Stephen Crocker “Citizen Kant”

Crocker, Stephen 2007. Citizen Kant: Flatness and depth in the image of thought. Deleuze Studies 1(2): 126–143.

‘Image of thought’ has an interesting history in Deleuze’s thought. In his early work he dismisses this phrase and calls for ‘imageless thought,’ meaning thought that doesn’t understand itself to be the expression of some higher, transcendent order. In later works, he embraces this phrase. In What is Philosophy he describes it as ‘the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 37). (126)

The significance of deep focus does not lie in its correspondence to the ‘extra-cinematic’ world, as André Bazin, among others had supposed. For Deleuze, it represents instead a kind of Copernican turn in film. Welles achieves in film something analogous to what Kant had achieved in philosophy. Instead of asking whether philosophy can produce an accurate image of the world, Kant asks how we can produce any image of the world at all. Critical philosophy concerns itself with the conditions of reason: what must reason be in order to produce an image of reality? In a similar way, Welles’ cinema of relations ‘arouses the thinker in us’ and reveals a new vocation for film: not to provide evidence that the world exists, but to produce an image of our powers of thought. After Welles, ‘The cinema must film not the world, but our belief in the world.’ (Deleuze 1989: 172) The deep focus shot achieves this change through a new organization of the cinematic shot, or plane. (127)

Welles overcomes early cinema’s dialectic of one or many planes when he reproduces the principle of montage – cutting up action into different planes – inside the shot. The result consisted neither of a single plane, nor a series of single planes unfolded in succession. Instead, complex planar relations inside the shot took on a more active role in the creation of whatever transpired on screen. Thus, ‘Relations of thought in the image have replaced the contiguity of relations of images.’ (Deleuze 1989: 174) (127)

The Transcendental Idea is not an image of something outside thought, it is a wholly internal and necessary moment of thinking in which finite reason produces an image of its own totality in order to systematize the otherwise isolated concepts of the understanding. Kant calls these images Ideas, and in a striking passage he compares them to images composed in depth and centred on a vanishing point. (128)

In overcoming the opposition of one or many planes, deep focus presents us with a new image of thought which, without the support of a central organizing principle, nonetheless holds things together in open unties, or multiplicities. (128)

For Bazin and Mitry, the deep focus shot represented a leap beyond the analytic fragmentation of action that characterized earlier forms of montage, because it allowed for a more realistic presentation of events as they occurred. Mitry described this as a change from ‘actualization’ to ‘presentification’. In the classical montage which precedes Welles ‘we participate in a represented past, rather than a present actuality . . . what we are viewing is the consequence of an action.’ (Mitry 1997: 187) In the deep focus shot, on the other hand, we witness the development of action and the open time in which this takes place. (128-129)

Bazin had already established that deep focus marked an important turning point in cinema. A ‘realist’, Bazin situated the evolution of film in a longer history of representation stretching back to the Renaissance discovery of perspective. Painting, photography and the various moments of film history are all defined by a movement toward a more perfect correspondence between the image and the reality it represents. The automatic, machinic nature of the photograph was a critical leap forward in this movement, and the deep focus shot its next significant stage. Where photography gave us unequivocal evidence of the world in a mould made from the object’s reflected light, the deep focus shot brought us still closer because it presented the ‘moulding’ of the thing in time, or ‘an imprint of the duration of the object’ (Bazin 1995: 14). On this view, the history of film displays a definite logical and dialectical progression. (129)

Early cinema, then, oscillates between two basic structures. It presents either a single undifferentiated plane, or a series of single planes given in succession. To these different forms there correspond two different types of synthesis, which, in turn, present two different kinds of ‘wholes’. In the early actualities, the whole is given in advance of its presentation. The camera simply records an already existing situation. In analytical montage, the whole is given as a sum that we piece together after the presentation of a sequence. In each case a whole, or an idea, is presented. In neither of these cases, though, is the whole immanent to the image being presented on screen. It is either given before, as a full reality to be captured, or afterwards, when a sequence has completed itself and an idea may be inferred from it. And in both cases the single plane – the cinema of the One – remains the basic compositional element of a whole that is conceived of as either as an arch¯e or a telos. (130)

Hence the significance of Citizen Kane (1941). Welles overcomes classical cinema’s dualism of one or many planes when he creates a shot composed of a set of striated planes all presented at once. What is remarkable about the shot is its new method of compositing and presenting a whole. The use of shadow and light, the  presence of the visible ceiling and floors give us a whole space in which complex actions transpire. The viewer is invited to roam across the multiple planes and to make inferences about the details as the scene unfolds. (130)

In the Wellesian shot, the whole is contemporary with the elements it presents. (131)

The history of the shot progresses from one (the early actualities) to many (montage) to, finally, a multiplicity (deep-focus shot) that passes beyond the opposition of one or many planes. (131)

We are no longer dealing with one single present, or a sequence of presents. It is true that Citizen Kane makes use of classical forms of montage which show us short, flat shots detailing the habitual movements of Kane’s life – Kane reading the newspaper, at dinner, in a meeting. But deep focus opens up these presents, and  suspends them from the chronological progression so that they can be explored as ‘sheets’ or ‘regions’ of past where we can roam around and look for the missing element – Rosebud – which the film seeks in the different slices of Kane’s past. (131)

The referent of realism in the Cinema books is not the faithful reproduction of the object in an external reality, but the structure of time and movement, or the ‘kinesiology’ from which cinema derives its name. The deep focus shot gives us the first time image, which Deleuze describes as ‘a direct presentation of time’ (Deleuze 1989: 214). (133)

What unites all these baroque examples is that the unity of the plane is replaced by an interest in the coexistence and relation among the planes; or, to be more precise, the relation takes precedence over the relata. Baroque recession is, like the ‘irrational interval’ of modern cinema, not simply an inert connective tissue, but a principle of differentiation that plays a positive role in the idea of the image. (135)

All pictures have recession, but the recession has a different effect, depending on whether we are compelled to organize the space into different planes, which we subsequently synthesize, or to experience it as a recessional movement. In the case of Renaissance planimetric composition, our attention is directed to the separate planar components of the work. The relations that link these together merely convey the eye from one distinct plane to another. We could say that the relations are subordinate to the planes, or that they work in the service of the plane. The baroque image, on the other hand, realizes a latent possibility of Renaissance perspective: that the multiplication of planes allows the relation to gain some autonomy from the content of the plane. Recession, or as Deleuze likes to say, ‘the interstice’ now knows a new unlimited freedom. (136)

As Deleuze says of Welles, ‘each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it’ (Deleuze 1989: 179).

Fold, relation and abstraction become the content of the image. This is ‘the contribution of the baroque to art in general’ (Deleuze 1993: 34). (137)

Merleau-Ponty’s thesis is that the projection of this whole is the condition of any empirical relations we might construct among the parts. There is not first a given difference in size and then a recognition of depth. We do not perceive planes with a given set of properties that we then relate. It is only because they have first been synthesized in this way that the elements can be distinguished and empirical and quantitative relations constructed among them. This is why depth is ‘the most existential of all the dimensions’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 264). In depth, elements that are mutually exclusive and belong to different planes nevertheless take as profiles’ of one and the same phenomenon. Depth is the dimension in which ‘things or elements envelop each other’. It is ‘the contraction into one perceptual act of a whole possible process’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 264). (137-138)

Crucial here is this ambivalence in the use of depth: it can signal either an associationist connection among discreet parts, experienced ‘partes extra partes’, or an open whole or ‘folding’ in which an array of sensations are co-implicated. It is in this latter possibility that both Wölfflin and Deleuze find the basis of all subsequent abstraction in art.6 In both cinema and painting the break with the plane represents a Copernican turn in which thought and image move away from the problem of representation toward an analysis of the conditions of any presentation at all. (138)

Kant does for empiricism what deep focus does for montage. He does not deny that thought is made of a diversity of sensations. Nor does he want to return to a theological vision of unity. When Kant asks about the conditions under which a manifold of immanent sensations can be thought, he is not dismissing empiricism but, rather, deepening and extending the principle of immanence introduced by Hume. Until Kant, the image of thought is divided between the One of God and the many of Hume’s ‘simple’ empiricism. In the same way that Welles moves montage inside the shot, Kant moves the empiricist array of impressions inside a new image of the whole of reason. (139)

Kant’s name for the new image of thought is ‘Transcendental Idea’. The idea in the Kantian system is a name for the whole that is implicit in each of our conceptual judgments. It is by virtue of the presence of the whole that we can regard any given phenomena as a part of a system that insures its truth-value. It is the idea, for example, that allows reason to create syllogisms where one idea (Man) implies, or is implicated in, another (Mortality). (139)

„I accordingly maintain that Transcendental Ideas never allow of any constitutive employment. When regarded in that mistaken manner, and therefore as supplying concepts of certain objects, they are but pseudo-rational, merely dialectical concepts. On the other hand, they have an excellent, and indeed indispensably necessary, regulative employment, namely that of directing the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection. This point is indeed a mere idea, a focus imaginarius, from which, since it lies quite outside experience, the concepts of the understanding do not in reality proceed; none the less it serves to give to these concepts the greatest [possible] extension. Hence arises the illusion that the lines have their source in a real object lying outside the field of empirically possible knowledge – just as objects reflected in a mirror are seen as behind it. Nevertheless this illusion (which need not, however, be allowed to deceive us) is indispensably necessary if we are to direct the understanding beyond every given experience (as part of the sum of possible experience) and thereby to secure its greatest possible extension, just as in the case of the mirror-vision, the illusion involved is indispensably necessary if, besides the objects which lie before our eyes, we are also able to see those which lie at a distance behind our back. (Kant 1965: 553). (140)

The mirror illusion allows us to synthesize different elements and planes of experience into a whole. It functions, in relation to the concepts, in the same way that a vanishing point does with respect to the different planes of a work of art. It transforms the flat, two-dimensional relation of concept and object into a three-dimensional plane with depth. (140)

Daniel W. Smith “Deleuze, Kant, and the theory of immanent ideas”

Smith, Daniel W. 2006. Deleuze, Kant, and the theory of immanent ideas. In: Boundas, Constantin V. (ed.). Deleuze and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 43–61.

In using the term ‘Idea’, Deleuze is not referring to the common-sense use of the term, or the use to which empiricists like Hume or Locke put it, for whom the word ‘idea’ refers primarily to mental representations. Rather, Deleuze is referring to the concept of the Idea that was first proposed by Plato, and the modified by Kant and Hegel. (43)

For Deleuze, Plato created the concept of the Idea in order to provide a criterion to distinguish between (or to ‘select’ between) things and their simulacra – for instance, between Socrates (the true philosopher) and the sophists (the simulacral counterfeits). If Plato failed in his project, it is because he assigned his Ideas a transcendent status. But Deleuze will more or less take up Plato’s project anew in order to rejuvenate it: Ideas, he argues, must be made immanent, and therefore differential. Yet this was already Kant’s project: in fascinating text at the opening of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, Kant criticises Plato for assigning to Ideas a ‘transcendent object’ – even though Kant is in the process of justifying his own appropriation of the Platonic concept of the ‘Ideas’. (43–44)

In the first critique, Kant distinguishes between three types of concepts: empirical concepts, a priori concepts or ‘categories’, and Ideas. Empirical concepts are concepts like ‘table’ and ‘rose’ that give us genuine knowledge. Such concepts are applied to a multiplicity (or manifold) of sensations: through the imagination I synthesise these perceptions, and in applying the concept ‘table’ to them, I can recognise the object before me. But Kant also identifies a second type of concept, which are a priori concepts or what Kant (following Aristotle) calls ‘categories’. Categories are concepts that are applicable, not just to empirical objects such as tables and chairs, but to any object I could ever come across, ever, for all time, in my experience. […] the concept of ‘cause’ is a category, precisely because I cannot conceive of an object that does not have a cause. […] Categories are thus a priori concepts that are applicable to every object of any possible experience. Indeed, Kant’s notion of ‘possible experience’ is derived from his notion of the category: it is the categories that define the domain of possible experience. (45)

Finally, there is a third type of concept in the Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant calls ‘Ideas’ (in the Platonic sense). An idea is the concept of an object that goes beyond or transcends any possible experience. There are various kinds of transcendent concepts: for instance, anytime we speak of something ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ – for example, the ‘pure gift’ in Derrida, or ‘absolute zero’ in physics – we are almost certainly outside the realm of possible experience, since experience presents us with impure mixtures and non-absolutes. (45)

Kant […] famously focuses on three transcendent Ideas, which constitute the three great terminal points of metaphysics: the soul, the world and God. These Ideas go beyond any possible experience: there is no object – anywhere, ever – that could correspond to such Ideas; we can never have a ‘possible experience’ of them. (46)

To use the famous Kantian distinction, we can think the world as if it were real, as if it were an object, but we can never know it. Strictly speaking, the world is not an object of our experience; what we actually know is the problematic of causality, a series of causal relations that we can extend indefinitely. It is this problem, Kant says, that is the true object of the Idea of the world. (46)

[…] ‘transcendent’ and ‘transcendental’ are not identical terms, and in fact are opposed to each other. The aim of Kant’s transcendental project is to discover criteria immanent to the understanding that are capable of distinguishing between two different uses of the syntheses of consciousness: legitimate immanent uses, and illegitimate transcendent uses (the transcendent Ideas). Transcendental philosophy is a philosophy of immanence, and implies a ruthless critique of transcendence (which is why Deleuze does not hesitate to align himself with Kant’s critical philosophy, despite their obvious differences). (47)

This is also why Kant can assign to Ideas a legitimate immanent use as well as an illegitimate transcendent use. The immanent use is regulative: ideas constitute ideal focal points or horizons outside experience that posit the unity of our conceptual knowledge as a problem; they can therefore help regulate the systematisation of our scientific knowledge in a purely immanent manner. The illegitimate transcendent use is falsely constitutive: it falsely posits or constitutes an object that supposedly corresponds to the problem. At best, reason can simply postulate a harmony or (in Kant’s terminology) an ‘analogy’ between its Ideas and the material objects of experience: Reason here is the faculty that says, ‘Everything happens as if …’ (as if there were a world, or a soul, or a God …). (47)

Put simply, whereas Kantian Ideas are unifying, totalising and conditioning (transcendent Ideas), for Deleuze they will become multiple, differential, and genetic (immanent Ideas). (48)

Maimon’s primary objection is that Kant ignored the demands of a genetic method, by which Maimon means two things. First, Kant simply assumed that there were a priori ‘facts’ of reason (the ‘fact’ of knowledge in the first critique, and the ‘fact’ of morality in the second critique) and then sought the ‘condition of possibility’ of these facts in the transcendental. Against Kant, Maimon argues that one cannot simply assume these supposed ‘facts’ of knowledge or morality, but must instead show how they are engendered immanently from reason alone as the necessary modes of its manifestation. In short, a method of genesis has to replace the Kantian method of conditioning. (49)

Second, Maimon says, such a genetic method would require the positing of a principle of difference in order to function: whereas identity is the condition of possibility of thought in general, he argues, it is difference that constitutes the genetic condition of real thought. (49)

[…] one could say that these two exigencies are the primary components of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’. (49)

There are two ways of overcoming the concept-intuition duality in Kant: either concepts are sensible things, as in Locke; or sensibility itself is intelligible, as in Leibniz (there are Ideas in sensibility itself). In effect, Deleuze takes this latter path. (51)

Two of these components of Deleuzian Ideas are worth mentioning here: the differential relation and the notion of singularities. The differential relation is a relation that persists even when the terms of the relation have vanished. It is thus a pure relation, a pure relation of difference; it is what Deleuze means by ‘difference-in-itself’. Moreover, not only is the differential relation external to its terms, it is also constitutive of its terms: the terms of the relation are completely undetermined (or virtual) until they enter into the differential relation; on their own they are simply determinable. Once such elements enter a differential relation, their reciprocal determination determines a singularity, a singular point. Every multiplicity (that is, every thing) is characterised by a combination of singular and ordinary points. (51)

For Deleuze, this is exactly how our life is composed or constructed – from singularity to singularity. The point where someone breaks down in tears, for example, or boils over in anger is a singular point in someone’s psychic multiplicity, surrounded by a swarm of ordinary points. (51)

One could say that these are the two poles of Deleuze’s philosophy: ‘Everything is ordinary!’ and ‘Everything is singular!’6 Your reading of this paper, here and now, is a singular moment, never to be repeated; but at the same time it is a completely ordinary event. Yet there is a complex temporality at work in Deleuze’s theory of Ideas; and there is a complex temporality at work here as well: your reading of this paper may be ordinary, yet in retrospect it may appear singular because, perhaps, it changes the way you think, or sparks an unrelated idea in you that brings you lasting fame and fortune. We never know such things in advance, of course. (52)

[…] Deleuze’s theory of Ideas is an attempt to answer Plato’s question: what is a thing, what is its essence? His answer, put briefly, is that every thing is a multiplicity, which unfolds and becomes within its own spatiotemporal co-ordinates (its own ‘internal metrics’), in perpetual relation with other multiplicities. (52)

[…] the fundamental questions Deleuze links with Ideas are questions such as: how?, where?, when?, how many?, from what viewpoint?, and so on – which are no longer questions of essence, in the old sense, but questions of becoming, of the event (although Deleuze himself does not hesitate to use the term ‘essence’). (52)

First, the elements of an Idea are completely undetermined (or virtual); second, these elements are nonetheless determinable reciprocally in a differential relation (dx/dy); and third, to this reciprocal determination there corresponds the complete determination of a set of singularities (values of dx/dy), which defines a multiplicity (along with their prolongation in a series of ordinary points). (52)

Kant’s definition of desire is extraordinary: desire is ‘a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations’ (Kant 1952). It is hard to overemphasise the importance of this Kantian definition for Deleuze, since it breaks with a long tradition in philosophy that defined desire in terms of lack. Desire, says Kant, is a faculty that, given a representation in my head, is capable of producing the object that corresponds to it. (53)

The fundamental thesis of Anti-Oedipus is a stronger variant of Kant’s claim: ‘If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 26). (54)

What would a purely immanent theory of desire look like in the domain of practical reason? What if one did not appeal to the moral law – and the transcendent Ideas that serve as its necessary postulates – and instead synthesised desire with a conception of Ideas as purely immanent? This is precisely what Deleuze does in the opening two chapters of Anti-Oedipus: the three syntheses by which he and Guattari define ‘desiring machines’ are in fact the same three Ideas that Kant defines as the postulates of practical reason (soul, world and God), but now stripped entirely of their transcendent status, to the point where neither God, world, nor self subsist. (55)

Generally speaking, Deleuze gives a purely immanent characterisation of the three syntheses – connection [world], conjunction [self], and disjunction [God] – and then shows how desire itself is constituted by tracing out series and trajectories following these syntheses within a given social assemblage. (55)

The new dialectic (theory of Ideas) whose formal components Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition, could be said to receive its practical determination in Anti-Oedipus – with the difference that, in Deleuze, the determinations of the Ideas are practical from the start (hence the importance of such questions as: how?, where?, when?, how many?, from what viewpoint?, and so on). (56)

Deleuze suggests that philosophers should start from the obscure: a clear perception emerges from the obscure (or the virtual) by means of a genetic process (the differential mechanism). Yet at the same time, my clear perceptions are constantly plunging back into the obscure, into the virtual Idea of minute perceptions: by its very nature, perception is clear and obscure (chiaroscuro). (58)

To say that perception is by nature clear-obscure (chiaroscuro) is to say that it is made and unmade at every moment, in all directions, constantly extracting the clear while constantly plunging back into the obscure. (58)

Even in such a simple example, making a decision is never a question of choosing between x (staying in) and y (going out), since both inclinations are multiplicities that include an unconscious complex of auditory, gustative, olfactory and visual perceptions – an entire ‘perceptio-inclinatory ensemble’, a multiplicity of minute perceptions, minute tendencies and inclinations. It is this state of constant disquiet that Locke called ‘uneasiness’, and which Leibniz, in the New Essays, termed the fuscum subnigrum, the dark background of the soul. (59)

The aim of presenting these examples from lived experience is to demonstrate that, despite the abstract Nature of his language, Deleuze is attempting to get at something concrete with his theory of immanent Ideas. Immanent Ideas do not constitute the condition of possible experience, but rather the genetic conditions of real experience. ‘This is what it’s like on the plane of immanence,’ Deleuze writes, ‘multiplicities fill it, singularities connect with one another, processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall. . . .’ (Deleuze 1997: 146–7). (59)

Marina Brilman “Canguilhem’s Critique of Kant”

Brilman, Marina 2017. Canguilhem’s Critique of Kant: Bringing Rationality Back to Life. Theory, Culture & Society 0(0). DOI: 10.1177/0263276417741674

It is argued that three ideas form the cornerstones of Canguilhem’s critique. First, his discussion of concepts as preserved problems, rather than as a unification or unity of a manifold (AA 5: 373, 1987: 252, 373; AA 5: 377, 1987: 256, 377), as Kant suggested regarding concepts of the living (AA 5: 396, 1987, 278: 396; AA 5: 385–6, 1987: 266, 385–6). Second, Canguilhem’s idea of vital normativity as the potential to institute new, always provisional, normative orders, as opposed to Kant’s idea of the normative as standard of evaluation or principle of judgment with regard to the living. Third, Canguilhem’s introduction of the environment as a ‘category of contemporary thought’ (2003: 165) engages the ‘problem of individuality’ in the life sciences (Canguilhem, 2003: 79) and introduces contingency, thereby challenging the centrality of Kant’s knowing subject. (2)

Canguilhem’s epistemological critique and political project is this: to oppose any rationality that relies on principles that judge, limit, or extinguish life, and to propose an alternative rationality that relies on life’s creative contingency, resistance, and resilience. (2)

[…] since it is always a particular problem that gives rise to a concept and that this concept – in turn – formulates, all concepts are necessarily normative (Duroux, 1993: 49). (6)

For Canguilhem, a concept is not productive because it ‘economize[s] thought’ (2002: 344) but because it ‘preserve[s] a problem’ that should be maintained ‘in the same state of freshness as its ever-changing factual data’. Philosophy’s task as the ‘science of solved problems’ is, then, to ‘reopen rather than close problems’ (Canguilhem, 1978: xxv, referring to Brunschvicg; Osborne, 2003; Schmidgen, 2014: 249, 234; Rheinberger, 2005: 193). (6)

Goldstein argued, based on the pathological data obtained while treating soldiers with brain damage incurred in the First World War (Goldstein, 1995: 15, 29–30; Canguilhem, 2006: 120), that there are two concepts of the norm, the ‘idealistic’ and the ‘statistical’, and that neither can be satisfactorily applied to the living: the former because it ‘is not oriented on any reality but, rather, would have to justify itself in reality’; the latter because it represents an average that cannot do justice to the individual. What was required was a normative concept that is: (i) generally valid, but (ii) able to account for the individual, while at the same time (iii) avoiding the subjective (Goldstein, 1995: 325). It is argued that Canguilhem’s vital normativity can be understood as an attempt to construe this almost logically impossible normative concept. It signifies that which (i) all living processes have in common, but (ii) is actualized in each individual, while (iii) the living cannot be judged as normal or pathological with regard to an ideal or average, but only objectively with regard to itself (Canguilhem, 2006: 87). (7-8)

Health and sickness, or the normal and pathological, are values of life that can only be re-evaluated by the particular life that leads it. No value can be attributed by reference to an existing norm, nor can value be derived from life itself. Vital normativity, therefore, regards nothing more or less than techniques of living; a potential for ‘switching . . . perspectives’ (Badiou, 1998: 232, referring to a ‘shift of meaning’). (8)

Vital normativity regards a capacity (Canguilhem, 2006: 120, 129) or a potential to confront the particular
problems that living implies (Osborne, 2003: 5–6). (9)

Contemporary biology seems to embrace life’s contingency, at least epistemologically (Rheinberger, 1997: S247; Jacob, 1976: 323). It has also been said that ‘the biological . . . has, in a sense, become a wholly contingent condition’ (Franklin, 2003: 100), implying that living processes have recently become contingent – not only been understood as such – supposedly because of technological developments. However, at least since Kant has life’s diversity been characterized as contingent. In this sense, Luhmann noted that, although contingency may seem a modern notion, it ‘is a part of any search for necessity, for validity a priori, for inviolate values’ (1998: 44), while Foucault said that what characterizes ‘modernity’ is only a certain ‘attitude’ towards contingency (1984: 39), not the idea of contingency itself. (10)

Whereas Luhmann referred to an almost Kantian ‘concept of contingency’ and wondered whether a ‘theory’ exists in which such a concept might be useful (1998: 46), Canguilhem recognizes that contingency cannot be understood through concepts, only through living. A consideration of life’s contingency is only productive when it is divorced from a theory that generalizes or rationalizes it. Vital normativity is, therefore, not a concept of contingency; it is itself contingent. Not because, following Kant, a norm is always applied to the living by a particular subject, but because all norms represent the possibility of their own replacement. (11)

The misunderstanding of vital normativity’s ‘immanence’ (Deleuze, 2001), as something that is in living processes, can be seized upon from the outside, and – in turn – applied to it, is similar to the misinterpretation of Foucault’s biopower as power wielded over or applied to the living. Such understanding regresses biopower back into sovereign power, rather than appreciating Foucault’s efforts to describe the transformation of power itself (1998: 139–40). (12)

Perhaps Canguilhem’s focus on the ‘existential priority’ of the abnormal (1978: 149) and the centrality of error – following Bachelard and Nietzsche (Wolfe, 2010: 203; Talcott, 2014: 259–61) – invites the idea of the norm as correction. However, Canguilhem regarded normalization as an inherently ‘anthropological’ or ‘cultural’ phenomenon, as opposed to normativity, which he associated with life rather than lived experience (Canguilhem, 1978: 147; but see Rabinow, 1994: 18). His idea of vital normativity refers to the confrontation of life’s predicaments through a potential to re-evaluate values, institute new normative orders, and liberate the living from understanding, judgment, and mediocre regularity. (12)

It is in fact the environment’s particular relativity that addresses the vital predicament whether direction of action should be attributed to organism or environment (Goldstein, 1995: 84; Nietzsche, 1968: 344). Canguilhem does not attribute action to either, but to the continuous process of differentiation or becoming, which Goldstein referred to as ‘Auseinandersetzung’ (Canguilhem, 2003: 187) and Simondon as ‘individuation’ (Simondon, 1964: 4: 281–2). (16)

The idea of the knowledge of life, or the living knowing itself as living through living, means that life ceases to be an exception to understanding or rationality’s blind spot. Rather, life lies at the heart of rationality and constitutes its condition of possibility. Canguilhem’s alternative to Kant’s rationality is a ‘reasonable’ or vital rationality that does not seek to introduce order to the world or impose norms on the living, but always takes the point of view of the living itself. (17-18)

J. Colin McQuillan “Beyond the Analytic of Finitude: Kant, Heidegger, Foucault”

McQuillan, J. Colin 2016. Beyond the Analytic of Finitude: Kant, Heidegger, Foucault. Foucault Studies 21: 184-199.

 

Like Heidegger, Foucault tries to explain how the question concerning man “relates to” the questions “What can I know?”  “What  ought  I  to  do?”  and  “What  may  I  hope  for?” Unlike  Heidegger,  however,  Foucault argues that the answers  to these questions are  not founded upon,  or  reducible to,  the question  concerning  man.  They  relate  to  that  question  in  a  number  of  different  ways, corresponding to the different senses in which Kant understands man in the different parts of the critical philosophy. First, there is the conception of man as transcendental subject in the  Critique of Pure Reason, which relates to the question “what can I know?” There is also the conception of man as  “person”  in  Kant’s  moral  philosophy,  which  relates  to  the question  “what  ought  I  to  do?” Finally, there is the conception of man that relates to the philosophy of religion and the question “what  may  I  hope  for?”  According  to Heidegger,  the  conception  of man that  is to  be found  in Kant’s anthropology explains all of these different senses, because Kant (allegedly) says we could “reckon  all  of  this  as  anthropology,  because the  first  three  questions  relate  to  the  last  one.” Foucault  denies  this  claim,  insisting  that the  question  concerning  man  “has  no  independent content.” It merely repeats the divisions of the faculties and the different parts of Kant’s critical philosophy. (190)

 

The problem of finitude is a problem that arises because the  relationship  between  the anthropological  question  and the  other  three  questions  is not clearly defined. We understand that the answer to the question “What is man?” is related to the answer to the questions “What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” and “What may I hope for?”  but  we  do  not  know  exactly  how.  We  know  only  that  man  is  related  to  transcendental subjectivity, moral personhood, and the revolution in human nature that is the ultimate object of religion; yet he is reducible to none of them, because they all transcend him. Nor does man have any  content  or  meaning  of  his  own.  Understanding  the  limit  this  imposes  on  anthropological reflection  positively  and  empirically  is  the  task  of  the  analytic  of  finitude  that  emerges  from Kant’s anthropological-critical repetition. (191)

 

[…] critical philosophy distinguishes itself  from  the  philosophies  that  preceded  it—both  rationalist  and  empiricist—by  founding knowledge in a transcendental condition that precedes experience. This condition may be grasped in  transcendental  reflection—as  the  a  priori—but  only  to  the  extent  that  this  is  possible  for  a transcendental subject. (192)

 

Foucault describes how a similar approach emerges in empirical sciences, where labor, life, and language appear as “so many transcendentals” at the end of the eighteenth century. Labor, life,  and  language  function  as  transcendentals,  because  they  “make  possible  the  objective knowledge  of  living  beings,  the  laws  of  production,  and  the  forms  of  language,”  but remain “outside of knowledge.” They refer, instead, to the “force” of labor, the “energy” of life, and the “power”  of  speech,  none  of  which  can  be  observed  or  measured  in  themselves. Nevertheless, these “new empiricities” differ from transcendental philosophy in two crucial respects. First, the condition of empirical knowledge is located in an object and not in the transcendental subject. Second, they are concerned with the “positivity” of what appears, rather than the “negativity” of its conditions. This creates a conflict between transcendental philosophy and empirical science that  was,  according  to  Foucault,  constitutive  of  European  thought during  the  nineteenth century. (193)

 

The difference between the Kant that Foucault finds in his studies of “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” and the Kant  that  he  calls  “the  threshold  of  our modernity”  in  The  Order  of  Things  is  both  radical  and tremendously significant. The fact that Foucault finds in Kant’s enlightenment essay a different kind of critique, one that leads beyond the anthropologism of the analytic of finitude is evidence that Foucault was pushing beyond Heideggerean interpretation he adopted in the 1950s, toward a new  reading  of  Kant  that  would  help  him  overcome  the  conception  of  man  as  an  empiricaltranscendental double  that  had  come  to  dominate  the  human  sciences.  That  he  continues  to oppose  the  critical  attitude  that  he  finds  in  Kant’s  enlightenment  essay  to  the  “analysis  and reflection upon limits,” however, suggests that Heidegger’s reading of Kant remained an obstacle that he would have to overcome. (197)