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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

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178824

Genesis and difference

Deleuze, Maïmon, and the post-Kantian reading of Leibniz

Daniel Smith

pp. 132-154

Abstract

Deleuze's appropriation of Leibniz's philosophy is undertaken from a resolutely post-Kantian viewpoint. On this score, it would be difficult to overemphasize the influence on Deleuze of Salomon Maïmon, one of the earliest critics of Kant's critical philosophy. Maïmon's Essay on Transcendental Philosophy was published in 1790, one year before the publication of Kant's Critique of Judgment. It was Maïmon's critiques of Kant that largely determined the subsequent direction of post-Kantian philosophy, at least with regard to the issues that would come to preoccupy Deleuze's early work. The two primary substantive exigencies laid down by Maïmon in his critique of Kant reappear like leitmotifs in almost every one of Deleuze's books up through 1969, even if Maïmon's name is not always explicitly mentioned: the search for the genetic elements of real experience (and not merely the conditions of possible experience), and the positing of a principle of difference as the fulfillment of this condition (whereas identity is the condition of the possible, difference is the condition of the real). One might say that these two exigencies of Maïmon's thought are the two components of Deleuze's own "transcendental empiricism'.1

Publication details

Published in:

van Tuinen Sjoerd, McDonnell Niamh (2010) Deleuze and the fold: a critical reader. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 132-154

DOI: 10.1057/9780230248366_7

Full citation:

Smith Daniel (2010) „Genesis and difference: Deleuze, Maïmon, and the post-Kantian reading of Leibniz“, In: S. Van Tuinen & N. Mcdonnell (eds.), Deleuze and the fold, Dordrecht, Springer, 132–154.