François Zourabichvili claims that Deleuze is not engaging in an ontology but in a transcendental problematic of critique that shows how critical thought is itself contingent upon affective evaluation of a “pure difference.”
To bring Kristeva and Deleuze closer together on the affective dimension, I discuss Kristeva’s Tales of Love and Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Two Regimes of Madness, showing how Deleuze’s interest in “logic” does not aim at knowledge about reality, but at contingency conditions.
The becoming sensible of sense is a regime that arises at the affective level, and in this “interaction regime,” a kind of testing within the affective dimension displaces the categories.
I introduce here, as a kind of testing, Kristeva’s late discussion of the “composition” of “ambiguity”: the form that the uncanny takes in the confrontation with death (trauma).
The confrontation between the finite signifying subject and the fantasy of an “impossible end” enacts the dynamic of both going through repression and defense.
Herein lies the affinity between these thinkers: the form that the uncanny takes in Kristeva might have to be interpreted as a kind of interaction regime of the affective dimension, which, as a “pure difference,” becomes a “thought of experience” in Deleuze.
I show how this may lead to a new and valuable critique of experience.
Emilia Angelova is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Her research is in 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, and Kant. Recent work has been directed to study of themes raised by Kant and transformed by Heidegger, e.g., selfhood, temporality, freedom and the imagination.
She has published mainly on Heidegger and Kant; other articles are on Hegel, Deleuze, and Nancy. She is completing a book manuscript on Heidegger’s reading of Kant from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics; and is the editor of an anthology (with University of Toronto Press) Hegel, Freedom, and History.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom International Conference, Athens, Greece, 24-26 April 2015
