Deleuze and Transcendental Empiricism

Positions the strange and paradoxical concept of transcendental empiricism as the key to Deleuze’s work.

The work of Deleuze immerses Kantian transcendental criticism into the dissolving bath of a renewed form of empiricism. Anne Sauvagnargues sets out to reconstruct this undertaking, and to analyse the astonishing creation of the concept of transcendental empiricism, which Deleuze pursues from his first monographs in 1953 to Différence et Répétition (1968), engaging in fertile debate and dialogue with the history of philosophy. How does Deleuze use distortion and collage to combine Hume's empiricism, Nietzsche's theory of the sign as force, Bergson's virtuality and multiplicities, Spinoza's modes and Simondon's impersonal individuation to renew Kantian theory of the transcendental? This is the overarching purpose of Sauvagnargues’ investigation, which takes us into the thinker's laboratory in order to grasp philosophy in the making and helps to explain the insistence of the transcendental in all of Deleuze’s work.