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

sensible. (This is why Deleuze talks about the sensible and organic syntheses that precede the
conceptual synthesis). Deleuze calls this being of the sensible the sign. “The object of encounter,
on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense. It is not an
aistheton but an aistheteon. It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of
the sensible” (DR 139-40). What exactly is this sign? For Kant the sensible being is what is given
in the manifold. However, Deleuze argues, the being of the sensible is what gives sensible being.
“It is not the given but that by which the given is given” (DR 140). Deleuze argues that the sign
is intensity. In “Deleuze-Bergson: an Ontology of the Virtual” Boundas writes: “what is it that
our sense ought to sense that they cannot (empirically) sense? Well, as Kant would have said, the
manifold is given; but, for Deleuze, that by means of which the manifold is given is intensity”
(Boundas 89). Deleuze often argues that to the extent that the Cogito is in charge of the faculty
of sensibility, the human being cannot sense intensity.
The faculty of sensibility that is dominated by the faculty of the understanding cannot
sense intensity. “It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible [insensible]. It is
imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition - in other words, from the point of
view of an empirical exercise of the senses in which sensibility grasps only that which also could
be grasped by other faculties, and is related within the context of a common sense to an object
which also must be apprehended by other faculties” (DR 140). Specifically, to the extent that the
faculty of sensibility is dominated by the faculty of the understanding it can only sense intensity
as extensity. This is why Kant claims that intuitions without concepts are blind. Daniel W. Smith
makes this point in “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality.” “In
empirical experience, to be sure, we know only intensities or forms of energy that are already
localized and distributed in extended space: intensity is inseparable from a process of extension
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