Grounding Deleuze

Abstract

The article discusses the significance of What Is Grounding?, a text based on a lecture course given by Deleuze at the Lycée Louis le Grand. This course is crucial for understanding Deleuze’s thought, as it presents his ideas in a focused manner and also establishes the differences between various approaches to the philosophical task of (self)grounding and the beginning of philosophy as a whole. Deleuze begins with mythology: mythological thinking accompanied by the endless task of ritual repetition forms the first step towards attaining reason as infinite. With Hume, Kant and post-Kantianism we arrive at the grounding of reason, and Deleuze’s text itself is also concerned with the capacity of finite creatures to “realize reason”. Knowledge after Hume, however, is grounded on subjective principles and in it the subject begins to assert its right to grounding through “questioning”. The structures of questioning are three: the existential, the logical-rational and the critical, and they are not opposed, but rather form a triple function of grounding. They could also have a relation either to knowledge or to expressing things as they are in themselves. Deleuze calls the first relation “method” and the second “system,” and takes a positive view of post-Kantian philosophers and even Hegel because they had moved towards system after Kant could not choose between it and method and yet had emphasized the constitutive character of human finitude. The deepest aspect of grounding, however, remains “groundlessness/ungrounding” — in these lectures Deleuze is already turning toward an encounter with the dark ground of the unconscious, an idea he borrowed from Schelling and related to individuation. Thus, grounding brings difference into ground, and this is what the immanent realization of reason consists of.