain how identities and differences are formed in the process of becoming.

Why does Deleuze use the metaphor of the desert island in his philosophical argument?

Deleuze uses the metaphor of the desert island to illustrate the tension between mythology and science, empiricism and rationalism. The desert island symbolizes the process of emergence and creation, which reflects the back-and-forth between these modes of thinking. The island becomes a model for understanding how things appear to themselves.

How does Deleuze view the relationship between mythology and science?

Deleuze sees mythology and science not as opposing forces, but as complementary ways of understanding the world. Mythology explains things through archetypes and origins, while science explains things through emergence. Together, they allow for a fuller understanding of how things appear and how reality is constructed.

What role does literature play in Deleuze’s philosophical framework?

Literature, for Deleuze, plays a crucial role in uniting mythology and science. It acts as a process of repetition that allows for the reinterpretation of old myths, revealing essences in moments of creation. Literature gives us a glimpse of reality and allows us to grasp the conditions of apparition.

What does Deleuze mean by the ‘second origin’ and why is it important?

The ‘second origin’ refers to the idea that essence is not found in an initial, metaphysical origin, but in the process of creation and repetition. This second origin is more important than the first because it explains the law of repetition, which governs the emergence of identities and forms the foundation of experience.

How does Deleuze’s concept of repetition differ from traditional representations of identity?

Deleuze’s concept of repetition is not about repeating the same identities or representations. Instead, it is the repetition of difference, a process that creates something new and cannot be fully represented. This concept allows Deleuze to move beyond traditional notions of identity and focus on the process of becoming.