Louis Schreel

In his early, programmatic essay “How do we recognize structuralism?” (1967), Gilles Deleuze presents a confrontation between structuralism and transcendental philosophy with the aim of demonstrating (1) how structuralism transforms transcendental philosophy, and (2) how a new transcendental structuralism becomes compatible with contemporary ideas in topology and dynamical systems theory concerning self-organization, singularities, complexity, etc. Concerning the first point, the key innovation of structuralism is the idea that the constitution of meaning in language does not presuppose an ideal, transcendental subject. Instead, linguistic structure is conceived as a transcendental field without a subject, which is generative of both meaning and subjectivity. Deleuze’s second key idea in this essay is that the foundations of structuralism are not only transcendental but also topological, and not logical. As such, psychic structure should be conceived as a topological, spatial order defined by differential relations of emergence and divided by a system of energetic differences and singularities, which organize the structural space. The aim of this paper is to evaluate these two key ideas underlying Deleuze’s transcendental structuralism: how does structuralism transform transcendental philosophy, and how should the foundations of structuralism be conceived topologically? To address the second question, the paper will turn to Jean Petitot’s dynamical structuralism, which has meticulously developed Deleuze’s proposal of a topological foundation. The key issue then becomes the naturalization of transcendental, constituent structure: either one conceives the foundations of structuralism and transcendental philosophy in a purely logicist manner, thereby adopting a resolutely dualist stance and leaving the naturalization of structure wanting, or one conceives these foundations in a dynamical and topological manner, thereby naturalizing constituent structure in physical, morphological and ultimately symbolic terms.

In his main work Vom Sinn der Sinne (1935), the German phenomenologist, psychiatrist and neurologist Erwin Straus developed one of the first phenomenological contributions to the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of psychology. Straus’ main concern was to present an alternative to the three dominant theories of the time: behaviourism, classical materialism and the emerging computationalism of cybernetics. According to Straus, the replacement of the behaviorist hypothesis (mental states are behaviour dispositions) with the classical materialist hypothesis (mental states are brain states) or with the computational hypothesis (mental states are computational states of the brain), did not change anything with regard to one underlying assumption: namely that cognitive processes function mechanistically and the conscious, subjective dimension does not itself play any essential cognitive role. It is this lingering epiphenomenalism, which for Straus phenomenology had to offer an alternative to. In this paper, I present Straus’ reflections in light of contemporary developments in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Extending his critique of epiphenomenalism, I show how Straus saw phenomenology as furnishing the requisite conceptual foundations for psychology.

There is a strange analogy between Kant´s and Deleuze’s accounts of aesthetic contemplation. In both cases we are dealing with a dynamical interpretation of aesthetic feeling as an augmentation of the spectator’s vital feeling, of what Kant calls our Lebensgefühl. Kant calls the principle that increases life force Geist, which the most recent English translation of the third Critique translates as “spirit,” since its function is to animate. Within Kant’s subject-oriented paradigm, this enlivening principle frees our state of mind from its “pathological” subordination to desires and other empirical interests and directs it to the super-sensible, which Kant determines as the idea that transcends all sensibility. Like Kant, Deleuze’s account of contemplation invokes an enlivening principle which animates our faculties by directing them at an idea that pushes our sensibility (the faculty of being affected) toward a transcending and transcendental transgression of its lower empirical exercise. However, there is an important difference between a mood which, in Kant’s view, speaks in the name of human reason and a vital sensation which, in Deleuze’s eyes, is the manifestation of the animalistic roots of reason. While for Kant, despite the sensory origin of the aesthetic idea, one must conceive all ideas (both aesthetic and intellectual) as spiritual entities that act in the mind without existing materially, for Deleuze the exact opposite must be considered, even if for an idealist philosophy it means total heresy of the spirit: in their primitive birthing ideas originate as spatio-temporal dynamisms that coexist with matter and that receive its movements from within.

For Kant, time is nothing but the affecting of self by self: “the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state.” The nature of this self‐affection is, however, fundamentally different in the first Critique and in The Analytic of the Sublime of the third Critique. In Kant’s account of sublime feeling, time is suspended as the form of inner sense and accordingly the continuous nature of time proper to the account of self‐consciousness and self‐cognition in the first Critique is lost. The suspension of time in sublime feeling does not annihilate time as such but it produces what Jean‐François Lyotard calls an “extemporalization” or “exit from inner sense”. In sublime feeling, both our imagination and our power of reasoning experience a form of “empty time” (“rien de temps”) that creates a feeling of non‐coincidence with ourselves. Lyotard interprets this suspension of time as part of a more profound temporal process belonging to a mode of subjectivity that is radically different from the one conceptualized in the first Critique. We will examine (1) how Kant’s account of temporality in sublime feeling relates to his earlier account given in the first Critique and (2) how Lyotard interprets the regress of the imagination in sublime feeling as an exit from inner sense.

In the phenomenology of Henri Maldiney, subjectivity is ontologically constituted by passibility, which designates the affective capacity of enduring a critical event. This ontological constitution of subjectivity does not concern an intentional act of self-constitution, but rather an ontological event in which a subject can only emerge as the effect of an existential wound. Unlike animals, who are captive to their environment and who must respond to unforeseen circumstances with a variety of actions, human beings can transcend the formative cycle between an external event and the necessity of a behavioral response. The human capacity to bear an event is a capacity to take an affective attitude to one’s suffering, which ranges from openness to closure. As such, passibility is a responsive capacity that shapes a variable degree of freedom: it makes possible a detachment from one’s ego and self-image, a projection into the future, and allows for making choices. In this chapter, we will examine what this distinct mode of affectivity entails, and how it is constitutive of subjectivity. How is it distinct from mere animal sensing and behavior? And if indeed human beings do not relate to their sufferings and their passions as egological subjects relate to the objects of their representations, then how should we conceive this distinct mode of subjectivity?

What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation – a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within. Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way, Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime opens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.

In the second chapter of The Time-Image, Deleuze addresses the conditions of possibility of a semiology of cinema. These conditions depend on the relations between cinema and language: under what conditions can cinematic images and signs be understood as a language? In other words, can cinematic images and signs be inscribed in the discursive plane of the signifiable? Discussing Christian Metz’s semiological approach of cinema, Deleuze argues that the structural conditions of linguistics and of post-Saussurian semiology cannot adequately render intelligible the specificity of cinematic semiosis. Drawing on Louis Hjelmslev’s semiotics, Deleuze redefines the specificity of a relation of designation distinct from a relation of signification, a specificity that concerns the fact that the designative relation is antecedent and heterogeneous to any signifying relation. Put differently, the very constitution of the sign is redefined: in opposition to semiology, semiotics becomes the study of images and signs as being independent of language in general and expressing a “non-language material”. This article explicates the importance of Hjelmslev’s semiotic theory in The Time-Image by offering a detailed account of the constitution of the sign in Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language and by tracing Deleuze’s earlier appreciation of Hjelmslev in Anti-Oedipus and its intricate relation to his appreciation of Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of designation in Discourse Figure.

Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics invites us to think the intensity of aesthetic contemplation as freeing the mind of its “pathological” subordination to desires and other empirical interests. For Kant, what is at stake in contemplation can never be understood as merely sensory: it involves a special disposition (Stimmung) that directs the mind to the supersensible, which he determines as the idea that transcends all sensibility. Beyond interpreting the domain of the ideal as an immaterial, self-sufficient realm, this collection of essays opens up the question of its ‘life’, suggesting an interrelation with the pathological that is more intimate than Kant himself seems to have surmised.

In his reconstruction of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole, Deleuze argues that the cognitive and practical faculties are genetically grounded in the affective, enlivening dynamics of the reflecting power of judgment. In this paper I propose to take Kant’s account of self-organisation as model for understanding this genesis of the faculties in terms of a circular causality that is purposively animated from within by a self-productive and self-maintaining tendency. The key argument I develop is that this generative tendency may be understood as a conatus that is inherent to the power of judgment and comes to the fore in the subject’s feeling of life.