The Creation of Thinking in Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy
Torbjørn Eftestøl rshoyskolen.academia.edu
What does it mean to think? In the following article I show Gilles Deleuze’s answer to this question. According to him ’to think is to create—there is no other creation—but to create is first of all to engender &#39;thinking&#39; in thought’ (Deleuze
In his 1924 lecture 'The Concept of Time' 1 , which has been called the 'Urform' of Being and Time 2 , Heidegger begins with the question 'What is time?' and shows how it gradually transforms itself into the question 'Who is time?' Time cannot be grasped by means of the question of essence, which enquires into 'the what' (das Was) of things. The traditional understanding of 'whatness' or 'essence' operates on the basis of a prior hypostatization of time as presence. Ousia is understood as Vorhandenheit, presence-at-hand (though Heidegger is not yet using this vocabulary in 1924). Thus the question 'What is time?' prejudges the very nature of the phenomenon about which it enquires by reducing it to the status of a specific way of being in time: being-present. But time is precisely that which is never merely present: its way of being cannot be grasped on the basis of being-present. So we cannot simply assume that time's way of being is that of intra-temporal entities. To understand how time is and how its way of being differs from that of intra-temporal entities, we must first understand how we originally come to grasp the various senses of temporal being, how temporal things are. But this entails grasping the intimate relation between those varieties of temporal being and our own being as that within which temporal phenomena are encountered. Thus for Heidegger the enquiry into how time is necessitates an enquiry into the way of being of that entity on whose basis we originally come to access the varieties of temporal being. That being is of course our own: Dasein. Its defining characteristics are temporal specificity (Jeweiligkeit) and mineness (Jemeinigkeit). Dasein is always mine: 'The specificity of the "I am" is constitutive for Dasein. Just as primarily as it is being-in-the-world, Dasein is therefore also my Dasein. It

Badiou claims Deleuze’s thinking is pre-critical metaphysics that cannot be understood in relation to Kant. I argue that Deleuze is indeed a metaphysical thinker, but precisely because he is a kind of Kantian. Badiou is right that Deleuze rejects the overwhelmingly epistemic problematics of critical thought in its classical sense, but he is wrong to claim that Deleuze completely rejects Kant. Instead, Deleuze is interested in developing a metaphysics that prolongs Kant’s conception of a productive synthesis irreducible to empirical causation. Where Badiou’s criticism might tell however is in the risk that Deleuze’s strategy runs of contaminating his new metaphysics with a new kind of transcendental idealism. This reading has recently been developed by Ray Brassier and I explore and evaluate it, concluding that in Difference and Repetition this accusation may be correct, but that by the time of Anti-Œdipus, Deleuze (now with Guattari) has the intellectual resources to resist it.

In the introduction to his 2007 essay After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux calls for the rehabilitation of primary and secondary qualities. Modern philosophy he claims has lost touch with the absolute and the hold of correlationism is complete. The following essay seeks to respond to this claim by turning to a Kantian aesthetic tradition. In the work of Giles Deleuze it finds the possibility of an aesthetics that could be understood as primary in nature, primary in the sense that they would establish precisely what correlationism denies, a relation to the absolute. In one of the last works published by Deleuze – his 1992 postscript to the work of Samuel Beckett, “The Exhausted” – he describes an encounter with an image precisely in these terms, as a moment in which the absolute becomes manifest. This image is not something we can see. It is not an image for us. Neither is it an image for the protagonist of …but the clouds… to whom, it nevertheless appears. Instead, Deleuze describes the image as a “movement in the world of the mind”. What this statement means, how it might demonstrate the “superior empiricism” at the heart of Deleuze’s thought and how it might reveal a speculative realism that takes place there, are just some of the questions this essay seeks to answer.