The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze

262 Pages·2006·27.739 MB·English

by  Alberto Toscano (auth.)

The Theatre of Production
Renewing Philosophy
General Editor: Gary Banham
Titles include:
Kyriaki Goudeli
CHALLENGES TO GERMAN IDEALISM
Schelling, Fichte and Kant
Keekok Lee
PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTIONS IN GENETICS
Deep Science and Deep Technology
Jill Marsden
AFTER NIETZSCHE
Simon O'Sullivan
ART ENCOUNTERS DELEUZE AND GUATTARI
Thought Beyond Representation
Celine Surprenant
FREUD'S MASS PSYCHOLOGY
Alberto Toscano
THE THEATRE OF PRODUCTION
Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze
Jim Urpeth
FROM KANT TO DELEUZE
Philip Walsh
SKEPTICISM, MODERNITY AND CRITICAL THEORY
Martin Weatherston
HEIDEGGER'S INTERPRETATION OF KANT
Categories, Imagination and Temporality
Renewing Philosophy
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The Theatre of
Production
Philosophy and Individuation
between Kant and Deleuze
Alberto Toscano
* ©Alberto Toscano 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-9780-7
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-349-54662-6 ISBN 978-0-230-51419-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230514195
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Toscano, Alberto.
The theatre of production: Philosophy and individuation between
Kant and Deleuze I Alberto Toscano.
p. cm.-(Renewing philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.1ndividuation (Philosophy) 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804.
3. Deleuze, Gilles. I. Title. II. Series.
BD394.T67 2005
111-dc22 2005049293
s
10 9 8 7 6 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Transferred to Digital Printing 2008
Contents
Series Editor's Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Preface X
Introduction: From the Intelligible to the Genetic 1
The ontology of anomalous individuation 1
Is there a science of the individual? 4
Univocity, haecceity and the birth of the object 7
Individuation and the ontological difference 11
Part I Kant Beyond Kant, or,
The Anomalies of the Organic
1 The Paradoxical Object: On Self-Organizing Beings
in the Critique ofJ udgment 19
1.1 The anomaly of self-organization 19
1.2 Defining nature 25
1.3 The object of cognition and the evidence of
individuality 27
1.4 Causality and mereology in natural purposes 32
1.5 The Antinomy of Teleological Judgment and its
ontological conversion 37
1.6 Analogy, contingency and the technic of nature 40
2 The Fate of Self-Organization: From Natural Machines
to the Philosophy of the Organism 44
2.1 Materia soluta, materia ligata: individuation in
Kant's Opus Postumum 44
2.2 Autonomy and allonomy: Kant's biophilosophical
legacy 55
2.3 Events, prehensions and subjective aim: the
philosophy of the organism 60
2.4 Remark on self-organization and
transcendental philosophy 78
v
vi Contents
3 The Method of Nature, the Crisis of Critique: Life,
Multiplicity and the Genesis of the Intellect in
Nietzsche's Early Notebooks 85
3.1 April1868 85
3.2 X=X 88
3.3 All unity is relative 94
3.4 Life force= ? 97
3.5 A materialism without matter? 104
Part II Elements for an Ontology of
Anomalous Individuation
4 Systems of Habit: Ravaisson, james, Peirce 109
4.1 Habit as a method of nature: ambivalence and paradox 109
4.2 The sedimentation of desire and the
canalization of matter: two images of habit 116
4.3 Chance, law, habit (the Monist papers) 123
4.4 'Possibilities beyond all multitude', or,
Peirce's Continuum Hypothesis 129
4.5 The return to teleology and the
temptations of spontaneity 132
5 Tertium Datur? Gilbert Simondon's Relational Ontology 136
5.1 Relation: disparation versus symbolism 136
5.2 Information: critique of the code 142
5.3 Interaction: beyond determinism and organicism 147
5.4 Transduction: search for a method 151
6 The Drama of Being: Figures of Individuation in
Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference 157
6.1 Internal difference and the theory of multiplicities 157
6.2 Structuralism and individuation: static genesis
and the paradoxical entity 167
6.3 The rhythms of immanence: haecceity,
intensity, subjectivity 175
6.4 Functionalism and the ontology of relations 180
6.5 Asylum Ignorantiae? 187
Conclusion: Becoming Individual 199
Notes 202
References 236
Index of Names 243
Index of Concepts 246
Series Editor's Preface
In the history of modern philosophy, empiricism's self-presentation has
been consistently epistemological. This has almost defined it against the
rationalist position when we recall that the principal proponents of the
latter - Leibniz and Spinoza - have, by contrast, been thinkers of a
decidedly ontological bent. The relationship of this division within
modern metaphysics to both the Kantian transcendental turn and the
contemporary division of philosophy into the camps of Anglo-American
and European is also worthy of remark. Carrying on the emphasis on
epistemology derived from the classical British advocates of empiricism,
the analytical tradition of philosophy has tended to eschew ontology
and to find its principal motivations in setting out a philosophical pro
cedure that will eliminate the need for it. By contrast, the contemporary
European tradition traces its lineage to figures such as Husser! and
Bergson, who revived the quest for an ontological basis for metaphysics.
Hence, the divide between the analytical method in philosophy and the
European traditions of phenomenology and virtual vitalism seems to
replicate the classic division between rationalism and empiricism.
To complicate this story somewhat, we need however to ask what dif
ference the transcendental moment that Kant represents made to the
original division between the rationalists and the empiricists? In posing
the transcendental question about the conditions of the possibility of
experience, Kant made 'experience' itself into an object of investigation
in a manner that refused to treat it - despite the readings of certain
Neo-Kantians - purely epistemologically, as the investigations of life,
purposiveness, teleology and substance clearly attest. In thus making
transcendental philosophy a meeting ground for ontological and episte
mological inquiries, Kant should have posed a challenge to the divide
we sketched in the paragraph above in a manner one would expect to be
lasting. So, one might ask, why does it appear that contemporary
philosophy has so resolutely resisted this transcendental road?
One key reason for this resistance within contemporary Anglo
American philosophy has been a consistent repudiation of idealism in
favour of materialism. The materialist tradition in philosophy was, for
many centuries, practically submerged, but threatens in some respects
in the contemporary world to become almost dominant. What the
vii
viii Series Editor's Preface
insistence on materialism is often today accompanied by, however, is a
form of empiricism that repeats the epistemological bias of the past, and
in so doing severs itself from the key ontological questions that materi
alism should be concerned with. In this work, Alberto Toscano recovers
a history of the doctrine of transcendental materialism, a doctrine
argued here to be coterminous with a thought of transcendental empiri
cism. In articulating this position Toscano has provided a significant
alternative to the standard divisions in contemporary philosophy and
suggested a possible bridge that could bring together traditions too long
at variance. Renewing Philosophy is intended as a series presenting work
that will force reconsideration of both the modernity that contemporary
philosophy is heir to, and to engage with the contemporary world in
which philosophical reflection takes place. This work suggests that the
modern traditions of philosophy contained within them the potential
to unleash the thought here described, a potential that contemporary
circumstances render imperative. In these respects, this book seeks to
renew philosophy and this is the reason for its publication in this series.
GARY BANHAM
Acknowledgments
This work owes a lot to the friendship and encouragement of Keith
Ansell Pearson, without whom, among other things, I would have
spared myself the maddening pleasure of Whitehead's writings. Its aim
would have been far less sure were it not for the polemical camaraderie
of all those involved in the production of Pli, especially Ray Brassier,
Michelle Speidel, Jon Rubin and John Appleby, some of whom, along
with Damian Veal and Mogens Laerke, kindly commented on and cor
rected versions of this manuscript. To Manuel and the folk at Zago
Design, I am grateful for turning Chladni's sound figures into the cover
image for this book. For being an unwitting catalyst of this work, I
would like to thank Jim O'Shea, who, contravening customary practice
in the teaching of Kant, decided to lecture on the second half of the
Third Critique during my time in Dublin. For their utterly disparate
philosophical inspiration and friendship, I am also very indebted to
Alain Badiou, Paolo Virno, Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward and Andrew
Benjamin. Last but never least, to Nina: compagna.
ALBERTO TOSCANO
ix