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

For Cogito knowledge is the unity of faculties under the faculty of the understanding such
that the representations of all the faculties answer to concepts. However, since concepts are
abstract and come out of nowhere that means that knowledge is an exercise of an imposition of
concepts that are god given. Everything changes with the Overman. Because for the Overman the
faculties are only unified by their relationship to the Ideas that means that knowledge cannot be
the imposition of concepts. There are no concepts to impose before there is the relationship to the
Idea. However, this relationship requires a kind of radical openness of the Overman. In other
words, the Overman can unify the faculties and their Ideas only because he synthesis sensibly
outside the concept. In this sense, for Overman knowledge must be the exercise of apprenticeship
and learning. “The paradoxical functioning of the faculties - including, in the first instance,
sensibility with respect to signs - thus refers to the Ideas which run throughout all the faculties
and awaken them each in turn....The exploration of Ideas and the elevation of each faculty to its
transcendent exercise amounts to the same thing. These are two aspects of an essential
apprenticeship or process of learning” (DR 164). In this sense, for Deleuze knowledge is a messy
thing. In order to know, one must get one’s hands dirty. In other words, one must try and
synthesize sensibly oneself. “That is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an
innate or acquired practical familiarity with signs, which means that there is something amorous
- but also something fatal - about all education. We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I
do’. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be
developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there
is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity” (DR 23). This is the difference between Kant and
Deleuze. If knowledge is the development of faculties through the faculty of sensibility, in other
words, through repetition that means that the Overman actually grounds the Cogito. Boundas
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