Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism: an apodictic aesthetics

Description In Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze argues that “empiricism becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, when we apprehend directly in the sensible what can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible”. However, the scope and implications of this metamorphosis have rarely been reflected upon. There are several studies devoted to the “infernal machine” of transcendental empiricism, and even more numerous are those devoted to the relations between Deleuze’s philosophy and art. Yet, there is a lack of works that make the equivalence between transcendental empiricism and apodictic aesthetics their main topic. The aim of this issue is to fill the gap. Starting from the consideration that transcendental empiricism first and foremost poses a question of method – the struggle against what Deleuze calls “the dogmatic image of thought” – we want to host papers that make clear the strategic function of the collision of the concepts of “empirical” and “transcendental”. By resorting to it, Deleuze does not only want to initiate a clinic of thought as a critique of representative reason. In the wake of the work done before him by Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze also fights for the overcoming of the old hylomorphic scheme in favour of a conception – which is inseparable from an experimentation – of the making of the experience at every level, i.e. of the modulation of the real as differential heterogenesis. As an apodictic aesthetics, transcendental empiricism means the immediate union of dialectic and aesthetics, and therefore also the end of the opposition between subject and object, intelligible and sensible, concept and intuition, abstract and concrete, form and matter, structure and operation. We therefore welcome contributions that explore the consequences of this union, or rather of the impossibility of distinguishing in a dualistic way between Kant’s two sources of knowledge, with particular regard to the new status of the concepts of “space”, “image”, “affect”, “matter”, “form” and “tool” that derives from it. As an apodictic aesthetics, transcendental empiricism gives meaning to the triple epistemic shift – spatial, iconic and affective – at the origin of what Michel Foucault calls the “Deleuzian century” causing another shift that is said artisanal because of the growing preference for ontologies based on practices or oriented towards effects (see, for examples, new realisms, new materialisms, mannerisms and the various pluralisms of modes of existence).