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

I would like to close this thesis on a controversial note. I have just developed Deleuze’s
Nietzscehan ethics. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze uses this Nietzschean ethics to criticize
Kant’s critical philosophy. Deleuze’s argument is that Kant’s thought is the expression of the
negative will to power. In this sense, Kant’s thought is bad. Deleuze gives a reason for this
argument. He argues that Kant’s thought demonstrates a fundamental commitment to truth
understood as the Platonic Idea. This interpretation is surprising given that Deleuze does think
that Kant’s critical philosophy is not just characterized by its commitment to the Cogito but also
by its overcoming of the Cogito. Still, Deleuze argues that this commitment to truth in the form
of the Platonic Idea demonstrates a fundamental desire to be rather than to become. In what
follows I present Deleuze’s criticism of Kant’s thought in Nietzsche and Philosophy in terms of
Nietzschean ethics. However, I would like the reader to be aware of my position here. I take
Deleuze’s criticism of Kant’s thought in terms of Nietzschean ethics to be fundamentally ironic.
I do not just do so because Deleuze is himself aware that Kant’s thought has all the tools to
overcome and actually does overcame the Cogito. “Kant is less a prisoner of the categories of
subject and object than he is believed to be, since his idea of Copernican revolution puts thought
into a direction relationship with the earth” (WP 86). Instead, I take Deleuze’s criticism to be
fundamentally ironic because of what such an overcoming of the Cogito in Kant’s thought
actually implies. That Kant’s thought overcomes the Cogito just means that it is the example par
excellence of the very Nietzschean ethics that Deleuze uses to criticize it. To the extent that
Kant’s thought overcomes the Cogito it is actually the thought of the Overman. The Overman is
the individual who is at the same time the passive self. For this reason, the Overman is the
embodiment of difference and repetition. But what does this mean? We have seen that for
Deleuze critical philosophy begins with difference and repetition. But what does this mean other
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