Projects

Experience and Reality: In the footsteps of Gilles Deleuze (PhD Research)


For the moderns, the question of experience begins with the question of the subject. Experience begins with a return on oneself, an exclusion of what surrounds us before an elevation of subjectivity to a transcendental status implying a relation of dependence of the object on the subject. Broadening this idea, the world –understood as a whole containing all the existents – is in a kind of subordination to the subject. If versions in favor of a more balanced relationship between subject and object -thus not implying dependence- have been thought of, this difficulty of what unites subject and world – subject and reality – nevertheless remains, a link which seems to be performed only through experience. My research question thus appears as natural and reasonable: should we think reality as the result or effect of the causal relationship that unites it to the experience we have of the world? This leads one to question if there is a possibility to think reality out of this worldly experience. This question thus forces us to reconsider – as Deleuze suggests – the idea of subject as a condition of possibility of experience. Doesn’t Deleuze consider experience as a new transcendental condition of possibility of a rhizomatic subjectivity? Could we then consider the existence of a pre-subjective experience? Then the relationship between experience and reality would be entirely overturned.

Alongside this conceptual research, a question of the History of philosophy arises. One of course expects, in this case, to have to reiterate the Deleuze-Kant link study in the same vein as the one led by Anne Sauvagnargues in Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendantal. It seems, however, that the Deleuzean conception of experience reveals deeper and less visible lines: a relationship to phenomenology – which Deleuze hardly ever quotes in his work (particularly Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty)-, pragmatism (James, Dewey), and the critical significance of Whitehead. Deleuze would then achieve an outstanding conceptual “synthesis of the heterogeneous” by bringing together in his philosophy such disparate currents. The question then is : Would Kant then serve as a conceptual screen to these more essential influences?