The Shock of a Radical Novelty: The Early Deleuze and the Gaps of Sense

Abstract

The article analyzes the evolution of Gilles Deleuze’s early philosophy by bringing into focus his recently republished journalistic articles from the late 1940s, which are unfamiliar to the Russian reader, as well as his first studies during the 1950s of the history of philosophy. The paper provides a context for his philosophy within the political and aesthetic debates of the post-War period and also alongside the academic philosophy of the time. Particular attention is devoted to the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Deleuze’s rupture with existentialism, which the young Deleuze wanted to replace with a new version of philosophical anti-humanism. During those years Deleuze was delving into the history of philosophy through such thinkers as David Hume and Henri Bergson, who were unusual choices at that time. In them Deleuze saw the potential for an extensive project, the “higher empiricism” which would play an important role in Deleuze’s mature work over the next three decades. In his analysis of this hypothetical empiricism, Deleuze found common traits between both of those philosophers that led him to propose a new reading. That interpretation ran counter to the critical consensus of the day that pigeon-holed Hume as a radical sceptic and Bergson as a spiritualist. The author concludes that Deleuze in his early work on the history of European thought had already elaborated his own particular way of working with classical philosophical texts and concepts by turning their creators into conceptual characters who were part of his own philosophical undertaking