Charting the Road of Inquiry: Deleuze’s Humean Pragmatics and the Challenge of Badiou

This essay responds to Badiou’s charge that Deleuze fails to set forth a philosophy that is “beyond categorical oppositions.” It is argued that this criticism of Deleuze is founded upon a misreading of the Deleuzean distinction between the virtual and the actual, a reading that carries forward Badiou’s misreading of Spinoza and, hence, of Deleuze’s Spinozism. With this corrected, we show how the virtualactual distinction operates within the experimental philosophy, or pragmatics, that Deleuze, and later Deleuze and Guattari, sets forth. It is this pragmatics that is precisely the philosophy of difference that is beyond categorical oppositions. Through a comparison of Deleuzean pragmatics with the work of Hume and Peirce, we are able to respond to Badiou’s further criticism that Deleuze’s philosophy fails to understand the conditions for creativity in thought and culture. This criticism is itself resolved once one corrects for Badiou’s misreading of Deleuze’s virtual-actual distinction. In Deleuze’s efforts to set forth a philosophy of difference, a number of philosophical texts from the history of philosophy are used in the formation of the conceptual tools Deleuze believes necessary to support these efforts. Deleuze does have his favorite philosophers—Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson—and they, as one would expect, play a more prominent role in Deleuze’s writings than others, but as one explores the themes that are important components of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, one Charting the Road of Inquiry: Deleuze’s Humean Pragmatics and the Challenge of Badiou Jeffrey Bell Southeastern Louisiana University Jeffrey Bell is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is the author of Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference (University of Toronto Press, 2006). His current research investigates the implications of Deleuze’s thought for the study of culture and history.