Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Gilles Deleuze continually amazes me. This incredibly tight and coherent book was written when he was only 28. it was his first book.
Here he utilizes Hume’s radical critique on induction (which is actually a critique on causation and empiricism) in order to realign not only culture and society but also subjectivity.
From here, Deleuze no longer speaks of subjectivity in his other works (for the most part). He immediately grasps the relation of subjectivity with time, as past coherences are also given in the present through a formal repetition of content deployment.
This is connection of Bergson and Freud; that process is knowledge, and the imprint of a particular process as being the “main line” highlights not only what is significant in an encounter but also significant for future encounters.
When we understand that relations are “outside themselves” as external connections that are imposed, we can grasp that subjectivities as self referential are also “relations outside themselves”. It is the process of this superimposition that creates mind, being and so on as synthetic relations of what we do. Knowledge is given to a material process. In later works, Deleuze shows the mixture of material sheets of consistency from which agency is expressed forms the partial objects of agential realism as the formation of new agencies as new material consistencies.
“Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what is”.
This is the jump as a young Deleuze pushes us beyond existentialism of a resoluteness of being into the functionalism of the 21st century.
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