dppkt conference program and info

8/12/2019 DPPKT Conference Program and Info

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‘Deleuze, Pragmatism and Post-Kantian Thought’

When and Where:December 17-18, 2012Deakin University – Melbourne City CentreLevel 3, 550 Bourke StMelbourne, VictoriaAustralia

Attendance and Cost:The conference is open to all and is free to attend on both days. Lunch and morning andafternoon tea will be provided.

Registration: Registration is required by Wednesday the 5 th of December for catering purposes. Pleaseregister by contacting [email protected] and providing your name, affiliation andwhich days you will be attending (subject line: DPPKT Conference).

Provisional Schedule:

December 17

8.30-9.15 Registration9.15-9.30 Welcome9.30-10.10 Anne Sauvagnargues (Paris 10), Deleuze, Aesthetics and the Neo-Kantian

Critique of Kant10.10-10.50 Daniela Voss (Free University of Berlin), The Concepts of Difference and

Intensive Magnitude in Maimon and Deleuze 10.50-11.20 Morning tea11.20-12.00 Yubraj Aryal (Purdue), TBC12.00-12.40 Paul Patton (UNSW), Towards a Deleuzian, Immanent Theory of Rights:

Between Kantianism and Rortian Pragmatism12.40-2.00 Lunch2.00-2.40 Craig Lundy (Wollongong), The Critique and Creativity of Universal History:

Deleuze and Guattari contra Hegel

2.40-3.20 Geoff Boucher (Deakin), Hegel and his Others: Adventures on the Möbius Bandof Psychoanalysis and Anti-Psychoanalysis3.20-3.50 Afternoon tea3.50-4.30 Gregory Flaxman (North Carolina), Deleuze and the Dépassement of Kant4.30-5.10 Dan Smith (Purdue), Temporality and Truth

December 18

9.30-10.10 James Williams (Dundee), Signs over Times in Deleuze and Peirce10.10-10.50 Janice Baker (Deakin), Pure Experience and Affect: William James and the

Deleuzian post-Enlightenment Museum10.50-11.20 Morning tea

mailto:[email protected]






11.20-12.00 Simon Duffy (Sydney), Deleuze, Price and the Pragmatist Priority of Subject Naturalism

12.00-12.40 Sean Bowden (Deakin), Antirepresentationalism and Objectivity in the thoughtof Rorty, Brandom and Deleuze

12.40-2.00 Lunch2.00-2.40 Jack Reynolds (La Trobe), Transcendental Pragmatics? On Naturalism,

Common Sense and Deleuze2.40-3.20 Jon Roffe (Melbourne), Experience, or, the Thing and Deception: Deleuze

against Pragmatism3.20-3.50 Afternoon tea3.50-4.30 Talia Morag (Sydney), On the Very Idea of Radical Conceptual Change in

Pragmatism and Contemporary French Thought4.30-5.10 Claire Colebrook (Penn State/UNSW), Pragmatic Finitudes5.10-5.20 Conference close



representation, and the new concept of difference as intrinsic difference and as a mode of production of the real. Deleuze goes along with Maimon’s refutation of Kantian psychologism and his endeavour to objectify intensive magnitudes, but for Deleuze, the‘objecticity’ of intensive magnitudes is grounded in a Nietzschean energetic model ofintensive forces. Thus, for Deleuze, the differential productivity is not to be understood in

terms of a generative law of an infinite understanding. Rather, it is an extralogical, sensible principle which affects ‘transcendental sensibility’.

3. TBCYubraj Aryal

TBC

4. Towards a Deleuzian, Immanent Theory of Rights: Between Kantianism andRortian Pragmatism

Paul Patton

This paper aims to outline a historical conception of rights. By this I mean one that does notdepend on any transcendent conception of the moral basis of rights or of the human nature inwhich they are supposedly grounded, but also one that in no way abandons a strong project ofrights-justification. On the one hand, against the Kantian view that there are universal rightsgrounded in features of a common human nature such as freedom, rationality or the capacityto communicate, I agree with Deleuze that rights conceived in this manner ‘say nothing aboutthe immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights.’ The work of Deleuze,Ewald, Foucault and others suggests another way of understanding rights as entirelyimmanent to the relations of power, affects, beliefs and social practices of the communities in

which they exist. These provide the micropolitical basis for the institutional protection of particular ways of being and acting that are required for the existence of rights.On the other hand, contrary to the view of pragmatists such as Rorty, who abandons the

project of justification in favor of an avowedly ethnocentric and sentimentalist conception ofrights, I argue that more is required. An immanentist or ‘social’ conception of rights mustaccount for the normative force of rights and rights claims, in order to explain how rights canserve to resist oppression and exploitation or to pursue remedies for historical injustice.Drawing on the work of Foucault and the late Rawls, I will argue that a suitably historicisedunderstanding of public political reason shows how this task of justification can be fulfilled ina manner compatible with a Deleuzian, immanentist understanding of rights.

5. The Critique and Creativity of Universal History: Deleuze and Guattari contraHegelCraig Lundy

This paper will explore the nature of universal history in the work of Deleuze and Guattarivis-à-vis its most pertinent counterpoint: Hegel’s philosophy of history. In their final jointwork, Deleuze and Guattari heavily criticise Hegel’s treatment of history, reiterating anambivalence that they had long held towards both history and Hegel. As Deleuze andGuattari claim, “unforeseeable creativity”, in Hegel, is “poorly understood”, for Hegelhistoricises reality, reducing it to “an analytic and necessary principle” that teleologicallyunfolds in history – the unravelling of history itself, guided by the light of Geist (WP 94-5).

Given this distaste for historical formulations that overcode and subject reality to a unitaryand totalising force, it is somewhat surprising that Deleuze and Guattari simultaneously



employ a form of universal history throughout their work. However, if this notion ofuniversal history differs from that as found in Hegel and the Hegelian tradition, it is largelydue to the insistence of Deleuze and Guattari upon its critical and creative capacities. Byshowing how history has the capacity to be ‘auto-’ and ‘self-critical’, history for Deleuze andGuattari is no longer placed in the services of a totalising power ( pouvoir ). Instead, history

itself exudes a power ( puissance ) of ongoing creativity that is capable of accommodating the process of becoming, in turn rendering history genuinely universal. If this gives rise to anotion of history that distinguishes itself from the image of Hegel’s ‘State history’, then this,I will argue, is precisely the point of their universal history: the positing of a form of historythat is nonlinear, contingent and creative, in contrast to the Hegelian histories of necessitythat they oppose.

6. Hegel and his Others: Adventures on the Möbius Band of Psychoanalysis and Anti-psychoanalysis

Geoff Boucher

The relationship between Deleuze and Hegel is an intriguing question that continues togenerate philosophical debate, with contestants dividing between those who think thatDeleuzian difference does not escape the movement of the dialectic, and those who hold thatdifference-in-itself breaks with the dialectical integration of identity and difference. One ofthe most recent entrants into the lists is Slavoj Zizek, who (not surprisingly) proposes to readDeleuze, with the help of Badiou, as anxiously defending himself from a hidden proximity toHegel, so that, in fact, Deleuzian difference is nothing more than the “core of Hegeliandialectics”. Although Zizek’s intervention is often marked by conceptual forcing and a lackof hermeneutic warrant for major claims, there is a rather interesting moment when Zizektriumphantly exhibits the Deleuzian concept of a “quasi-cause” as equivalent to the Lacanianobject (a). What is interesting about this is that Deleuze and Guattari are perfectly aware ofthis, and indeed, draw attention to it in Anti-Oedipus (p27)—something that Zizek overlooks.Indeed, earlier, in The Logic of Sense , Deleuze corroborated the implications of this referencewhen he linked pure difference to Lacan’s notion of a founding difference as the moment ofinstitution of the decentred subject. Far from clinching the case that “Deleuze secretlyrehearses Hegel,” what this paper argues is that this fact points to the way in which Deleuzeand Lacan are, at this point, tracking the same path out of Hegel. This path leads through theidea that what interrupts the movement of dialectical integration is a non-representationaldifference that constitutes the generative matrix for affective intensity, thus problematizingdialectics with a kind of reference to the body that cannot be reduced to naïve naturalism. Thereal question, then, is not whether Deleuze’s negative reference to Hegel means that his

philosophy can ultimately be recruited to the idea of a mutation in the dialectic, but to whatextent Deleuze, and especially the somewhat neglected Deleuze of the collaboration withGuattari, can be brought into systematic connection with the (still perplexing) late work ofLacan. In conclusion, I argue, this perhaps surprising relation throws potential light on theconceptual necessities surrounding this sort of exit from the field of post-Kantian philosophy,whilst at the same time illuminating some otherwise bewildering moments in both Lacan’sfinal seminars and Deleuze and Guattari’s joint work.

7. Deleuze and the Dépassement of KantGregory Flaxman

This talk concerns Deleuze’s debt to Kant—and the sense in which this debt demands to beovertaken ( dépasser ) in Deleuze’s subsequent philosophy. In his early writing, Deleuze



credits Kant as the modern philosopher most responsible for having undone the enduringsubordination of time to space. While Kant defines space as “outer sense,” that is, the a prioriform of representation which underlies appearances, those appearances only exist in the“inner sense” of time—the “a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever.” In other words,with Kant, the definition of time ceases to be cardo (the cardinal points in a successive

trajectory of moments) and becomes “the form of everything that changes and moves.” The problem with this argument is that, Deleuze’s affirmation notwithstanding, his own reckoningwith space and time necessarily outstrip these forms. This talk concerns the way “space isthought” in Kant’s first Critique , namely, “all the parts of space coexist ad infinitum ,” sincein Deleuze’s oeuvre, this claim demands to be read in light of the cinema. In particular,Deleuze fundamentally reorients space in light of the off-screen ( hors cadre /hors champs ),which consigns distinct spaces to different durations. In other words, Deleuze understandsspace-time to be a matter of deeply “uneven development,” and by turning to The Movement-

Image and The Time-Image , I suggest that we are compelled to reformulate Kant’s“transcendental aesthetic” in terms that, while no less aesthetic, are “transcendentalempirical.”

8. Temporality and TruthDaniel W. Smith

This paper will examine the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze’s philosophy, highlighting the ways in which Deleuze draws upon and extends post-Kantianand pragmatic conceptions of truth and time.

For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times andin all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, notthe eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress,evolution, etc.) in a way that put the form of the true (as universal and necessary) in crisis, yetthis change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable laws of nature that governchange. Deleuze argues that it was Kant who finally brought about a decisive revolution inour conception of time: if the ancients saw time as the measure of movement, Kant sawmovement as something that takes place in time. In Kant, in other words, time assumed anindependence that it never had before, defined solely by its three modalities of succession,simultaneity, and permanence.

Following Kant, the status of time became one of the defining features of modernthought. Post-Kantian philosophers such as Hegel made temporal development the essentialfeature of his dialectic, just as pragmatic philosophers such as Dewey and James madetemporal variation an essential component of their pragmatic conception of truth. At the

same time, philosophers such as Bergson ( Creative Evolution ) and Whitehead ( Process and Reality ) developed metaphysical systems that made temporality (in the form of “creativity”and “process”) the defining modality of reality itself. In Being and Time , Heidegger wouldformulate an “ecstatic” conception of temporality that grounded his concept of Being.

The aim of this paper is to show how Deleuze explicitly draws on these post-Kantian philosophical traditions in order to formulate his own conceptions of both time and truth. Onthe one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, is renderedautonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that becomes a positive

principle of the production of the new (passive synthesis). It is this conception of temporalitythat lies at the basis of the metaphysics that Deleuze formulates in Difference and Repetition(1968), and which is explored more thematically in The Time-Image (1983).

As a result, on the other hand, if time puts the concept of truth in crisis, it does so notat the level of its content (“truth changes with time”), but rather at the level of its form: the



form of time takes the place of the (universal) form of the true. Moreover, the false as ‘mereappearance’ is thereby given a power of its own. If the false does not have a form, itnonetheless has a power. When does the false take on a power? When it is freed from themodel of truth. What can disengage the concept of the false from the model of truth? Theanswer is: time. Just as Deleuze attempts to formulate a concept of difference-in-itself, freed

from its subordination to the concept of identity, so he attempts to formulate a concept of thefalse-in-itself, freed from its subordination to the concept of truth. But this in no way impliesthe banal conclusion that “everything is false,” which would now be presented as a truth: as

Nietzsche said, in one of his most profound phrases, in abolishing the true world we have alsoabolished the false world of appearances. There is no longer either truth or appearance, andthe false is no longer presented as being true; instead, the false assumes a power of its own.What then is the “power” of the false? If the form of the true is derived from the power of

judgment , the power of the false is a power of metamorphosis, that is, a power of creation .Creative of what? At this point, there is no reason not to re-employ the word “truth.” The

power of the false is creative of truth—but this is, precisely, a new concept of truth , whichDeleuze develops in the “analytic of concepts” proposed in What Is Philosophy? : truth is nolonger a timeless universal to be discovered, but a singularity to be created (in time).

9. Signs over times in Deleuze and PeirceJames Williams

This essay studies the implications of Deleuze's philosophy of time for a theory of signs inrelation to Peirce’s theory of the sign and to pragmatist objections to metaphysics of timemade by F.C.S. Schiller against J.M.E McTaggart. It therefore expands critically onDeleuze’s work on the sign in Proust and Signs , Difference and Repetition , Logic of Sense and other early texts by considering it as positioned between pragmatist ways ofunderstanding the function of the sign and metaphysical constructions of theories of time.The theory of signs developed around the apprenticeship to signs is seen as one aspect of awider original theory of the sign in time which is both pragmatic and metaphysical. Thattheory is itself studied for its response to time, not only as apprenticeship over time, but alsoas a radical situation of the sign in manifold time-processes running counter to synchronicaccounts of the sign. This role of time will be considered critically in relation to Peirce’sthree-fold distinction within signs, which will be considered not only in terms of itsimplications for three different ways of positioning the sign in time but also for an overallaccount of time and the sign across all three. Both positions will be contrasted with strictlytimeless or synchronic accounts of the sign. Put in its most stark version, this novel

pragmatist approach to the sign can be summed up through the following claim. No sign

signifies generally in one time, such as the present, because all signs are a matter of changesin singular series of events over different times. This understanding of the sign as manifold process is opposed to definitions of signs as different types of place holders in structuresdetermined synchronically; such as, for example, the association of a signified with asignifier at a given time in a given language. The sign does not have a meaning but rather acomplex destiny over times. Meaning and signification cannot be separated from this destiny.Practically, each sign is a variable operator in an emerging process of apprenticeship or,avoiding an over-emphasis on human learning, of interactions between developing things inemerging environments. So the sign is a complex transformation over many times that cannot

be reduced to one another. The sign is then never a carrier for reliable general transmission orexchange. It is instead the site for an inevitable, if often unseen or unconscious, struggle and

mutual alteration. The sign is hence distanced from ideas of code and natural or conventionalresponses. These ideas are replaced by more pliable and necessarily diachronic ones such as



negotiation, encounter, seduction and learning. This has implications for theories ofknowledge and practical accounts of education, which will be touched on in the essay.Peirce's theory of the sign will therefore be drawn on through the essay to provide a foil andtesting ground for Deleuze's account. In particular, the distinction between firstness,secondness and thirdness in Peirce will be contrasted with a process account of the sign,

where processes follow Deleuze's manifold of time dimensions, as developed in Differenceand Repetition and elsewhere. Each of these dimensions determines a process-sign, therebyleading to different yet always connected signs, such as the sign as condenser for theconcentration of the past in a selection in the present ( this taste is what we have beensearching for together ), or as symbolic redistribution of the past and future through a break inthe present ( the war has broken our collective efforts and dreams ). The combination of

pragmatist and Deleuzian accounts thus allows for internal distinctions in terms of different pragmatist definitions of the sign and for an external debate about the grounding of the signin metaphysics of time that either stretch or deny a full pragmatism.

10. Pure Experience and Affect: William James and the Deleuzian post-EnlightenmentMuseum

Janice Baker

This essay outlines the delimiting function of the ‘rational’ museum model and examines analternative ‘affective’ museum through William James’ theory of pure experience and theresonance of his pragmatic method in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical project. The criticalliterature of museology continues to frame the idea of the museum in rationalist terms and assuch cannot give serious measure to non-rational perspectives. In the rational model, museumvisitors are formed as subjects and encounters with cultural artefacts are subsumed into thestructure of a knowledge/power relation; a structure that perpetuates the institution’snineteenth-century Enlightenment legacy. The model, which supports structural andideological discourses of the museum, is challenged by the autonomous ‘pre-individual’transformation to thinking that is an impact of affecting encounters. It is the quality of thisencounter that is given expression in James and Deleuze.

James’ philosophy of radical empiricism intends to free human experience from thedogmatic hold of reason and common sense. The inventive possibilities of this freedom havea distinctly Deleuzian momentum with repercussions for a contemporary understanding of anaffective, post Enlightenment museum. Deleuze accords a different status to, or refutes manyof the notions considered axiomatic to the subject-object dichotomy that frames theapplication of reason. He rejects the implicit presupposition of thought he calls ‘a dogmatic,orthodox or moral image’ as it is in terms of this image ‘that everybody knows and is

presumed to know what it means to think’. James’ pragmatic method has application to themuseum in this Deleuzian context. He outlines an alternative to the subject-object divideinherent in nineteenth-century scientific rationalism and metaphysical idealism. His methodconveys the practical benefits of focusing on what an idea or event does as an affectingencounter rather than what it might mean from the perspective of critical reasoning or theAbsolute.

The attention James accords to pluralism and duration in his philosophy of experience portends Deleuze’s conceptualization of affecting assemblages and the production of thinkingthat is not limited by the discursive designations of structuralism. Recalling James, Deleuzenotes that the difficulty in renouncing ‘common sense’ notions of thought is that there is ‘noally but paradox’, notably the paradox that relates to the doubling of time. Tied to common

sense thought, is the model of recognition which Deleuze describes as ‘the harmoniousexercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object’. What evolves from these



connections, for Deleuze, is that ‘difference is crucified; difference becomes an object ofrepresentation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imaginedopposition or a perceived similitude’. James too is aware of the limits of recognition andrepresentation and assesses the paradox of experience as a felt, actual presence. On James’view it is relevant that experiences register materially in the activity of the body before they

register consciously, expressed in his deliberately provocative ‘shock to thought’ that ‘we donot run because we are afraid, but we are afraid because we run’. He argues that the‘affectional’ realm dissipates in human temperament and inquiry once the body and itssensations are separated from thought.

There are significant aesthetic implications via James and Deleuze in a museumrestricted by its legacy to Enlightenment values of reason. Their work contributes torethinking museum encounters with cultural artefacts as affecting, transformative events.Somewhat paradoxically, the tenets of James’ nineteenth-century pragmatism function as aDeleuzian deterritorialization of the Enlightenment rational museum.

11. Deleuze, Price and the Pragmatist Priority of Subject NaturalismSimon Duffy

Pragmatists have traditionally been critical of representationalism but supportive of a kind ofnaturalism, understood as naturalism about human subjects. In ‘Naturalism Without Mirrors,’Huw Price distinguishes between two kinds of naturalism. On the one hand there is thefamiliar ‘object naturalism,’ or what he refers to as ‘capital N Naturalism,’ which is the viewthat the only facts there are are the kinds of facts recognized by natural science. The world isthe world-as-studied-by-science; whatever exists, exists ‘in the natural realm.’ Whereas, onthe other hand, there is the less familiar ‘subject naturalism,’ which is the philosophicalviewpoint that begins with the realization that humans are natural creatures and that humanthought and discursive practice are part of the world, or part of the natural order. Whilecapital N Naturalists consider subject naturalism to be merely a sub-species of objectnaturalism, Price claims, on the contrary, that subject naturalism is importantly prior to objectnaturalism. This claim to priority is in response to the fact that object naturalism presupposes a particular ‘representational’ or ‘referential’ view of human linguistic activity, namely therepresentational or referential relation between language and the natural world. And that thisview about human language is a presupposition that is properly assessed from a subjectnaturalist standpoint.

While Price is primarily concerned with better addressing the kinds of concerns thatobject naturalism engages with, this distinction is informative for assessing andunderstanding some of the moves that are made by Deleuze in the development of his

philosophy of difference. Similarly to the pragmatism outlined above, Deleuze is also criticalof representationalism, and his work is concerned with recent developments in mathematicsand science, indeed his work is replete with mathematical examples, which begs the questionof the relation Deleuze’s philosophy has to pragmatism and to the kinds of naturalismsupported by its various adherents. It is clear from a number of statements that Deleuzemakes throughout his work that he is critical of the scientific reductionism that goes hand inhand with what I’ll refer to, following Price, as ‘capital N Naturalism.’ However it is lessclear whether a kind of subjective naturalism can be understood to be operative in his work.Deleuze’s obvious favour of the Spinozist doctrine that we humans are not ‘a kingdom withina kingdom’ (EIIIPref; PT, ch. 2.6) but rather are a part of nature does provide some supportfor such a reading. However the metaphysics that is more or less explicit in the philosophy of

difference that Deleuze develops throughout his work, and the range of Romantic



characterisations of it that have been developed by his commentators, is less obviouslyreconcilable with the pragmatist subjective naturalism proposed by Price.

What I propose to do in this paper is claim that Deleuze’s metaphysics can beunderstood to be a metaphysics of the calculus that draws upon a conception of mathematicsthat is more than just the sum of its theories, and that this metaphysics is consonant in useful

ways with the subject naturalism proposed by Price. One preliminary consonance being thatthe conception of mathematics that Deleuze develops does not serve the same reductive endsthat ‘capital N Naturalism’ requires, but rather it serves as a useful tool for modelling thenature of our relation to the world without the representational presuppositions of the latter.This conception of mathematics draws upon the work of early pragmatists such as Peirce andthe mathematical philosophy of Albert Lautman. The metaphysics of the calculus thatDeleuze develops therefore moves beyond the scientific reductionism of a thoroughgoing‘capital N Naturalism’ and provides a model for the metaphysical claims that Deleuze makesin relation to the virtual. It is important to note that this move does not privilege mathematicsover other discourses, but merely positions the metaphysics of the calculus as one componentof the concept of philosophy that Deleuze constructs. To make this case, I will drawarguments primarily from Difference and Repetition , Expressionism in Spinoza , A ThousandPlateaus , Leibniz and the Baroque , and Bergsonism .

12. Antirepresentationalism and Objectivity in the post-Kantian thought of Rorty,Brandom and Deleuze Sean Bowden

Semantic and epistemological antirepresentationalism is a position common to post-Kantianthinkers such as Hegel, classical and neo-pragmatists, and Deleuze. Broadly speaking, this

position denies that propositional content and knowledge are to be explained with referenceto a type of ‘mirroring’ relationship which holds between our words and an independentworld in-itself. Rather, they are to primarily be explained with reference to our social

practices or, in the case of Deleuze and in a way to be explained, with reference to‘problematic Ideas’.

Many philosophers, however, are concerned that antirepresentationalism jettisons theimportant category of objectivity, along with the associated categories of truth and reference,and thereby threatens us with the possibility that our speech might be merely ‘spinning in thevoid’ or not ‘about’ anything real. In light of this concern, this chapter will examine the

potential for the recuperation of a certain renovated understanding of objectivity, truth andreference within antirepresentationalism. In order to this, we will examine Rorty’s rejectionof objectivity on pragmatic grounds, Brandom’s social-pragmatic rehabilitation of objectivity

and, finally, a Deleuzian response to a potential problem with Brandom’s account ofobjectivity. In order to bring out the differences between Rorty, Brandom and Deleuze, thechapter will also explore the different lessons each took from post-Kantian thought. In broad

brushstrokes, the chapter will advance as follows:It is well know that Rorty wanted to replace ‘objectivity’ with social ‘solidarity’,

arguing that the idea of a world ‘in itself’ dictating to us how it should be talked about is bothindefensible and practically disastrous. For Rorty, antirepresentationalism goes hand in handwith democratic humanism insofar as it declares that we are not answerable to ‘the real natureof things’, but only to our fellow human beings. Brandom, however, while sympathetic toRorty’s social-pragmatic antirepresentationalism, feels the need to respond to criticisms ofthe ‘spinning in the void’ type. He thus argues that objectivity need not be abandoned, only

re-conceptualized. For Brandom, objectivity is not equivalent to grasping reality ‘in itself’. Itrather has to do with the constraint our social practices impose upon us as we undertake



epistemic commitments and keep track of one another’s entitlements to these commitmentsaccording to the roles they play in our patterns of inference. What is objective, in otherwords, are those things that we, in our collective games of giving and asking for reasons,grant as having authority over the correctness of our commitments.

An objection to Brandom’s conception of objectivity, however, is that because

objectivity is rendered solely at the normative and semantic level, because it is something thatwe engineer, it loses its sense of being something that constrains our thought in a way that is

beyond our control. It is for reasons such as this that scholars such as Levine and Bernsteinurge a return to classical, pre-linguistic-turn pragmatists such as Dewey and Peirce in order toconceive of the rational relations characteristic of the space of reasons as part and parcel of a‘thick’ notion of embodied experience. In this way, we will be able to recuperate a moresatisfactory understanding of objective constraint in our pragmatic, collective coping with theworld.

At this point, this chapter will turn to examine what Deleuze might be able tocontribute to this line of thought. In particular, it will be argued that Deleuze’s 1968conception of problematic Ideas in Difference and Repetition already captures a number ofthe features of the ‘objective constraint’ that one hopes to achieve by combining Brandom’sinferential approach to semantics with classical pragmatism’s account of experience. First ofall, it will be shown how, for Deleuze, problematic Ideas carry out a ‘genesis of the true’insofar as they constitute the relation between the sense of a proposition and the object itdesignates in the case of a true proposition. Secondly, it will be shown how, for Deleuze,

problematic Ideas are able to do this precisely insofar as they establish a type of differentialcommunication between all of the ‘faculties’ constitutive of experience: from sensibilitythrough to thought, taking into account habits, memory, imagination, sociability and languagealong the way. What we might provocatively call ‘objective constraint’ in Deleuze is thus nota matter of having to grasp objects in their self-sameness or identity in some exterior reality.It is rather a matter of the way in which both our speech and the objects we take our true

propositions to successfully refer to are ‘integrated’ within the structure of our experience,where this latter is constituted by differential tensions between various plastic capacities,habits, inter-personal relationships, concepts, and so on.

13. Transcendental Pragmatics? On Naturalism, Common Sense and DeleuzeJack Reynolds

Extending work I have previously done on the significant metaphilosophical role thattranscendental reasoning and common sense have played in differentiating much work donein so-called analytic and continental philosophy, in this paper I take up the challenge of

pragmatism. Pragmatism is a tradition that predates any such ‘divide’ and has a prima facieclaim, even today, to being irreducible to any such ‘divide’. Indeed, in recent times SamiPihlstrom’s Naturalising the Transcendental incorporates some forms of American

pragmatist thought within the post-Kantian transcendental tradition, by relating the work of‘postanalytic’ philosophers like Wittgenstein, Putnam, McDowell, Rorty, Brandom, andothers to this trajectory. This paper will consider the prospects for such a transcendental

pragmatics, largely by considering the extent to which any such rapprochement is predicatedon criticisms of what McDowell calls bald naturalism. It will also be suggested, drawing onDeleuze’s critique of good and common sense in Difference and Repetition , that a bracketingof the metaphilosophical value of common sense is also required. The conjunction of thesetwo features – critique of bald naturalism and critique of common sense – are central to any

transcendental philosophy worthy of the name.



14. Experience, or, the Thing and Deception: Deleuze against Pragmatism Jon Roffe

A certain reading of Deleuze’s view of human experience, which finds its foundation perhapsabove all in “Immanence: A Life …” would bring his position close to the kind of empiricism

William James embraced late in his life and now collected in Radical Empiricism . WhileJames’ “immediate flux of life,” is clearly a close analogue to Deleuze’s “pure immediateconsciousness,” and while both philosophers are animated by a commitment to forms ofrelational ontology, this paper will argue that the two positions are in fact dramaticallydifferent, even conflicting, in nature.

This can be seen most directly at the methodological level, where James’ commitmentto experience as the object of direct knowledge is displaced by Deleuze’s perennial use oftranscendental methods. This paper will, however, be concerned with the status of experienceas such, and its relationship with what Kant calls transcendental illusion, whose consequencesalso redound upon methodological issues. The argument takes place in three moments.

The first presents a summary of Kant’s account of transcendental illusion, and itsrelationship with the structure of experience as such. This account is then situated in relationto Deleuze’s modifications of both the scope and nature of illusion in thought, and to theaccount he gives of the advent of objects of experience in Difference and Repetition .

The second moment situates Deleuze’s work in relation to the treatment of perceptualerror in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit . I will argue that Hegel’s account, according towhich elementary experiential relationships with the world are caught up in unavoidable andin fact foundational misunderstandings, is (with the exception of the role of negation)identical to Deleuze’s position on what can go wrong in thought. In particular, by insisting onthe unavoidable nature of these ‘errors’, Hegel overcomes the lingering investment in thenotion of good sense in Kant’s philosophy which so floridly manifests itself in the thirdCritique .

Third, and on the basis of these earlier points, I would like to show that WilliamJames’ position on experience is pre-critical in the strict sense, and unable to account for theillusory-deceptive character of experience. This is due on the one hand to the lack of adequatereflection on transcendental questions about the constitution of particular objects ofexperience – James seems the pre-eminent twentieth century victim of Hegel’s remark thatexperience abstracted from particular cases is nothing but pure abstraction – and, on theother, because he has no adequate account of illusory experience.

Consequently, this paper argues that the greatest disservice we can do to Deleuze is toread him as entirely hostile to the tradition of transcendental philosophy that runs from Kantthrough Hegel and other post-Kantians. It is moreover a mistake to adopt the dogmatic

position according to which Deleuze and Hegel have nothing in common and are naturalenemies, no matter how strenuously Deleuze himself makes the case for this view atmoments in his work.

15. On the Very Idea of Radical Conceptual Change in Pragmatism and ContemporaryFrench Thought

Talia Morag

In the conceptual realm the notion of the radically new has been a central preoccupation of both pragmatists (e.g. paradigm shifts in the sciences), and contemporary French philosophers (e.g. events and their consequences). In this paper I compare the accounts of

Kuhn, Deleuze and Badiou in making sense of revolutionary conceptual novelty or change. Akey question will be to consider the scope and limits of the idea of the “radically” new.



16. Pragmatic FinitudesClaire Colebrook

One of the ways of understanding pragmatism in general is to read the commitment to

practical grounds as post-Kantian. Because we cannot know things in themselves and cannothave knowledge of any moral law practical reason must formulate its own principles and doso from a position of ignorance and formal deliberation. Deleuze’s pragmatism is also anti-foundational with regard to any moral law, but is nevertheless highly critical of any negativeor suspended ethics of bad conscience, and is also committed to a philosophy of intuition thatwould go beyond human finitude. In this paper I outline a pragmatism that is at once anti-foundational while also being multiply finite.

Discussing modernity and its ‘mathematical’ comportment, Martin Heidegger writesthat the Greeks identify ta mathemata (or that which can be known and determined inadvanced) in connection with ta pragmata . Ta pragmata refers to things, but things insofar asthey are objects of our concern. Heidegger’s own project, ambivalently following Husserl’soutline of phenomenology as a return to ‘things themselves,’ is curiously poised with regardto the concern for things. On the one hand, Heidegger (in line with the pragmatic readings of

phenomenology from Rorty and Dreyfus) wants to distinguish ta pragmata from themathematical comportment, where an established and fixed logic determines the truth of theworld independent of the relation we bear towards it. Instead, Heidegger shows that themathematical itself emerged from a concern with the world, and that this concern alwaysemerges from a field of purposive, finite and therefore personal (or owned) projects. Thething is not some independent unit that then becomes practical; even the useless, broken,unrecognizable or anonymous thing can only emerge as such from a horizon or lifeworld ofsense. The pragmatism of this gesture is clear: before there is a logic that would orientthinking from without, there must have been a logos or ‘speaking about’ that allows for thecoming into appearance of a world that might then be determined as true or false. On theother hand, Heidegger also never abandons the withdrawal of things, and never fully allowsthe thing to be reducible to its sense. It is this aspect of his work – the thing’s being that wemust also allow to be – that has led to the object-oriented ontologies of Graham Harman andTimothy Morton. Here, though, we do not return to Kant’s thing in itself – the thing that isoutside of all concern or relations. Indeed, we could still consider the thing to be pragmatic or

practical, as having to do with concerns or as caught up in relations of doing. But theconcerns and relations are not ours, and if there is a sense to these relations it is neitherhuman nor linguistic. It is this possibility of an inhuman sense – a sense that is not reducibleto, nor dependent upon human language that I take to be the contribution of Gilles Deleuze. I

argue that it is this inhuman and incorporeal sense – a sense that is not that of the body, but ofthe ‘doing’ of bodies – that ought to be our object of concern in the twenty-first century. Thatis to say: I argue that twenty-first century pragmatism has as its ‘thing of concern’ theconcerns of things.



Bios for DPPKT Conference

Yubraj Ayral is a Ph.D candidate at Purdue University. He is Secretary of The Society forPhilosophy and Literary Studies (SPLS) and Editor of its publication, Journal of Philosophy:

A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry . He is also a member of the Asian and Asian-American

Philosophers and Philosophies Committee of the American Philosophical Association (APA).His The Humanities at Work: International Exchange of Ideas in Philosophy, Literature and

Aesthetics , was published by Sunlight in 2008. His research areas include modernistaesthetics, affects andtransnationalism. http://www.gradschool.purdue.edu/oigp/igp_profile.cfm?id=35

Janice Baker is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Alfred DeakinResearch Institute at Deakin University. She is currently completing a book manuscript,entitled The Deleuzian Museum: Spaces of Affect and Desire . Other publications, all undercontract, include: ‘flensed’, in G. Lean, R. Staiff, E. Waterton (eds), Travel andTransformation (Ashgate, forthcoming); ‘Unmooring the body: Museums and serial killerhorror in film’, in A. MacDonald (ed.), Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of theSerial Killer in Popular Culture (Continuum, forthcoming); ‘Reel Objects: Movies inmuseums’, in S. Butler and E. Lehrer (eds), Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (Duke University Press, forthcoming); and ‘Museums and Radical Otherness’, in A. Witcomband K. Message (eds), Museum Theory: An Expanded Field (Blackwell,forthcoming). http://www.deakin.edu.au/alfred-deakin-research-institute/people.php/janice.php?contact_id=612&style=7

Geoff Boucher is a Senior Lecturer in the Psychoanalytic Studies Programme and in LiteraryStudies at Deakin University. He is the author of several books on critical theory, includingThe Charmed Circle of Ideology (2008) and Zizek and Politics (2010). His books onUnderstanding Marxism and Adorno Reframed are appearing in 2012. He works oncontemporary culture from a perspective influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, publishingin the fields of continental philosophy and psychoanalyticstudies. http://www.deakin.edu.au/alfred-deakin-research-institute/people.php/janice.php?contact_id=525&style=7

Sean Bowden is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University,Australia. He is the author of The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (EdinburghUniversity Press, 2011) and the editor, with Simon Duffy, of Badiou and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). http://www.deakin.edu.au/alfred-deakin-research-

institute/people.php/janice.php?contact_id=614&style=7

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University andResearch Professor at the University of New South Wales. She has written numerous booksand articles on Deleuze, literary theory, feminist theory, literary history and literary criticism.Her sole-authored books include Ethics and Representation (EUP, 1999), Deleuze: A Guide

for the Perplexed (Continuum, 1997), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge, 2002), Understanding Deleuze (Allen and Unwin, 2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska UP, 2003), Irony (Routledge, 2003) and Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum, 2010). Her mostrecent book is Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital (2012,Continuum). http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/cmc30

http://www.gradschool.purdue.edu/oigp/igp_profile.cfm?id=35



http://www.deakin.edu.au/alfred-deakin-research-institute/people.php/janice.php?contact_id=612&style=7











http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/cmc30













School of Continental Philosophy and an editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of CriticalPhilosophy .

Anne Sauvagnargues is Professor of Philosophy at l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre,France. She is a leading French specialist in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and has

published a large number of articles on Deleuze, Guattari, the history of philosophy, arttheory and cinema. She is the author of Deleuze. L’empirisme transcendental (PUF, 2011),

De l’animal à l’art in La philosophie de Deleuze (PUF, 2004) and Deleuze et l’art (PUF,2006). This last work will soon be published in English translation with Continuum Press as

Deleuze and Art .

Daniel W. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at PurdueUniversity. He is the translator of Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensationand Essays Critical and Clinical (with Michael A. Greco), as well as Pierre Klossowski’s

Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and Isabelle Stenger’s The Invention of Modern Science. Hehas published extensively on Deleuze and is the author of Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh UP,2012), and the co-editor of Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (Continuum, 2009), Deleuze and

Ethics (EUP, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge UP,forthcoming). http://www.cla.purdue.edu/philosophy/directory/?personid=129

Daniela Voss is a philosopher based in Berlin. She is the author of Deleuze and theTranscendental Conditions of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2013) andhas published a number of articles on the intersections between Gilles Deleuze, Kantian and

post-Kantian thought.

James Williams is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dundee, UK. He is theauthor of Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: a Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh UP,2008), The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze (Clinamen, 2005), UnderstandingPoststructuralism (Acumen, 2005), and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: aCritical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh UP, 2003). His most recent book is a study ofDeleuze and time: Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: a Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh UP, 2011). http://www.dundee.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/jameswilliams/

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/philosophy/directory/?personid=129



http://www.dundee.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/jameswilliams/





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