Kenneth Surin - Was Deleuze a Materialist?

A/V#17.03 2013 Autumn

Gilles Deleuze said repeatedly that he was an empiricist, empiricism being for him the one philosophical standpoint that was resolutely non-dialectical and immanentist, thereby avoiding what was him the whole sad drama of dialectics and transcendence). However, Deleuze never made the same repeated and unambiguous claims about his philosophical relation to materialism. How are we to understand this seeming discrepancy between Deleuze’s respective attitudes towards empiricism and materialism (understanding both of these as philosophical topoi)?

At one level, it is clear that empiricism, in avowing that reality can only be approached through our senses, belongs to the theory of the subject, whereas materialism, in maintaining that only matter exists, belongs to the theory of the object. Is Deleuze’s philosophy therefore in danger of being undermined by the age-old dichotomy between subject (‘subject’ being the underlying constitutive basis of our putative empiricism) and object (‘object’ being the concomitant underlying basis of our presumed materialism)?

My paper will address this question, by arguing that Deleuze’s key category of the ‘event’ bridges the ontological gap represented by this seeming dichotomy.

Kenneth Surin is Professor of Literature and Professor of Religion and Critical Theory Literature Program at Duke University.