Deleuze’s Post-Critical Metaphysics

Abstract

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 problems of critical thought in its canonical 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 hold, 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-Oedipus, Deleuze (now with Guattari) has the intellectual resources to resist it.

Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making

“…The cognitive scientific use of this term is originally Kantian: Kant uses it to describe the mental actions necessary for the constitution of objective experience. But Deleuze widens its usage considerably, divorcing it from Kant's preoccupations with representation and transcendental unity (Welchman, 2009). Broadly based on the operators of Stoic logic, Deleuze discusses the operation of three syntheses in The Logic of Sense : conexa , coniuncta , disiuncta .…”

Producing Alternative Urban Spaces : Social Mobilisation and New Forms of Agency in the Spanish Housing Crisis

“…that produce and shape the space. Secondly, the product of this interaction, even if these encounters are repeated in time, they are unique in a specific space and time, with their specificities and their uncertain outcomes, as their repetition generates their differences (Žižek, 2004;Welchman, 2009). As the fieldwork showed, all the activities carried out by the movements are interconnect-ed and play their role in the resistance and the maintenance of the mobilisation.…”