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

But this is not the only significance of chapter 7. Deleuze often likens his writing of the
history of philosophy to sodomy. “I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see
the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or it comes to the same thing an immaculate
conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind, and giving him a child that would be
his own offspring, yet monstrous” (N 6). But I claim that Deleuze’s relationship with Kant does
not take the form of sodomy. Or if it does then it is unclear that it is Deleuze who sodomizes
Kant. Deleuze thought that he has a special relationship with Nietzsche. “It was Nietzsche, who I
read only later, who extricated me from all this. Because you just can’t deal with him in the same
sort of way. He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back” (N 6). But Deleuze might have
been wrong about that point. In chapter 7 I show that Deleuze seems to recognize the precise
moment when he thinks he must depart from Kant in favour of Nietzsche. When Deleuze argues
that difference is an ethical rather than an ontological concept he seems to think that it is
Nietzsche rather than Kant who allows him to make that argument. In fact, Deleuze thinks that it
is precisely Kant who stands in the way of this argument. On the other hand, I hope that after
reading the first part of my thesis, the reader will see the irony of Deleuze’s arguments against
Kant and in favour of Nietzsche. Making what seems to be the ultimate ontological concept into
an ethical concept is not opposed to Kant’s critical philosophy. It is as the first part of my thesis
argues the very essence of Kant’s critical philosophy. In this sense, what Deleuze says of
Nietzsche actually seems to be truer of Kant. In other words, it is really with Kant that Deleuze
has a special relationship despite himself. ‘You just can’t deal with Kant in the same sort of way.
He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back.’ Perhaps it is this reverse sodomy that names
the true encounter between Kant and Deleuze.
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