This project on a Deleuzian transcendental philosophy is born out of a feeling of astonishment. On the one hand, the theme of the transcendental runs through many of Deleuze's works, in particular those published between 1962 and 1968. On the other hand, the spirit of Deleuze's philosophical thought seems so very different from that of Kantian transcendental philosophy: Deleuze does not bother to seek a justification or ground for the possibility of experience and its objects. He does not put together a table of categories, nor does he give any transcendental deduction of a priori conditions. Moreover, in Deleuze, there is certainly no transcendental subject, which would have the task of representing the world according to a priori conditions. So why should he label his own philosophy of the 1960s a transcendental empiricism (cf. DR 144/187 and 56/79–80)? In what way, if at all, is his philosophy transcendental?

Our approach to this problem has been guided by the intuition that the key had to be found in Deleuze's critique of the so-called dogmatic Image of thought, a critique that appears in almost every book from this early period and that makes up the central part of Difference and Repetition. The first thing to be noted is that Deleuze understands philosophy fundamentally as critique, and in Nietzsche and Philosophy he explicitly demands a rethinking and radicalisation of Kant's critical project.