Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze

Sinthome Says: May 16th, 2007 at 6:18 pm Steven, I hate to be rude by jumping in midstream but I have only recently begun following your blog closely (it looks like I’ve really been missing out by not following your writing more closely). Am I correct in surmising that these recent posts are part of a larger book project you’re working on? If so, could you say a bit about what you’re developing or arguing or refer me to a post that outlines this?

I was exceptionally pleased to see your development of the Kant/Deleuze connections with regard to problematic ideas in your previous post. Are you working through any of the connections to Maimon and Maimon’s critique of Kant? As a way of shamelessly pimping my own book, I devote three chapters to the Deleuze-Kant-Maimon-Bergson connection vis a vis the ontology of problems in my own forthcoming study of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Until the publication of de Beistegui’s Truth and Genesis (and even there), there has hardly been any sustained or serious discussion of Deleuze’s account of individuation, actualization, and indi-different/ciation in the secondary literature, which is a significant problem in interpretations of Deleuze as this goes straight to the core of his thought. I’m thus very excited to see the work you’re developing here. As an additional self-promotion, you’ll find various posts devoted to these issues at Larval Subjects under the tag of “individuation”.

Steven Shaviro Says: May 16th, 2007 at 9:01 pm Sinthome, thanks for your comments. I read your blog regularly, and I am looking forward to your book.
In terms of my own work, I’ve worked on Deleuze, on and off, for a long time; I have been especially interestedin the Kant/Deleuze connection. But I have never read Maimon or many of the other less familiar figures Deleuze talks about in Difference and Repetition. And overall I have to admit that I am weaker on the intricacies of Difference and Repetition than I am with regard to many other of Deleuze’s books.

• But my current (theoretical) focus is mostly on Whitehead.
• I am currently trying to cobble together a book, partly with articles I have previously published, and partly with new stuff, on Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze.

Though this is something of an interruption of my other in-progress book project — the one I am probably more impassioned about — The Age of Aesthetics, which is not really a philosophy or theory book at all, but more a work of science-fictional politico-aesthetic speculation.