A transcendental philosophy of the event: Deleuze's non-phenomenological reading of Leibniz

This chapter situates Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in the context of its rejection of phenomenologically inspired readings of Leibniz. Though texts like The Logic of Sense and Immanence: A Life seem to be written almost entirely under the sign of a radicalised transcendental reduction, it is well-known that Deleuze takes an almost diabolical pleasure in dismissing the phenomenological tradition, which is ‘too pacifying and has blessed too many things’ (F 113). His critique of Husserl and Husserl’s followers condenses in his critique of common sense in its transcendental functioning, in other words, of Urdoxa. Even if phenomenology replaces transcendent essences with the immanence of sense in intentionality, Deleuze argues that it nonetheless resurrects essences by imposing on us the alternative of either the non-sense of an undifferentiated groundlessness or sense as guaranteed by its imprisonment in common sense (LS 103, 106; F 14; WP 51, 160). Firstly, in its account of the genesis of sense, it confuses the explanans with the explanandum: it raises ‘to the transcendental a mere empirical exercise in an image of thought presented as originary’ (LS 98) and ‘thinks of the transcendental in the image of, and in the resemblance to, that which it is supposed to ground’ (LS 105). Secondly, because it determines the lived flux of time as an experience immanent to human consciousness instead of vice versa, it inevitably reinstates a triple transcendence: the objective sensory World, the intersubjective Other and higher-level scientifico-cultural Communities1, three proto-beliefs that carry away the flow of immanence by determining the ‘significations’ of the potential totality of the lived (WP 47, 142).

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