The Idea of Pure Critique 9781472546890, 9780826468062, 9780826468079

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Acknowledgements

The idea of pure critique has emerged slowly over many years. As a result of this slow gestation, I have accrued many intellectual debts along the way. The conversations with my former colleagues in the School of Politics at Queen's University Belfast did much to set this work in motion and shape its outlines and I am particularly grateful to the incisive views on critique proffered by Shane O'Neill, Moya Lloyd, Alan Finlayson, James Martin, Vincent Geoghegan, Debbie Lisle and Robert Eccleshall. My former colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at Middlesex University greatly contributed to deepening my appreciation of the philosophical issues at stake in the idea of pure critique: Peter Osborne, Christian Kerslake, Stella Sandford, Stewart Martin and Ray Brassier all, in different ways, sharpened the ideas that guide this work. Many students at both institutions also contributed to bringing this work to fruition and I am grateful to them for their patience in responding to my stuttering attempts to articulate the idea of pure critique over the years. In particular, during the latter stages of the project both Kieran Laird and Peter Gilpin helped to focus my mind on some of the intricacies required of the idea of pure critique. My thanks also to those in the Department of Politics at the University of Glasgow who taught me to see an idea through to its conclusion: Christopher Berry, Michael Lessnoff and David Lloyd-Jones. This project would not have got off the ground had it not been for the support of Tristan Palmer and Keith Ansell Pearson. Tristan's commitment to publishing innovative work in philosophy and his patience as deadlines were missed allowed the idea of pure critique to be conceived and to grow to maturity. I am also grateful to his successor, Hywel Evans, for overseeing the final stages of this project with such care and attention to detail. Keith's support from the beginning and his constructively critical comments on the draft manuscript were invaluable in 'purifying' the idea of pure critique. I am also extremely grateful to those who read early drafts of this book: Robert Porter, Robert MacKenzie and Christian Kerslake. Their careful commentaries have

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helped to clarify the idea of pure critique in ways that I had not anticipated at the outset of the project. My warm thanks go to Diana Coole for the on-going debates about the nature of critique — debates that have proved decisive in informing the direction of this work. I am also grateful to Barbara Kennedy and Robin Durie for invites to conferences that allowed the main aspects of pure critique to be aired for the first time. For their constant love and support I am forever grateful to my parents Margaret and Angus, my brothers Christopher and Robert and my sister Angela. My own children, Kathryn and Sam, are always teaching me the critical impact of novel ways of looking at the world. My partner Anna has been my constant guide on the journey towards the idea of pure critique and without her love and commitment to creativity this project would never have been brought to life.

Some sections of this book are based on previously published material. Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use revised versions of the following: Radical Philosophy Ltd, 'Creativity as Criticism: The Philosophical Constructivism of Deleuze and Guattari', Radical Philosophy, 86, 1997, pp. 7-18; Taylor and Francis Ltd, 'Unravelling the Knots: Poststructuralism and Other "Post-isms" ', Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2001, pp. 331-45; Pluto Press Ltd, 'Idea, Event, Ideology' in I. MacKenzie and S. Malesevic (eds), Ideology After Poststructuralism, London, Pluto Press, 2002.

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Preface

Critique becomes pure when it becomes wholly adequate to itself. Pure critique, in becoming adequate to itself, becomes equal to the task of the critique that always accompanies the expression of critique as an idea. As such, it must always contain within itself, as the fullness of itself, the critique becoming within itself. In an age scarred by the actions of regimes in pursuit of purity it might seem odd to construct the idea of critique around the very same motif. What is to be gained by addressing ourselves to the idea of pure critique when it could plausibly be argued that purity is the very problem that critique must address? Indeed, from its beginnings in Kant's famous text, the idea of critique was set against those dogmatic advocates of pure reason who had failed to interrogate the proper limits and powers of reason before applying it in the fields of knowledge, morality, theology and human affairs. Should we not assume, therefore, that critique must be deployed in the service of constraining the desire for purity in thought and life? Rather than try to grasp concepts and events in their purity, is it not the lesson of our age that concepts and events are infinitely complex and irreducibly interconnected? Is it not the case that whenever we find people trying to reduce complexity and interconnectedness in the name of purity that we must be sharpening our critical tools and subjecting their ideas to the most rigorous critique? There are, in other words, prima facie reasons to be suspicious of the very project announced in the title of this book: the idea of pure critique. Such suspicion, however, is easily overcome. First, we must simply recall that there is nothing inherently troubling with the idea of purity. On the contrary, purity is an ideal that secures many of our most deeply felt attachments to our sense of self, our relations with others and the ebb and flow of life. Culturally, moreover, the ideal of purity has motivated many of the most innovative and challenging exercises in the arts and literature, from attempts

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to represent the purity of bonds of love to cultural artefacts that have left representation behind in the drive for pure line, colour, sound or phrasing, for example. Of course, it is for the cultural and intellectual historians to chart the complex lineage of the idea of purity in its various contexts at different historical moments. The point for now is the simple one that we must not be afraid of the idea of purity simply because of a current ideological tendency to associate it with dangerous fundamentalisms, be they philosophical, political, economic, religious, cultural or whatever. Second, it is important to be clear from the outset that the idea of purity should not, in and of itself, be set against the equally important ideas of complexity and interconnectedness. Indeed, the opposite is surely the case. For an adequate understanding of complex and interconnected phenomena to emerge one must both be clear on the purity of the elements involved in complex and interconnected systems and be able to elaborate the purity of the ideas of complexity and interconnectedness that one is deploying. Rather than being anathema to the understanding of complexity and interconnectedness, purity is surely at the core of such understanding, if such understanding is to remain adequate to the ideas themselves. This is as true of the complexities of the natural world as it is of the complex worlds created by humans and as it is of the interconnectedness between them. The idea of pure critique is not an exercise in simply removing critique from complex conceptual systems or from its deep interconnectedness with other ideas. Rather, it is the preparatory work required of an adequate understanding of how such entrenched complexity and deep interconnectedness can be most adequately comprehended. In sloughing off the commonplace associations that the idea of critique brings with it, in pursuit of an idea of pure critique, one of the key aims is to clear the way for a full and rich understanding of the manner in which the activity of critique is embedded in life; the human, the non-human and the many liminal zones of life between these idealized planes. That such a rich and full understanding is far beyond the reach of this book does not invalidate the opening gambit of such a project, namely the delimitation of the idea of pure critique. Third, it is often those who worry most about the idea of purity who draw most heavily on thinkers, artists, practitioners, activists and so on who themselves rely on explicit or implicit evocations of the same ideal, purity. Given that the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari will loom large throughout the argument that follows, their work can provide one possible example. Amongst

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their disciples it is sometimes thought that their oeuvre provides the clearest example to date of the need to avoid purity in philosophy, politics and other spheres. Is it not the case that they have shown how impoverished thought becomes and how dangerous life can be when people cut off one domain of thought or life from other domains; the psychological from the economic, the philosophical from the political, the literary from the scientific, and so on? Is it not one of the great lessons of their work that we must constantly and consistently critique those who seek to set up pure domains of inquiry? Of course, all of this is, in large measure, true of their work. Yet, only the most cursory reading of their contribution to these debates could uphold the further idea that this depends upon a critique of the idea of purity as such. Otherwise, what sense could be made of some of the keystones of their philosophical innovations, the ideas of pure difference; pure multiplicities; the pure event; pure becoming and so forth? For all that they rightly stress the deep interconnectedness of thought, life and their domains there is a (more-or-less) consistent appreciation of how such analyses can only be conducted on the basis of having first taken the trouble to examine ideas and events in their purity. Many other examples from within the work of those most often thought to be wary of the idea of purity could be given. The point is to recognize that purity is not antithetical to most of those philosophers, artists, activists and so on who have, usually despite themselves, gained a certain cultural capital from being thought of as critics of purity in all its forms. All of which should lend weight to the idea that pure critique is not a defence of the idea of purity, in and of itself. Rather, it is a defence of the idea of critique, a defence which first requires that we delimit the idea in its purity. Indeed, it is important to be clear on this: if we are to become critics of the claims to purity in thought and life that have scarred our age — forms that have cut deeply into our sense of ourselves, of each other and of our world - then we can only begin from a solid footing if we have first undertaken the task of seeing what critique itself is in its purity. If an unthinking rejection of the idea of purity causes us to neglect the idea of pure critique, leaving the terrain clear for those who wish to use the idea of purity in pursuit of the most noxious economic, cultural, social, political and philosophical regimes, then we have ceded the ground to forces within thought and life that will always escape critique. Whatever the fervour of our protests, if they are not backed up by rigorous investigation into the idea of pure critique then they will always succumb to the embrace of that to which we most object.

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Only a fully developed idea of pure critique can successfully overcome the many manifestations of the noxious desire for purity that have scarred our modern and contemporary world. What is involved in making the idea of critique pure? In order to answer this question, we must have a grasp of what is involved in developing any idea in its purity. In Kant, of course, pure reason refers to the deployment of reason without reference to experience, a deployment that allows for the systematization and unification of knowledge under its proper regulative use but which can lead to illusion if used to constitute possible objects of knowledge. Generally speaking, Kant uses the motif of purity to distinguish the transcendental conditions of knowledge from the empirical world to be known; for example, in the distinction between pure apperception, the 'I think' that accompanies every representation, and empirical apperception, the way I represent myself to myself as having certain features — blue eyes, two legs, feeling pain and so on. This use of the qualifier 'pure' to distance concepts from the impure empirical world that they represent or condition is probably the dominant connotation within the philosophical tradition: generally, the purity of thought over and above the impurity of the world. As Deleuze puts it in The Logic of Sense, 'The popular and technical images of the philosopher seem to have been set by Platonism: the philosopher is a being of ascents; he is the one who leaves the cave and rises up. The more he rises the more he is purified.' There are, however, notable exceptions. In Bergson, for example, 'pure' is most often used in conjunction with the related concepts of duration, perception, memory and recollection and it is assigned to the intuitive grasp that we have of the mobile reality of becoming against the impure analytical procedures which immobilize that reality. Purity is attained precisely by countering the traditional process of philosophical ascent. For Bergson, moreover, Kantianism remains a Platonism because it pours 'all possible experience into pre-existing moulds' and thereby falls into the trap of trying to account for the pure duration of experience by way of 'fixed concepts'. While Kant sought purity by subtracting the empirical world from its transcendental conditions, Bergson sought purity by subtracting our analytical habits from our intuitive grasp of mobile reality. In both cases, though, purity is the result of a method of subtraction: the pure is what remains after the impurities have been removed. In regard to the idea of critique, therefore, we can delimit its purity by subtracting elements

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that are not proper to the idea itself. Throughout the discussion below, this subtractive method will be deployed in a variety of contexts beginning with an interpretation of Kant's idea of critique that will see the everyday notion of criticism subtracted from an adequate approach to the idea of critique. This will be developed, in the analytic of pure critique that opens Chapter Two, by subtracting from the idea of critique pre-given conceptions of the world to be criticized, the activity of critique itself and the nature of the critic that carries out the critical gesture. Only once this three-fold subtraction is complete can pure critique be constructed. If ideas gain their purity solely through subtraction, however, a problem immediately arises: in continually subtracting elements from an idea, elements often firmly fixed in the mind as part of the idea itself, is one left with an empty idea or, at best, the bare skeletal form of an idea? Using the arithmetical image of subtraction as the sole methodological guide, indeed, might even lead one to think that the pure idea one is left with has a wholly 'negative' form. Here, the Husserlian notion of 'reduction' may be more useful. In Husserl, the 'phenomenological reduction' is a way of accessing the 'pure phenomenological field' which, when properly grasped, results in 'the perfect expansion of the genuine psychological concept of "inner experience".'7 In this example, the purity developed through reduction is said to provide the basis for the expansion of a common-sense notion. Clearly, this is also at work within Kant and Bergson, where the transcendental field and our intuitions are similarly expanded\sy virtue of subtracting or, we might say following Husserl, reducing aspects commonly associated with our approach to the world. And so it is with the idea of critique: while subtracting elements from it to make it pure one must also see the subtractive method as one which expands the idea of critique itself. As will become clear throughout the discussion, the process of 'taking away' commonly held views about critique is simultaneously a process whereby the idea of critique can expand to become full and richly textured in itself. The aim of grasping the idea of critique in its purity, therefore, means grasping it in its fullness. To say that critique becomes pure when it becomes wholly adequate to itself is to indicate the fullness that results from a method of subtraction or reduction. This formulation, however, raises one final issue with delineating an idea in its purity, an issue that can be developed by way of a brief comparison between the use of purity in this context and the role of purity in the thought of Alain Badiou. For Badiou, 'purity is the composition of an Idea such that

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it is no longer retained by any relation, an idea that grasps from being its indifference to all relation, its isolated scintillation'. While a full treatment of the complexities of this statement is beyond the remit of this work, it is clear that Badiou is also adopting a method whereby the relationality of an idea is subtracted in order to comprehend the purity of the idea. In Badiou's view, indeed, for an idea to count as pure it must be unrelated to any other idea. If adopted in this context, this criterion of purity would require that pure critique be 'composed' in such a way as to divest it of all relationality. As Hallward has succinctly pointed out, however, the task of exposing thought to its 'unrelatedness' constitutes 'both the extraordinary ambition of Badiou's philosophy, its unflinching determination, and its own peculiar difficulty the difficulty it has in describing any possible relation between truth and knowledge, any dialectic linking subject and object' such that 'Badiou's philosophy forever risks its restriction to the empty realm of prescription pure and simple'. Without deciding the matter here, the idea of purity deployed in the following discussion of critique does not assume that purity comes at the cost of 'unrelatedness'. The idea of pure critique is coined not to sever critique from its relations to other ideas but to secure a full and rich expansion of the idea so as to grasp its relations with and to other ideas with greater analytical precision. To invoke a well-known Deleuzean motif, developed in his early work on Hume, one can retain both the purity of an idea and its relatedness to other ideas if one is careful to construct the relations between ideas 'on their own terms' (an idea which is developed in the discussion of conceptual personae in Chapter Two). Moreover, as purity is the result of a method of simultaneous subtraction and expansion, the notion that the pure is that which has no relation to anything else may obscure the expansive feature of the analysis which works to explore the relations internal to that which is developed as pure, in this case critique. Just as the purity of pure critique does not rule out an analysis of its external relations to other ideas, so it does not rule out that the idea itself is composed of internal relations which make the idea full and complete in itself. To anticipate the example discussed in the opening chapter on Kant's seminal contributions to the idea of critique, pure critique contains within itself the aspect of indifference which it overcomes; if it did not then pure critique would indeed become empty prescription. An idea becomes pure in becoming subtracted from external relations that have been deemed internal to the idea itself. This is simultaneously a method

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which expands the idea itself in its purity by exposing its component parts or aspects such that external relations with other ideas can be properly constructed. Similarly, internal relations between aspects of the pure idea are the matter of expansion which give substance to the idea itself such that pure ideas are never empty or merely abstract. At stake in the idea of pure critique is the very idea of critique itself. If critique cannot be shown in its purity then we are left with the troubling conclusion that all critique is impure, by which I mean that very idea of critique could not be thought of as adequate to itself. This would entail that all critique necessarily contains an investment in that which it criticizes and therefore can never bring that which it criticizes fully to account. This is not just a problem for thought, where one might lament the old dreams of being able to surpass the history of thought itself. This is a problem for life - one might, without too much exaggeration, say that it is the problem of our lives and of life itself — in that we must be able to critique the world in which we find ourselves in its entirety, in the name of new worlds to come, if we are to give meaning to the idea of life itself. Such critique can only be founded on a pure conception of critique, one which calls forth the future by denaturalizing the past in order to crack the limit of the present and, thereby, constitute it as a liminal zone of transition. In other words, it is only through pure critique that history can become the ground that leaves itself behind in the present as the new worlds of the future take shape. Thankfully, of course, pure critique has a momentum in life wholly independent of the arguments that may reveal it; otherwise we would already be condemned to the repetition of the same. Pure critique is already, always has been and always will be life in its purity. The philosophical project is to connect the idea of pure critique with the activity of life in a manner which maintains the immanence of thought to life, and life to thought. The idea of pure critique is the first part of this project. Such speculative declarations have yet to pin down why we cannot rest content with variously impure versions of critique. In anticipation of the arguments to come it is worth bringing forward the problems with impure critique. In a nutshell, impure critique is that which is not adequate to the idea of critique itself, which amounts to saying that there is always the possibility of a reactive critique contained within one's critical project. More specifically, the critique of one's impure critique is always grounded in the

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very 'thing' that is being subjected to criticism. Impure critique, therefore, fails the first test of critique, namely that it should be comprehensive, by which is meant that it should be able to bring the whole of that which is criticized under critical investigation. The lack of a comprehensive critique brings with it a practical lack - that is, a lack of persuasiveness or effectiveness - to the extent that impure critique is always, at some level, halted by virtue of being implicated with that which is being criticized. For instance, if the critique of capital amounts to even a surreptitious recognition of the legitimacy of capital, and as such amounts to an impure critique of capital, then the legitimacy of the critical gesture itself will always fade under further scrutiny. This is the case with those 'anti-capitalists' who take this mediagenerated tag seriously, for in being simply opposed to capitalism they are already acknowledging that they share the same ground as capitalism and they will, therefore, fail to bring the whole of capitalism under critical review. Similarly, the purity of the critical gesture motivated by the ideal of communism can only be won through its disassociation with the inevitable dysfunctions of the capitalist machinery. This theme will be picked up again and developed in the Conclusion. For critique to have real utility it must be based on a pure understanding of the idea of critique itself. Without this pure understanding the activity of critique is reduced to the to-and-fro of opinions about that which is assumed as given; for example, capital and its machinations. One of the principal elements of an idea of critique, from the very beginning, is that it does not rest content with opinionated arguments about the given (as we shall see with Kant's critique of the critical exchanges between dogmatists and sceptics). The task of a pure idea of critique is to ensure that the given is never surreptitiously reintroduced into the gestures of critique. This is a more demanding task than the post-Kantian purveyors of critique usually assume. Impure critique will always fail to overcome that which is criticized by virtue of being inadequate to the idea of critique itself. Such inadequacy will always place critique within the domain of opinion and the idea of critique as intervention will be reduced to the bare repetition of that which is assumed to be given. For critique to become active in the world, for it to find its connection with the critique life enacts upon itself, it must first become pure.

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Introduction

Can the nature of critical activity become adequate to the idea of critique itself? In order to approach this question, two preliminary questions must be addressed: 'What constitutes the nature of critical activity?' and 'What constitutes the idea of critique?' This book provides an answer to the latter question. As such, it is only the first part of the preparatory work that needs to be done to clear a path to the primary question that motivates the project as a whole; the second part being future investigations into the nature of critical activity. It is clear that much of the theoretical and practical activity that claims the title of criticism, or that is commonly described as critical, does not in itself meet the demands of a fully articulated idea of criticism. Whether, for example, it is the studied moralizing of the philosophers and the priests or the unreflective opinions of the politicians and 'the public', the idea of criticism is poorly served when it is confused with variously subtle and unsubtle regimes of judgement and techniques of power. It is also clear, however, that the idea of criticism itself seems to rest on inherently insecure foundations. However much one tries to shore up these shaky foundations by providing the definitive account of criticism, the possibility of further criticism, the critique of one's idea of criticism (and so on, ad infinitum), is always present. Together these two intuitions provide the framework for a genuinely political and philosophical problem; namely, how to clarify practical discourse without inducing a sense of conceptual freefall. The idea of pure critique is a response to this problem. The resources with which to articulate the idea of pure critique can be found within the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Although it is not an idea that one finds explicitly within their work, Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy, their development of an idea of pure positive difference and their use of the distinction between the virtual and the actual all provide key stepping stones in the journey towards the idea of pure

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critique. In order to make this idea explicit, however, it is important to read their work within the tradition of critical philosophy that finds its roots in Kant. This should not be taken to imply that Deleuze and Guattari's work is substantively Kantian. Rather, the aim is to reveal the thoroughly critical attitude that infuses their work by situating it in a conceptual terrain first surveyed by Kant. In particular, the Kantian revolution in critical thought brought to light that which criticism must overcome, namely indifference, and the means by which indifference will be overcome; that is, an unrelentingly immanent idea of critique. Yet, for all that Kant is the first to survey the terrain and to suggest an idea of critique adequate to this terrain, ultimately the resources do not exist within Kant's philosophical project to overcome indifference. In fact, indifference returns within Kant's conceptual architecture as the guardian of the harmonious unity of reason. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, it is possible to articulate the idea of pure critique as that which achieves immanence and, therefore, as that which realizes the Kantian project of overcoming indifference. Put like this, the idea of pure critique is intimately related to the development of a philosophy of difference. It is commonly recognized that recent European philosophy has been especially preoccupied with the idea of difference. Although we must not forget that this is a topic as old as philosophy itself,l much of the most interesting work in contemporary philosophy has assumed that questions of difference must be brought to the fore. Generally speaking, the aim of such philosophies of difference is to avoid the troubling political and philosophical effects of basing one's outlook on life on certain notions of human identity that may exclude aspects of human experience. Without going over this well-trodden terrain, it is important to note that one of the effects of the recent emphasis on difference has been a certain embarrassment about the possibility of critical interventions in the public sphere. Moreover, 'neo-Kantians' have argued strongly for the need to be wary of the conservative implications of prioritizing difference over the need for universal standards against which to judge those who transgress social norms. There is a need, therefore, to match the insights of recent philosophies of difference with a keen critical agenda true to the spirit of the idea of difference. The development of the idea of pure critique should also be read in this context, as an attempt to articulate the critical agenda often implicit within philosophies of difference. If, however, the idea of pure critique requires situating the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a Kantian milieu so as to garner the resources for a

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response to contemporary neo-Kantians critical of difference oriented philosophies, then we must be clear on exactly what it means to be Kantian today; or, more strictly speaking, what it means to be in a post-Kantian intellectual environment. Adopting a rather different terminology to that which is commonly deployed, one can say that recent post-Kantian philosophy is a rather awkward mix of both 'pro-Kantian' and 'pre-Kantian' analyses. Having undertaken the critique of impure reason for the bulk of the twentieth century — one can think of the early Frankfurt School work on the dialectic of Enlightenment, poststructuralist accounts of the disciplinary and normalizing tendencies of the social and human sciences17 and feminist readings of masculine accounts of agency,18 to name a few - current postKantian thought is either concerned with defending the basic tenets of Kant's ideas or it has brought back to life themes and sources that Kant's critical revolution was supposed to have laid firmly to rest. Pro-Kantians are especially prevalent in the mainstream of moral and political philosophy. The recent work of Habermas springs immediately to mind. For all that it grew out of the soil of Horkheimer and Adorno's early critique of Enlightenment totalitarianism, his increasing rapprochement with Rawls evident in the work on law and democracy makes one wonder if the earlier analyses into the systematically distorting effects of money and power were just detours along the journey to an admittedly nuanced defence of Kant's categorical imperative and cosmopolitanism.19 For those who saw the critique of impure reason as signifying the impurity of all reason, there has been a turn to pre-Kantian themes and sources. Of course, this renewed interest in pre-Kantianism is rather more difficult to pin down than the tendency towards pro-Kantianism. While one could scarcely talk of a pre-Kantian movement in recent European philosophy, it can not go unremarked that there is currently a trend towards a critique of Kant, and pro-Kantianism, from behind, as it were. To cite some noteworthy examples: there is Badiou's avowed Platonism; the post-secular turn in Derrida and, in a different way, in Taylor; Hardt and Negri's revival of the Roman idea of Empire; and, of course, the Spinozism and/or empiricism so evident in Deleuze. For all that each of these is much more than a simple return to pre-Kantian themes, there is nonetheless an atmosphere within much modern European philosophy conducive to contemporary interpretations of classically metaphysical, 'pre-critical' projects. Where pro-Kantians have continued, developed and rarefied the Kantian drive to differentiate, categorize and schematize the world with a 'postmetaphysical' sensibility, the

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pre-Kantians tend towards various attempts at de-differentiation, organicism and holism without obvious embarrassment at metaphysics. Even if such bold brush strokes contain but a hint of truth when it comes to a diagnosis of the current condition of post-Kantian philosophy the question remains: what does it mean to be genuinely post-Kantian today? I take it that neither pro-Kantianism nor straightforward pre-Kantianism provides an adequate answer to this question. In short, the pro-Kantians and the preKantians maintain an uneasy alliance when it comes to the emphasis they place on either defending or transgressing the limits of reason. The issues at stake, in other words, are still resolutely Kantian. I take it that genuinely postKantian philosophy must question the centrality and dominance of this Kantian focus on the limits of reason, at least in the first instance. One must be cautious though, of moving beyond Kant in a way that does not ignore or dismiss altogether the Kantian contribution to European philosophy. There is little to be gained, after all, from what one might call non-Kantianism — at least if one wants to avoid the excesses of dogmatism and scepticism that Kant interrogated so thoroughly. Rather, the task of post-Kantian philosophy, as it will be developed throughout this work, is to bring to light questions that lie dormant or underdeveloped within Kant's philosophy itself. Post-Kantian philosophy, if it is to move beyond pro- and pre-Kantianism without falling into non-Kantianism, must tackle Kant from within. As Kant conducted an immanent critique of reason, so post-Kantianism must conduct an immanent critique of Kant. The place to begin, I would suggest, is with the idea of critique itself. The idea of pure critique, therefore, is an attempt to move beyond Kant byway of a thoroughly immanent critique of Kant's critical turn in philosophy. It is in this context that I see the work of Deleuze and Guattari as genuinely post-Kantian, despite their obvious revival of, and elaboration upon, pre-Kantian themes and sources. This reading will be extended in the section on Badiou's treatment of Deleuze in his recent book, Deleuze; The Clamor of Being (see pp. 43—4). Situating the project in this way, that is by claiming that the idea of pure critique amounts to a genuinely post-Kantian reading of Deleuze and Guattari, raises an issue of fundamental importance in regard to how we treat the substance and method of their philosophical contributions. Namely, on what basis can we reconcile their affirmation of metaphysical naturalism with Kant's critical bracketing of metaphysics and his transcendental turn towards questions of justification? Does Deleuze and Guattari's affirmation of

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naturalism amount to a mere affirmation or is it justifiable and therefore defensible against competing metaphysical views? Must Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project be read as a variant, albeit a significant variant, on Kantian critical transcendentalism if it is to become defensible? A recent exchange in the secondary literature, between Christian Kerslake and Peter Hallward, has posed this problem in a particularly acute fashion. In rehearsing the general tenor of the debate and suggesting how it might be resolved, the claim that the idea of pure critique offers a genuinely post-Kantian reading of Kant which simultaneously locates Deleuze and Guattari's work in a post-Kantian milieu can be clarified and defended. Without going over the many subtleties of their respective positions, the debate between Hallward and Kerslake is generated by a respective 'yes' and 'no' to the following question (as formulated by Kerslake in his reply to Hallward): 'Can an affirmative philosophy of immanence be produced without passing through the fire of critique?' On Hallward's reading of Deleuze, 'it is above all the equation of thought with affirmation that Deleuze celebrates in the anti-Cartesian "naturalism" he associates with both Leibniz and Spinoza'. The celebration of naturalism and of 'the metaphysical game of creation' that flows from it, he goes on, cannot be deduced 'from anything resembling a demonstration of its logical possibility'. In contrast, Kerslake, in the essay that began the exchange and in his reply to Hallward, argues that Deleuze's philosophy can be read as a radicalization or completion of Kant's critical turn (by interpreting the treatment of 'problems' in Difference and Repetition as productive reconceptualizations of Kant's regulative Ideas) and, moreover, Deleuze's philosophy must be read in this way if it is to claim to be more than a merely 'possible, somewhat aesthetic, perspective on the world'. At stake, clearly, are fundamental questions regarding the relation of Deleuze and Guattari to Kant and the 'critical' status of their work that such a relationship or lack of relationship would imply. And yet, there is a sense in which Kerslake and Hallward, for all their insights into particular features of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, appear to be talking past each other. In the first instance this sense comes from a desire to agree with them both. Kerslake is clearly right to distance Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on immanence and naturalism from naive reliance upon an act of choice or leap of faith. The attempt to ground their work in terms that would make it justifiable and therefore defensible to those who hold different views makes the appeal to their Kantian critical heritage appear

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crucial. Yet equally, Hallward's rendering of Deleuze and Guattari's unease at questions of justification, questions that have a tendency to posit a transcendent outside of the immanent transcendental field, is thoroughly in keeping with so much of their work. How can these positions be reconciled? In essence, they can be reconciled only by being dissolved, but they can only be dissolved if, first, we render the distinction between them more hard and fast. To make the distinction between the two positions we need only recognize that Kerslake is primarily concerned with questions of method whereas Hallward is primarily interested in Deleuze and Guattari's contributions to substantive questions of metaphysics. As such, we might be tempted to say that Kerslake has correctly identified the methodological presuppositions of Deleuze and Guattari's affirmation of immanence, whereas Hallward has correctly emphasized the naturalist substance of their philosophy of immanence. However, it is not quite that simple. Hallward's claim is that their substantive metaphysics precisely removes the need to have recourse to questions of method, whereas Kerslake contends that substantive metaphysical issues can not be consistently held without a secure methodological footing. Putting it like this, however, raises another possibility: namely that Deleuze and Guattari's radicalization of Kant's critical turn is one which completes the idea of critique itself (rather than simply transforming the Kantian Ideas while accepting the Kantian idea of critique, contra Kerslake) so as to make substantive metaphysics methodologically self-sufficient (rather than removing the need for methodological inquiry, contra Hallward). The development of the idea of pure critique throughout this work can be read as an extended attempt to make good this possibility. As will become clear, this will involve distancing the idea of critique developed from within the work of Deleuze and Guattari from regimes of justification but not at the cost of forsaking the possibility of a defence of the affirmation of the idea of pure critique. To reiterate, this possibility arises from the intuition that locates Deleuze and Guattari's contribution as a radicalization or completion of the idea of critique itself, rather than accepting Kant's idea of critical philosophy and then radicalizing its substantive features or refusing the critical injunctions of Kant in the name of an indefensible affirmation of substantive metaphysics. It will be argued that the deceptively simple idea that philosophy is the creation of concepts (the cornerstone of Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?} can do the required work of producing a

XXIII

INTRODUCTION

methodologically self-sustaining and therefore defensible affirmation of the metaphysical naturalism required of the idea of pure critique. Anticipating the more detailed discussions to follow, it will be argued that their constructivist account of philosophy both displaces the Kantian turn towards justification (as any particular philosophical system is only ever justified by reference to the novel concepts already affirmed within the system itself) and embraces a defence of their own constructivist account of philosophy against its idealist, non-naturalist, competitors (by providing an immanent standard which other metaphysical positions must meet in order to qualify both as philosophy in general and as 'good' philosophy in particular). The extent to which this claim can be made good is the extent to which the claim that Deleuze and Guattari's work can serve both to inhabit and to develop a genuinely post- Kantian milieu can also be made good. For all the importance of these broad interpretive contextualizations in terms of situating the following inquiry within a range of contemporary debates, the idea of pure critique itself is not primarily an interpretive device. Ideas, as ideas, will always be subject to a variety of interpretations, but in themselves, precisely because they are that which is to be interpreted, they supersede the regimes of interpretation brought to bear upon them. Constructing the idea of pure critique from the ashes of interpretive struggles regarding the idea of critique itself has but one aim: overcoming indifference. Indifference in itself cannot be overcome by interpretation; rather, as will be argued throughout, it must be overcome by the thorough, on-going construction of difference. This is not to be thought of as the impotent multiplication of different interpretations but as the potent construction of difference in itself, the implications of which will be shown to have far-reaching consequences for our common-sense understanding, interpretation, of criticism. The idea of pure critique is a task for thought in the world rather than an interpretation by thought of the world. The task is to overcome indifference. To overcome indifference requires an idea of critique that is wholly adequate to itself, that roots out all vestiges of indifference from within itself. The idea of pure critique has this task as its raison d'etre. The book is constructed of three chapters. In the first chapter, the idea of critique as developed by Kant is examined and then found wanting on its own terms. Where Kant correctly identifies 'indifference' as the product

XXIV

INTRODUCTION

of failed attempts to ground metaphysics on pure reason, he also correctly identifies 'indifference' as the first moment in the development of an idea of critique that decisively shifts 'critical philosophy' from the terrain of opinions about the given. Critique, with Kant, becomes a critique of criticism. The problem bequeathed by this Kantian innovation is derived from his own failure to root out indifference. As argued in section three of Chapter One, indifference returns as the guardian of assumptions regarding the unity of reason as a given residing beyond critique. Kant's 'Copernican revolution' may have shifted the grounds of critical inquiry but the problem he identifies in 'pre-criticaT philosophy is simply played out again on these new grounds themselves. The philosophical problem bequeathed by this reading of Kant is thus: how can we construct the critique of indifference without securing indifference within the idea of critique itself? Chapter Two approaches this problem by first exploring a differentiated idea of critique. Three modes of criticism are distinguished: partial criticism, total critique and pure critique. The purpose of this section is to clarify some of the elements that must be present within the idea of critique for critique to avoid the return of indifference within itself; that is, for critique to become pure. It will be argued that the idea of pure critique requires unlocking critique from a justificatory regime that refers to the given while retaining the conceptual basis of the idea of critique as an intervention in the given. In other words, the abstract analytic of pure critique sets the general criteria which must be met in fleshing out the idea of pure critique itself. In section two of Chapter Two, Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy is presented with a view to showing that it meets these fundamental criteria. The relationships they establish between concept construction, the plane of immanence and conceptual personae provide a convincing and defensible account of how the discipline of philosophy may be said to avoid problematic assumptions about the given without falling into quietism or disengagement with the world. Indeed, and as argued in section three, rather than think of their constructivist account of philosophy as the framework within which one could ground the idea of pure critique, it is more appropriate to conceive of their account of philosophy as pure critique. Chapter Three investigates four problems bequeathed by the idea of philosophy as pure critique — or more simply, the idea of pure critique developed in Chapter Two. Each of these problems amounts to a lingering concern .that pure critique must assume certain 'givens', thereby raising the

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INTRODUCTION

spectre of a safe haven for indifference within the idea itself. The potential 'givens' are: the ideality of the idea of pure critique; the role of the critic as creator and the mediator as creator; pure critique as conditioned by historical givens; and pure critique as dependent upon an idea of difference that is subordinate to the logic of identity. The first two are addressed directly as problems whereas the last two are problems that reside within the idea of pure critique as a philosophy of immanence and as a philosophy of difference. The excision of these givens is crucial to the project of being able to locate critique in its purity. It also serves to clarify what is at stake in the idea of pure critique and ward off some of the more obvious critical responses to it. The Conclusion, after recapping the momentum of the argument, reveals how the idea of pure critique can be said to fulfil the critique of indifference so clearly identified by Kant and yet beyond resolution within Kant's thought itself. This is shown by addressing, in brief, the main counter-critique that pure critique may be said to engender; namely, that it amounts to a form of appeasement with the machinations of contemporary capitalism. The Afterword sounds a note of modesty in regard to the idea of pure critique by recalling the preparatory nature of this work and by briefly outlining the ways in which this idea must be developed if a fully articulated response to the philosophical-political problem announced at the beginning of this introduction is to be forthcoming: can the nature of critical activity become adequate to the idea of critique itself?

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CHAPTER ONE

Kant and the Critique of Indifference

Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason?1

INDIFFERENCE AND THE IDEA OF CRITIQUE The Kantian revolution in critical thought rises from the ashes of dogmatism and scepticism but the oxygen that gives it life is a reaction to indijferentism. It is important to be clear on this point. In Kant, dogmatism is the application of'pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers'. The rival of dogmatism is scepticism, described by Kant as 'that which makes short work with the whole science of metaphysics'. Where the dogmatist begins with assumptions that are put beyond question, the sceptic questions all assumptions with a view to never really beginning the task of metaphysics at all. The dogmatist approaches the world with a view to the despotic rule of all that is surveyed. The sceptic approaches the world with a hatred of settled habitation and an anarchical drive to destroy all attempts to impose rules on the world. On the face of it, then, it would seem that dogmatism and scepticism are two wholly distinct ways of engaging with the world. Yet, the great insight of Kant is to see dogmatism and scepticism as founded on the same terrain, a terrain that shuns self-examination in favour of 'baseless assumptions and pretensions'. In this sense, dogmatists and sceptics express the same image of what it means to think. For both, thinking is reduced to the battle between claim and counter-claim without resort to an analysis of the presuppositions of their claims. As Kant makes clear in Chapter One, section two of the 'Transcendental Doctrine of Method' in the Critique of Pure Reason, both

i

THE IDEA OF PURE CRITIQUE

dogmatism and scepticism are based upon investigations into 'facfa' rather than upon inquiries into the limits and powers of reason itself. As such, dogmatism and scepticism are only superficially opposed to each other because fundamentally the two battalions wage war against each other with the sole aim of laying claim to the same soil beneath their feet; the world of facts. From this perspective, we may say that dogmatism includes scepticism within it, and vice-versa. In this sense, therefore, they are true rivals; each dependent on the other, each propping up the other. It would be mistaken to view Kant's idea of critique as occupying the same terrain as dogmatism and scepticism. Rather, the Kantian revolution in critical thought is so radical precisely because it ignores the fruitless debate between proponents of dogmatism and scepticism. Strictly speaking, Kant is not engaged in a critique of either approach.35 Rather, he constructs a terrain of inquiry adequate to the idea of critique itself. He does so by articulating the idea of criticism against the idea of indifference, not against dogmatism and scepticism. When philosophical inquiry has nothing to offer other than dogmatic despotism or sceptical anarchy it would seem that all that remains is simply to shrug our shoulders in the face of imponderable metaphysical conundrums. At this point, dogmatism and scepticism give way to indifference. However, that this attitude of indifference arises from the conflict between dogmatism and scepticism should not mislead our understanding of the rupture in thought being articulated here by Kant. Indifference is certainly related to the marshalling of claim and counter-claim but it is not constitutive of that conflict in itself - after all, it would be foolish to say that dogmatists are indifferent to sceptics or vice-versa, when each draws their existence from the other. It is only as the conflict becomes exhausted, tired and worn out that indifference emerges. For all that it is the product of exhaustion with metaphysics, it is interesting to note that indifference is made manifest for Kant in the guise of popular philosophy. In the Preface to the First Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, we are told that indifferentists are prone to 'disguise themselves by the assumption of a popular style'. By the time of the second edition he talks of those who profess 'that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity' and those that transform intellectual 'labour into sport, certainty into opinion, and philosophy into philodoxy'. It would appear that indifference is not an attribute of the silent; rather it is found precisely where silence has been deposed by the clamour of popular debate. For all that

2

KANT AND THE CRITIQUE OF INDIFFERENCE

one can detect an air of elitism in such remarks there is no doubt that Kant has clearly perceived the modus operandi of indifference. Indifference is not a private affair; rather, it is the transformation of metaphysical complexities into what we might now call the Sunday supplement version of philosophy — all style and labels with no real substance and subtlety. In the reign of indifference, when metaphysics becomes a slave to popularity, critique has found its true rival and it is, therefore, at its most necessary. In Kant, this necessity takes three forms. First, Kant declares that criticism must meet the claims of indifference on the grounds that indifference is plainly at odds with the interests of humanity. For all that the form of the debate between dogmatism and scepticism (the form of unreflective claim and counter-claim) has engendered indifference, the issues at stake in those debates cannot in themselves be a matter of indifference. The indifferentist is called to account for not recognizing that the very foundations of our knowledge about the world 'cannot be indifferent to humanity'. This claim, however, is only made in passing. This must be the case because it is a claim that is dogmatic in its form. Instead of interrogating the presuppositions of this claim Kant simply marshals the rhetoric of dogmatism to the service of opening up a new terrain for the idea of critique. The second, and more telling, reason why the criticism of indifference is necessary is derived from an internal critique of the logic of indifference itself. No amount of silky rhetoric proclaiming the poverty of philosophy can hide the fact that the indifferentists cannot avoid philosophical presuppositions. As Kant says, 'however much they may try to disguise themselves by the assumption of a popular style and by changes in the language of the schools, [the indifferentists] unavoidably fall into metaphysical declarations and propositions, which they profess to regard with so much contempt'. 8 This straightforward performative contradiction is the point at which critique must assert its claim to be the true rival to indifference. But before elaborating on this point, there is a third necessity that we should mention, drawn not from the opening of the Critique of Pure Reason, but from Kant's essay on Enlightenment. In this essay we find that the surest sign of public indifference is a naive and uncritical obedience to those who order our public life and control our private beliefs. In a scathing attack on the 'laziness and cowardice' of those we can recognize as the indifferentists from the Critique of Pure Reason, he lampoons their attitude to life as follows: 'If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a

3

THE IDEA OF PURE C R I T I Q U E

doctor who decides a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will undertake the irksome business for me.' ° We can say with Kant, therefore, that indifference to philosophical problems is one of the key sources of unthinking apathy in social and political life. As a result, the critic must always be alert to the social and political consequences of a general indifference to metaphysics. As Diana Coole puts it, for Kant 'challenges to indefensible metaphysics and to arbitrary power structures are complimentary processes that define an enlightened age'. The need for an idea of critique adequate to the task of meeting and confounding indifference, therefore, is also the need for a reflective and mature civil society upon which to found enlightened apparatuses of government. The rise of metaphysical indifference in philosophy and the rise of unthinking obedience in social and political life are two sides of the same coin. Before going on it is worth pausing over a discussion in the Critique of Pure Reason that would seem to contradict this account of the central role of indifference. One could elaborate the idea of critique with reference to Chapter One, section two of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method' and in doing so construct a developmental picture of criticism as that which emerges from the failings of dogmatism and scepticism. There is certainly plenty of textual evidence to support the idea that this was Kant's own view. Scepticism is presented by Kant as a 'useful' polemical device to call into question dogmatic assertions of fact: 'All unsuccessful dogmatical attempts of reason arefacta, which it is always useful to submit to the censure of the sceptic'. 2 By the end of this section, we are told that 'the sceptical procedure in philosophy', while not presenting any solutions to the problems of reason, does nonetheless form 'an excellent exercise for its powers, awakening its circumspection, and indicating the means whereby it may most fully establish its claims to its legitimate possessions'. 3 It is tempting to read Kant's idea of critique, therefore, as developing out of scepticism which itself must be seen purely as a reaction to dogmatism. From the usefulness of sceptical attacks on dogmatic assertions one can prepare reason for the task of thinking about itself rather than simply thinking about facta. In the context of this discussion, that would seem to negate the emphasis on indifference and therefore refute the claim that Kant's idea of critique rests upon a prior survey of a terrain beyond that which is occupied by the dogmatist and the sceptic. However, this picture of the emergence of critical philosophy cannot in itself sustain the idea of critique.

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KANT AND THE CRITIQUE OF INDIFFERENCE

The problem is that Kant fails to account for the link between scepticism and critical philosophy in a satisfactory way. Kant admits that there is a qualitative leap from the sceptical destruction of dogmatic claims to the critical construction of the limits and powers of reason; the leap from investigations of the facta of reason to inquiries into the nature and grounds of reason itself. But how can one conceive of such a leap? Famously, the analogy with the Copernican revolution in science is deployed by Kant to account for this transformation in thought. Where once we thought of the earth as the stable centre of the universe with the stars revolving around it, Copernicus took the leap of trying to explain celestial movements on the assumption that the earth was moving and the stars were at rest. It is in terms of just such an imaginative leap that Kant sees the transition from debates about objects of reason to investigations into the scope of reason itself; from dogmatism and scepticism to critical philosophy. However, this analogy with the Copernican thought-experiment obscures rather than clarifies the development of critical philosophy by over-emphasizing the idea of a leap of the imagination to the detriment of an understanding of the conditions that give rise to the idea of critique itself. Just as one needs to interrogate the precise nature of the Copernican revolution in science in order to understand the truly radical nature of the shift in thought that it produced, so one needs to be sure that we understand Kant's idea of critique in terms that allow for a thorough investigation into the relation between the new critical philosophy and that which it surpasses. This can only be achieved if one dwells on the relationship between pre-critical and critical philosophy in a way that gives substance to the leap of imagination at work while also retaining the connection between the different modes of inquiry. In other words, it is important to traverse the terrain between dogmatism/scepticism and critique. There is evidence, already mentioned, in the Critique of Pure Reason to support the claim that understanding the role of indifference is crucial to this task. As I shall show, the account of the relationship between pre-critical and critical philosophy given in the Preface to the First Edition and elsewhere situates the idea of indifference as both the last moment of an exhausted metaphysics and the 'source of, or at least the prelude to, the recreation and reinstallation of a science' founded on the new idea of critique. The idea of indifference helps us to stake out the ground in-between the old and the new philosophies. While it constitutes a link between them it is nonetheless a link that also allows us to understand the rupture in thought between the two modes of philosophical

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THE IDEA OF PURE C R I T I Q U E

inquiry. As such, one can say that indifference functions liminally rather than synthetically. The first task of demonstrating the liminal function of the idea of indifference, though, is some terminological clarification. So far, the terms criticism and critique have been used without establishing a technical distinction between them. Having sketched out the Kantian revolution in critical thought, as that which side-steps the terrain of dogmatism and scepticism and which occupies the new terrain of indifference, it is important to disentangle the elision of these terms and become more precise in the way they are used. From this point on, criticism will denote the unreflective to-and-fro of claim and counter-claim, such that we talk of dogmatists being critical of sceptics and vice-versa. The idea of critique will denote a mode of inquiry aimed at overcoming indifference. The relationship between criticism and critique, therefore, is indirect by virtue of being constituted through the idea of indifference. Indifference begins with the exhaustion of criticism and out of indifference, as we shall see, comes the idea of critique. Whenever criticism and critique are confused, whenever the rule of claim and counter-claim is directly related to the overcoming of indifference, the return of indifference is inevitable. In section three of this chapter we shall see how Kant ultimately falls into this trap. The founding moment in the purification of critique is the subtraction of criticism. The subtraction of criticism from the idea of critique amounts to the simultaneous expansion of critique as that which must overcome the effect of criticism, indifference. Pure critique becomes wholly adequate to itself if and only if all vestiges of criticism are subtracted from it such that the consequence of criticism, indifference, is irretrievably rooted out from the idea itself. Returning to the performative contradiction at the heart of indifferentism it is possible to put more flesh on the bones of the idea of critique, particularly the relationship between critique and indifference, as understood by Kant. For Kant, indifference is the true rival to critique by virtue of being internal to the idea of critique itself. As he makes clear, the identification of indifference is the first moment in a process of reaching the heights of reflection demanded by critique. In discussing the lack of a secure foundation that seems to haunt all areas of cognition other than mathematics and the physical sciences he says that, 'in the absence of this security, indifference,

6

KANT AND THE CRITIQUE OF INDIFFERENCE

doubt, and finally, severe criticism are ... signs of a habit of thorough thought'. Indifference, in other words, signifies recognition of the pointlessness of criticism, of the fruitless exchange of claim and counter-claim, in the search for a secure foundation for all areas of cognition. Critique, we can now say, begins with an attitude of exhaustion and exasperation towards criticism. But that critique begins with this attitude of indifference only reinforces the idea that critique must overcome indifference in order to reach its end. This must be the case because of the impossibility of consistently maintaining an attitude of indifference to life. The wellspring of critique is located here, in the performative contradiction involved in trying to articulate a position of consistent indifference. However, if indifference opens up a space between the pre-critical and critical philosophies we must still be careful not to rush too quickly to a fully articulated definition of critique. As Kant suggests, while the recognition of a performative contradiction may prepare the ground for the idea of critique there are other dimensions to this liminal space that must also be considered. From the recognition of indifference as one sign of a 'habit of thorough thought' there is still the need to dwell on indifference with an attitude of doubt. Without a doubting attitude the recognition of the performative contradiction at the heart of indifferentism would result simply in intellectual paralysis. Doubt is necessary to the genesis of critique because it engenders further reflection on the sources of contradiction within indifferentism. To doubt that contradiction expresses what it means to think is to bring thought that step closer to critique. This reference to doubt clearly indicates Kant's Cartesian lineage. Yet, given the context in which it appears, Kant's rejection of Descartes' method can also be discerned. The Cartesian method of doubting everything is not sufficient when it comes to establishing critique because it generates a dogmatic tautology as the basis of knowledge. Descartes assumed that the doubting subject secured the thinking subject as the foundation upon which knowledge could be established. Yet, as Kant makes clear, 'I think therefore I am' is tautological because 'I think' already presupposes that 'I am'. 7 On its own the activity of doubting cannot be said to constitute the idea of critique because it utilizes the tools of scepticism to further the cause of dogmatism, namely the pursuit of the presuppositionless basis of knowledge. While one must doubt that contradiction is the essence of thought, doubt itself must not be taken to be the essence of thought because that would be to replace contradiction with tautology. To be clear, then,

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THE IDEA OF PURE C R I T I Q U E

doubt is not critique itself, rather, it is a necessary precursor to clearing the ground for critique. Furthermore, it is a precursor only when one has recognized the contradiction inherent in trying to maintain an attitude of consistent indifference. The traversing of the new terrain of critique, therefore, moves from the recognition of indifference to the attitude of doubt that results from dissatisfaction with the idea that thought is essentially contradictory. Doubt itself must be transcended because tautology is no surer foundation for critique than contradiction. Yet, the realization of critique itself is still incomplete. How does Kant suggest that we move beyond doubt to the idea of critique? As mentioned above, the final sign of a 'habit of thorough thought' for Kant is that of'severe criticism'. In the first instance, this reminds us that Kant viewed the relentless critical approach of the sceptic as a step in the direction of critique. But in this context, it is important to see that the sceptical criticism of dogmatic assertions must reach beyond the dogmatic appeal to scepticism itself: scepticism must not become another form of dogmatism via the idea of doubt. Again, we are reminded of the need to transcend the critical to-and-fro of dogmatic and sceptical claims about the facta of reason. If the terrain of criticism is to be transformed to facilitate the idea of critique then there must be something more than dogmatic scepticism at work. In other words, there is the need to understand how moving beyond doubt creates a space for the arrival of critique via the idea of severe criticism, without reading this as an appeal to the 'utility' of scepticism, as it appears later in the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed, the idea of 'severe criticism' in the Preface to the First Edition anticipates Kant's distinction between the sceptical method which 'aims at certainty' and the 'thoroughly distinct' idea of scepticism, 'the principle of a technical and scientific ignorance'. 8 Where scepticism is the production of a disabling doubt by virtue of it becoming dogmatic, the sceptical method is a mode of severe criticism aimed at transcending the dogmatic appeal to doubt. The motif of severity is crucial here. Arguably, at least, to be a severe critic is to doubt that even doubt can serve as the basis for knowledge. The severity of the criticism involved at this moment in the development of critique resides in the two-sided nature of the criticism of doubt. On the one hand, doubt is always doubt about some thing, some facta of reason that inevitably functions as a dogmatic basis of our cognition of the world. In order to move beyond doubt, therefore, Kant develops a philosophical method that does not presuppose that one is already thinking about some thing. After doubting

8

KANT AND THE CRITIQUE OF INDIFFERENCE

that contradiction can serve as the basis for knowledge, critical philosophy must move beyond the tautological implications of dogmatically grounding knowledge upon doubt itself. On the other hand, Kant recognizes that critical philosophy can only proceed on the assumption that what we can legitimately know about the world is conditioned by, rather than separate from, the world itself. The dualism developed from the Cartesian method of doubt inevitably leads to the perils of'problematical idealism', 'which declares the existence of objects in space outside of us to be ... doubtful and indemonstrable'. As the 'Refutation of Idealism' makes clear, Descartes' cogito can only think itself on the basis of assuming 'a thing outside me',50 where this notion of 'thing' is distinguished from a dogmatic facta by virtue of being a noumenal object in the negative sense. The construction of a positive account of how the world and thought are related, and what can and can not be known on the basis of that relationship, is the construction of the idea of critique. This brings us to the rather familiar view that Kant's critical revolution in philosophy is an attack on the shared assumptions of dualism and idealism - the shared notion that the world and how it appears to us are distinct and irreconcilable - in the name of a transcendental idealism that presupposes an empirical realism. On its own, though, this account of the critical project does not realize the idea of critique in its entirety because this constructive agenda amounts only to a formal precondition of the idea of critique. This formal precondition must be filled out; it must be given some substance, in order for it to become fully realized as critique. How is it filled out? For Kant, the answer is obvious: It is, in fact, a call to reason, again to undertake the most laborious of all tasks — that of self-examination, and to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws. This tribunal is nothing less than the Critique of Pure Reason. The formal precondition of constructing an account of how the world and its appearances are related is given substance in the analysis of the timeless features of reason itself. Critique is a call to reason: that is, a call to reason about reason. Yet for all that this is the explicit and commonly acknowledged substance of the idea of critique (Kant calls it 'the matter of our critical inquiry' ), it

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THE IDEA OF PURE C R I T I Q U E

does not in itself serve to clarify the aim, or end, of critique. For Kant, this clarification is necessary because the end of critique must be part of the idea of critique itself. The question of the end of critique, however, is not explicitly dealt with until the closing sections of the text and it is only really given prominence by the time of the Preface to the Second Edition, published the year before the appearance of the Critique of Practical Reason. In the Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant informs us that the insight critical philosophy brings into the 'two-fold sense in which things may be taken' (as appearances and as things in themselves) will 'above all... confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion'. As such, the end of critique is a practical end; the critique of pure reason can clear the way for rooting out illusions in our moral and religious life. However, this is a rather different task than that we have reconstructed from the Preface to the First Edition, where the aim of overcoming indifference is prioritized. Simply, it is by no means obvious that there is a necessary connection between overcoming the indifference that results from exhaustion with metaphysics and the aim of bringing clarity to moral and theological issues. Or, rather, it is the manner in which Kant negotiates the relationship between these two tasks of the new critical approach to philosophy as necessary that must be investigated. The investigation must begin by bringing to the surface a number of questions occluded within the text itself. For example: is there a tension between the two tasks of critique in Kant, the initial task of overcoming indifference and the final task of clearing the ground for a better understanding of moral and theological issues? Does the moral-theological purpose of critique condition the matter of critique such that we may be legitimately suspicious that the end itself constitutes a site of indifference within critique that is beyond critique? Even if we grant, with Kant, the political consequences of a generalized indifference to metaphysics, does the critique of such consequences necessitate that we conceive of critique as having a moral and theological purpose? In general, is it possible to hold that critique has a purpose without also holding that the purpose itself is externally generated? If the purpose is external to critique, is it beyond the rigours of critique? Can the end of critique be internal, or immanent, to the matter of critique itself? Is it possible to isolate an idea of critique that constitutes the matter of critique as its end? Can the end of critique be conceptualized as always open to critique itself without plunging into conceptual free-fall? Can the practical end of critique be an end that is internal to the idea of critique itself?

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KANT AND THE CRITIQUE OF INDIFFERENCE

These questions are the signposts one finds strewn within the Kantian construction of critique, signposts to routes obscured by Kant's own travels into critical philosophy, that nonetheless point toward the as yet distant idea of pure critique. As such, the very possibility of inquiring into an idea of pure critique, an idea of critique that does not subordinate critique itself to a purpose beyond critique, arises from questions generated within Kant's framing of his critical project. The claim that needs to be defended in order to pursue this line of inquiry is this: while Kant accurately surveyed the terrain constitutive of a new approach to critical philosophy he occluded (or, at best, elided) the tension between the idea of critique as the overcoming of indifference and the idea of critique constituted 'above all' by a moraltheological purpose. Put more simply; if it can be shown that while Kant inaugurated the idea of critique he ultimately transformed it back into an idea of criticism by subordinating it to an externally generated 'purpose', then we must follow those discarded signposts that lead the way to the idea of pure critique.

CRITIQUE, TOTALITY AND IMMANENCE For Kant, once critique is realized as reason's auto-critique, indifference is surpassed totally and immanently. Only once these general features are examined in more detail can the questions posed to Kant's idea of critique be articulated with greater precision such that the tension within his idea of critique can be exposed more acutely. As Kant understood, the criticism of indifference must be total. There must be no facet of thought or life that remains beyond the reach of critique. If there are any exemptions to the rigours of critique then these will become 'the subjects of just suspicion'. The suspicion, of course, is that such exemptions will shelter indifference, allowing it to flourish again in the future. Certainly there are many whose interests demand that indifference is not only sheltered but also kept safe and nurtured during harshly critical times. The critic must not bow to such interests. If the reach of critique is to be total then it must be deployed without regard for whatever comforts are associated with a life of indifference. Not even the 'sacredness of religion' or 'the authority of legislation' can claim such exemptions, according to Kant. If the critique of indifference is manifest as a call to reason, then both religious and political authority must

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be subject to the rigours of reason. That this is the case does not mean, however, that pure reason is capable of pronouncing on the nature and essence of God, for example. As Kant makes clear, the tribunal of pure reason is not the place to make such pronouncements. Reason, he says, is not an 'indefinitely extended plane'. Rather, it should be thought of as a sphere and 'beyond the sphere of experience there are no objects which it can know'. The nature of God is outside of this sphere and thus not the subject of an inquiry into pure reason. Nonetheless, those who transgress the circumference of this sphere by rationalizing their claims about the nature of God (believers and nonbelievers alike) can be held to account for applying reason in a domain where it cannot properly reside. A similar tactic is used in the area of legislation. Reason has a role in shaping the right forms of social and political organization but it is impotent as regards questions of the good life. There are a number of important sources for this distinction between the right and the good but the essay, 'On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice', provides one of the clearest statements of Kant's distinction: But the concept of an external right as such precedes entirely from the concept of freedom in the external relation of people to one another and has nothing at all to do with the end that all of them naturally have (their aim of happiness) and with the prescribing of means for attaining it; hence too the latter absolutely must not intrude in the laws of the former as their determining ground. 7 For all that we have moved from the sphere of religion to that of legislation, the idea that reason sits in judgement over all that comes within the sphere of experience is retained. Indeed, all that tries to intrude from the outside must be put back in its rightful place. This distinction has, of course, been central to contemporary neo-Kantian political theory as articulated by, among others, Rawls and Habermas. In general, though, the totality of critique is articulated as the rational interrogation of all that falls within the domain of experience. For Kant, the totality of critique must be matched by the immanence of critique. Given that critique is manifest as a call to reason, as the rational interrogation of what we may legitimately claim to know, there is a need to subject the features of rational interrogation itself to critique if totality is to be maintained. This demands an immanent critique of reason by reason.

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The essential element of this immanent critique is the interrogation of reason purely on its own terms, without recourse to a critique of reason from the perspective of experience. The rational interrogation of reason becomes for Kant the crowning moment of rational interrogation of the sphere of experience. In other words, critique can only proceed if reason is put on trial before reason itself in pursuit of its own eternal and unchangeable laws. Only on this basis could critique root out indifference within reason itself and, therefore, achieve totality. Once again, the founding role of indifference is crucial in this regard. For a thoroughly total critique to emerge, that which critique has as its target, the indifference it must overcome, must be immanent to the domain of reason itself. The immanent sources of indifference that Kant locates within reason are the transcendental illusions, those unconditioned ideas of soul/self, world and God that are deemed to be constitutive of real objects. For all that reason has a purely logical function, its function in exploring the conditionality of syllogisms, it is nonetheless driven to postulate its own peculiar objects, the transcendental illusions, which become the source of indifference that critique must expose in the deployment of pure reason. The immanence of reason's critique of reason itself is maintained, therefore, by giving it the task of rooting out the illusory products of its own activity. It is important to reiterate, therefore, that indifference is the first moment of the realization of critique. But indifference is only finally overcome, for Kant, in the culminating moment of critique; that is, as the utter indifference of pre-critical rationalism to the transcendental illusions that organize its own understanding of criticism is fully exposed. For Kant, the totality and the immanence of critique are realized as the critique of indifference. The to-and-fro of criticism that sustains the debate between dogmatists and sceptics is outside of the qualitatively different mode of thinking that we have labelled critique. Critique is not aimed at transcending criticism but that which criticism leaves in its wake, the legacy of indifference manifest as popular philosophy. The construction of the idea of critique, therefore, is the construction of a terrain of inquiry qualitatively different from the terrain that sustains criticism. In this way, Kant not only surpasses criticism completely: he also constitutes the possibility of a thoroughly immanent critique of indifference on the basis of the tribunal of reason. So, both drawing on and extrapolating from Kant, the idea of criticism is transformed into the idea of critique; critique is that which has indifference as

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its true rival; this rival is located within critique itself; indifference can only be overcome by an idea of critique that challenges indifference totally and immanently. The unquestionable importance of Kant can be found in this fundamental survey of the terrain of critique. But as noted in regard to the tension between the matter and the end of critique, we can now also see a tension between the totality and the immanence of critique. The immanence Kant assigns to the idea of critique is immanent to the limited totality he derives from the idea of critique as reasoning about reason. Given this, it is appropriate to ask if a mode of critique that claims dominion over a limited sphere can be said to be wholly immanent. The immanence of critique may be put in jeopardy, in other words, by virtue of the limited totality that it is immanent to. In general terms, Deleuze and Guattari have diagnosed this problem as follows: 'whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent "to" something a confusion of plane and concept results, so that the concept becomes a transcendent universal and the plane becomes an attribute in the concept. When misunderstood in this way, the plane of immanence revives the transcendent again.' While the terminology of plane and concept will be explored in the next chapter, the principal idea is that immanence can only avoid becoming transcendent if it remains wholly immanent to itself. By making the immanence of critique immanent to the auto-critique of reason (itself constrained by the sphere of experience), the possibility of a wholly immanent idea of critique is curtailed. Reason becomes the transcendent that conditions the immanence of critique, such that critique becomes subordinated to the demands of reason. The questions formulated at the end of the last section can now be more precisely formulated as one fundamental question: can the matter of critique achieve totality while the idea of critique is immanent to a purpose, an end, which trancends critique itself? In the following section we shall explore in more detail how the relation between totality and immanence reflects on the tension between the matter and the end of critique. This will pave the way for a discussion that moves beyond Kantian constraints on critique into the domain of pure critique in the next chapter.

THE RETURN OF INDIFFERENCE The goal of a total and immanent critique of indifference is unrealized in Kant because of his failure to root out indifference. This can be viewed most clearly in Kant's advice to those reasonable critics faced with the fervour of

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the faithful and the faithless. It was noted already that Kant is at pains to keep the borders of the sphere of pure reason thoroughly intact against the claims of theologians who wish to push reason into the domain of religious speculation and of atheists who wish to use reason to denounce the existence of a Supreme Being. While developing the idea that we leave questions about the nature or existence of God at the door of our entry into pure reason, Kant urges that we meet the claims of the theologian and the atheist with 'a calm indifference'.59 On the face of it, this would seem to be thoroughly consistent with the parameters that Kant established around the immanent critique of pure reason. Yet, it also points to a problem with Kant's idea of critique. The problem is this; while Kant places all within the domain of reason under intense scrutiny so as to root out indifference, he is forced to defend the domain itself, the circumference of the sphere of reason, by deploying indifference. Indifference has not been transcended and destroyed, rather, it has been pushed from the centre to the margins. Moving indifference to the margins, however, does not relegate it to the wastelands of thought. Rather, indifference becomes the guardian of reason, that which secures the domain of reason against incursion from the outside. But why is this problematic? Surely Kant could respond to this charge by simply reiterating the idea that one cannot deploy reason in the domain of theology and anti-theology without overstepping the bounds of reason itself. All that remains, therefore, is an attitude of calm indifference to questions regarding the nature and existence of God. The problem for Kant, though, is that such indifference functions as criticism, a criticism of both the theologian and the atheist, but not as critique. The attitude of indifference to such fundamental issues functions as criticism rather than critique precisely because it is not detached from the logic of claim and counter-claim that forms the debate between the theologian and the atheist. To say that we cannot know whether or not God exists is a position that is itself ultimately based on a claim about the true nature of the world, a claim that is stated rather than interrogated through critique. There is, of course, a subtle and important difference in the way that Kant constructs his version of the dogmatic and sceptical appeal to 'facta of reason'. Where the pre-critical philosophers appeal to certain objects as the basis of reason, Kant objectifies reason itself. This must be the case given the nature of his defence of indifference as the guardian of the sphere of pure reason. Elaborating the need for calm indifference, Kant is forced to appeal to the fact that 'there is no antithetic of pure reason'. For

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this to function as critique, the indifference of the critic would have to be transcended into a thorough-going interrogation of the presuppositions of this indifference in order to reach a total and immanent critique of treating reason as a fact without antithesis. Yet, this possibility is curtailed precisely because Kant is categorical in limiting the sphere of pure reason. The effect is that Kant enters the debate about the existence or not of God with a disputable claim about the nature of pure reason itself, one which both theologians and atheists may indeed find antithetical to their own accounts. Although the fact of God's existence or not is held in suspension, the critical debate is simply shifted on to a new site within the same terrain, a site defined by the way Kant treats the facticity of reason itself. The effect is criticism rather than critique because Kant has presupposed the natural harmony of reason as a fact beyond reasonable interrogation. Two options present themselves: either the domain of pure reason is extended or critique is constructed in such a way as to facilitate the interrogation of areas outside of the domain of pure reason. Both options are plainly denied by Kant; pure reason must know its bounds, it is not 'an indefinitely extended plane', and the matter of critique must be thought of as a 'call to reason'. Indeed, the transformation of indifference from that which critique must overcome to that which guards the sphere of pure reason itself is rooted in both the limited idea of totality as a sphere and the notion that immanence requires a critique of reason by reason. While Kant may have identified the true rival of critique he has failed to overcome this rival by virtue of his failure to construct 'the matter of critique' in a manner adequate to the task. Far from being overcome, indifference is elevated into the role of guardian at the borders of pure reason. This might seem an unimportant consequence of the delimitation of pure reason. There are two reasons why we must not let such an idea hold sway. First, Kant is involved in contradiction as a result of this return of indifference. Most obviously, the claim that 'our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected' is revealed as purely rhetorical for Kant. As is clear, there are many areas of life that fall outside of the domain of critique and the role of the critic in these areas is that of the allegedly detached observer who in reality partakes of the debate in as unreflective a form as the dogmatist or sceptic. What becomes clear is that critique is not marshalled against everything; rather it is marshalled so as to ensure that pure reason reaches a 'state of permanent repose'. The aim of critique is not the rigorous interrogation

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of all our assumptions but the protection of reason from intruders who might call reason itself to account. As the return of indifference makes clear, this means that critique is put to the service of the interests of the reasonable and the reasonable are claimed to be the only ones capable of critique. Curtailing critique in this way makes critique the servant of reason and therefore limits the possibility of a total and thoroughly immanent critique of reason itself. As Deleuze claims, Kant failed to find a method adequate to the task of bringing reason to trial before itself: Kant concludes that critique must be a critique of reason by reason itself. Is this not the Kantian contradiction, making reason both the tribunal and the accused; constituting it as judge and plaintiff, judging and judged? Kant lacked a method which permitted reason to be judged from the inside without giving it the task of being its own judge. The outcome is that reason remains, at least partially, beyond the reach of criticism. A truly total critique of reason does not materialize and we must assume, therefore, that the interests of the purveyors of indifference are never fully brought to account. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the reign of indifference has entered a new golden age precisely because it finds its strongest support yet in the current milieu of 'reasonableness': a milieu that furthers compromise rather than critique. The social and political consequences of the return of indifference in Kant constitute the second set of reasons for being wary of limiting critique in this way. In the assertion of the primordial role of right in relation to the good as regards matters of legislation, Kant formalizes the calm indifference that he urges on theological matters in the context of the coercive power of law. It is law that must become indifferent to ends and seek only to secure the rights of people to pursue their chosen ends. Given that indifference in theology acts as a critical intervention in theological debates, and not as a critique of the presuppositions of that intervention, we may expect that the same is true in the sphere of legislation. Indeed, as communitarian critics of neo-Kantianism in political theory have argued, the alleged indifference of the law to questions of the good life surreptitiously reinforces a liberal conception of the good life, based on contentious claims about the nature of our social bonds. As Taylor has argued, for example, the neo-Kantian ideal of law based on a system of rights already presupposes the good of those rights as a shared

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source from which we may draw. The right is not indifferent to the good, rather, the good of a liberal system of rights is protected from other claims to the good by the presupposition of the indifference of rights. From the perspective of the idea of critique, there is a failure to critique the presuppositions upon which law as a system of rights itself rests. The idea that even the authority of legislation must be held to account within the age of criticism, therefore, is not followed through by Kant. The idea of a total critique is impoverished for the sake of protecting ends that are ultimately presupposed rather than derived from the method of critique. Bringing these two problems together we can say that the return of indifference resides ultimately in the problematic assertions Kant makes regarding the link between pure and practical reason. Pure reason, as we saw, has as its end the practical aim of preparing the way for clearing up moral and theological disputes. Yet, as Kant makes clear in the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason, one can only guarantee that pure reason is practically oriented by assuming that which could not be known within the framework of pure reason, namely the idea of freedom. While the scope of pure reason does not admit of knowledge of the idea of freedom, the nature of practical reason must proceed on the basis of an assumption about the objective reality of freedom. This assumption is then used to retroactively establish freedom as 'the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason'. Kant recognizes that this argumentative tactic is rather contentious and he tries to rationalize the manoeuvre as follows: Lest anyone suppose that he finds an inconsistency when I now call freedom the condition of the moral law and afterwards, in the treatise, maintain that the moral law is the condition under which we can first become aware of freedom, I want only to remark that whereas freedom is indeed the ratio essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. For, had not the moral law already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a thing as freedom (even though it is not self-contradictory). But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be encountered at all in ourselves. It is clear that the argument only works if one takes the existence of the moral law as a given. But this is really only a subset of the larger claim found in Kant, mentioned above, that reason has no antithesis. We have said already

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that this is an assumption about the matter of critique that would need to be subjected to the rigours of critique if Kant were to maintain consistency. To the extent that the discussion of freedom and the moral law brings the relationship between the matter of critique and the end of critique into focus, we find that the problem is doubled. Assuming that reason cannot be in contradiction with itself, Kant appeals to the moral—theological end of critique to retroactively justify the harmony of pure and practical reason. In general, therefore, Kant deploys the practical end of pure reason to assume the unity of what he calls pure practical reason. This argument is only plausible, however, on the already assumed unity of reason, an assumption that takes the form of a dogmatic fact of reason, in this case the fact that reason itself must be unified and by virtue of being unified be beyond critique. Indifference returns within pure (and) practical reason as the guarantor of the unity of reason and the claim, reconstructed from Kant's work, that critique must begin with indifference and yet end indifference cannot be supported. Kant's overtly rationalist understanding of the matter of critique and his objectification of the end of critique as the unity of pure and practical reason serves to transform but not remove indifference. Indeed, indifference to the problematic assumptions regarding the matter and end of critique becomes that which is used to secure the fact that Kant dogmatically assumes, namely the harmonious unity of reason. In Kant, therefore, critique is subordinate to the ends of criticism — the ultimately unreflective claim that reason must be without antithesis - rather than a mode of thought that transforms what it means to be critical. One might object that this is a perfectly reasonable assumption for Kant to make and that the onus is on those who question this assumption to prove the disharmonious nature of reason. This would, however, miss the point of the discussion. It is enough to show that Kant takes as given that the matter of critique must be the tribunal of reason and that he assumes the end of critique to be found in the moral law for us to question how such facts about critique are justified. Given, as we have shown, that both assumptions rest on the prior assumption of a primordial unity of pure and practical reason and this assumption is only justified by the dubious claims that pure reason clears the way for practical reason and that practical reason reveals the unity of both pure and practical reason, then the whole architecture of critique is shown to have a circular logic of the kind Kant criticized so rigorously in the dogmatists and the sceptics.

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In Kant, reason transcends critique such that both the totality and immanence of critique itself are unrealizable. The purity of the idea of critique can only be realized upon subtracting all transcendent elements from its immanent construction and only a purely immanent idea of critique can genuinely overcome the totality of indifference. As such, and as we shall see below, pure critique achieves a 'totality' that even total critique, an idea of critique that rests on a transcendent idea of totality, cannot reach in itself. One of the central tasks of the idea of pure critique must be to pursue the critique of indifference to its utmost. This cannot be achieved by limiting the totality of critique to the domain of reason, or by retroactively justifying the end of critique by assuming the existence of the moral law. Critique must establish and sustain itself on a terrain that is independent from the terrain of reason and morality if it is to become pure. But how can such a negative precondition become filled out to provide a positive conception of the idea of pure critique? Answering this question is the task of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER TWO

Philosophy as Pure Critique

INTRODUCTION Pure critique is qualitatively distinct from partial criticism and total critique. Partial criticism always contains an investment in the criticized, total critique delimits a totality that transcends critique and both, thereby, rely upon justificatory strategies that condition the idea of critique itself such that the justificatory bedrock is beyond critique. Indifference resides wherever critique cannot reach. The Kantian contribution to the idea of critique derives from the construction of a mode of interrogation aimed at overcoming the public indifference generated by endless criticism. It is a contribution that has set the standard for all critical theory; if one's criticisms harbour indifference in any form whatsoever then one has failed the test of critique. As discussed in the last chapter, it was a test that Kant's own understanding of the matter and end of critique could not pass. The task for post-Kantians, those who acknowledge the validity of the test set by Kant, is to find a way to avoid his failure. An idea of critique that passed the test of obliterating indifference from within itself would properly be called an idea of pure critique; an idea of critique worthy of the idea itself. Having used Kant to set up the idea of pure critique it is important at this stage in the argument not to become embroiled in the history of the idea of critique. It might be tempting to engage with the grand vista of post-Kantian philosophy with a view to judging the ideas of those who claimed to have passed the test set by Kant. While such an engagement would be worthy of pursuit in itself, it would do little to bring the idea of pure critique any closer. It is methodologically wrong-headed to survey the tradition looking for pure critique, while what is needed is an analytic of pure critique itself before any such investigation could take place. The discussion of Kant has

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simply set the agenda for this analytic of pure critique by providing its guiding principles. In this chapter I shall construct the idea of pure critique with a view to fleshing out the guiding principles derived from Kant. First, there is a differentiated idea of critique, one that develops the negative definition of the previous chapter by providing criteria that must be met if the idea of critique is to become pure. In section two, the constructivist account of philosophy outlined by Deleuze and Guattari is revealed as that which defines philosophy in a way that meets the criteria for pure critique. In section three, it is argued that we should conceive of Deleuze and Guattari's account of philosophy as pure critique. By the end of the chapter, therefore, we are able to articulate pure critique positively and fully, for the first time.

PARTIAL CRITICISM, TOTAL CRITIQUE AND PURE CRITIQUE Indifference will remain embedded in the act of criticism as long as there is a part of that which is under critical scrutiny which is not actually criticized or criticizable. For example, a partial criticism of democracy is always couched in terms of more democracy, or deeper democracy, or substantive democracy, or radical democracy or some other form of democracy. Where parts of the idea of democracy are criticized the idea of democracy itself remains intact. The partiality expressed, therefore, is a partiality to the idea of democracy. The justificatory background of such partial criticism is clearly the whole that gives meaning to the part being criticized. Partial critics of democracy may disagree about what the idea of democracy actually means vis-a-vis, for example, the demands of citizenship, but the idea of democracy itself acts as a shared background against which to justify the alternative renderings. It is only by virtue of occupying the same general terrain as that which is criticized that partial critics can claim to be justified in their criticism. This partiality to the idea of democracy places the idea of democracy itself beyond criticism and, to the extent that it does this, indifference to key critical questions will always remain. It should be clear, then, that partial criticisms never amount to even the pretence of critique, remaining firmly embedded in the to-andfro of claim and counter-claim without calling the presuppositions of their criticisms to account. This does not imply that we simply give up on debates constituted by partial modes of criticism, for partial criticism has a key role to play in all walks of life. Rather, the implication is simply that partial

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criticisms cannot be what we have in mind when we talk of critique, as Kant knew so well. But if we exceed such partiality and bring the totality of the whole under critical review, do we fare any better in generating a critique of indifference? A total critique of democracy is one that criticizes the very idea of democracy itself, as a whole. This mode of critical inquiry is worthy of the name critique to the extent that it questions the indifference that is constitutive of partial criticisms. In this respect a total critique of democracy must locate the outside of democracy in order to put the whole of democracy into view. Strictly speaking, therefore, a total critique of democracy does not even start with an inquiry into democracy, as that would be to cede too much conceptual ground from the beginning to this most magnetic concept. Rather, total critique must begin elsewhere, from the outside of democracy, beyond the obvious attractive pull it exerts over the field of politics. The total critic, therefore, refuses to occupy the terrain of the whole that gives meaning to the part being criticized so as to put the whole - democracy, for example - under total and not just partial scrutiny. But even in this case, the critique will still be implicated in that which is being criticized if it remains situated within the total terrain of which the idea of democracy is a part. For example, if one critiques democracy from an oligarchical perspective one may achieve a total critique but only at the expense of a deeper partiality. As democracy and oligarchy are different answers to the same question — what is the best form of government? - they ultimately occupy the same terrain of thought, in this case an explicitly normative terrain in political philosophy. The upshot is that oligarchy is defined against democracy, and vice-versa, such that neither amounts to a radical break with the other. In such cases, critique may be total in a particular sense but it retains partiality by virtue of a second-order relationship to that which is being criticized. Where the critique tends toward totality the justificatory terrain is different from that which grounds partial criticism, but ultimately indifference remains the outcome. The totality that is invoked, in other words, remains partial to the extent that it is a totality shared by the critique and the criticized, such that the totality is always implicitly deployed as a common justificatory foundation. Once again, therefore, criticism that invokes a mode of total critique will always leave certain critical questions beyond the reach of criticism itself. It is this reservoir of assumptions beyond total critique that harbours whatever the critic remains indifferent to; assumptions that Kant tells us must be the 'subjects of just

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suspicion'. Total critique displaces indifference but does not remove it, as we saw in the previous chapter on Kant, and as such it does not live up to the idea of critique itself. Generalizing this account we can say that the difference between partial and total criticism is a matter of degree: the degree to which the critic and that which is criticized dwell on the same conceptual terrain. This has an intriguing consequence: if criticism is a matter of degree then it should not be thought of as either justified or unjustified criticism. Admittedly, the idea that criticism is not circumscribed by justification is counter-intuitive but what we often take to be criticisms - the loud opinions of other citizens, the studied moralizing of philosophers - are not, when properly understood, criticisms at all. Although the phrase 'unjustified criticism' is a common part of our vocabulary, what is usually meant by this expression is the idea that someone is just giving us his or her own opinion of events. In this sense, 'unjustified criticism' might be better described as 'unwanted opinion'. Similarly the common idea of 'justified criticism', upon interrogation, could be more aptly re-described as the opinions of others that we are willing to take on board. Of course, theorists of many different hues want to make a stronger set of claims: criticism is justified by reference to it being, for example, true, reasonable, morally correct, ethically astute, in accord with tradition, or whatever. Criticism is unjustified, therefore, by the absence of whatever benchmark is deemed the most appropriate by each philosophical position. In this sense, it is said that criticism may be acknowledged but unjustified or not acknowledged but justified. But this clarification, in defence of the centrality of justification to the idea of criticism, amounts to a form of sophistry. Upon investigation, we can see that understood in this way partial criticism and total critique are only justified by reference to implicit acknowledgement of the terrain of critical inquiry itself. Acknowledged but unjustified criticism and unacknowledged but justified criticism amount to the same thing; critical encounters where the shared terrain of critical inquiry has not been explicitly articulated. Rather than seeing such critical encounters as a sign of criticism with bite ('my criticisms are justified even if you refuse to acknowledge them', for example) they should be seen as a sign of critical encounters where the real issues at stake have been put to one side by the participants. It is precisely in such critical encounters that indifference is allowed to flourish, because it goes unacknowledged.

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In order to move beyond total criticism towards the idea of pure critique, with a view to purging our critical interventions of lingering indifference, we must outline an account of critique that does not subordinate it to a regime of justification. If critique is made to justify itself by reference to anything other than itself, that which holds court over it must be beyond critique: regimes of justification are tools in the service of criticism but they are anathema to the idea of critique. Pure critique cannot, therefore, be a tool in the service of justification. Rather, every justification must be subject to critique such that no justification stands beyond critique. But if the project of pure critique is understood solely from such a negative perspective - as the destroyer of justifications - then it fares no better than the idea of total critique. This is the case because the idea of critique itself becomes that which must not be criticized, leading to a contradiction that can only provide shelter for the purveyors of indifference. To avoid this lurch into contradiction, pure critique must be reconfigured as a project that is not solely a destructive (and ultimately self-destructive) venture. In order to achieve this one must reorient thought onto consideration of what pure critique is, rather than simply saying that it is not criticism based on assumptions shared with the criticized. Initially, though, this involves demarcating a series of criteria that will provide the guidelines within which a more positive articulation of pure critique can be achieved. The first point to note is that whereas the difference between partial criticism and total critique was one of degree, that which differentiates partial criticism and total critique from pure critique is a difference in kind. The partial critic and the total critic differ only insofar as they explicitly or implicitly appeal to different levels of shared assumptions with that which they criticize; either the particular idea under review or the totality of the terrain upon which intimately related ideas are situated. The pure critic places all such appeals to a shared background under investigation so as to critique all attempts at justification (as this is the only way of overcoming indifference). In this sense pure critique differs in kind from the other modes of critical activity by virtue of not being located within a regime of justification, at either the particular (typically explicit) or the total (typically implicit) level of shared assumptions. A partial criticism becomes total when it shifts from assuming a particular justifactory framework to the assumption of a general terrain which serves as a shared foundation for the criticism. A total critique

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CRITIQUE

becomes 'pure' when even this general second-order relation to that which is being criticized is overcome. While this constitutes the elemental criteria for a definition of pure critique, it remains both negative and obscure unless we spell out what is required of the idea of critique itself once the idea of justification has been subtracted from it. One of the most surreptitious forms of shared justificatory framework within the idea of critique, one that is therefore likely to harbour indifference, is a shared definition of critique itself. If, for the sake of argument, our pure critic of democracy constructs a critique that does not rely on the shared general terrain of normative political philosophy, it is possible that she will nonetheless revert to the position of being a total critic by virtue of sharing a definition of critique with the advocates of normative political philosophy. For example, there may be shared assumptions at work regarding the relationship between critical theory and political practice (say, that the critic must first conceptualize a critical position and then apply this to that which is under critical review). In this case the shared assumptions may be thinly constituted but they are nonetheless constitutive of a shared territory of inquiry that would legitimate this being described as a reversion to total critique from a position of (supposed) purity. The potential purity of critique is relinquished, in other words, when a given totality is delimited as a transcendent element conditioning the immanence of critique such that the totality itself is beyond critique. It is important to clarify, therefore, that one of the principal components of subtracting justificatory frameworks from partial criticism and total critique in order to conceive of pure critique is the task of adumbrating an idea of critique that is not itself shared with the criticized. One of the particular criteria that the idea of pure critique must meet, therefore, is the suspension of a shared notion of what it means to be critical. Where the analytic of pure critique provides us with the view that critique must take place without reference to a justificatory framework shared with the criticized, this must be further clarified as an idea of critique that does not assume that we all share or must share a common definition of critique itself. The idea of pure critique, therefore, is that which problematizes even the idea of critique itself. This may appear to push the idea of pure critique to the limits of comprehensibility, but before the construction of comprehension from out of these ashes of analysis can begin in earnest, we must push credulity even further. There is still a sense in which pure critique may be said to share a common

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ground with that which is under critical scrutiny, namely as regards the idea of the critic that carries out critical activity. If, for the sake of argument, our pure critic problematizes both the grounds upon which the critique and the criticized reside and the idea of critique itself, she may still be assuming a common ground vis-a-vis the nature of the critic. Our supposed pure critic of democracy may construct a terrain beyond normative political philosophy while also constructing an idea of criticism beyond the normative, while still clinging to the view that the critic is, for example, always an individual human being possessed of certain critical faculties. Such residual commonality would amount to a reinstitution of a shared justificatory framework, thereby steering the hope of a pure critique of democracy towards the rocks of total critique. In such cases the safe haven for indifference is to be found in the idea of the critic. For pure critique to become truly pure the idea of the critic must also be problematized so thoroughly that it cannot serve the function of harbouring indifference. Again, this is a particular example of the general idea that pure critique must do away with justification to become pure. Critique avoids partiality by subtracting criticism from within itself, it avoids a transcendent totality by not submitting to regimes of justification. Critique becomes pure, that is adequate to the idea of critique itself, only on the condition that it has priority over justification. The priority of critique over justification can only be sustained if all the natural aspects of critique itself (the nature of critique, the nature of the criticized, the nature of the critic) are thoroughly denaturalized. Pure critique, therefore, must always contain within itself, as the fullness of itself, the critique becoming within itself. It may appear that we have entered into the conceptual free-fall that would lead to critical paralysis. Is it possible to articulate critique in such a pure fashion without the return of indifference through the surreptitious reliance on shared justificatory frameworks? Is it possible to define the idea of pure critique positively? If it is to be possible then we must be able to articulate the idea of pure critique as that which avoids assuming a) a given, or shared, terrain that concepts are said to occupy, b) a given, or shared, idea of what is involved in the activity of critique, and c) a given, or shared, account of the critic. This amounts to saying that the idea of pure critique must not assume a) a common 'world' that critique 'intervenes in', b) a common 'concept' of critical intervention, and c) a common 'agent' of critical intervention.

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In other words, the very ideas of 'world', 'concept' and 'agent' must be rethought in the process of outlining the idea of pure critique. Clearly, what is at stake alludes to the very grounds of philosophical activity itself. If we can outline an account of philosophy that carries out this rethinking then we shall have gone a long way towards providing the positive account of pure critique required by both the reading of Kant in the previous chapter and the analytic of pure critique just discussed. All of the elements required of this rethinking of the nature of philosophy can be found in the constructivist account of philosophy outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. This is expressed most clearly in their last work together, What is Philosophy?, although it arguably informed all their previous work together and as solo authors. Their account of the relationship between concepts, planes of immanence and conceptual personae is the first proper step on the way to a positive articulation of the idea of pure critique such that we can say that it amounts to presenting philosophy as pure critique, a claim that will be expanded upon in section three below.

PHILOSOPHY AS CONSTRUCTIVISM Deleuze and Guattari give a deceptively simple answer to the question, 'What is philosophy?': 'philosophy', they say, 'is the discipline that involves creating concepts'. 6 At first glance this definition is hardly contentious. Its critical impact, though, is clear from the conceptions of philosophy that it excludes; namely, philosophy as 'contemplation, reflection and communication'. Philosophy as contemplation, Deleuze and Guattari call 'objective idealism' and it is clear that they have Plato in mind as the founder of this approach. For Plato, philosophy was the contemplation of 'Ideas'. In The Republic, for example, Plato is able to equate justice in the individual with justice in the community because the 'Idea of Justice' resides in neither the individual nor the community but in a separate realm of pure 'Ideas'; in the bright world outside the cave. Philosophy as reflection, Deleuze and Guattari call 'subjective idealism' and here they have both Descartes and Kant in mind. In Cartesian philosophy the doubting subject cannot be sure of the objective status of 'Ideas'; Platonism, whether right or wrong, must be bracketed out of the equation. Yet, in the act of doubting, Descartes rediscovers the 'Idea', only now it resides within the subject as the 'I think'; the famous Cartesian 'cogito'. Although Kant called into question the Cartesian 'cogito', the approach of

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reflecting upon an agent's self-knowledge was maintained (the transcendental categories replacing the activity of doubting). Philosophy, on this account, is reflection upon the subject's implicit knowledge of thought (in Descartes) or thought, space and time (in Kant). According to this approach, 'objectivity will ... assume a certainty of knowledge rather than presuppose a truth recognised as pre-existing, or already there'. 8 Philosophy as communication, Deleuze and Guattari call 'intersubjective idealism', a philosophical moment whose beginnings they associate with phenomenology, in particular the work of Husserl. Husserl's project was to reintroduce the Kantian subject to the phenomenal world, not in order to renounce transcendence but to put the transcendental subject on the solid empirical ground of 'actual experience'. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the subject's transcendence via such experience has a triple root: 'the subject constitutes first of all a sensory world filled with objects, then an intersubjective world filled by the other, and finally a common ideal world'. ' The transcendent 'Idea', on this account, is neither a pre-existing object, nor a presupposition of subjective reflection, but a consequence of intersubjective interaction. Philosophical activity becomes indistinguishable from the 'communication' (broadly defined) that takes place between subjects. That Deleuze and Guattari take these differing accounts of philosophical activity to be variants of'idealism' already suggests the tenor of their critique. Contemplation, reflection or communication, they argue, cannot be definitive of philosophical activity because the concepts 'contemplation', 'reflection' and 'communication' must first and foremost be created. What they say of Plato in this context applies equally to Descartes, Kant and Husserl; 'Plato teaches the opposite of what he does: he creates concepts but needs to set them up as representing the uncreated that precedes them.' Deleuze and Guattari are not suggesting that human beings do not 'contemplate, reflect or communicate', nor that philosophy should not concern itself with these actions, only that it is a mistake to equate these actions with philosophical activity itself. Philosophy, they say, becomes 'idealism' when it forgets this distinction. Surely treating philosophy as a form of constructivism, as the creation of concepts, is also susceptible to the charge of idealism? Is 'creation' not a concept, and a distinct activity, as surely as contemplation, reflection and communication? One response would be: if creation is a concept, as a concept it must first and foremost be created, thus retaining the idea of philosophy as the creation of concepts. Does this help? To pursue this line is to ground

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philosophy in a representation of the 'uncreated of creation', precisely the kind of argument that engenders the philosophical idealism Deleuze and Guattari hope to avoid. Besides, to equate philosophy with creation and leave the matter at that would be to neglect the fact that other disciplines, such as science and art, are equally creative. To give substance to the idea that philosophy is the creation of concepts, and thereby meet the charge of idealism, one must look more carefully at what is being created: the concept. For Deleuze and Guattari, every concept is multiple. There is no concept with only one component - the Cartesian 'cogito', for example, involves the concepts of'doubting', 'thinking' and 'being'. Neither is there a concept that has infinite components - even 'so-called universals as ultimate concepts must escape the chaos by circumscribing a universe that explains them'. The concept, therefore, is 'a finite multiplicity', 'defined by the sum of its components', the component parts being other concepts. Why can there not be any singular or universal concepts? For Deleuze and Guattari, such concepts are impossible because every concept has a 'history' and a 'becoming'. Every concept has a history to the extent that it has passed through previous constellations of concepts and been accorded different roles within the same constellation. Every concept has a becoming to the extent that it forms a junction with other concepts within the same or adjacent field of problems. Given this, there can be no singular concepts to the extent that every concept implicates other concepts and no universal concepts to the extent that no one concept could survey all possible concepts. Why does every concept have a history and a becoming? For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not so much that concepts are embroiled within changing 'social and historical contexts', though of course they are, rather it is because every concept has an 'atemporal' and 'acontextual' feature at its core. As well as 'surveying' its conceptual field, every concept inaugurates what Deleuze and Guattari call the 'plane of immanence' of the concept. The plane of immanence is 'neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts'. It is, rather, a preconceptual field presupposed within the concept; 'not in the way that one concept may refer to others but in the way that concepts themselves refer to nonconceptual understanding'. What is this 'nonconceptual understanding'? Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is 'the image thought gives itself of what it means to think'.7 They give the following examples: 'in Descartes [the plane of immanence] is a matter of a subjective understanding implicitly presupposed by the "I think" as first concept; in Plato it

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is the virtual image of an already-thought that doubles every actual concept'. The plane of immanence is inaugurated within the concept (that which is created) and yet it is clearly distinct from the concept (as it is that which expresses the uncreated; that which thought — to put it colloquially — 'just does'). In this sense, there is always an expression of the nonconceptual, internal to, and yet 'outside', the concept. This complex relation is characterized by Deleuze and Guattari as follows: 'concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events'. We may say, for example, that 'the present happens' because there is a 'pastbecoming-future horizon' presupposed by the idea of the present. Without a presupposed limitless expanse of time we could not talk of the present. In the same way, without the presupposed plane of immanence, concepts would never 'happen'. Moreover, as the present would never change without the existence of an 'eternal horizon' presupposed within it, without the institution of the plane — that which thought 'just does' — concepts would never change. The fact that concepts institute this 'unthinkable' plane at their core engenders the movement of concepts; their history and becoming. Two important consequences follow from this discussion. First, the initial claim — that treating philosophy as 'contemplation, reflection or communication' leads philosophers to confuse the concepts they create with the activity of creation — can be redeployed in a more precise way. Having explored the nature of the concept, the problem of 'idealism' is less a matter of confusing concept and creativity than a matter of confusing the concept with the presupposed plane of immanence. In 'idealist' approaches, the prephilosophical plane of immanence is always made immanent to the privileged concept (contemplation, reflection or communication). As such, the privileged concept is considered co-extensive with the plane of immanence, rendering both the concept and the plane transcendental — simply, 'contemplation', 'reflection' and 'communication' are privileged as that which thought 'just does'. Philosophy is contemplation in Plato, for example, because the alreadythought object of contemplation extends across the plane of immanence inaugurated by the concept 'contemplation'. In other words, both the object of contemplation and the activity of contemplation are always already bound together in the transcendent 'Idea of Contemplation'. Philosophy gives rise to transcendence whenever it confuses the concept it creates with the plane of immanence instituted by the concept; or, putting it another way, whenever it confuses the image it creates of what it is to think with thought itself.

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In general, if philosophy treats the plane of immanence as immanent to a concept, then it creates its own 'illusions of transcendence' (in both concept and plane). Deleuze and Guattari summarize their position as follows: 'whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent "to" something a confusion of plane and concept results, so that the concept becomes a transcendent universal and the plane becomes an attribute in the concept'. A second important consequence of the distinction between concept and plane is that it helps us to see why philosophical constructivism does not fall prey to the charge of idealism; or now more correctly, the charge of attributing immanence 'to' something. For constructivism to escape the charge of idealism, the concept 'creation' must be shown to institute a plane that is immanent only to itself. Recalling that the plane of immanence is 'the image that thought gives itself of what it means to think', the question becomes: 'what is the image of thought that treats thought as immanent only to itself?' We already know what thought cannot be according to Deleuze and Guattari: an object for contemplation, a subject of reflection, or an intersubjective act of communication. But what is left? Given their critique of these 'idealist' accounts, thought must be devoid of both subjects and objects. Yet, if there are no subjects or objects in thought, thought must be viewed as an impersonal field of thought. If this is the case, there must also be no boundaries to thought, as boundaries would reinstate the plane as immanent to whatever constituted the boundary. What this suggests is that thought must be viewed as 'pure movement', where movement is taken to be 'infinite movement or movement of the infinite'. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: 'thought constitutes a simple "possibility" of thinking without yet defining a thinker capable of it and able to say "I" '. The 'absolute' plane of immanence, the plane which is immanent only to itself, is the pure movement constitutive of the possibility of thought. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is not 'thought-as-the-unconscious', irrespective of whether or not the unconscious is deemed to be an attribute of persons or an attribute of a structural field, as 'the unconscious' resides firmly within the realm of the conceptual. Nor is this 'thought-as-consciousness'. As already noted, Deleuze and Guattari refute the idea of thought as populated by subjects (or objects), yet even if thought is deemed to be wholly co-extensive with consciousness, this still requires a conception of thought as 'immanent-to-consciousness'. The failure of this (Hegelian) approach, for Deleuze and Guattari, is that it gets things the wrong way round; 'immanence

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is not immanent to consciousness', rather consciousness is immanent to immanence.8 Taking one further example, the plane of immanence is not 'thought-as-reason', irrespective of whether reason is attributed to reflecting subjects or the structural features of linguistic exchange, as reason is a concept as straightforwardly as all the other examples (contemplation, reflection, communication, the unconscious and so on). Moreover, reason could not be the presupposed plane instituted by constructivism as creativity takes on many forms; rational, for sure, but also delirious, dream-like, intuitive, drug-induced and the like. Philosophers do not (always) 'reason concepts into existence', they create concepts and subsequently reason about them. As Nietzsche put it, 'what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an "inspiration", generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event'. In general, argue Deleuze and Guattari, we must accept that all attempts to define thought conceptually, ' thought-as-x', will ultimately fail because all concepts must first be created. Yet, if all concepts are created, then thought itself must be 'conceptless'. The image of thought inaugurated by constructivism, therefore, is one of a 'conceptless plane'. As such, the concept 'creation' is distinct from the 'conceptless' image of thought it institutes. In other words, constructivism is that which maintains the distinction between concept and plane. The confusion of concept and plane, as noted earlier, was the source of 'idealist' approaches to philosophy. Philosophy as the creation of concepts maintains the distinction between concept and plane, and to this extent, may be said to avoid the charge of 'idealism'. Constructivism is that which institutes an image of thought, a plane of immanence, which treats thought as immanent only to itself; that is, thought as an impersonal field of thought. This is equivalent to treating thought as a field of pure movement constitutive of the possibility of thought. For Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, thought is not the object or 'aim' of philosophy, rather, thought is the nonphilosophical of philosophy; the nonphilosophical that is inaugurated within every act of philosophy. We are now in a position to appreciate what Deleuze and Guattari understand by 'good philosophy'. 'Good philosophy', they suggest, is that which is the most philosophical. The most philosophical approach to philosophy, however, is that which institutes the most nonphilosophical plane of

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immanence, that which manages to maintain the distinction between concept and plane.87 Of course, every philosophy confuses the concept and the plane, constructivism included, by virtue of the fact that a 'perfect' or 'ideal' philosophy is literally 'unthinkable' (therefore, Deleuze and Guattari are only too aware that 'the plane of immanence' is, of course, a concept). But 'good' philosophy is that which tries to grasp the plane as immanent only to itself. 'The supreme act of philosophy', they say, is 'not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside - that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought'. 'Good' philosophy is that which, on the one hand, continuously tracks down transcendence wherever it appears and, on the other hand, restores immanence to the nonphilosophical (that which philosophy seeks to conceptualize which is, ultimately, that which thought 'just does'). As it stands, this image of thought as pure movement may be said to 'idealize' the question of being; that is, confuse the 'mental' concept of creation with the 'physical' plane of being. Deleuze and Guattari solve this problem by claiming that 'movement is not the image of thought without being also the substance of being'. There is, then, a 'vitalist ontology' immanent to philosophical constructivism rather than a rejection, in the manner of much postmodern thought, of ontology per se. Without this ontology, Deleuze and Guattari's depiction of philosophy would indeed be a variant of the 'idealist' approaches discussed earlier — the plane of 'being' would be constituted as 'outside' and, correlatively, the plane of immanence as immanent to thought. With a vitalist ontology, an ontology of movement as the substance of being, the charge of idealism could not be more misplaced. In short, idealism is avoided because the concept 'creation' inaugurates an image of thought as pure movement which retains its immanence by virtue of a vitalist ontology of movement as the substance of being. What exactly is the relation between concept and plane? We know that the concept and the plane are intimately connected to each other, and yet wholly distinct. For this to be the case, that which is between the concept and the plane must be 'external' to both. The relation itself, in other words, must be understood on its own terms; it must have its own logic. This idea shows the strong connection Deleuze and Guattari have with a certain kind of empiricism. Deleuze credited Hume with being the first to treat 'the relation' seriously: 'he created the first great logic of relations, showing in it that all

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relations (not only "matters of fact" but also relations among ideas) are external to their terms'. This is not the empiricism so typical of first-year philosophy classes, where it is taught as a theory of 'atomism' or 'individualism'. A 'pluralist' or 'radical' empiricism is a theory of 'associationism' where between 'x and y' is 'and', not an abstract, eternal or universal 'x-ness', 'y-ness' or 'z-ness'. The relation, 'and', is constituted as external to the terms 'x' and 'y'. What constitutes this external relation between concept and plane? In its most general sense, it is 'a point of view'. When a concept is created it institutes a plane of immanence, but since no concept can encompass THE plane of immanence, philosophy always simultaneously invents a 'point of view' which 'brings to life' the concept and the plane. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari characterize this 'point of view' as the 'conceptual persona' of a philosophy. Their choice of phrase is revealing. The 'point of view' is neither a concept nor a plane but that which 'personalizes' the absolutely impersonal plane by circumscribing a relative position on that plane. The conceptual persona, in other words, constitutes the impersonal field as a 'perspective' which then 'activates', or 'insists upon' the creation of concepts. It may be tempting to associate the conceptual persona that brings philosophy to life with the life of the philosopher. For Deleuze and Guattari, though, this would be a mistake; 'the conceptual persona is not the philosopher's representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopher's "heteronyms", and the philosopher's name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.' Once again, the Nietzschean heritage is evident: 'a philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below'. While the conceptual persona, in its most general sense, is a point of view construed as external to both the concept and the plane, we can think of it in more particular ways. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari talk of the conceptual persona as the 'territory' mapped out across the plane within the concept. Such territories may be geographical or national, as when one talks about the perspective 'Italian philosophy' brings to a set of problems; or, they may also be 'normative', 'cultural', 'ideological', 'historical', 'institutional', 'global' and so on. When such territories become 'sedimented' in thought, as in the examples just given, we may talk of the formation of

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philosophical knowledge. Viewing philosophical knowledge in this way gives rise to a greater concern with the 'territory' upon which knowledge stakes a claim — 'how does perspective function to create knowledge?' - instead of the conditions which may 'guarantee' knowledge - 'what kind of knowledge transcends perspective?'.

PHILOSOPHY AS PURE CRITIQUE The aim of reconstructing the basic features of Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy is to show that it provides the resources with which to articulate the idea of pure critique as qualitatively distinct from the ideas of partial criticism and total critique. We can recall that the problem was this: how to articulate an idea of critique that didn't presuppose indifference to certain key critical questions within the act of critique itself. What the analytic of criticism and critique revealed, though, was that this requirement can only be met by subtracting the idea of justification from the idea of critique itself. Specifically, this raised three criteria that have to be met in order for critique to become pure. First, the idea of pure critique must be defined in a way that avoids the partiality created by either assuming a particular conceptual or a more general territorial justificatory framework. Second, there was the added dimension of finding an idea of critique that did not reify the idea of critique itself and thereby create a reservoir for indifference within the critical act. Finally, it was noted that pure critique must not assume a predetermined understanding of what it is to be a critic, an idea that would similarly shelter indifference from the critique itself. Pure critique, in sum, must be constituted in such a way as to avoid unquestioned assumptions about the world (that which is under critical review), the concept (the idea of critique itself), and the 'critical agent' (that which 'carries out' the critique). Recalling these criteria it is possible to see why the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the constructivist nature of philosophy is so central. The idea of philosophy as the creation of concepts which institute a plane of immanence brought to life by the perspective of a conceptual persona provides all the elements that we require in order to meet the challenge of fulfilling the criteria laid out in the analytical discussion of the first section of this chapter. In showing this to be the case, the idea of pure critique can be defined as qualitatively distinct from partial criticism and total critique while also

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presenting it in a form that is amenable to the kind of positive definition that the analytic itself could not provide. Indeed, it is not just that Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism provides the framework for a definition of pure critique, rather their account of philosophy will be shown to be co-extensive with pure critique itself: philosophy as pure critique. It is important to spell out the connections more explicitly. In the first instance we can do this by examining whether or not Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist approach to philosophy meets the general requirement of an idea of critique: that of facing up to the challenge of indifference. Second, we can examine the extent to which their account of philosophy meets the general requirement of pure critique: that of subtracting regimes of justification which harbour indifference. Third, it is important to make the conceptual links between the terminology of philosophical constructivism and the language of pure critique, so as to show their interdependency to be one of mutual presupposition to the point of identity. Last, we shall draw out some of the implications of this identification with a view to setting the scene for the next chapter. To what extent, then, does philosophy as the creation of concepts meet the challenge of indifference? On one level this is an odd question to ask of What is Philosophy?. There is no sustained discussion of indifference, nor even a discussion of difference (a concept that was a long-standing concern of Deleuze's work in particular). That said, it is not an exaggeration to say that the whole of the text is forged out of a diagnosis of the current climate of thought that bears remarkable similarities to Kant's diagnosis of his own time as an epoch of indifference. As Kant recognized that indifference emerged within philosophy as the product of the unreflective use of philosophy in pitting claim against counter claim, so Deleuze and Guattari see that the very core of philosophy, the concept, has become a tool in the service of the communication industries; 'computer science, marketing, design and advertising'. For these authors, separated by two centuries, the problem is the same: that which is proper to philosophical inquiry has been hijacked by rivals. The solution to the problem is to reclaim the heartland of philosophy with the aim of exposing the barrenness of the appropriation of philosophy for the sake of sterile arguments and selling products. In both cases, philosophy as a form of strategy is to be replaced by the idea that philosophy is a form of inquiry that must gain its legitimacy solely on its own terms.

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Of course, this comparison does no more than hint at the real depths of the connection between Kant's critical project and Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy. While this comparison remains external to the real innovations both of the work of Kant and those of Deleuze and Guattari, we can get a better picture of the shared concern with indifference by thinking of it from a more internal perspective. In both projects, the reason why philosophy has been appropriated by its rivals for strategic purposes resides within philosophy's misunderstanding of itself. It is precisely because philosophy has failed to understand itself in a mode proper to philosophy itself that it has created the possibility of its misuse. The indifference to philosophy that characterizes both Kant's epoch and that of Deleuze and Guattari's is the result of indifference residing within philosophy. The real source of indifference, therefore, is to be found in those accounts of philosophy that secure a role for indifference within philosophy itself. For Kant, as noted in Chapter One, this is the result of a failure to interrogate the nature of reason using the court of reason itself. For Deleuze and Guattari, as noted in the preceding section, this is the result of a failure to recognize that concepts are first and foremost creations rather than representations of the uncreated. The substantive distinction between these two responses is obvious enough, but we must not let it obscure the formal similarity to be found at the level of the problems facing philosophy. Nonetheless, for all that this formal similarity speaks of an internal connection between Kant's critical project and the constructivism of Deleuze and Guattari, it does not establish the link in the latter's work between the idea of critique and the overcoming of indifference. What is more, the difficulties involved in making this link seem insurmountable in the face of an almost complete absence of the idea of critique within What is Philosophy?. The task of constructing philosophy (as a constructivism) as pure critique would seem to flounder on this basic lack of a connection between philosophy as the creation of concepts and the project of critique. Even if we grant the formal similarity of the project effacing up to indifference generated by the appropriation of philosophy by its non-philosophical rivals by way of an interrogation of how philosophy generates indifference within itself, this would appear to be only one side of the equation. Two related questions emerge: 'what do we make of the almost complete absence of critique in Deleuze and Guattari's text?' and 'how should we understand the debt or not that Deleuze and Guattari incur in relation to the critical project inaugurated by Kant?'.

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In response to the first of these questions we must note that the 'almost complete absence of the idea of critique' in What is Philosophy? is not a complete absence. There are some infrequent but telling moments when the idea appears, though these moments are not amenable to straightforward interpretation, nor necessarily congruent with each other. The first appearance of an idea of critique is during the discussion in the Introduction regarding philosophy and its contemporary rivals in the communication industries. As already noted, Deleuze and Guattari are pitting their account of philosophy against the 'shameful moment' when 'all the disciplines of communication seized hold of the word concept itself and said "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers" '. They add, 'Philosophy has not remained unaffected by this general movement that replaced Critique with sales promotion.' There is clearly a relation at work here between the idea of philosophy and that of'Critique', a relation suggestive of a lament aimed at reminding the reader of the inherently critical function of philosophy as against the strategic function of philosophy as a tool in the service of contemporary capitalism. That said, it is hardly a relationship that forges a connection between Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism and the Kantian idea of critique as the overcoming of indifference. Indeed, the capitalization of the word 'Critique' presents it as a school, or moment, within philosophy that is not coextensive with philosophy itself. This reading is supported by the fact that the sentence constructs a relation of externality between philosophy and Critique, such that philosophy has been affected by the replacement of Critique with sales promotion, rather than being transformed in itself as a result of this process. Another passing reference to the relationship between philosophy and critique at first sight seems equally unlikely to provide a link between Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism and Kant's critical project. In discussing Kant's relationship to Descartes they say: 'The fact that Kant "criticizes" Descartes means only that he sets up a plane and constructs a problem that could not be occupied or completed by the Cartesian cogito.' It is not the details of this claim that are important; that is, whether or not they are right in their assessment of the relation between Kant and Descartes. Rather, the importance resides in the inroads it gives us to the internal relationship between philosophical constructivism and critique. In particular, it is interesting to note that the quotation marks around 'criticizes' point to two interpretive

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possibilities. First, and surely this is the interpretation that is most in line with the tenor of the text, Deleuze and Guattari are claiming that philosophy is not to be confused with criticism, or critique, at least not as commonly conceived. In particular, the history of philosophy should not be seen as the progression of ideas through critique toward the possibility at least, if not the actuality, of an adequate representation of the world through philosophical investigation. There is, in other words, a challenge to the idea that philosophy is a progressive discipline, where the ideas of one philosopher are incorporated and criticized by the next in line with a general accumulation of philosophical knowledge and refinement of philosophical argumentation.98 This reading would seem to be supported by the following quote from Deleuze in conversation (although this conversation was three years before the publication of What is Philosophy? it is clear that it is the time that he and Guattari were working on producing that text): 'On the question of progress in philosophy, you have to say the sort of thing that Robbe-Grillet says about the novel: there's no point at all doing philosophy the way Plato did, not because we've superseded Plato but because you can't supersede Plato.' However, we must be careful of leaping from this to the claim that Deleuze and Guattari see philosophy as distinct from critique as there is a second interpretation of the initial quote regarding Kant's relationship to Descartes that is already implied within this first reading. Accepting that Kant created concepts that could not be thought within the ambit of Cartesian philosophy, we may say that Kant's relationship to Descartes is not criticism as it is usually understood. We may say that what is being highlighted by the quotation marks around 'criticizes' is an implicit distinction between common conceptions of criticism and a new alternative understanding of what is involved in one philosopher 'criticizing' another. If we remove the 'historicist' and 'progressivist' baggage that comes with the traditional conception of criticism we could plausibly say that Deleuze and Guattari are implying that Kant 'criticizes' Descartes precisely because he constructs a series of conceptual relations that could not be housed within the Cartesian system. On this reading, the activity of criticism properly understood is not that which involves exposing lacunae or inconsistencies, but that which completely surpasses that which is criticized by virtue of building a whole new house of concepts. Indeed, it would make sense at this point to introduce the distinction between criticism and critique that was developed in relation to Kant. We could say that those who merely criticize are the

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philosopher's interpreters and disciples - those who work on the fine-tuning of the philosopher's system - whereas those who critique a philosopher's work are themselves true philosophers by Deleuze and Guattari's definition; that is, they are creators of concepts. It would make sense to say, therefore, that Kant does not merely 'criticize' Descartes, while maintaining that he does nonetheless construct a profound critique of Cartesianism. This is clearly a reading against the grain of this particular moment in the text, but it is nonetheless supported by two other mentions of criticism in the text. First, and during an invective against philosophy as 'discussion', Deleuze and Guattari say that: To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy.: Second, and at the end of their discussion of conceptual personae, Deleuze and Guattari claim that: Criticism implies new concepts (of the thing criticized) just as much as the most positive creation . . . Nothing positive is done, nothing at all, in the domains of either criticism or history, when we are content to brandish ready-made old concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation, without seeing that the ancient philosophers from whom we borrow them were already doing what we would like to prevent modern philosophers from doing: they were creating their concepts, and they were not happy just to clean and scrape bones like the critic and historian of our time. 101 In both cases, there is, at the very least, an implicit distinction between criticism as the uncreative practice of refining and defending a philosopher's claims and philosophy as the practice of creating new concepts, where this account of philosophy becomes commensurate with the notion of critique, as the attempt to overcome indifference to assumptions within that which is being criticized by creating new concepts (which inaugurate a plane of immanence by 'calling forth' conceptual personae). While the criticism/critique

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distinction is not explicitly formulated in their work, it is nonetheless operative. Indeed, the explicit formulation of that which resides implicitly within a philosophical project is precisely what Deleuze refers to when talking of how to do philosophy as the creation of concepts in regard to doing the history of philosophy: 'The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn't say but is nonetheless present in what he did say.' In this case, there is an idea of critique as the creation of concepts implicit in the apparently tangential remarks on criticism throughout the text; an idea of critique, that is, which is manifestly different from the idea of criticism and which can be said, therefore, to be an idea of critique aimed at overcoming the indifference that would result from mere criticism of a philosopher's conceptual system from a position assuming that system as a shared point of reference. Before moving on to the second question in regard to formulating Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy as in keeping with the tenor of the idea of critique developed through Kant and the analytic in the first section of this chapter, the parenthetical remark in the first sentence of the last quote cannot go unremarked. It is clearly misleading of Deleuze and Guattari to suggest that philosophy creates different concepts that refer to the same thing, given that their constructivism explicitly rules out such straightforward representationalism. It would be more correct, from a constructivist perspective, to say that philosophy posits that which it criticizes by way of'the most positive creation'; that is, the criticized must be constructed in the construction of the critique if it is to avoid becoming a site of indifference and if critique is to become pure. Without such a view, a view of the rhizomatic connection of philosophy to the world and vice-versa,103 philosophical constructivism would become thoroughly idealist by virtue of its representational assumption. As we shall also see in later sections, Deleuze and Guattari do not always maintain a consistently constructivist language, a consistent language of pure critique, such that some of their formulations imply the very indifference that constructivism can be said to overcome. All of which may be said to be stretching the interpretation too far when we may get more interpretive mileage out of assuming that Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy is resolutely a-critical; that is, resolutely unconcerned with developing a relation of immanence between critique and philosophy in order to overcome indifference within philosophy and misappropriations of philosophy in other walks of life. As noted in the

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Introduction, there is much in Deleuze and Guattari's work that would suggest reading it as concerned with pre-critical sources: a strong ontological orientation coupled with a complete lack of embarrassment in regard to questions of metaphysics (which amounts to the same thing). This line has been developed most persuasively by a contemporary of Deleuze and Guattari's, Alain Badiou, in his book Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. It is worth turning to a brief examination of the main theme of Badiou's reading so as to answer the second question raised above: 'how should we understand the debt or not that Deleuze and Guattari incur in relation to the critical project inaugurated by Kant?' Badiou's book is one of the most interesting recent developments in Deleuze scholarship. Without doubt it is a timely reminder of the need to untie Deleuze's philosophical project from the rather dense theoretical knots associated with what we may loosely call postmodern philosophy. Central to this task is a reinvigoration of the ontological commitment at the heart of Deleuze's work in place of an unthinking submersion of this commitment under a sea of slogans about 'philosophy without foundations', 'the end of philosophical grand narratives' or even 'the end of philosophy itself. Instead of Deleuze the deterritorializer of desire, Badiou presents Deleuze the philosopher of 'a renewed concept of the one' and, at this level, one can hardly refute the importance of his analysis. What is more problematic, however, is Badiou's rendering of Deleuze's ontological commitment as an 'involuntary Platonism'. Badiou's investigation of the central concepts that make up the Deleuzean universe is steered by his conviction that, despite Deleuze's efforts to 'overcome Platonism', he remained an anti-Platonist - trapped, therefore, in the Platonic world searching for the one idea of Being that would serve to express all of the modalities of Being. While the details of Badiou's critique offer a revealing, subtle and nuanced picture of Deleuzean philosophy — and, therefore, demand the kind of rejoinder that it is simply not possible to give at this juncture - I would like to comment on the general tenor of Badiou's interpretation with a view to elucidating the idea that Deleuze (and Guattari) can be read firmly within a post-Kantian domain, where post-Kantian means accepting the problem of the relationship between critique and indifference bequeathed by Kant. The emphasis that Badiou gives to Deleuze's approach to Plato gives the misleading impression that Deleuze and Guattari were pre-critical

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philosophers, by which I mean that Deleuze and Guattari are presented in a manner which ignores the Kantian revolution in critical philosophy. This impression of Badiou's interpretation is bolstered by the very few and scattered remarks throughout the book which distance Deleuze's work from Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy. Of course, the omission of Kantian themes is justified by Badiou from no less a source than Deleuze himself: Badiou mentions that during their correspondence 'the epithet "neoKantian" was the crushing accusation that Deleuze most often tried to pin on me'. With this in mind, it would seem entirely legitimate to make statements of the kind we find earlier in the text: 'Deleuze's philosophy is in no way a critical philosophy' and 'we can state that Deleuze's philosophy, like my own ... is resolutely classical', where 'classicism' is defined as 'any philosophy that does not submit to the critical injunctions of Kant'.1 While it would be interpretive violence of the highest order to argue that Deleuze was substantively Kantian or neo-Kantian, this should not blind us to the post-Kantian nature of his philosophical project. It is in this sense that Nietzsche, for Deleuze, is the post-Kantian par excellence: 'Nietzsche's relation to Kant is like Marx's to Hegel: Nietzsche stands critique on its feet'; 'Nietzsche ... thinks that he has found the only possible principle of total critique in what he calls his "perspectivism" '; and finally, 'philosophy is at its most active as critique'.1 Without rehearsing the arguments of Nietzsche and Philosophy, and without dragging the discussion into an unsustainable trade in quotes from this or other works, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Deleuze on his own and with Guattari did indeed view his and their philosophical project in the light of a general post-Kantian critical milieu; while maintaining, nonetheless, a critical distance from Kant on so many levels. To dismiss or downplay the critical dimension of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari is to virtually eradicate the idea that their work constitutes a critical intervention in the world. Situating their work within the terrain of critical philosophy serves to remind us of this dimension, a reminder that situates the 'renewed concept of the one' within the critical analysis of contemporary global capitalism and its myriad cultural formations expressed throughout Deleuze and Guattari's writings (both their individual and their collective works). How close are we to showing that Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy can be said to constitute a project that recognizes the problem of indifference and internalizes that problem in the account of

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philosophy that it inaugurates? It is clear that the evidence in support of a direct link between the Kantian problematic and their constructivism is largely circumstantial. This should not surprise us, of course, as the presence of any more direct forms of evidence would inevitably implicate Deleuze and Guattari in the problems that beset Kant's idea of critique. The task, after all, is to construct rather than merely reiterate a sense of connection between the critical philosophy of Kant and the constructivist account of philosophy in Deleuze and Guattari. Nonetheless, it should be clear that the grounds exist for continuing to develop the idea of philosophy as pure critique. The next step is to turn to the second of the basic questions that need to be addressed within this section: to what extent does the constructivist account of philosophy meet the general requirement of pure critique — that of subtracting regimes of justification which harbour indifference? In this regard, the project of What is Philosophy? seems to meet the requirement of pure critique rather straightforwardly. It was noted above that for critique to become pure it must not be a tool in the service of justification, as that which justified critique would always stand above critique itself such that the justificatory dimension would be beyond the reach of critique and, therefore, it would serve to harbour indifference. In their constructivist account of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari are equally concerned, though they never put it like this, with delimiting a pure conception of philosophy. A pure conception of philosophy is one which does not posit an extraneous element that conditions philosophical activity as such, one that would stand beyond the reach of philosophical inquiry itself. This is a perfectly adequate way of expressing their critique of idealism in philosophy; the critique of philosophies that posit an uncreated moment of contemplation, reflection or communication 'outside' philosophy itself. Philosophy as the creation of concepts expresses no such extraneous element and as such does not require justification by appeal to anything outside of itself. That said, we must take care when handling this movement beyond justification, both to avoid confusion and to clarify what is at stake in the relationship between pure philosophy (and pure critique) and questions of justification. The confusion could emerge with regard to the role of the nonphilosophical in Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism. It was noted above that the plane of immanence inaugurated by a concept constitutes the nonphilosophical within philosophy; the image that thought gives itself of what it means to think. Is it not the case that this nonphilosophical dimension

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constitutes a domain of justification within constructivism? On the contrary, the plane of immanence is that which emerges from within the creation of concepts, rather than that which precedes and predetermines that creativity itself. Plainly, philosophy itself is not justified by reference to it coming into an accord with that which thought 'just does' in reality. The plane of immanence inaugurated by the creation of concepts cannot be justified against the reality of thought because concept creation is constitutive of the different activities of thought itself. That thought is capable of contemplation, reflection and communication is not in doubt. What Deleuze and Guattari dispute, in their search for a philosophical understanding of philosophy itself, is that these modes of thought are preconceptual and therefore prephilosophical. Moreover, and as noted above, the idea of creation itself as that which thought just does is only sustainable on account of inaugurating a plane of immanence which is conceptless; that is, a plane of immanence in which the idea that the 'reality of thought is creativity' is itself ruled out. As we shall see in the next chapter when faced with the problem of creators and the need to address the problem of mediators, this pushes philosophical constructivism as pure critique to a thoroughly radicalized understanding of the critic. If pure philosophical constructivism has no place for justificatory regimes that serve to legitimate philosophy itself, this does not mean that justification has no place within philosophy. The justificatory question should not be, 'how do we justify philosophy?' but 'how is justification deployed within philosophy?' Clearly, justification is intimately connected to the activity of judgement and judgement is an important feature of philosophical discourse. But judgement only ever occurs within philosophy after concepts have been created which facilitate the judgement. That Kant passed judgement on Descartes' philosophical endeavours is not in dispute, for example, but it should be equally beyond dispute that such judgements could only be formulated on account of conceptual innovations which inaugurated an image of what it means to think that transformed the Cartesian image of thought. Judgements and their justifications are only a part of philosophical discourse, they do not define philosophy in its purity. So far, then, we have established that Deleuze and Guattari's project in What is Philosophy? can be read as commensurate with the Kantian idea of critique as the overcoming of indifference within philosophy and that their account of philosophy meets the general requirement of pure critique as that mode of critique that severs the link with regimes of justification. The next

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step is to bring the terminology of pure critique and Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism into line with a view to establishing the identity between philosophy and pure critique; to establish, in other words, philosophy as pure critique. Pure critique is a constructivism. The criticized, the critic and the idea of critique itself must all be constructed within the critique if it is to fulfil the criteria of overcoming indifference such that it becomes pure. The pure critique of indifference is the construction of difference in this expanded sense. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy, we can say that critique without partiality must be creative. Generally speaking, it is only in the creation of an alternative to that which is being criticized that the territorial relationships that render critics complicit in that which they criticize are avoided. From the perspective of the concept, if one wants to be a pure critic of democracy, then the task is to construct a conceptual alternative to democracy rather than an alternative concept of democracy. One could say that Marx's construction of communism functioned in this way: the idea of democracy was criticized by first constructing the alternative of communism such that the question of communism's democratic credentials becomes moot. Equally, though, it is clear that discussions of communism often amount to claiming that communism is the true version or telos of democracy, such that the conceptual alternative may still be said to reside on the same general democratic and normative terrain. This reminds us that the pure critique of democracy must be explicit about the creation of a new terrain of inquiry as well as the creation of a new concept on the same terrain as that which is being criticized. But drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's account of philosophy we can see that each creation of a new concept already presupposes the inauguration of a plane immanent to the concept. In this way we may distinguish the democratic appropriation of the communist alternative, for example, from the plane immanent to communism itself. One might say, to continue the example, that the terrain of rights and duties has been transformed into a terrain defined by production and questions of human alienation. The problem is that philosophy often stops at the level of the concept and the plane. In seeking to map out new territories for thought, philosophers often cease the activity of critique by assuming that their own particular

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account of the plane immanent to the concept is adequate to THE plane of immanence itself. If we follow Deleuze and Guattari in saying that the plane instituted by the concept one constructs as a critical alternative cannot coincide with THE plane of immanence, that which is immanent only to itself, then pure critique must take the role of the conceptual persona seriously. Recalling that the conceptual persona is that which resides between concept and plane, it is precisely this idea of perspective or territory that serves to problematize the relationship between one's conceptual innovations and that which is assumed by such innovations. This is truly the point at which the constructivist account of philosophy becomes pure critique because it problematizes its own conditionality. Maintaining the distance between concept and plane by viewing the critique itself as a territory of that which is immanent only to itself means that the creation of alternatives does not surreptitiously reintroduce assumptions shared with that which is being critiqued. The territorial relationships that mark out the nature of partial and total criticism are avoided through the activity of staking out a territory immanent to the concept and the plane that is created: this is not a different territory on a plane shared by that which is criticized but a territory specific to the new plane inaugurated by the conceptual alternative one has created. Philosophy as pure critique is the construction of alternatives in this full sense: creating concepts which stake out a plane immanent to the concept that is irreducible to the concept one has created by virtue of a perspectival relationship between concept and plane. Critique becomes pure, in other words, by not assuming as given the concept of critique that one is deploying, the 'world' that one is criticizing, and 'the critic' that constructs the concepts in the first place. Clarification of this identification of Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy with the idea of pure critique is certainly required. The main aim of the next chapter is to face head-on certain problems that emerge from within this moment of identification. In preparation for this discussion, however, it is useful to address some prima facie objections to this idea of philosophy as pure critique, objections that all circle around the lingering suspicion that identifying philosophy as pure critique in this way does not adequately account for the nature of critical activity outside the academies. So first of all we need to face this objection in its generality: namely, that the idea of philosophy as pure critique may be all very well for philosophers thinking about how they criticize each other, but it does little to

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account for the activity of criticism in the world. The ethereal nature of academic philosophy may sanction conceptual innovation for its own sake, but criticism of forces within the world rather than of other philosophers surely demands more than the creation of conceptual alternatives; in particular it would seem to require that we first and foremost challenge that which oppresses us. This demand is cached out as the idea that critique is always a process of determination and of negation before it is a process of construction. The assumption is that the critic must first determine that which exists, then negate its existence through criticism and only then engage in the production of an alternative to that which has been critiqued: 'Know your enemy! Resist your enemy! Create a society of friends!' From the perspective of pure critique, however, the first two steps of this process make the third impossible; at least they make it impossible if one is conceiving of the 'new society of friends' as something radically different from that which one is criticizing. In determining and negating (we may bring the two elements together under the idea of'resisting'), the critic has already become implicated in the assumptions of the criticized, such that the critic will always remain indifferent to elements within the criticized that the critic hoped to critique. These elements beyond the reach of critique will always infect the creative process with the diseases of the 'old society'. As regards pure critique, the more apt slogan is simply, 'Create!' To resist is to be against something, to be against something is to assume that 'thing' as given, to assume some 'thing' as given within the act of critique is to harbour indifference within the critique and, therefore, to secure the impurity of one's critique in a way that will always sustain the possibility of a justified critique of one's own critique. The result is a critical impasse rather than a revolutionary creation of the new society. A true revolution is only possible on the basis of a critique that prioritizes creation over resistance, on the basis of pure critique. Simply stating the difference in approach between critique-as-resistance and critique-as-creation, however, will hardly suffice to rid pure critique of the image that it is a form of critical game played by philosophers amongst themselves. What is required in order for pure critique to eschew any reliance on determinate negation as its modus operandi is a development of the positive features of critical practice that pure critique brings forth. The test is to show how a rejection of determinate negation as the core of critique does not mean that pure critique is condemned to a form of indeterminate critique. Although there will be more to say on this in the next chapter, we can begin

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by examining the implications of pure critique in three ways (broadly corresponding to the nature of pure critique vis-a-vis the concept, the plane and the persona). First, pure critique is not a form of academic quietism. Second, pure critique is always practically oriented. Third, pure critique is always 'brought to life' by a. pragmatic assessment of the present milieu. After expanding upon each of these features, the next chapter will dwell in more detail on some problems associated with each of these clarifications, after an initial response to the problematic relationship between ideas and concepts at the very heart of the idea of pure critique. The first clarification draws directly upon the previous discussion. One of the claims derived from constructivism is that it is not possible to be genuinely critical of a particular concept (or set of concepts) unless one first creates a concept (or set of concepts) as an alternative. Critique is primarily a creative act. Interesting and challenging critique, Habermas's version of critical theory for example, always arises from the creation of a new terrain of thought. In itself this is hardly something that Habermas, or other conceptual innovators, would deny or worry about. The more challenging claim is that one can transform critique mtopure critique by fully articulating the ramifications of the constructivism that underpins one's own conceptual innovation. Recalling the arguments discussed above, this demands that one must keep the concept, the plane of immanence and the conceptual persona as distanced and distinct as possible. Taking the previous example, the problem with Habermas's critical theory, from a constructivist perspective, is that it blurs the critical concepts it creates (say, discourse ethics) with the plane of immanence it institutes (the lifeworld of undistorted communicative encounters) because the conceptual persona that 'brings it to life' embodies the properties of both (the perspective of the rational and moral interlocutor is thereby privileged over other perspectives). As a result, Habermas's idea of criticism does not avoid transcendentalism to the extent that it confuses the perspective it brings to thought with that which thought 'just does'. Following Deleuze and Guattari, critique is always creative but pure critique is always constructivist; that is, it maintains a position of immanence by recognizing the constructedness of its own perspective. As noted, a legitimate response to this picture of pure critique is that it seems to reduce critique to the academic activity of 'out-creating' one's theoretical rivals, rather than giving it a role in actually calling to account 'realworld' institutions and norms. Using Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist

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account of philosophy as the embodiment of pure critique may appear to have side-lined the rhizomatic engagement of their earlier texts for a philosophy that seeks a role independent from the world in which it operates.l1 If this is the case, then the idea of pure critique inspired by constructivism would seem to be emasculated by a lack of practical bite. Such criticisms, while understandable in view of Deleuze and Guattari's complex reworking of the philosophical tradition, do not stand up to much scrutiny. The whole thrust of What is Philosophy? is the critique of those who seek to halt the creation of concepts in all walks of life. For example, constructivism is readily equipped with the necessary conceptual armoury to critique a fascist way of life. The fascist is clearly a practitioner of a singularly 'bad' kind of political philosophy - because fascism endows certain conceptions of race, nationality and so on with a highly transcendental quality - and can be coherently undermined as a mode of philosophical idealism using the tools of philosophy as pure critique. Less dramatically, pure critique is equally equipped with the means to critique homophobia, sexism, ageism, commercialism and many other 'pathologies of modernity', on the same grounds. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari save some of their bitterest attacks for the ways in which concepts have been harnessed to the service of sales promotion: 'an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism'. In short, wherever and whenever concepts are used in 'the social and political world' (though this phrase itself is not beyond scrutiny, as we shall see) there is the possibility of a constructivist intervention, of a pure critique. Far from creating a hierarchical role for 'academic' critics, pure critique does not distinguish between the use of concepts in an 'academic' context and the use of concepts in an 'everyday' social context. There is nothing to stop the purveyor of pure critique from pronouncing on the use of concepts in all realms of life and urging upon people the 'good' use of concepts. There is no link, in other words, between pure critique and quietism. This idea can be expressed in a slightly different form. The practical nature of pure critique is not only about 'professional' philosophers pronouncing upon the conceptual matters of everyday life. In attempting to salvage philosophy from the ravages of modern capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari are not defending academic 'ivory towers' as the only haven of critical thought. Quite the reverse, they are defending 'good' philosophy (as that which engages in the creation of concepts and which maintains their created

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status) wherever it appears. Such conceptual innovation, they recognize, is often stultified by the disciplinary constraints imposed by the academy. As they put it in the Introduction to What is Philosophy?, 'the philosopher is the concept's friend' whether she is in the academy or not. This implies a 'levelling' of philosophy where everybody who constructs concepts is a philosopher and, therefore, may also be a 'good' philosopher: 'so long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is called something else'. An example of a 'good' philosopher in a non-academic context would be the nomads who, in refusing the sedentary thought of the state, create new ways of living, new concepts. Equally though, the nomadic lifestyle itself may become sedimented into a regime of thought that could be just as stultifying as the state-thought it sought initially to oppose, but which it now resembles (the injunction, 'We must all be nomads!' is an example of state-thought to the extent that it circumscribes the creation of concepts). For Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, one must always approach concept creation pragmatically, not dogmatically. Pure critique is always aware of its context and always ready to be on the move. This leads on to the third clarification of pure critique, namely that it involves a pragmatic approach to the present. Given that pure critique recognizes its own perspectival character, it must always be aware of the perspective-dependent nature of the forms of critical knowledge it generates and must,, therefore, use as its 'starting point' its embeddedness within a given perspective. We can explore what this entails vis-a-vis the normative dimension of social criticism through a pure critique of the debates surrounding 'the right and the good'. From the perspective of pure critique, the neo-Kantian concern with the priority of the right over the good emerges from a legitimate suspicion of traditional moral ontologies. Both the pure critic and the neo-Kantian can agree that there are very real dangers in affirming conceptions of the good over the right - in particular, the danger that marginal groups in society will be (at least) under-represented, or (at worst) actively excluded. To favour any particular 'comprehensive doctrine' - no matter how thin - is indeed an untenable position in light of the 'reasonable differences' over the legitimacy of such doctrines that characterize modern societies. However, pure critique retains a strong sense of sympathy with the communitarian critique of neoKantianism. The idea that neo-Kantianism invokes an impoverished sense of

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what it means to be a human agent; the idea that neo-Kantianism does not address the 'background understandings' that generate moral decisions; the idea that neo-Kantianism has insufficiently interrogated 'the good'; all of these must strike the pure critic as serious problems for neo-Kantianism. Pure critics and communitarians alike remain unconvinced that neo-Kantianism can realize the task it sets itself - the rational justification of moral norms that do not give priority to one particular version of the 'good-life'. Where neo-Kantianism accuses the communitarians of being wedded to oldfashioned ontologies and untenable teleologies, the communitarians accuse the neo-Kantians of surreptitiously advocating 'a comprehensive doctrine' of their own (without admitting it). From the perspective of pure critique it is possible to agree with both, though on grounds that neither would accept. As argued above, the pure critic is not suspicious of ontology tout court, though she is suspicious of the kind of troubling moral ontologies found in many communitarian accounts; Taylor's realist meta-ethics, for example, imbues the plane of immanence with a moral dimension that circumscribes the plane as immanent to conceptions of 'the good'. Nor is pure critique suspicious of practical reason tout court. In the neo-Kantian affirmation of a 'critical society' that actively encourages difference to flourish, there is a 'critical ethic' that is very dear to pure critique. However, as Hardt has put it, 'the principal fault of the Kantian critique is that of transcendental philosophy itself... Kant's discovery of a domain beyond the sensible is the creation of a region outside the bounds of the critique that effectively functions as a refuge against critical forces, as a limitation on critical powers.' For the pure critic, it is not a matter of prioritizing either the right or the good in all cases, rather it is a matter of prioritizing that which will allow critique, that is, creative activity, to flourish. In any particular case this may require prioritizing either the right or the good, but in general it is a matter of conviction for the constructivist that it would be impossible to cover all possible cases with either approach (given the perspectival nature of philosophical knowledge). There is no problem for the pure critic in pragmatically supporting the cause of practical reason in, say, a community where the dominance of one particular world-view is stultifying creative thought. Nor is there any problem for the pure critic in pragmatically supporting the cause of deeply embedded social goods where these are being quashed by the demands of political correctness. Pure critique is neither for the right nor for the good, but is aware of how the right and the good may be mobilized in any

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particular situation in the service of creative alternatives to dominant modes of thought. Equally, therefore, the pure critic is aware that talking in terms of the right and the good may itself suppress the potential for creative thought. If this is the case, then the pure critic will look elsewhere for an opening that will allow critique to develop. Indeed, if we accept Deleuze and Guattari's account of the disempowering pervasiveness of normative discourses in modern Western societies, then we would expect to have to look elsewhere. Contrary to the picture painted by Land, however, the pragmatic use of normative discourses may well be the most effective way of initiating a critical environment. In short, the pure critic is neither a neo-Kantian nor a communitarian (though she may occasionally have the same objective as one or other or both) but is first and foremost a conceptual innovator who pragmatically pursues her innovations to see what potential they have (in the language of^l Thousand Plateaus, the nomad philosopher follows the 'lines of flight' and charts the dangers along these lines). Pure critique is the toolbox out of which any number of useful conceptual tools (some well known, others not) may emerge to enable a critical perspective on the present milieu. As Foucault found out in his genealogies, changing one's topic of inquiry required changing theoretical tools to enable a critical perspective to emerge. Above all, while the constructivist is unflinching when it comes to defining what counts as critique, she is thoroughly pragmatic when it comes to defining that which engenders the possibility of pure critique. Is it not this pragmatism, this intellectual rummaging through the bags of others, that leads to the charge of normative confusion? If we take normative confusion to be the surreptitious use of norms whilst claiming a nonnormative approach, then this criticism is misplaced. Having clarified the nature of pure critique we can now see that the charge of normative confusion itself confuses different analytical levels within the idea of pure critique. The conceptual relationship between critique and creativity is based on a series of ontological presuppositions regarding the nature of thought (as discussed above) and entails a non-normative account of what it means to engage in critique. At this level, the level of what the concept 'pure critique' institutes as a plane of immanence (that which critical thought 'just does'), there is no concession to a normative approach. It is imperative, therefore, that conceptual innovation is not thought of as a 'good' in itself. Constructivism asserts that all pure critique is first and foremost creative and this has no bearing on whether or not that which is created is 'a good thing'.

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PHILOSOPHY

AS PURE CRITIQUE

Evaluation, as the act of judging novel concepts or ways of life against a preestablished moral framework, is not an act of critique. If by normative confusion we mean the use of different critical tools, including normative ones, in different situations then the criticism is appropriate but hardly damaging. For the constructivist, it is wholly appropriate to be 'confused' on this level given that the ontological account of pure critique implies a perspectival and therefore pragmatic practice of critique (given the impossibility of creating an idea of critique that is wholly co-extensive with the plane that it institutes). The practical engagement of the pure critic, therefore, consists in both an analysis of the present milieu and, on the basis of this analysis, a pragmatic appropriation of the means by which thought may become creative within that milieu. Such practical engagement is distinct from the ontological status of pure critique in a manner directly analogous to the distinction between the concept-plane conjunction and the conceptual persona; the logic of practice must be understood on its own terms. For the pure critic, therefore, the confusion arises when one perspective, the normative, is posited as the representative of a multitude of critical possibilities. Pure critique is immanent, practical and pragmatic. It has a wide remit, a horizontalizing analytical thrust, yet no normative imperative which says, 'we ought to strive towards a radically horizontal society' (whatever that could mean, other than a complete dissolution of the social). If the pure critic were found to be proselytizing in favour of this or any other moral imperative, then she certainly would be in a state of conceptual and normative confusion. However, there is nothing inherent in the idea of pure critique that entails this position.

CONCLUSION The previous chapter established that Kant failed to eliminate indifference from within his critical philosophy and thereby failed the test of critique that he had set himself. This provided the bare bones of the idea of pure critique: an idea of critique that is adequate to itself. In other words, pure critique is an idea of critique that does not reinstate indifference within itself. The opening section of the chapter developed this point from the perspective of a general analytic of criticism and critique. The upshot of this discussion was that pure critique to be adequate to the idea of critique and to oust all residues of indifference from within itself must be a mode of critique that

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does not subordinate itself to regimes of justification. In particular, critique becomes pure by not justifying itself against predetermined conceptions of the criticized, the nature of critique and the critic. This raised the stakes of the discussion by virtue of calling forth a conception of philosophy itself that could articulate the relationship between 'world', 'concept' and 'philosopher' without presupposing any of these as given. The constructivist account of philosophy outlined by Deleuze and Guattari was shown to be just such an account of philosophy. In the third section, the links between the idea of pure critique and philosophical constructivism were established (as firmly as possible, given the obvious dissonances between the Kantian and the DeleuzoGuattarian projects) with a view to fleshing out the negative features of pure critique identified in Chapter One and the first section of this chapter. To this end, pure critique can be said to be identical with philosophy (as the creation of concepts). The closing discussions took on board the possibility that identifying philosophy as pure critique in this way could be said to constitute a very academic, ivory tower definition of the activity of critique. In response, however, it was shown that such a view of philosophy as pure critique rests on a number of misconceptions regarding the idea of philosophy as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. Once these misconceptions are dealt with, pure critique can be shown to avoid academic quietism, to be practically oriented and pragmatically grounded in the present. That said, there are a number of key assumptions at work that need to be brought to the surface if the idea itself is to become a worthy response to the test set by Kant. The next chapter addresses these assumptions by formulating problems that demand clarification of the idea of pure critique.

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CHAPTER THREE

Four Problems with Pure Critique INTRODUCTION It might seem odd to structure a chapter aimed at clarifying the idea of pure critique around the notion of problems. This strategy has a number of different purposes, though, that warrant the approach. First, highlighting certain problems is a useful way of making the assumptions guiding the idea of pure critique accessible. Second, by responding to problems one can anticipate some of the critical remarks that are likely to flow from an engagement with the idea of pure critique. Third, and most importantly, the idea of pure critique is inherently problematic and it is important to show how this is a necessary constitutive dimension, rather than a disabling feature of the idea itself. It is this superficially paradoxical claim that will be the point of departure by way of an examination of the potential difficulties involved in using the term 'idea' in relation to pure critique.

PROBLEM ONE: THE PROBLEM WITH IDEAS As an idea, pure critique is essentially problematic. It is essentially problematic, however, because it is an idea. Ideas and problems are co-extensive: the idea of pure critique is co-extensive with the problem of forming an idea of critique adequate to the task of being equal to the critique becoming within itself. There are two different senses in which the idea of pure critique is potentially problematic. In fact, these two different senses are intimately related: but it is as well to begin by separating them out for the sake of clarity. First, by using Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist account of philosophy as the means by which a positive definition of pure critique was achieved, there may be said to be an elision at work between their use of 'the concept' and the phrase which provides the title and guiding thread of this book, namely the idea of pure

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critique. Is there a worrying obfuscation between these two terms that hides a more fundamental problem? Second, we may say that the more fundamental problem that this interpretive slippage hides is as follows: in talking of the idea of pure critique as an idea of critique worthy of the idea itself there may seem to be an attempt to fix the notion of pure critique in a hard and fast manner in a way that the more cautious notion of 'philosophy as the creation of concepts' does not. By talking of the idea, are we surreptitiously evading the constructed nature of the concept of pure critique itself, positing it as uncreated in a way that would violate the general requirement of pure critique; namely, that it precisely avoids argumentative regimes that rely on an uncreated dimension to justify the manoeuvres being made? Surely the point of Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism is precisely not to define philosophy as the realm of ideas, where ideas may be said to have residues of the Platonic Idea as an object to be contemplated beyond the heterogeneity of the actual world? Does it make sense to talk of an idea of pure critique when the very notion of idea itself may be said to harbour certain given assumptions about the nature of critique (and philosophy in general), assumptions that would become the safe-haven for indifference and thereby violate the project of critique? Minimally, the first of these problems is a problem of interpretation. As such, it is important to specify the legitimacy of using the notion of idea in a Deleuzo-Guattarian context and then to specify the use that is being made of the notion 'idea' in the context of the development of pure critique. As regards the legitimate deployment of this term within a constructivist context, the response to the problem is rather straightforward. Indeed, it follows the same lines as the discussion of 'purity' in the Preface. There is nothing inherently anti-Deleuzo-Gauttarian in using the terminology of ideas; to think this would be to ignore the productive use the notion of idea has in their work, in a variety of different contexts. One example from Deleuze should suffice to make the general point. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze engages in a discussion of difference that 'demands its own Idea' in contrast to those philosophers of difference - he mentions in this text Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel - who are content to think of difference 'as already mediated by a representation'. What is crucial, of course, is that Deleuze does not merely assume a certain notion of idea: rather, he uses the terminology of Ideas to specify exactly what an idea of difference requires, thereby differentiating an idea of difference from other notions of the Idea (say, Platonic and dialectical). To some extent, in the English translation, this distinction