Brassier on Deleuze: Answering the speculative realist critique of thought and temporality in 'Difference and Repetition'
Dale  Clisby deakin.academia.edu
Brassier on Deleuze: Answering the speculative realist critique of thought and temporality in 'Difference and Repetition'
In this paper, I want to look at Deleuze’s philosophical heritage in two different senses. In the first part of the paper, I explore his relationship to perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger plays a central role in Deleuze’s early philosophy, and even when in his later collaborations with Guattari their explicit references to Heidegger are dismissive, Heidegger’s influence can clearly be detected, particularly in their critiques of other philosophers. In the second part of the paper, I look at Deleuze’s own contribution to philosophy, and to see how this contribution has been assessed by one of the most influential contemporary French philosophers, Alain Badiou. For Heidegger, Deleuze, and Badiou, perhaps the central problem for philosophy emerges from thinking about totality. For all three, the traditional metaphysical view of totality, derived from Aristotle’s concept of paronymy, occludes rather than solves the problem of how we characterise our most general concepts. As we shall see, Heidegger’s diagnosis of metaphysics, as constituted by what he calls onto-theology, is shared by all three philosophers, while their responses to this diagnosis differ. Deleuze and Badiou both reject Heidegger’s poetics of being in favour of the language of mathematics, but the question I want to explore in the final part of the paper is, which mathematics? The mathematics of the continuous, or the mathematics of the discrete?

This paper aims to explicate Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of Bergsonism. Specifically, I expound on Deleuze's reconstruction of Bergson's concepts of intuition, the virtual, and duration. Bergson's formulation of these concepts is critically informed by traditional science and metaphysics' insular obsession with quantitative differences, succession, homogeneity etc. In the eyes of Deleuze, this preoccupation redounds to the failure in perceiving real differences— the realm of qualitative difference, duration, intuition etc. Accordingly, real difference and the creative differentiation of its corollary concepts form part of Deleuze's Transcendental or Virtual Empiricism. Ultimately, tracing Deleuze's intellectual indebtedness to Bergson's differential philosophy does not only disclose his own way of overcoming or antagonizing traditional science and metaphysics, but more importantly, it opens us to a life of self-reflexivity, pure becoming, and infinite durations.

Deleuze does not provide a theory of History. His thought has instead a profound anti-historicistic development. This does not imply that history is not a philosophical problem for him. On the contrary, his strong critical view on historicism requires new concepts suited for subverting historicism and for defining a new philosophy of the historical processus, a philosophy of Becoming. The basis of some of the key-concepts in the philosophy of Deleuze, such as Event or Virtual, can be found in his complex thinking on Time. The development of these concepts is based upon a rich dialogue with the philosophy of Bergson, where Nietzsche and Spinoza are always present. We think that the Bergsonian axis in Deleuze's thought plays a very important role, especially in the context of the radical pursuit of negating historicism. This approach differentiates the Deleuze mechanics of history from the Foucault critical history, and underlines their different interpretations of the Nietzsche Genealogy. Keywords: Deleuze, History, Deleuze, History, Genealogy, Bergson, Foucault, Becoming, Event, Virtual, Time, Nietzsche, Rhizome, Stoics, Immanence

In keeping with the Edinburgh Philosophical Guides series aims, the central principle of this introduction is to provide the reader with the means and context necessary to develop an understanding of the key arguments of Deleuze’s most influential philosophical work, Difference and Repetition. The main hurdles new readers face when approaching Difference and Repetition are the wide range of philosophical sources Deleuze draws upon and the density of his philosophical prose. The book will present a novel interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophical project and situate Deleuze within the broader philosophical tradition, interweaving accounts of his interlocutors where they are absent from the text with clear reconstructions of his own arguments. While it is written in an accessible style for readers new to Deleuze, it will also be of interest to advanced scholars as the first sustained attempt to situate this major work within the wider philosophical community.