The Noise of Time

Abstract

The ‘I’ fractured by time – if Deleuze returns repeatedly to this seemingly minor moment in Kant's system, it is not simply to sound anew the theme of ‘difference’ (this time, with an a priori accent). No, Deleuze turns to this ‘interior drama’ for the same reason that Kant, in the Opus Postumum, returns to it: it presents the most direct passage from ‘interior’ (self) to ‘exterior’ (Nature). But Kant's late complication of the transcendental field undermines several of his most cherished theses – in particular, the fixity of the table of categories, the homogeneity of the forms of intuition (Space and Time) and the rights of logical determinacy. It is left to Deleuze to radicalise Kant's critique along the lines of time. In contending with this fissure, Deleuze inaugurates nothing less than a truly genetic philosophy of Nature – one that would think with Nature rather than of it. Only one caught in this labyrinthine flow could inquire into the possibility of radical metamorphosis.