A former undergrad student of mine, now busy in his postgraduate studies, requested a copy of an article I wrote a while ago with a mate and so I’ve scanned this in because it wasn’t previously available in an electronic form. The files are rather large, I’m afraid - I could do with getting a proper copy of Acrobat working on my laptop but in the meantime this is a kind of workaround. The article developed from some discussion I had with Ben regarding deafness, partially resulting from the way in which the ‘worlding’ of Heidegger - and phenomenology generally - takes the sound as something given within an interpretative stance, a position I always found rather difficult to accept, even though the arguments in favour quite often seem strong. My resistance would be framed in a rather different way now, probably by using something like the clear-confused notion of Deleuze, the infinitesimal perceptions of Leibniz and the like, and I think the problem I have with the over-arching interpretative priority that seems central to phenomenology arises from a resistance to idealism. Anyhow, the 2 PDF files are here and here, both of them quite large I’m afraid.
In a post on Marx’s dialectical method and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro makes the interesting claim that it is Deleuze’s pluralism that is transcendental. It is the theory of relations that Deleuze has which underpins his pluralism and this theory of relations, presumably, would be the place to look for a transcendental structure in the sense of a ‘condition of possibility’-type argument (Shaviro makes it explicit he’s referring to a Kantian transcendental when talking of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental pluralism). Indeed this is plainly the case for Shaviro, since the article begins from the differences and similarities between dialectics and Deleuzian thought in terms of their theory of relations. He suggests a strong commonality around this area of theory of relations, arguing that:
"There are definite commonalities. (1) Both the Hegelian/dialectical language of negativity, and the James/Bergson/Deleuze language of virtuality, insist that all those things that are omitted by the positivist cataloguing of atomistic facts are altogether real. (2) Both locate this reality by asserting that the relations between things are as real as the things themselves, and that ‘things’ don’t exist first, but only come to be through their multiple relations. (3) Both construct materialist (rather than idealist) accounts of these relations, of how they constitute the real, and of how they continually change (over time) the nature of what is real. (4) Both offer similar critiques of the tradition of bourgeois thought that leads from Descartes through the British empiricists and on to 20th century scientism and post-positivism. (numbers in brackets inserted)"
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