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.