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

(I think) determines the undetermined (I am) in terms of the determinable (time) means that
thought temporalizes the self. In other words, it means that thought does not so much
demonstrate the Cogito outside of time, but rather the self in time. We can put this in simple
words. The fact that we think demonstrates not so much that we exist outside of time, that we are
intelligible, but rather that we live in time, that we are sensible. Thought implies the existence of
some kind of self. But this self is not the active Cogito in other words the self in possession of
the concept. Instead, it is the self in time, the passive self. Deleuze thinks that this is an important
point. “The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined
only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive receptive phenomenal subject
appearing within time” (DR 86). The self that thinks is not the spontaneous self, the Cogito.
Instead, the self that thinks is the receptive, passive self. Therefore it is not like there is a self that
demonstrates its freedom in thought. Instead, there is the thought and this thought implies the
passive self. “As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the ‘I think’ cannot be
understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a
passive self which experience its own thought – its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it
can say I – being exercised in it and upon it but not by it” (DR 86). This is why Deleuze likes to
say that for Kant another one thinks in me, that ‘I’ is another. This is how Kant explodes both the
Cogito and thought as conceptual synthesis. More importantly, Deleuze finds his own project in
this Kantian explosion. “Rather than being interested in what happens before and after Kant
(which amounts to the same thing), we should be concerned with a precise moment within
Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by
post-Kantianism…” (DR 58). So how does one continue this furtive and explosive moment
within Kantianism? One begins with the passive self. However that one begins with the passive
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