Levi R. Bryant, difference and givenness

Abstract

"Three deep philosophical questions have to-date remained without comprehensive answer in Deleuze scholarship, perhaps because work has gone into the related fields of the critical exposition of his work and its practical application to a vast set of disparate disciplines: 1. In exactly what way, if at all, is Deleuze’s philosophy transcendental? 2. If we accept Deleuze’s description of his philosophy as empirical, how can we accommodate that label with the obvious divergences between his work and traditional empiricism, notably in light of the question of the transcendental nature of his philosophy? 3. What is Deleuze’s philosophical method, as opposed to the many practical and theoretical methodological approaches that can be traced through his work with Félix Guattari (schizo-analysis, for instance)? Levi Bryant’s recent book offers comprehensive and well-argued answers to these questions. As such, it is an important reference point for academics seeking to determine Deleuze’s philosophical import in its own right, as opposed to through his reading of other thinkers, or in its descriptive powers, or as a move within a more tightly defined philosophical area, such as political theory or aesthetics. The most straightforward account of Bryant’s answer to the opening questions is deceptively simple and grounded in very well-known statements by Deleuze. His philosophical method is “transcendental empiricism”. Yet, as Bryant is careful to argue, this “oxymoronic” answer raises many more problems than it solves,1 as if Kant had awoken from his dogmatic slumbers only to remain haunted by impossible hybrid beasts. How can empiricism be transcendental without falling back into a form of dogmatism in the universal and therefore non-historical conditions of any possible experience?