Transcendental Immanence

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze openly admires Kant's critique for revealing the transcendental realm (DR 135), for bringing Time into the conditions of experience, for inaugurating the idea of the passive self (DR 86), for substituting of the idea of internal illusions for the concept of error (DR 136), for its simultaneously destructive and creative capacity (DR 132, 139), and for that brief moment in the Critique of Judgement when it reveals sublimity as engendering aesthetic common sense and thereby rises above its simple standpoint of conditioning to achieve that of genesis. But while Deleuze argues that Kant seemed poised to sweep away the dogmatic Image of thought, he also strongly argued that the Kantian critique ultimately fails, for several reasons: It elevates simple empirical examples to transcendental models (the problem of ‘psychologism’) (DR 135); it does not ultimately overcome the dualism of concept and intuition; it retreats from the standpoint of genesis in favour of conditioning; and it understands problems in terms of their solvability (the problem of ‘extrinsicism’). Yet all of these reasons can be traced back to one fatal flaw: Kant's failure to push his thought beyond its common sense subjective biases and conformism. This flaw is what Deleuze calls Kant's ‘moralism’ (DR 4, 132, 197), and it is so significant that the dogmatic Image of thought is synonymously referred to throughout Difference and Repetition as the ‘moral Image’ of thought (DR 131). Deleuze contests the dogmatic Image of thought in the way that he claims Kant could not: by subjecting it to a ‘radical critique’ (DR 132).

According to this radical critique, the Kantian critical model Deleuze has laid out must undergo its own critique and submit to a series of radical modifications aimed at the ‘common sense’ presuppositions of morality that Deleuze believes Kant failed to abandon. So, even though Deleuze laments Kant's failure to take his critique far enough, he does not consider this an inherent failure of the critical project itself. Rather than abandon that project, Deleuze attempts to renew it. His radical critique thus begins not by overthrowing the original Kantian initiative (the effort to turn the examination of the relationships and limits of power inward) but by applying that initiative to a systematic evaluation of the dogmatic Image of thought and the moral presuppositions on which it is built (DR 132).