stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

doing philosophy. In other words, my goal is to show how Deleuze thinks. I adopt this method
for a specific reason.
Many commentators recognize that Kant exerts considerable influence over Deleuze. No
one has done more than Christian Kerslake in this respect. In “Deleuze, Kant and the Question of
Metacritique” Kerslake writes: “while my Kantian interpretation is not intended to adequately
represent all aspects of Difference and Repetition, it is intended to articulate the ultimate,
metatheoretical framework for Deleuze's philosophical work up to and including that book”
(Kerslake 484). In Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy Kerslake writes that “the main
claim of this book is that the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze represents the latest flowering
of the project, begun in the immediate wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to complete
consistently the ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy” (Kerslake 5). I agree with Kerslake to an
extent. Thus I argue that Deleuze’s philosophy in most important respects follows Kant’s. In
chapter 5 I do a close reading of Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy. I argue that in this work
Deleuze develops an original interpretation of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Specifically, I
argue, Deleuze thinks that Kant only executes the true Copernican Revolution in the Critique of
Judgment. I call this true Copernican Revolution the Copernican Counter-Revolution. This
Revolution claims not so much that reason is interested in subjecting objects to itself, but rather
that reason is interested in according contingently with the productive aspect of the object in
order to develop itself. In some sense, this point requires that we revise our terminology.
Specifically, here we cannot talk about the object since the object is precisely what the subject
synthesizes. However, if we understand the subject as something that is itself developed in
relation to the object then that object can no longer be said to be an object. Instead, it must be
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