Deleuze’s Concept of the Virtual and the Critique of the Possible

Abstract

In this paper, I would simply like to sketch out what I take to be the component elements of Deleuze's concept of the virtual. (1) My thesis is this: Deleuze's philosophy can accurately be described as a transcendental philosophy--a transcendental empiricism, as he himself puts it--although Deleuze defines the transcendental field in a completely different manner than does Kant, who invented the term. Kant's genius, according to Deleuze, was to have conceived of a purely immanent critique of reason, a critique that did not seek, within reason, "errors" produced by external causes, but rather "illusions" that arise internally and inevitably from within reason itself by the illegitimate (that is, transcendent) uses of the syntheses. (2) Insofar as Deleuze conceives of philosophy as the construction of a plane of immanence, he aligns himself squarely with Kant's critical philosophy. (3) But he also criticizes Kant for having failed to fulfill the immanent ambitions of his critique, for reasons that we shall see in a moment. The difference does not lie simply in the fact that Deleuze purges the transcendental of any reference to consciousness or to a transcendental subject. The more important difference lies precisely in the distinction he makes between the possible and the virtual. For Deleuze, the transcendental does not serve to define the "conditions of possible experience" for a subject; on the contrary, it is a virtual field that serves as the genetic or productive condition of real experience, and that exists prior to the constitution of the subject. In what follows, I would like to draw out this difference between the possible and the virtual (as two conceptions of the transcendental) from the point of view of the history of philosophy: first, by examining two figures who seem to have influenced Deleuze most in this regard--Henri Bergson and Salomon Maimon; second, by examining the reading of Kant that Deleuze provides in Difference and Repetition; and finally, by briefly examining, as examples, Deleuze's analysis of three virtual structures, namely those of language, society, and the body. 1. Bergson's Problematization of the Possible. I turn first to Bergson. Deleuze derives the concept of the virtual directly from Bergson, and in a number of early articles (1956) he argues that Bergson forged the concept of the virtual by problematizing the notion of the possible. More precisely, the virtual is by nature problematizing; it expresses a problematic. What does he mean by this? The activity of thought is frequently conceived of as the search for solutions to problems, a prejudice whose roots, Deleuze suggests, are both social and pedagogical. In the classroom, it is the school teacher who poses ready-made problems, the pupil's task being to discover the correct solution, and what the notions of "true" and "false" serve to qualify are precisely these responses or solutions. Yet everyone recognizes that problems are never given ready-made but must themselves be constructed or constituted--hence the scandal when a "false" or badly-formulated problem is set in an examination. This is not to imply that solutions are unimportant; on the contrary, it is the solution that counts, but, as Deleuze says at several points through his work, a problem always has the solution it merits in terms of the way in which it is stated, and the means and terms we have at our disposal for stating it, i.e., in terms of the conditions under which it is determined as a problem. To "problematize" a concept thus does not only mean that one places it in question; it means that one seeks to determine the nature of the problem to which it serves as a solution. This is why the process of problematization is so complex. "While it is relatively easy to define the true and the false in relation to solutions whose problems are already stated," writes Deleuze, "it is much more difficult to say what the true and false consist of when they are applied directly to problems themselves. …