Hume in Deleuze: the first outlines of transcendental empiricism

Abstract

Deleuze liked to compare his philosophical work with a kind of patchwork or collage: Harlequin-style thinking, colourful and made of not holistic fragments. This is the pluralism (or empiricism) claimed by the French philosopher, and its result: an unusual mosaic made of encounters or téléscopages between seemingly unrelated authors. However, the case of Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) is rather strange: it does not seem to fit in this complex puzzle, and the undervaluation suffered in numerous comments on Deleuze tends to reinforce this prejudice. On the contrary, we intend to show that this study about Hume contains the first sequences of a metaphysics that will be fully established in Difference and Repetition –”l’oeuvre souche”– and, in parallel, how this rising issue of the Outside will appeal the complementary issue of Involvement –in others words, the overcoming of Humean physicalism.