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Gilles Deleuze's Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd i 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrifi cial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual. Franz Kafka 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd iiii 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity A Critical Introduction and Guide JON ROFFE 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd iiiiii 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Jon Roffe, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11.5/15 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0582 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0584 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0583 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0585 0 (epub) The right of Jon Roffe to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd iviv 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Contents Acknowledgements vii Note on References ix Preface xi 1. Beyond Kant’s Hume 1 2. Belief and Theoretical Reason 19 3. The Moral World 37 4. The Madness of Thought and the Delirium of Practical Reason 81 5. Subjectivity 103 6. The Singularity of Empiricism 129 7. A Kantian Hume 149 Index 165 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd v 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd vivi 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Acknowledgements My thanks go to Carol Macdonald for talking me into writing this book, and for her patience during the distended period of time it took me to make good on the promise. I dedicate this book to Virginia, who kept me still and sane enough to write it. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales for supporting the publication of this work, and Haydie Gooder for preparing the excellent index. vii 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd viivii 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd viiiviii 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Note on References In what follows, Deleuze’s book will be referred to each time with a pair of page numbers, the French original followed by Constantin Boundas’s English translation – for example (ES 23/21). I have frequently modifi ed the translation, but whenever the change turns around a signifi cant point, a note will be appended. Whenever a single page number appears, it should be taken to refer just to the French original, with the exception of references that use lower-case Roman numer- als. These indicate the preface to the English translation that Deleuze contributed in 1991. Boundas has done a great service to readers of Empiricism and Subjectivity by tracking down the original English passages in Hume’s work that Deleuze cites in André Leroy’s translation, allowing for an easy location of these texts. Here, I will follow the now standard procedure of citing from the Clarendon Edi- tion of the Works of David Hume. References to A Treatise of Human Nature will take the form (T 1.3.1.1), indicating the book, chapter, section and paragraph respectively. References to Enquiry concerning Human Understanding will refer to sec- tion and paragraph (e.g. EHU 2.6); the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals will invoke section, part and paragraph (EPM 3.1.4). ix 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd ixix 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd x 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Preface Gilles Deleuze published his fi rst book Empiricism and Sub- jectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature in 1953, the year that he turned twenty-eight.1 There is a pleasing symmetry here: David Hume was the same age when the fi rst two books of his precocious masterpiece A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) initially appeared.2 A book on David Hume might seem an unusual, even bizarre, choice for a young French philosopher, educated at the height of the dynastic rule of les trois H in French philosophy – Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger. Even today, you would have to extend the list of infl uential Hs in French philosophy for a very long time before Hume’s name would appear on it. The least we can say is that Deleuze’s disregard for intellectual fashion and what would today, even more than then, pass for sensible career decisions was already in full fl ower in his philosophical youth. This is not to say that the work had no precursors or patrons in Deleuze’s milieu. Deleuze occasionally refers to the infl uence of Jean Wahl, whose Preface to Vers le concret (1932) includes a brief remark about Hume’s empiricism that strikingly resembles the line of argument that will appear in Empiricism and Sub- jectivity. Despite the fact that Wahl’s doctoral thesis The Plu- ralist Philosophies of England and America (1920) explicitly marginalises Hume’s contribution,3 Deleuze will write that he xi 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd xixi 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Preface ‘had the ability to make us think, in French, things which were very new’.4 But Empiricism and Subjectivity is not dedicated to Wahl but to one of Deleuze’s teachers and a champion of the young idiosyncrat, the towering Hegelian Jean Hyppolite – ‘in sincere and respectful homage’. This dedication is something of a riddle, and one that we will later try to solve. * The translator’s introduction by Constantin Boundas is the fi rst text on Empiricism and Subjectivity that connects the book to a range of themes prominent in Deleuze’s mature work, but the truth is that there is at fi rst blush little in either Hume’s philoso- phy or Deleuze’s account of it that directly resembles his later, more well-known works. Readers of these works are likely to fi nd themselves confronted to some degree by the foreign char- acter of Deleuze’s argument. Conversely, the Hume that lives on in contemporary, predominantly analytic, Anglo-American philosophy departments is not easily recognisable in his Deleu- zian portrait either. This book hopes to present an account of Empiricism and Subjectivity that will be of interest and illu- mination to readers coming from either direction. That said, the aim here is not to set up a comparison between Deleuze’s reading and those prominent in the Anglo-American tradition from Beattie to Baier. The reader familiar with this trajectory will nevertheless fi nd it gradually appear in the discussions of naturalism and Hume’s moral thought that will emerge as we tease out Deleuze’s argument. Neither is the goal of this book the connecting up of ideas in Empiricism and Subjectiv- ity and those we fi nd later in his work. Readers interested in either or both of these approaches will fi nd them in Jeffrey Bell’s Deleuze’s Hume: Philosophy, Culture and the Scottish Enlight- enment. Again, though, and particularly in the later chapters, a few points will emerge in passing that address the way in which Deleuze’s reading of Hume might open onto his later work. Finally, the presentation that follows will not put Deleuze’s Hume in the docks of comparative scholarship. Judging the xii 55194_Roffe194_Roffe andand Deleuze.inddDeleuze.indd xiixii 115/10/165/10/16 4:574:57 PPMM Preface fi delity of his reading of Hume is not the goal. No, my aim here is more modest: to schematically present the argument of Deleuze’s little text. His writing, here as elsewhere, is remark- ably dense. Rarely does he repeat a point, and rarely does he need more than a page to present even complex arguments. At the same time, his interpretation of Hume, though brief, is remarkably wide-ranging. While the Treatise is his central refer- ence, he ranges across the whole of Hume’s writings, including the two Enquiries, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and his political and economic essays.5 And while he does not dwell on the content of Hume’s history of England, he does make an important place for it in his inclusive reading of Humean thought. We can add to this the fact that, as is often the case in Deleuze’s works, the order of argumentation is unusual and, to some extent at least, misleading. The logic of this order is certainly present in Empiricism and Subjectivity, but it is woven through the book, and only appears to the reader once a certain level of comprehension is already gained. Conse- quently, to replay in full Deleuze’s reading of Hume in its richness and idiosyncrasy would require a book signifi cantly longer than the original, and the one in your possession is already (embarrassingly) longer than it should be.
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