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

(Nietzsche 24). This is why Deleuze likes to talk about the singular. His concepts are the most
necessary and the most contingent because they demonstrate the power of difference as
repetition and because this power of difference as repetition is precisely what individuates. What
is more necessary and more contingent than one’s own singular existence? Thus Deleuze’s
concepts are developed in existence. They are existential concepts. “That is why philosophy has
often been tempted to oppose notions of a quite different kind to categories, notions which are
really open and which betray an empirical and pluralist sense of Ideas: ‘existential’ as against
essential, precepts as against concepts, or indeed the list of empirico-ideal notions…” (DR 284).
In other words, it is the Overman who creates these concepts. But who is the Overman? That he
is not the Cogito means that he is not a centered individual. He penetrates and is penetrated on all
sides. He is in tune with the power of individuation. “Only an empiricist could say: concepts are
things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond ‘anthropological predicates.’ I make and
remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center,
from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them” (DR xxi). We can
understand the distinction between Kant’s conditions of possibility of experience and Deleuze’s
conditions of real experience in this context. In L’Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze Véronique Bergen
defines the task of each. “Là où le souci conditionnant vise à régler l’application des catégories
aux intuitions, à délimiter le champ d’une connaissance objective, le souci génétique vise à
engendre penser dans la pensée” (Bergen 48). Deleuze’s concepts do not condition from an
abstract perspective, in other words, they are not external conditions. Instead, they condition
from within the univocal being, that is, within difference and repetition which is to say that they
are developed. “In fact, the condition must be a condition of real experience, not of possible
experience. It forms an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning. In every respect, truth is a
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