Precarious Necessity: Deleuze and the Theory of Thought

Date

2023-8-12

Author

Aktaş, Ahmet

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This thesis aims to give an elaborate exposition of Deleuze’s philosophy of thinking by discussing particularly its relationship to his metaphysics. The first chapter provides a detailed presentation of Deleuze’s understanding of thinking by distinguishing it from two other salient conceptions of thought. The second chapter focuses on Deleuze’s criticisms of the Kantian model of thinking and a brief introduction of his proposed solution to those problems, which amounts to his theory of Ideas. The following three chapters focus on a crucial problem within the theory of thought, i.e., thinking’s relationship with the real and its capacity for reaching an absolute. To this end, these chapters discuss the relationship between Deleuze’s philosophy of thinking, his philosophy of time and metaphysics. My argument in these last three chapters is that Deleuze, as a “pure metaphysician,” propounds a non-dogmatic speculative position which I call speculative temporalism. According to this position, thought can reach an absolute, i.e., an unconditional truth, which is that time as the pure and empty form of change is the condition of any occurrence, including contingent human thinking and experience. However, what is original in Deleuze’s theory of thought is that any necessity and truth thought can reach remains a precarious necessity, meaning that they, all truths, including the necessity of the pure form of time, are open to being destroyed by the disintegrating powers of time itself.

Subject Keywords

Deleuze, Philosophy of thinking, Kant, time, the absolute, pure form of time

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104850

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis