Semiology

Semiology

  • Submitted By: wimberly5
  • Date Submitted: 03/04/2009 11:26 AM
  • Category: Philosophy
  • Words: 808
  • Page: 4
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Philosophy Overview Deleuze

Deleuze suggests that there are two fundamental problems with philosophy as we know it;

1. Politics of tradition

‘The history of philosophy…has played the repressors role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book on them...An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking’ (Dialogues p.13)

2. Traditional style of philosophy

‘what we should in fact do is stop allowing philosophers to reflect on things. The philosopher creates, he does not reflect’. (Negotiations p.136)

For Deleuze the history of philosophy embraces a much more active, constructive sense. Each reading of a philosopher, an artist, and a writer should be undertaken, Deleuze tells us, in order to provide an impetus for creating new concepts that do not pre-exist. (D&R p. vii)

Thus the work that Deleuze studies are seen by him as inspirational, but also as a resource from which the philosopher can gather the concepts that seem the most useful and give them a new life; along with the force to develop new, non-preexistant concepts.

New concepts derived from others works, or old ones are recreated or ‘awakened’ and put to a new service.

Deleuze and Kant

‘I did it [his book on Kant] as a book on an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs the tribunal of reason’ (Neg p.6)

Deleuze concentrates on Kant’s rejections of transcendentality at key points in the Critiques, in favour of a generalised pragmatism of reason.

Deleuze locates, in Kant, the development of the concept of the transcendental at the root of modern philosophy. (D&R p.135)

Even in the transcendental faculties in Kant, understanding, reason and imagination act only in an important fashion to achieve their own ends:

‘…the so-called transcendental method is always the determination of an immanent employment of reason, conforming to...