The Chemistry of Darkness

Abstract

The article attempts to elucidate the connection between Deleuze and idealism partly by answering an apparently futile question: What kind of idealist was Deleuze? The author answers it by resorting to a deep (geo)chemistry, which allows him first to discern a parallel between Hegel’s pleas for a new world and Deleuze’s summons to a new earth and then to recognize that Schelling’s Ungrund concept influenced Deleuze’s version of those ambitions as the indifference preceding all difference and hence prior to all synthesis. However, Deleuze’s idealism is also Kantian - Grant sees Kantian “ethico-teleology” in Deleuze and Guattari’s call for a new people. Grant rejects this shared element in their thinking and replaces it with a less anthropocentric approach derived from chemistry through which he arrives at the absolute empiricism of Schelling’s nature-philosophy, which explains the ideal through the real. Schelling maintains that ubiquitous chemical processes explain all sensation and that all chemical processes contain sensation as a component. With the help of this empiricism devoid of things, Grant concludes that the new earth is nothing more than a blind chemical synthesis in which evil is the will of the ungrounded ground. In this chemical philosophy, evil itself - Schelling’s movement towards particularization - becomes material, and the ontology of absolute empiricism becomes the chemistry of darkness.