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The Fractured Subject: Deleuze's Response to Kant

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The Fractured Subject: Deleuze's Response to Kant 1 The Fractured Subject: Deleuze’s Response to Kant Abstract: I offer an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the subject is fundamentally fractured, drawing on his response to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Paralogisms. I will argue that Deleuze accepts Kant’s claims that (1) our judgments are the result of the spontaneous exercise of the understanding, and that (2) time, as a sensible form of objects, cannot be derived from the form of thought. This makes Deleuze out to be more Kantian in his account of judgment and of temporal objects than has heretofore been appreciated. My primary task in what follows, however, is to reconstruct Deleuze’s argument in favor of the claim that the subject is, most fundamentally, fractured by the form of time. My thesis is that Deleuze’s argument is persuasive. Keywords: Deleuze; Kant; time; subject; spontaneity; passivity A fractured, or split, subject is one whose self-understanding contains two aspects such that the subject is indissociably both but cannot grasp how the two aspects are both characteristics of one and the same being. The fracture in the subject that we will be interested is between the subject insofar as it thinks (the ‘thinking I’) and the subject insofar as it exists (the ‘existing Me’). We can get this fracture in view with an example: when I say ‘I’, I mean to refer to myself as a particular being; but what I express is something that is common to every self- conscious subject, or to every thinking I. I, then, have indissociably two aspects: I am this particular being, and I am an I. If the only resource I had available to me for grasping their unity were whatever content is contained in ‘I’, then I could not grasp how those two aspects characterized one and the same being: all I could grasp was what is common to every thinking being; I could not reach all the way to the particular being that I (also) am, and grasp how that being is an I.1 In my understanding of myself, I would not be able to grasp my unity; I would be fractured. 1 This example is one of Hegel’s favorites (cf., e.g., Hegel 1977: ¶101-2). It is worth noting that Hegel, at least, thought that the resources contained in ‘I’ did suffice to grasp the unity of this particular being and self- consciousness (what is expressed by ‘I’) (cf. Hegel 2010: 12.16ff.). But if ‘I’ refers only to the self-consciousness common to every thinking being, it is difficult to see how it could also be the source of whatever specifies one individual thinking being. 2 Of course, it is reasonable to think that we have many more resources than just those contained in ‘I’ for understanding my unity. And I will not rest any weight on this brief example; it is merely illustrative of our topic. That topic, the fractured subject, was especially significant in 20th Century Continental philosophy. Many different philosophers in that tradition worked out views on which the subject was fractured. They offered very different views on what fractured the subject, and on what implications we should draw from the fracture. But the idea that the subject was, most fundamentally, fractured, was fairly common. In this essay, my focus will be on Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the fractured subject. The topic of the fractured subject was introduced into philosophy before the 20th Century. The most important, and perhaps the first, discussion of the topic prior to the last century occurred in Kant. Kant discussed the fracture in terms of a paradox of inner sense. According to Kant, we are conscious of ourselves as the active or spontaneous source of the combination of our representations in judgment. But that consciousness of ourselves is not consciousness of ourselves as an object; it is a purely formal consciousness, a consciousness that accompanies or at least can accompany our consciousness of any object whatever. Nevertheless, Kant recognized that we are also conscious of ourselves as an object. He thought that meant that we are conscious of ourselves insofar as we appear to ourselves through a form of intuition, in this case inner sense. As he puts it, ‘through inner sense we intuit ourselves only as we are internally affected by our selves, i.e., as far as inner intuition is concerned we cognize our own subject only as appearance but not in accordance with what it is in itself’ (B156).2 The most important part of this for our purposes is that we cannot grasp how the active, thinking I is the same as the passive, 2 Citations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason will use the standard A/B pagination, and follow the Cambridge translations. 3 existing Me that appears as an object. They must be the same, but we cannot grasp how the two characteristics are characteristics of the same being. Hence, Kant’s subject is fractured. Deleuze credits Kant with having discovered the fracture in the subject, and in particular praises Kant’s idea that the ‘pure and empty form of time’ is responsible for that fracture (cf. 1994: 116-23/85-91).3 Surprisingly, not much critical commentary has been written about Deleuze’s account of the fractured subject, or of the way in which his account draws on Kant.4 There is, to be sure, a lively debate, within scholarship on Deleuze, between those who think his work is heavily indebted to Kant and those who do not. In this essay, I will not try to wade into this more general debate, focusing instead exclusively on the relation between Deleuze and Kant on the topic of the fractured subject. On this topic, at least, it is obvious that Deleuze is very heavily indebted to Kant. The bulk of commentary on Deleuze’s idea of the fractured subject relates it to his doctrine of the three passive syntheses of time, because his discussion of the fractured subject occurs in a discussion of the third passive synthesis. My argument in what follows will instead focus on his claims about the fractured subject in their own right, as I believe he has an argument in favor of the fractured subject which can be separated from the much more difficult account of 3 For references to Deleuze: translations are my own, though I have consulted the extant English translations. The year refers to the year of publication of the English edition cited in the bibliography; page references are to the French edition followed by the English edition as cited in the bibliography. Wherever a reference contains a year and no author name, the author is Deleuze. 4 The critical guides to Difference and Repetition all discuss the topic, though most do no more than provide some background on Kant (and Descartes, Plato, Shakespeare, etc.) that Deleuze is more or less taking for granted in his argument. One extensive treatment that I will not be able to discuss in this essay is that put forward by James Williams – Williams takes it that the subject fractured is not the thinking subject, but rather anything that can in any way said to be active or passive in relation to any process (cf. Williams 2011: 5, 27-9, 90). So, a rock eroding over time is a fractured subject on his reading. The relevant passages about the fractured subject strongly suggest a focus on the thinking subject, as Williams admits, but he finds reasons to doubt that appearance in his overall interpretation of Deleuze’s project and space does not permit me to respond to those reasons; so, I set Williams’s view aside. 4 the three passive syntheses. Further, most of the critical commentary is simply trying to get a handle on what Deleuze is claiming. This is reasonable, as Deleuze’s texts are hard to pin down due to his constantly shifting vocabulary and his seemingly endless allusions to other thinkers.5 My project in what follows will not primarily consist in trying to make plain what Deleuze thought. Building off of some excellent work that others (especially Joe Hughes and Henry Somers-Hall) have done to clarify what Deleuze means, in this essay my primary task will be to offer an argument in favor of Deleuze’s claim. Deleuze credits Kant with the discovery of the fractured subject, but he nevertheless thinks that Kant betrayed his own discovery. On his reading, Kant makes the fracture in the subject logically posterior to unity of the subject. The thinking I is, for Kant, unified, and that unity is logically prior to, and indeed a condition on the intelligibility of, any appearances of the subject through inner sense. Moreover, time (which fractures the subject) is unified through being determined by the thinking I. As a result, the fracture in the subject can only be made sense of by appealing to a prior unity in the thinking subject. Thus, though Kant’s subject is fractured, it has a prior unity in the nature of the thinking I. Deleuze argues that this is inconsistent with Kant’s thought that the form of inner sense cannot have its source in the nature of the thinking I, because (as Kant puts it) ‘the I that I think… differ[s] from the I that intuits itself (for I can represent other kinds of intuition as at least possible)’ (B155). So, Deleuze argues that the fracture in the subject is logically prior to the unity in the thinking I, and he does so on what he takes to be Kantian grounds.
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