Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime: Idea and Individuation [Hardcover]

What becomes of the sublime today, in a philosophy that discards the old oppositions between body and mind and embeds human reason in the creative evolution of life? In this book, Louis Schreel shows how Gilles Deleuze's life-long engagement with the Kantian sublime grappled with just this question. Its core argument centres on Deleuze's understanding of the sublime in terms of psychic individuation  a creative, self-organizing process that animates cognitive systems from within.

Exploring Deleuze's transcendental philosophy through central concepts of self-organization, psychic individuation, passibility and infinity, this book shows how a new notion of the sublime emerges in a timely and novel way. In this way,Deleuze and the Immanent Sublimeopens up an innovative perspective on transcendental philosophy, shedding new light on Deleuze's transcendental empiricism both in relation to Kant and to contemporary cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.

Natural science has been beset by fundamental puzzles that remain unsolvable within its overly simplistic materialist ontology  the reality of time, the origin of life, the basis for open-ended evolution, the emergence of consciousness.Deleuze and the Immanent Sublimedelivers much-needed conceptual tools for envisioning an ontology more aligned with the complexities of contemporary reality Tom Froese, Assistant Professor, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

This remarkable and fascinating analysis of Gilles Deleuze's sublime places his profound relationship with the Kant of theCritique of the Power of Judgementboth ls+