Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime - by Louis Schreel (Hardcover)

About the Book

"What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation - a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within. Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way, Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime opens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study." --

Book Synopsis

What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation - a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within.

Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way, Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime opens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.

Review Quotes

Natural science has been beset by fundamental puzzles that remain unsolvable within its overly simplistic materialist ontology - the reality of time, the origin of life, the basis for open-ended evolution, the emergence of consciousness. Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime delivers much-needed conceptual tools for envisioning an ontology more aligned with the complexities of contemporary reality
Tom Froese, Assistant Professor, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

This book by Louis Schreel is a hymn to the collective imagination of the 100,000 species
Alessandro Sarti, Director of Research, CNRS-EHESS, Paris, France

This remarkable and fascinating analysis of Gilles Deleuze's sublime places his profound relationship with the Kant of the Critique of the Power of Judgement both in the context of the great metaphysical dialectics that animate modernity and in the context of the cognitive sciences in neuropsychology and linguistics. It is also an excellent introduction to dynamical structuralism, which schematises Deleuze's theory of structuralism using the dynamical models of morphogenesis developed by René Thom.
Jean Petitot, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

About the Author

Louis Schreel is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium.