Difference and Givenness by Levi R. Bryant

As Deleuze argues, all beings are ongoing processes of individuation, embedded in fields of individuation that far exceed the entity itself. This is no less true of a book. A book is itself the result of a process, engenders new processes by entering into foreign assemblages, and is a synthesis of the world and those that one has encountered in the world...

Sadly I was unable to integrate a number of outstanding works that appeared after the writing of my initial draft. Manuel Delanda’s Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy appeared almost immediately when I completed the first draft of Difference & Givenness. Since then we have also been graced with Manuel de Beistegui’s Truth & Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology, Alberto Toscano’s Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze, and Peter Hallward’s Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. Regardless of where one ultimately comes down on these appropriations, they show what Deleuze scholarship can be and that it can make a major contribution to contemporary philosophical debates. I hope this book comes somewhere close to the excellence of their scholarship and philosophical practice.

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March 2008 Northwestern6 x 9, 352 pp.Paper Text ISBN 0-8101-2454-8 / $ 34.95 Difference and Givenness Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence Levi R. Bryant

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness, Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition--as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism.

What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology.