Deleuze,

Phenomenology and the Real

Alistair Welchman

Paper given at Virtuality, Becoming, Life: Deleuze Studies 2016. Rome, Universit di
Rome Tre, July 13th 2016, 2-4pm

I Introduction

Deleuze is an enigma (and thats not to mention Guattari). Even the most basic
questions of fundamental philosophical doctrine remain unsettled. Is their project
essentially continuous with the natural sciences? Is their work by contrast a
description of the structures of experience, in other words a phenomenology? Or are
they speculative metaphysicians of the early modern tradition? No one seems quite
sure.

I think their position can be made clear by seeing them in the intellectual framework
of post-Kantian idealism. The central thought of Kants mature philosophy is the
distinction between things as they appear to us, and things as they are in
themselves. And a correlate of this distinction is that we cannot know what things in
themselves are like, since our access to them is only by way of how they appear.

German idealists responded to the inaccessibility of things in themselves in two
different ways. The dominant mainstream of idealist thought dismissed the idea of
things in themselves as paradoxical and unnecessary. But a counter-tradition,
including Maimon, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, took the idea as a
challenge and responded by attempting to give a positive characterization of things
in themselves that is maximally abstracted from the contribution of human
cognitive structures. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari can best be seen as operating
in this German counter-tradition.

On this way of understanding Deleuze and Guattari, there is a phenomenological
component to their thought: they sometimes start from descriptions of experience.
But Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in establishing invariant structural
features or genetic conditions of experience. Rather they are interested in peak
experiences, for example experiences of art works that break everyday experience
apart and allow us to see something else. Equally, they are metaphysical thinkers.
But their metaphysics is not of a traditional type; rather it is filtered through Kants
notion of the thing in itself: a realism that goes beyond the real of everyday
experience, and hence beyond the invariant structures that classical
phenomenology identifies as its conditions of possibility.

Equally, there is a scientific component to their thought. But precisely because it is
metaphysical their project cannot be identified with a merely scientific ontology.

II Science


The interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari as providing a general systems theoretic
framework within which contemporary physical and social science can be
integrated is due almost exclusively to two thinkers: Manuel DeLanda (2002, 2016)
and John Protevi (e.g. 2010). In particularly, DeLandas most recent text Assemblage
Theory (2016) is a tour de force: providing for the first a clear account in one book
of the ways in which a Deleuzo-Guattarian apparatus can serve to unify
interventions in specific disciplines as disparate as linguistics, chemistry, physics,
history and biology.

Nevertheless, despite some terminological suggestions to the contrary, it is not
really providing a metaphysical view of Deleuze. Rather it interprets Deleuze as
essentially a high-level empiricist, interested in providing a general ontology for
broadly scientific investigations, some aspects of which point to genuinely
provocative similarities between different disciplines, but none of which go beyond
the scientific in any philosophically serious way.

For instance, one of the basic insights of the DeLanda/Protevi approach is that
Deleuzes vocabulary can often be mapped quite rigorously onto the modeling
technique of dynamical systems theory with its use of abstract state and phase
space diagrams to model empirical systems, and this technique is content neutral
and has been used successfully across a number of scientific domains. What
DeLanda/Protevi do is to use Deleuze to provide an ontological framework for
dynamical systems theory and then argue that this framework unifies empirical
investigation across traditionally disparate areas such as physics and history.

But in Kantian terms, this interpretation locates Deleuze squarely within the
empirically real understood as the arena of scientific explanation. As a critique I
would only note briefly that the DeLanda/Protevi reading of Deleuze makes it
difficult to account for the apparently muscular metaphysical pronouncements of
Deleuze; and at the same time these readers of Deleuze evince some distaste for the
subjective vocabulary that Deleuze deploys in e.g. Chapter 2 of Difference and
Repetition. DeLanda, for instance, finds these terms disquietingly anthropomorphic
(DeLanda 2004: 162).

III Phenomenology

The basic orientation of phenomenology is transcendentally idealist in a Kantian
sense: the problematic of philosophy involves the nature and structure of
experience. It would be nave to suppose that experience simply resembles the real;
experience is a product of human cognitive apparatus in the broadest sense. Indeed
the way in which the phenomenological tradition characteristically goes beyond
Kant is in its rejection of the relevance or even meaningfulness of the question of
how things are in themselves.

This kind of view of Deleuze is often implicit. For instance James Williamss excellent
Critical Guide and Introduction to Difference and Repetition (2003) appears to
presuppose an essentially anti-realist view of Deleuzes account of time in Chapter 2
of Deleuzes Difference and Repetition. His careful unpicking of the effects of
temporal synthesis delineates such effects as concerning the significance of events,
thus implying the presence of an underlying substructure that remains unaffected
by temporal synthesis. Significance is surely here a transcendentally ideal
construct rendered plausible by an underlying transcendental realism
corresponding to the standard scientific worldview (Williams 2003: 8, 104, see also
Welchman 2009: 36 note 22).

Other versions of the phenomenological reading of Deleuze are both explicit and
positive. Joe Hughes (2008) for instance reads Deleuze unapologetically as
operating with the intellectual frame of Husserl: the main texts of the Deleuzian
corpus (Hughes analyzes Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus)
aim to give an account of the (transcendental) genesis of the empirically real world
of representation. Where Deleuze is apparently critical of representation, this is not
a signal that we should actually try to abandon representationfor without
representation we would not have consciousness, nor would we be able to evaluate
our environment and make decisions which ensure the repetition of joyful
affections (2008: 53)but rather an indication that we must reject the natural
attitude that goes along with representation, the good sense and common sense of
Difference and Repetition, if we want to get a good philosophical grip on the genetic
conditions of representational experience.

Hughes view struggles however to deal with both the apparently metaphysical
pretensions of Deleuzes texts and even with its engagement with empirical history
(for if, as Hughes argues, social production in Anti-Oedipus is just static genesis, then
it must be ahistorical).

IV Metaphysics

In complete contrast, Badiou claims that Deleuzes thinking constitutes (like his
own) a classical, that is an essentially pre-critical, metaphysics; for Badiou, this
makes any return to Kant (or by implication any phenomenological development of
Kantianism) impossible. The fact that Deleuze identifies philosophy purely and
simply with ontology is a point that can never be sufficiently emphasized, and one
that a critical or phenomenological interpretation continuously conceals. (Badiou
1997/2000: 456/69, 32/20). And Deleuze himself has described himself, in
conversation with Arnaud Villani, as a pure metaphysician (Villani 1999: 130).

It can seem that this kind of approach is continuous with the ontology of the
DeLanda/Protevi view. But this is a mistake, as can be seen by Badious emphasis on
the fact that Deleuzes metaphysics is pre-critical, i.e. pre-Kantian. Kant
distinguishes quite rigorously between what he terms legitimate and illegitimate
forms of metaphysics: his reputation as the destroyer of metaphysics is only partly

deserved. Metaphysics is illegitimate iff it makes claims about the nature of reality
that are beyond the possibility of empirical verification, i.e. to which no possible
experience could correspond, claims about the nature of things as they are in
themselves rather than as they appear to us. This is Kants diagnosis of the failures
of pre-critical metaphysics: it is characterized by an attempt to use pure reason to
determine the nature of things; but pure conceptual reasoning does not need to be
constrained by experience, and hence such reasoning can often err in subtle ways
beyond the possibility of experimental verification.

However, Kant does note eschew the possibility of metaphysics in general:
philosophers can still make synthetic a priori claims about the nature of objects of
experience in general. Indeed, this is just a description of the positive project of the
Critique of Pure Reason: conditions of the possibility of experience are synthetic a
priori claims that cannot be justified (merely) by adverting to experience. Why?
Because they make claims about what makes experience itself possible, and thus
have a justification that is immanent to experience (and so does not go beyond it)
but at the same time is independent of particular experiences. More controversially,
Kant goes on, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, to argue that
empirical scientific enterprises must also contain a pure i.e. not-empirical i.e. a
priori component (although he was never clear about exactly what this component
consisted of).

In a nutshell, the Protevi/DeLanda view is continuous with this Kantian conception
of metaphysics, as itself continuous with and a generalization of scientific research
immanent to experience. By contrast the metaphysical interpretations of Deleuze
see Deleuze, as Badiou emphasizes, as essentially pre-critical. Indeed interest in
Deleuzes Kantianism and his metaphysics seem often mutually exclusive in the
literature. For instance, an avowedly metaphysical commentary like Peter
Hallwards Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation has Deleuze
doing ontology (Deleuze equates being with unlimited creativity, 2006: 8) but does
not have much time for Kant (Deleuze himself is not primarily a critical thinker,
2006: 73) and regards Deleuze as simply affirming the existence of that intellectual
intuition, (2006: 12) into the nature of things in themselves that Kant emphatically
denies. (see Welchman 2009: 25-6 note 2)

V German Idealism

I think that it is possible, at least in principle, to resolve the tensions between these
various, apparently inconsistent readings of Deleuze, by understanding Deleuze as a
metaphysician but of a special post-Kantian rather than pre-critical stripe.

In a previous paper (Welchman 2009) I have argued a special case of this view: that
the term synthesis in Deleuze undergoes a specific kind of mutation from its
Kantian sense. For Kant, synthesis is a subjective process (or set of processes) that is
responsible for the construction of the empirically real but transcendentally ideal
object of experience. By contrast, for the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus at least, synthesis

is no longer a subjective process but more akin to chemical synthesis: it is the name
for the processes of production of the real in the real. Such processes are consistent
with empirical science, but metaphysically deeper than science. That reading was
however unsympathetic to the phenomenological aspects of Deleuze, and I now
want to try to integrate those too.

The outlines of such an integration are quite simple, and follow from the
development of a strand of post-Kantian philosophy that goes from Maimon to
Nietzsche. The main stream of post-Kantian thought, culminating in Hegel, views the
Kantian distinction between things as they appear phenomenologically
(phenomena) and things as they are in themselves as essentially mistaken and aims
to recover the real for the rational. Deleuze goes the other way: underneath the
forms of representation, the real synthesizes itself by itself (and synthesizes
representations as a byproduct). But the counter-tradition (it is not exactly the same
one as Deleuze identifies) is interested in the way in which the real disrupts
phenomena construed as object-recognition, that it, it proposes a counterphenomenology that promises access to the ultimately synthetic real via
experiences that are still arguably phenomenal but which go beyond and beneath
object-recognition.

For example, Kant sees aesthetic experience of beauty as inherently resisting the
empirical objectivity of a property, even while he argues that such anobjective
experiences actually underwrite our confidence in the regularity and uniformity of
nature, and provide a symbol for the good and common sense.

One avenue of research I originally thought was promising was to distinguish
between Deleuzes uses of the terms experience and encounter: the former would
be experiences of recognition of formed objects (and subjects); while the latter
would be exceptional and deforming phenomena that disrupted recognition both of
objects and of oneself. Unfortunately, I do not think Deleuze uses the terms in a
consistent manner.

Still I think the overall procedure still has potential, and by way of conclusion I want
to outline one way in which a counter-canonical thinker can be used as a model for
Deleuzes procedure. I have in mind Schopenhauer (see Welchman 2015).

Of course Schopenhauer does not appear frequently in Deleuze: the most extended
discussion is in the Nietzsche book (otherwise Schopenhauer is lumped in with
Schelling a couple of times as one of the thinkers of the undifferentiated
schizophrenic abyss). In the Nietzsche book the presentation is ambiguous at best.
On the one hand, Deleuze wants to emphasize Nietzsches break with
Schopenhauers pessimism, and this affirmation of life is clearly very important to
Deleuze; on the other, Deleuze recognizes that Nietzsches debt to Schopenhauer is
great: in particular, it is by means of Schopenhauer that Nietzsche breaks from the
dialectic of the negative in Hegel, something that is also of great importance to
Deleuze.


Schopenhauer himself is quite close to Kant: he argues that the world as we
experience it is representation i.e. a transcendentally ideal (synthetic) construct.
However he considerably simplifies Kants transcendental machinery, collapsing the
notionally conceptual categories and the Kantian intuitions of sensibility into a
single intuitive-sensible faculty, and vastly diminishing the importance of reason:
reason is the borrowed light of the moon while intuition is the direct light of the
sun (WWR I 8, pp. 578/2:41). There is already something here that corresponds
to Deleuze: early in Difference and Repetition Deleuze tables his slogan for
repetition, difference without a concept and immediately relates the way in which
repetitions form of difference escapes conceptuality by appealing to the peculiar
power of the existent, a stubbornness of the existent in intuition, which resists every
specification by concepts, no matter how far this is taken (1968/1994: 13/23, citing
Welchman 2015). Schopenhauers privileging of intuitive-perception is of a piece
with this.

But this is not Schopenhauers most important innovation. That comes from the first
part of the title of 1819 work: The World as Will and Representation. Representation,
comprised by individuated subjects recognizing individuated objects, is not all that
the world is. That is just how things appear to us; in themselves, Schopenhauer
argues, they are also will. Schopenhauer goes beyond the Kantian characterization
of the thing in itself as merely the negative of appearances. Although this
subtraction of the forms of representation not in itself an inappropriate method, in
Kants hands it has the drawback that the result of the subtraction is something
purely rational, a thought-object or noumenon. Schopenhauer approaches the
matter differently, indeed phenomenologically.

On the one hand, we have an inside view of the actions of our own bodies that is
based (actively) on the experience of intentional action; on the other, things grab us
by affecting our wills and it is only willing that can be fully subtracted from
representation. Every episode of actual willing is inserted into a framework of
representation governed by the principle of sufficient reason: in Schopenhauers
vocabulary, I can explain why I willed something to occur on the basis of the
representation that forms my motive. But, as with other representational
explanations, I cannot explain why I will at all (WWR 1, 29, 199/2:1945). But
willing can be so subtracted: there is a core of conative activity in every episode of
willing, a not-yet directed striving or surging, that does not require a transitive
object, and hence escapes the most general form of representational structure, the
division into subject and object. In doing so, of course, it is also independent of the
principle of sufficient reason

Thus the phenomenological experience of will gives us a unique clue for
understanding how things are in themselves, and in the process the concept of will
undergoes a radical revision: will as such is no longer the locus of responsible free
human action. Rather it is a fundamentally intransitive form of activity of
production:


[T]he absence of all goals, of all boundaries, belongs to the essence of the will
in itself, which is an endless striving (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, vol. 1, 29, p. 188/2:195)

I am hoping that this idea of an intransitive striving will appear similar to Deleuze
and Guattaris critique of the similar notion of desire in Anti-Oedipus: in the tradition
desire is lack because it is representational: it represents a striving after some goal
which has not been attained; but one of the innovations of desiring-production is
that it is not lack, hence not representational, hence not transitive.

It is true that Schopenhauer uses this premise in his argument for pessimism:
because the will is intransitive, it can never be satisfied because it can never attain
its object. But a moments reflection (from a Deleuzian perspective) reveals that this
is backwards: it is only because we, individuated subjects, represent the will as
transitive that it appears as such to lack an object; in itself it surely lacks nothing.
Perhaps Nietzsche did not need to do so much work to overcome Schopenhauers
pessimism and convert the philosophy of the will into an affirmation. And perhaps
Deleuzes regimes of primary process (desiring production) and secondary
elaboration (representation, Oedipus) can be mediated by a phenomenological
bridge that Schopenhauer has helped to build.

References

Alain Badiou (1997/2000) Deleuze: La clameur de ltre (Paris: Hachette, 1997), tr.
by L. Burchill as Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000)

Manuel DeLanda (2002) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT
Press)

Manuel DeLanda (2016) Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press)

Gilles Deleuze (1968/1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press)

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1972/1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London:
Athlone)

Peter Hallward (2006) Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation
(London: Verso)

Joe Hughes (2008) Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London: Continuum)

Immanuel Kant (1781/1787) Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul
Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999)

Immanuel Kant (1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Edited and
translated by Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2004)

John Protevi (2010) Adding Deleuze to the mix Phenom Cogn Sci 9:417-436

Arthur Schopenhauer (2010) The World as Will and Representation, trans. and ed.
Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. 1

Arthur Schopenhauer (1988) Smtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hbscher, 4th edn
(Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1988), 7 vols.

Arnaud Villani (1999) La gupe et lorchide: essai sur Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Belin)

Alistair Welchman (2009) Deleuzes Post-Critical Metaphysics Symposium:
Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie
continentale, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 25-54

Alistair Welchman (2015) Deleuze and Schopenhauer in Craig Lundy and Daniela
Voss (eds) At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 213-252

James Williams (2003) Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition: A Critical Guide and
Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)