The commanding theoretical intervention of Rationalist Empiricism is to have demonstrated, across the broad arc of post-Kantian theory, and in the context of post-Althusserian materialism in particular, the productive tension between these two categories, rationalism and empiricism, at the very limits of the thinking of ontological difference.1 There is so much I have taken from this book, from the incisive clarity of its critiques of Kant and Hegel, to the discerning development of Quentin Meillassoux’s intervention, after and in critical dissonance with speculative realism, but here I want to focus on the crucial dimension of the book of particular interest to me, its elaboration of the Althusserian reading of Marx’s Capital.

Here I wish to push back against Nathan’s repeated and repeatedly suggestive invocations of empiricism, to propose that Rationalist Empiricism, in the culminating moments of its most elaborate developments, repeats a gesture, a gesture that for me marks a hesitation, or, at least, one that invites further demonstration. By this, I wish to propose that these imposing readings, of Meillassoux, of Kant and Hegel, of Althusser, Marx, and Badiou, in each case culminate in the determination of a novel theoretical concept that the book nonetheless hesitates to name; in each case instead problematically reiterating the concept of empiricism. This reiteration of empiricism, for all its novel sophistication, marks a puzzling and persistent reappearance at these heights of theoretical sophistication: of a dualism of subject and object, of the concrete and the immaterial, of phenomenon and noumenon.2 Instead, this concept Rationalist Empiricism constructs, yet hesitates to name, I would call a Rationalist Materialism.

To be sure, Rationalist Empiricism refuses to limit the notion of empiricism to the mere definition it receives in every philosophical dictionary, as the assertion that all knowledge arises from sensuous experience, whether classically for Hume or as what Nathan rightly calls the “vulgar empiricism” of Mill or Lenin that “takes the objects of scientific practice to be pure phenomena that have not undergone a process of either ideological or theoretical transformation” (RE 14). The book does initially define empiricism along similar lines, as “a philosophical orientation claiming the genesis of ideas in experience” (RE 3). It proceeds, however, above all in its acute analysis of Meillassoux’s thesis, to develop a provocative, yet to me still-confounding, notion of empiricism delinked from any governing debt to psychological apperception. Without attending to the many subtle intricacies of this argument on Meillassoux, however, already I will pose Nathan the question delimiting my intervention: why still call Meillassoux’s position, one that asserts “the capacity of mathematics to formalize physical properties so as to subtract them from their sensory correlates” (RE 50); why still call this an empiricism, and even, a rationalist empiricism?3

I want to suggest, polemically perhaps, the theoretical incongruence of Althusser’s two positions from 1965 and 1966, positions Rationalist Empiricism crucially invokes at various points in its demonstration, those of an Althusser at the peak of his theoretical powers of insight in the pages of genius, cast with Rimbaldian clairvoyance in the Introduction to Reading Capital, versus a constitutionally weakened and theoretically ambivalent Althusser just a year later, embroiled in the debates with Garaudy and Aragon on theory and practice, under attack by the PCF for the so-called theoreticism of Reading Capital, in a minor essay in which Althusser weakly asserts the reductive conflation of a line of thought he names “rationalist empiricism” (RE 6).

While Althusser is clearly making a broadly inclusive point about the history of French epistemology, to place as he does the proper name of Jean Cavaillès next to that of Bachelard in this brief essay obscures materialist, anti-empiricist intervention that Cavaillès initiates in his call to theoretical struggle, the famous final lines of his 1942 philosophical testament, now finally translated into English, On Logic and the Theory of Science: “It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can yield a doctrine of science” (On Logic 84).4

In contrast to Bachelard’s experimentalist empiricism, Cavaillès initiates a philosophical orientation attentive to the historical determinations of the criteria governing adequate demonstration, in which the formal signs or marks of logic are taken to constitute a (asubjective) history of mathematics. Cavaillès thus calls for a notion of mathematics, and scientific development more generally, that follows the internal development of its concepts rather than a dualist model of the adequation of an empirical object to its mathematical formalization. Cavaillès invokes in this manner an apodictic philosophy of the concept, a dialectic that displaces the philosophy of consciousness to demonstrate the “internal necessity” determining the apodictic development of a science.5 Though Cavaillès’s debt to Spinoza is as decisive as it is elusive,6 and the object of his writings remained devoted entirely to the philosophy of mathematics (in which domain this “internal necessity” governs most evidently), Althusser will, in the introduction to Reading Capital, simultaneously bring together the thought of Spinoza and Cavaillès, while expanding their materialist propositions to encompass the non-mathematical science of Marx’s critique of political economy.7

This Spinozist materialism,8 which Althusser will argue governs Marx’s methodological introduction, refuses the dualist empiricist logic of the adequation of an object to its concept, to assert instead a single order and connection of all things (including ideas), grasped under the attributes of extension or thought (or any other).9 Following Althusser in his reading of Marx’s 1857 introduction, the materialist conclusion we must draw from this Spinozist, Cavaillèsian epistemology, is that the material thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum) that Marx will eventually construct, the unfinished book that is Capital, that is to say, is not analytically or inductively extracted from any supposed experimental observations of capitalism, but simply is capitalism, grasped under the attribute of thought rather than in its physical extension.

Spinoza, in the Scolium to E IIP7, goes on to refuse any empiricist notion of the adequation of the object to idea as the index of truth, and to assert instead that adequate knowledge of a thing, as knowledge, can be demonstrated only through deduction via the attribute of thought rather than in abstraction from observed empirical extension.10 Marx’s Capital, in this view, is exactly what its subtitle names, a critique of political economy: a radical reworking of the substantial ideas forged by the tradition of thought from Smith and Ricardo onward (ideas of value, of money, of labour, etc.). Althusser puts the matter decisively: “No mathematician in the world waits until physics has verified a theorem to declare it proved, although whole areas of mathematics are applied in physics; the truth of his theorem is a hundred per cent provided by criteria purely internal to the practice of mathematical proof, hence by the criterion of mathematical practice” (RCC 61, my emphasis).

Let me pause here and back up, in order to move more decisively to the ultimate object of my remarks: the apodictic, positive dialectic and logic of demonstration that determines Marx’s Capital as a materialist intervention in thought, in a dialectic otherwise than empiricist. To do so, I wish to return to the confounding ambivalence I invoked in beginning my remarks, between what I see as two conflicting moments in Rationalist Empiricism’s readings of Althusser and Marx. First, on the one hand, there is Althusser’s lucid 1965 refusal of all Hegelian, negative dialectical readings of Capital, the theoretical call to arms of Reading Capital that rightly stands as the epigraph of Nathan’s own brilliantly original reading of Capital as a logic of separation (ch. 10): “In Capital,” Althusser writes, “we find a systematic presentation, an apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis” (RCC 51). This is explicitly to name the Spinozist, Cavaillèsian positive dialectic that governs, Reading Capital polemically argues, Marx’s non-Hegelian methodology of synthetic demonstration.11

In contrast to the resonant, iconoclastic force of this epigraph, a resounding silence; a silence all the more surprising as it is not merely that, as Brown writes, “although Althusser deploys the term ‘rationalist materialism’ [in his 1966 essay] to characterize an entire epistemological tradition, . . . he does not often characterize his own epistemology in such terms” (RE 13). It is rather the case that in the Introduction to Reading Capital from only a year before, Althusser articulates an encompassing and unyielding critique of empiricism, in which, indeed, Althusser explicitly names as among his targets the concept that gives our book its titular concept: rationalist empiricism. Not merely content to confront the familiar, and perhaps more vulnerable, concept of a sensualist empiricism, Althusser formulates his critique of “the empiricist conception of knowledge” in novel fashion, taking the term, he writes, “in its widest sense, since it can embrace a rationalist empiricism as well as a sensualist empiricism” (RCC 34, my emphasis).

Althusser’s critical notion of empiricism is all the more surprising, since one would expect Althusser simply to have based his critique on Spinoza’s familiar claim, in the famous Appendix to Ethics Book 1, for the radical inadequacy of all thought derived from sensory impressions, in its necessary movement from observed effects backward to their imaginary, ideological causes.12 Instead, Althusser identifies an entirely different criterion that he will contrast with Marx’s materialist method in Capital. In passages as famous as they are absent from Rationalist Empiricism, Althusser claims instead that “the whole empiricist process of knowledge lies in fact in an operation of the subject called abstraction. To know is to abstract from the real object its essence, the possession of which by the subject is then called knowledge” (RCC 35). This initial formulation already casts empiricism, in all its variants, as a dualist relation of subject to object, a conception of knowledge production that Althusser will then contrast with Marx’s Spinozist “thought-concrete” that reproduces (as opposed to merely representing) the material, extensive real of the capitalist social form, capitalism itself, that is to say, in the attribute of thought (RCC 41).

Althusser then takes a further step in this general critique of empiricism, to draw a necessary implication of the empiricist extraction the essential truth from an object (RCC 36). In all empiricist operations, Althusser asserts, encompassing both its sensualist and rationalist variants, the “sole function [of knowledge] is to separate, in the object, the two parts which exist in it, the essential and the inessential, . . . the gold [from the] the dross— by special procedures whose aim is to eliminate the inessential real” (RCC 36).

Now, whatever we may make of these claims regarding the nature of all empiricism whatsoever, and I hope and fully expect that Brown will push back against the broad stroke of Althusser’s brush, in the case of Marx’s Capital, I believe Althusser makes a very compelling claim indeed. For a real distinction should be drawn between the empiricist methods of Adam Smith, for example, and Marx’s Spinozist materialism in Capital. Smith, to take a famous example, begins The Wealth of Nations with the assertion of a universal notion inductively abstracted from the observed regularities of human communities in general. Transhistorically, these constitute the basic anthropological features that need only, in this view, naturally come to flourish once the historical impediments to trade of previous social forms (agrarian, feudal, etc.) were lifted. There exists, Smith writes in the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations, “a certain propensity in human nature, . . . the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. . . . It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals” (11).13

Althusser’s point is well-taken, since not only does Smith appear to derive this universal notion from empirical abstraction, but he furthermore deploys it to discern an essential characteristic of human behavior from other inessential qualities common to human and other animal species (“passions,” “acting in concert,” etc.). Marx, in contrast, does something significantly greater than merely demystify the illusory nature of the various phenomenal features of capitalism. These include concepts such as commodity fetishism, money, profit, the “freedom” of the wage labour contract, the illusions of a supposedly virtuous and benevolent primitive accumulation, and of the Trinity Formula of profit, land-rent, and wages, as well as many others. In every case, Marx does not simply dismiss these as inessential features of capitalism, in contrast to the more “essential” categories he discovers such as abstract labour, labour power, or surplus value. Instead, in Spinozist fashion, he rigorously demonstrates in every case the systematic necessity that governs each category of the capitalist social form, including its superficial forms of appearance.14 In addition to mere negative critique, Capital produces a positive theory of ideology and its forms of appearance.

Here then, in conclusion, let me try to draw together the strands of my argument thus far around the status of Marx’s Capital as, in Althusser’s words, “a systematic presentation, an apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis” (RCC 51). I have to say I remain unconvinced by Nathan’s assertion that the concept of separation constitutes not only a crucial category for Marx (which Rationalist Empiricism powerfully demonstrates), but, moreover, provides “an analytical method to be gleaned from the structure of capitalism [that] formalizes the dialectical logic of this double mediation” (RE 232, 236). It is still not clear to me, having read this chapter several times, exactly how separation constitutes a method for the apodictic demonstration of the nature of the capitalist social form, as Althusser’s well-chosen epigraph to the chapter implies it must. I would be glad to hear more from Nathan on this point.

In any case, I find it even more difficult to accept the claim, in this case generic to the entire, empiricist thrust of Rationalist Empiricism, that “Marx discovers his method . . . through an empirical study of what is already there . . . : the history and structure of the capitalist mode of production” (RE 232). Marx painstakingly derives his method, I would argue, not from empirical observation of markets and factories, interviews with laborers, or debates within the First International. Marx developed his method by critically inquiring into the theoretical writings of political economy and of nascent socialism, and largely did so sitting in the British Library or at his desk. There were no experimental, empiricist data for him to interpret, not even the famous parliamentary reports. These supplementary pages detail the mere quantitative fluctuations of the price of labour power amid the historical dynamic of class struggle; Engels did as much or more long before in his 1845 study of the working class. Instead, Marx asked a far more fundamental question in Capital: What is the law of the tendency and the social form governing these empirical, quantitative fluctuations? While his vast biographical experience with the world of nineteenth-century capitalism certainly informed his critical orientation as a condition of his critique, in the sense Badiou gives the term, and was of course decisive in his political writings, the empiricist dimension of the initial enquiries for Capital (the Grundrisse) and the decades of painstaking drafting and revision from 1859 to just before his death in 1883 is arguably limited to his tired eyes scouring the markings across thousands, even millions of sheets of paper.15

While there are so many more things to say about this prodigious contribution to contemporary theory, let me conclude simply by the proposition that Capital must be read, as Althusser and Macherey first maintained, as a logic; not, as Althusser quickly corrects, as “logicians [which] would have meant posing it the question of its methods of exposition and proof” (RCC 12), in other words as a mere discursive, logical positivist word game, but as the Spinozist, materialist logic of the necessary forms of appearance of things in the capitalist social form. This would mean, firstly, to remain faithful to the unfulfilled promise of Reading Capital,16 to pursue this project of discerning in Capital a positive, synthetic demonstration, a project disbanded in the wake of May ’68, and pursued only obliquely, on other terrains, above all by Macherey (via Spinoza) and Badiou (in his reconstruction of logic).17

Rationalist Empiricism brilliantly distinguishes Hegel’s Logic, both from the psychologistic assertion of the “I think” as the subject of the experience of thought (RE 78, 79), as well as from the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception (RE 79), to show however that it remains an idealist logic, such that “being cannot be thought independently of thinking, or as external to thinking” (RE 79). If then we are to think Capital as a logic, it cannot be one wedded to being in this sense; Capital is not only a materialist rejection of Hegelian idealism, it is quite simply neither a metaphysics or an ontology. Capital reproduces as a thought-concrete, in apodictic, positive dialectical form, the structural logic governing the necessary forms of appearance of things in a historically specific social form, a social form axiomatically defined, in the first sentence of Capital, as characterized by the general commodification of all socially valorized and counted things and relations.

To assert the necessity of the contingency of the laws of becoming because to assert the opposite—the contingency of contingency—would be self-contradictory, is to revert to the idealist logicism Badiou refuses as the enabling gesture of Being and Event (Meditation 3). Logic has no power to institute the existence of a specific order of being (contingency). Meillassoux’s anhypothetic principal, in this view, in rejecting an axiomatic orientation, renews this grandiose pretension of logical positivism. In its place, materialism, as the primacy of the real, requires an axiomatic position: if we suppose the existence of a particular world with its particular set of entities (for Marx, a world characterized by the general, tendential accumulation of commodities and commodified relations), then we can demonstrate the necessary consequences of the logic governing that world (the necessary forms of the appearance and relations of those things).

Logic has no power to induce the necessary existence of a world, with its particular ontological characteristics (say, a world characterized by the general necessity of contingency). No more can logic induce a materialist encounter with the outside of thought. Materialism, for Marx as for Badiou, means not the idealist hypostatization of the exteriority of Being to thought, but, more modestly and more precisely, the immanent critique of the logic of a world axiomatically presumed to exist.

When delinked in this fashion from its constitutive, Hegelian suturing to ontology, as the general science of Being, logic must be taken to constitute, as Badiou says in his refoundation and delimitation in Logics of Worlds, the science of appearance (la science de l’apparaître), of the necessary forms of appearance and relations of objects in a given world, precisely Marx’s project in Capital. And yet, neither in its six hundred pages nor anywhere else in his corpus of over two hundred books does Badiou devote even a shred of analysis to the logic governing our world, the capitalist social form. . . . This will hopefully be the book I’m writing now, under the influence of Rationalist Empiricism, on the unfinished project of Althusserianism, the Spinozist Logic of Capital. But for now, I’m just going to reread Rationalist Empiricism, for the pleasure of it.

Let me begin by citing a set of formulations from the end of chapter 1 of Nathan Brown’s Rationalist Empiricism:

Rationalist empiricism . . . is not primarily concerned with the conditions of experience. . . . It is the interruption of experience by reason, and the extrapolation of reason from and yet beyond experience, that is at issue in the rationalist methodological pole, while it is the experience of reason and also the exposure, by empirical science, of what cannot be experienced that is at issue in our empiricism. . . . [It] is oriented . . . toward the groundless manner in which reason and experience propel one another without achieving synthesis (47).

There is doubtless something paradoxical about what Nathan Brown calls in the same passage an “exteriority [that is] of an encounter which never took place, and which [therefore] has to be constructed” (46). Moreover, the paradox is of a species that, rather than leading to a mere impasse, is generative of genuinely new thought upon its very identification as a paradox. Thus Brown finds an apt description thereof in Quentin Meillassoux’s felicitous expression “the paradox of manifestation”: in Brown’s reformulation, this is a paradox “through which the given makes manifest that which is refractory to givenness, that which could never have been and has never been given to manifestation, though its very subtraction from manifestation has been made manifest” (48). In After Finitude, of course, Meillassoux writes that the possibility of making “scientific statements about a manifestation of the world which is supposed to be anterior to any human form of the relation to the world” (Meillassoux 112) is due to the historical emergence of a conception of the mathematization of nature that renders meaningful “thought’s capacity to think what there is whether thought exists or not” (Meillassoux 116). But Brown’s project raises Meillassoux’s stakes: what if we were to subtract from this world, from which the necessity of its relation to us is already subtracted, also the need for the distinction between “in itself” and “for us,” even as a heuristic principle (that makes “meaningful” the idea of a world without us)? Such that not even the stability of the referent (“in itself”) is left overturned and manifestation as such can be grasped as the form of the problem to hand? (cf. 20–21)

For those of us who work in what one might provisionally call the “mathematical humanities,” the audacity of this proposal strikes at the heart of the matter: it embraces the challenge of speaking of a world whose spatiotemporal givenness comes to be given by virtue of the contingency of the very terms of its construction. Such terms range from the “unity” of natural laws and “the horizon” to the devices, numbers and operations that take measurement and, indeed, symbolization itself. So a project that aims to dislodge “the world as such” from a forced conformity to the “limits of reason” is rich in implications for how we might rethink the relations between the “present state of things” and the reasons, rules, and other movements of intellection that organize and manipulate such states.

In short, a project that promises to transform how we think about transformation—namely, as a problem of thinking through manifestation a non-manifest world—is very much one I want to see come to fruition. As such, the remarks that follow are made in the spirit of inviting clarification and solidification of a couple of its key premises. I’ll therefore focus my attention on the first chapter, where the methodological premises are laid out by way of outlining the domain in which the promise of a “rationalist empiricism” first takes shape.

The chapter begins with a conviction arising from Alfred North Whitehead that “philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity” (30). At issue, therefore, in any philosophical system is a selectivity of interpretation that informs the determination of its concepts and schemata; concomitantly, there arises the task of “recovering the totality obscured by the selection” (Whitehead, cit. 30) and considering the “extra-systemic space” we inevitably pass through when we cross systems in entering our experience into philosophical systematicity (cf. 36–37). This task would require us to somehow return “critique” to “speculation” without also reasserting the need for the transcendental subject. In other words, it is necessary, Brown writes, to return to a “pre-Kantian” (37) understanding of the relation between concept and experience.

Hence the chapter’s pursuit, which is articulated in a series of questions—“What is a philosophical exception? . . . How are we to think the mutual exteriority of philosophical exceptions? . . . What happens when we encounter philosophical exceptions in their mutual exteriority, and when we invite them to encounter one another?” (37) This pursuit will discover its proper domain in a peculiar amalgamation of positions that after Kant are customarily treated as mutually suspicious of one another in virtue of transcendental subjectivity, namely, Humean empiricism and Cartesian rationalism.

Brown gives to this unique amalgamation the name “exemplary exception”: it “inhabits an extra-systemic yet intra-philosophical space . . . unbounded by an envelope of conceptual systematicity, yet . . . determined in its contours by the edges of those philosophical systems that . . . produce exteriorities by constituting a field of internal coherence” (37). And exemplary of these exemplary exceptions is what Brown calls “Absent Blue Wax”—an anomalous entity co-determined by, on the one hand, the hue “absent” from a spectrum of blues that, contrary to his own epistemology, Hume believes the mind is capable of filling in (39–40); and, on the other hand, the wax of the famous experiment that, in his Second Meditation, Descartes permits himself “just this once” in order that his mind “wander off” into the perception of bodies, “[un]restrained within the bounds of truth” before ultimately returning to confirm the priority of the intellect (Descartes 20; Brown 40).

What is striking, though, is that Hume and Descartes are not equally co-determinant; Descartes seems to be “more exemplary” of the “exemplary exception,” as indicated by the way Brown presents his exemplarity. “In the wax experiment,” he writes, “Descartes breaks with the order of reasons guiding his Meditations, as Martial Gueroult argues, in order to ‘deliver a verification’ of the priority of the intellect by provisionally situating it ‘in the opponent’s point of view'” (40). The experiment is, accordingly, an “anomalous empiricism” through which “we rediscover,” so Gueroult, “by another means . . . the conclusion obtained directly by following the genetic order of reasons” (cit. Brown 41). Derived initially from Gueroult’s interpretation of Descartes, “the order of reasons” is then incorporated as a principle into Brown’s own heuristic framework, for instance in the way he reconstructs After Finitude in chapter 2 (59ff., where “The Order of Reasons” constitutes its own section heading). Indeed, Brown’s choice of Gueroult’s as the interpretation of Descartes that will exemplify pre-Kantian philosophical exception seems to involve motivations that perhaps have something to do with the alignment of Gueroult with the structuralism and counter-phenomenological stance associated with his celebrants, some of whom are also important for the project of rationalist empiricism: Althusser, Deleuze . . .

Thus it is worth taking a closer look at what exactly “the order of reasons” entails and unpacking the specificity of Gueroult’s interpretation of Descartes. The “order of reasons” is, first, a method that Gueroult develops for how to read Descartes, but it also derives from what Descartes says about his own method. As Descartes writes in his address to the readers of the Meditations: “I should not advise anyone to . . . read my book, except those who intend to meditate seriously with me. But those who, without worrying much about the sequence and linkage of my reasons (rationum mearum seriem et nexum comprehendere non curantes), amuse themselves with splitting hairs on each of the parts—as many do—those, I say, will not get much profit from reading this book’” (Descartes 8; cit. Gueroult xx). Citing this in his preface to Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted according to the Order of Reasons, Gueroult, for his part, comments that “we must therefore above all bare the order of reasons that is the sine qua non of the value of Descartes’ doctrine in his own eyes” (Gueroult xx). For “the exact restitution of this order”—this return to Descartes’s text—is what will allow us to “settle . . . the deep meaning of the doctrine” and arrive at the unabridged “historical truth,” and not the attribution of radical doubt to “inferiority complexes . . . and other psychoanalytical categories according to today’s fashion” (Gueroult xx).

For some commentators, notably Knox Peden, Gueroult’s insistence on interpreting Descartes according to “the order of reasons” should be understood in light of his altercation with Ferdinand Alquié, who had advanced his own reading of the discovery of the cogito as a result of “an absence of certainty . . . in the surrounding, existent world” (Peden 371). Reading Cartesian philosophy more geometrico (cf. Gueroult xx) and as demonstrative of its own truth, Gueroult was in this view turning Descartes into a Spinozist aligned with the “structuralism” of the 1960s (Peden 376). But what if Gueroult’s Descartes were not solely definable in terms of this altercation with Alquié and the lens of a Spinozist-rationalist tradition one is already committed to identifying in 1960s “structuralism”? According to Mogens Laerke, for instance, Gueroult called “structural analysis” a principle of philosophical history that was concerned with conditions of possibility of the discipline already in the 1920s (Laerke 583); this “dianoematics” might thus have more in common with late nineteenth-century historiography and neo-Kantianism and what Gueroult himself termed “radical idealism” (Laerke 600), a positivist affirmation of the reality and self-sufficiency of all systems based on the fact of the existence of past philosophical works.

By extension, “the order of reasons” is not Gueroult’s own invention of an a priori principle of philosophical history—a notion that his dianoematics outright rejects—but his interpretation of a unique way of understanding the Meditations as self-verifying and as established by Descartes himself. In this light a crucial dimension of Gueroult’s characterization of Descartes’s wax experiment becomes legible. Gueroult proceeds through the Second Meditation “geometrically,” according to the internal linkages between its truths: I exist as a thinking being; my nature is no other than pure thought and pure intelligence; I know myself, my existence and my essence, while my body is cancelled by the evil genius and remains unknown to me; therefore body is less easily known than soul. To overcome the lingering power of common sense definitively, however, Descartes provisionally situates the mind in the opponent’s position and examines “one of the objects that ‘appear to be outside’” in order to verify “by another means” that bodies are known “insofar as they are understood by thought” (Gueroult 75). Gueroult’s appraisal of the indirect means, though, is that “the more faculties through which I know problematically the existence of bodies, and the more faculties that allow me to know immediately and in all certainty that I exist, the more faculties I can relate to myself as its own modes. The more ways I picture myself as knowing bodies, the better I know myself” (Gueroult 77). Particularly this final sentence seems key. Gueroult emphasizes the iterative, cumulative character of the so-called synthetic order as described by Descartes. Synthetic order may be indirect, but it and the imagination it involves contribute to “better knowledge of self” which, as a consequence, is “richer and more distinct.” Certain knowledge of myself is therefore infinitely richer than uncertain knowledge of bodies. But the increasing richness of knowledge of oneself derives from the increasing ways of (problematically) knowing bodies.

Thus, however much the end affirms the priority of the intellect over the imagination, the imagination also “enriches and strengthens” (Gueroult 76) the order of reasons and is “reversed” rather than “abolished” outright (Gueroult 76), making the scenario according to Gueroult himself rather less analogous to the Kantian sublime and its “subtractive method” (Brown 41) than, perhaps, Husserl’s Second Cartesian Meditation. There, Husserl replaces the wax with a multisided die, which pictures “giv[ing the same being] continuously as an objective unity in a multiform and changeable multiplicity of manners of appearing,” “flowing away in the unity of a synthesis” so as to disclose the “facts of synthetic structure” through the temporality immanent to its modes of givenness (Husserl 41–43). Indeed, the die’s substitution for the wax itself references the wax’s substitutability as such for Husserl in the intentional object’s first, “formal-logical (formal-ontological)” sense: in this initial sense, the intentional object stands in for “the Anything Whatever” (Husserl 51), which “makes present in phantasy the potential perceptions that would make the invisible visible” and so bring “also the potential,” “implicit” and “predelineated” subjective processes “in the sense-producing intentionality of the actual ones” “into the field comprising . . . the objective sense of the cogitatum in question” (Husserl 48). It is because infinite multiplicities “always belong together,” “noetically and noematically,” “in respect of their possible synthesis” (Husserl 54), that anything fixed and abiding can be indicated about an intentional object at all. This I take to be analogous to Gueroult’s surprising concession to what he calls the “true indestructibility” of the wax that “remains the same” as a substance for us (Gueroult 70) precisely through an experience of the temporality immanent to its modes of givenness (i.e., hot, liquid, or solid).

This is important because it indicates how for Gueroult, reading Descartes “according to the order of reasons” seems to lead directly to an unexpected acknowledgment of the irreducibility of the imagination and therefore to its non-abolition. And this perhaps in spite of himself, as the first chapter of his Descartes book does not hesitate to rehearse the narrative, in currency since the end of the nineteenth century, that modern rationalism was born from a radical shift of perspective attributed to its first heroes, Descartes and Leibniz, and their shared project of a mathesis universalis. “From the beginning,” Gueroult writes, “Cartesianism was engaged in an effort to construct a complete system of certain knowledge, at once both metaphysical and scientific, a system fundamentally different from the Aristotelian one, because it is wholly immanent in the mathematical certainty embodied in the clear and distinct intellect, but no less complete, and even stricter in its need for absolute rigor” (Gueroult 4). Yet just a few pages later, Gueroult notes that Descartes warned his readers not to delve too deeply into metaphysics alone at the expense of deploying the understanding together with the imagination, which he admits is necessary for mathematics and physics—though he then also adds that Descartes is not to be taken too seriously on such statements (Gueroult 11).

Whatever else might be said about Gueroult’s ambivalence—perhaps the historian in him could not help but distinguish between “Cartesianism” and “Descartes”—this much seems certain: the “modern rationalism” associated with “universal mathematics,” typified by a mathematical practice that presents itself as innovative and associated with an “algebraization of geometry” that purportedly brought an end to the imagination, is itself a modern narrative with ties to neo-Kantian historiography.1

Were one to consider contemporaneous mathematical practice, however—and enter the empirical qua empirical that way and, indeed, precisely as Brown would like us to do in Rationalist Empiricism—one discovers that imagination plays a central role in Descartes’ mathematics—not just in a representative or “semantic” sense in respect to an algebraic expression, but as a “material” proxy onto which reason “projects and manipulates basic mathematical relations” and which can genuinely carry inferences (Rabouin 4753–54). Cartesian extension can express relations between magnitudes and thus any perceived state of affairs because of the imagination viz. phantasia and the senses and its ability to “see” mathematical proportions and ratios. Algebraic symbolization merely supplements this process by abbreviating and making manipulable more complex problems (Rabouin 4758). Similarly, one could say, the infinitely changing aspect of the wax in the account of the experiment given in the Second Meditation is too complex for the imagination to sufficiently treat in present attention, thus indexing a discordance between imagination and concept though not yet the elimination of the former. Importantly, what’s innovated here is not the supremacy of the intellect over imagination but, rather, the idea that the geometric imagination can therefore not function as a “representation” if understood as a “form of semantic relation” (Rabouin 4772–73). As David Rabouin has argued, diagrams are in certain (reductio) proofs necessarily based on impossible configurations; that is, they can serve an analytic end even when we “do not know in advance whether they represent a possible state of affair or not” (Rabouin 4773). Sometimes the work of imagination is used to show how a mathematical situation is not possible and is used because it does not represent a genuine mathematical situation. And it can do so precisely because they involve manipulating material inscriptions and thus thinking with a specific body: “they are proxies with which we reason” (Rabouin 4774) because they describe a material structure onto which meaning is projected (cf. Rabouin 4776).

Which brings me to my conclusion. Rationalist Empiricism asks that we return to a “pre-Kantian” (37) framework for constructing the relation between concept and experience as an encounter that never took place. As I have suggested, it therefore demands that we rid ourselves of the obstructive nineteenth-century narrative that attaches the birth of modern rationalism to a “discovery” of the formal at the expense of imagination that is attributed to Descartes’s “invention” of a purely formalized approach to matters geometrical. What this entails is that we distinguish between “pre-Kantian Descartes” and “twentieth-century interpretations of Descartes,” a distinction that, in turn, asks that we hold open the possibility that the wax in the experiment is a “material proxy” for the mind’s self-enrichment via a cumulative imaginative process—and that the wax experiment is neither “an empirical demonstration” per se nor “knowledge or understanding of the body” in general. What if the wax experiment were a “material proxy”—can the “immanent critique of empiricism” that Brown identifies in the Second Meditation not be undertaken by something other than “the really empirical,” such as, for instance, a “proxy” for “empiricism,” situated prior to the purported historical emergence of a mathesis universalis that is taken to render meaningful “thought’s capacity to think what there is whether thought exists or not” (Meillassoux 116)? What if rationalist empiricism were accomplished precisely by a detour through the imagination, its project of thinking through manifestation a non-manifest world achieved precisely in the proxy’s hybrid material-conceptual universe? Such a detour presents an alternative to the familiar story that philosophical and scientific modernity emerged from the “discovery” of abstraction at the cost of materiality and sense, a story that demands that the European “Scientific Revolution” be placed at its hierarchical and singular apex. By contrast, redirecting through imagination’s hybrid universe would suspend the need for the idea of a world without us to be “meaningful” for us at all—without also abdicating the possibility for the world without us to be “meaningful” without us.

Works Cited

Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 2. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Gueroult, Martial. Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted according to the Order of Reasons. Vol. 1, The Soul and God. Translated by Roger Ariew. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960.

Laerke, Mogens. “Structural Analysis and Dianoematics: The History (of the History) of Philosophy according to Martial Gueroult.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 58.3 (July 2020) 581–607.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Peden, Knox. “Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy: Ferdinant Alquié versus Martial Gueroult.” Modern Intellectual History 8.2 (August 2011) 361–90.

Rabouin, David. “Logic of Imagination: Echoes of Cartesian Epistemology in Contemporary Philosophy of Mathematics and Beyond.” Synthese 195 (2018) 4751–83.

I would like to begin with the quotation that serves as an epigraph to your book, from Gaston Bachelard’s The Philosophy of No: “Empiricism and rationalism are bound, in scientific thought, by a strange bond, as strong as that which unites pleasure and pain” (7). This enigmatic formulation naturally piqued my interest, so I was pleased to see you return to it in the conclusion to the book, where you approach it as a “riddle” that demands a solution. You offer that the bond that unites pleasure and pain must be life (260). This passage appears in the midst of a short reading of two works by Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation and The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. For Henry, “life” is synonymous with the immediacy of auto-affection; it is also the necessary condition of all thinking, since he understands every possible form of thought, representation, or perception to be conditioned by sensation (Brown 257).

Returning to the riddle of Bachelard, you then ask: what bond could be “as strong as” the bond of life itself? Your answer, of course, is technics, which enables new configurations of experience (for example recording) that “project thought outside of its synthesis with lived immediacy” (260). You write,

If rationalism and empiricism are bound, in scientific thought, by a bond as strong as this, could it be precisely that which is not life: technics? This is indeed “a strange bond,” for technics separates reason and experience, the better to enable the non-immediacy of their coordination. Yet it also embodies reason and experience: technology is the material instantiation and the record of their historical transformation, just as it becomes a condition of possibility for the historical transformation of their relationship: for what can be thought, for what can be experienced. What distinguishes “science” from “life” (technics) is what constitutes the strange bond of rationalism and empiricism in “scientific thought.” If this bond is as strong as “that which unites pleasure and pain”—life, the immediacy of auto-affection—that is because it is capable of displacing it, of propelling scientific thought beyond the determinations and indeed the existence of life. (260–61)

In the book you make clear that what you call “technics” is not limited to technology and its different iterations, but includes writing and techniques of inscription more generally—all of which underscore the exteriority of thought to life. You read the “as strong as” of Bachelard’s analogy not as a statement of equivalence, therefore, but as positing two bonds of equal strength but opposed effects.

While I’m persuaded by your reasoning here—and especially by your account of technics as effecting this unity-in-separation—I don’t buy it as a gloss of Bachelard’s evocation of the “strange bond . . . as strong as that uniting pleasure and pain.” This is because while life may indeed include pleasure and pain or involve the experience of these sensations, it does not “unite” them: at least, not in the immediacy of auto-affection. As sensations, pleasure and pain can only be experienced as opposed, if not mutually exclusive: they certainly do not constitute a unity from the vantage of immediate sensory experience. To understand them as united, as “bound,” we would at the very minimum require a theory of the unconscious and of fantasy, neither of which belong to the sphere of auto-affection.

I must admit that when I think about what unites pleasure and pain, what comes to mind for me is not “life,” but the pleasure principle—and above all its “beyond.” This association is hopefully not as gratuitous as it sounds, since it raises fundamental methodological questions that I think are not without relevance to your account of rationalist empiricism. I’m thinking in particular of Deleuze’s meditations on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which examine the challenge it presents to any experiential or sensory investigation of pain and pleasure. He understands Freud’s account of the death drive as the “beyond of the pleasure principle” as a foray into speculative philosophy: an attempt to identify the foundation or law of the pleasure principle, the supersensual law of its sensual manifestations:

Of all the writings of Freud, the masterpiece which we know as Beyond the Pleasure Principle is perhaps the one where he engaged most directly—and how penetratingly—in specifically philosophical reflection. Philosophical reflection should be understood as “transcendental,” that is to say concerned with a particular kind of investigation of the question of principles. It soon becomes apparent in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud is not really preoccupied with exceptions to that principle; they are not what he means by the “beyond” of the title. All the apparent exceptions he considers . . . are treated by Freud as merely apparent exceptions which could still be reconciled with the pleasure principle. In other words, there are no exceptions to the principle. . . .

At this point we need to resort to philosophical reflection. What we call a principle or law is, in the first place, that which governs a particular field; it is in this sense that we speak of an empirical principle or a law. Thus we say that the pleasure principle governs life universally and without exception. But there is another and quite distinct question, namely in virtue of what is a field governed by a principle; there must be a principle of another kind, a second-order principle, which accounts for the necessary compliance of the field with the empirical principle. It is this second-order principle that we call transcendental. Pleasure is a principle insofar as it governs our psychic life. But we must still ask what is the highest authority which subjects our psychic life to the dominance of this principle. Already Hume had remarked that though psychic life clearly exhibits and distinguishes between pleasures and pains, we could never, no matter how exhaustively we examined our ideas of pain and pleasure, derive from them a principle in accordance with which we seek pleasure and avoid pain. We find Freud saying much the same: we continually encounter pleasures and pains in psychic life, but they are found scattered here and there in a free state, “unbound.” That the pleasure principle should nevertheless be so organized that we systematically seek pleasure and avoid pain makes it imperative that we should look for a higher type of explanation. In virtue of what higher connection—what “binding” power—is pleasure a principle, with the dominance that it has? Freud’s problem, we may say, is the very opposite of what it is often supposed to be, for he is concerned not with the exceptions to the principle but with its foundation. His problem is a transcendental one: a problem, as Freud puts it, for “speculation.” [The reference here is to the famous first words of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “What follows is pure speculation.”] Freud’s answer is that the binding of excitation alone makes it “resolvable” into pleasure, that is to say makes discharge possible. . . . It is the binding process which makes pleasure as the principle of mental life possible.1

Why am I mentioning this? Because to affirm that pleasure and pain are united by the immediacy of life as auto-affection, I believe, is to dismiss as self-evident the very problem that Deleuze describes here as calling out for philosophical reflection, and as requiring precisely what you describe as a “retroaction of thought upon life” (260).

Deleuze frames the bond uniting pleasure and pain as a problem for what he calls transcendental philosophy, for what Freud calls “speculation,” and for what I will suggest could be called, following the lines of enquiry your book has opened up, a “rationalist empiricism.” The question it raises is, how do we go about investigating this “beyond”? What allows it to be thought?

Initially Freud thinks of the death drive as a drive to destruction or dissolution, whose clearest manifestation might be sadism. He posits that in addition to “the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units”—the province of the life drives, or Eros—“there must exist another, contrary drive seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state”:2 the death drive. Their concurrent or mutually opposing action would then explain the phenomena of life.

Eventually, though, Freud realizes that the attempt to isolate the death drive or make manifest its operation encounters an impasse. While a “portion” of the death drive “becomes visible” in sadism, “coming to light” as a drive to aggressivity and destruction, it is perceptible only on the condition of being “pressed into the service of Eros,” and therefore presented in the already compromised form of an impure “alloy” or compound. Moreover, he now understands destructiveness not as a manifestation of the death drive, but as a form of defense against the primary processes, and thus as a mode of cathexis. The death drive as such is not an object of empirical investigation.

Freud now stresses that this substantialization of the death drive tends to obscure a more profound understanding of the drive as immaterial, not given, and therefore thinkable only in speculative terms, as a formal or mythical3 construction. In Deleuze’s gloss, “when we speak of the Death [Drive], we refer to Thanatos, the absolute negation. Thanatos as such cannot be given in psychic life, even in the unconscious; it is, as Freud pointed out in his admirable text, essentially silent. And yet we must speak of it for it is a determinable principle, the foundation and even more of psychic life” (30). What is required is an investigation of the “primary processes,” which are not themselves accessible to experience. (In Freud’s own work, one of the forms this takes is an abandonment of the earlier energetic model, and of a thermodynamic paradigm more generally, in favor of a mathematical model.)

Derrida, in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” offers one of the most influential treatments of this problem, one that seems especially pertinent to your book’s argument inasmuch as it makes central the role of technics and inscription in exploring this “absolute negation.” He explores how Freud’s treatment of inscription, and his discussion of the “Mystic Writing-Pad” in particular, enables both a non-logocentric treatment of “writing” that unfolds outside of auto-affectivity and an exteriorization of thought. (I would be glad to hear your views on this, since I imagine this argument is at least in the background of your thought.)

But Deleuze also offers a novel contribution to this vein of thought when he proposes that disavowal is a speculative method that allows for a thinking of primary nature, and with it the death drive, precisely as ungiven. He writes,

It might seem that a disavowal is, generally speaking, much more superficial than a negation or even a partial destruction. But this is not so, for it represents an entirely different operation. Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends or neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it. (31, my emphases)

What Deleuze underscores in disavowal is the problem of construction, or the real that disavowal makes available to thought beyond what it refuses or denies. This construction is not sensuous, but linked to the purely mental sphere of imagination and myth. The method of disavowal is central to masochism, which is concerned with what Deleuze calls the “divine latency”4 of the death drive, the primary processes as uncathected or unbound: a pure potential not discharged in action (destruction) or sensation (pleasure or pain). Deleuze contends that “masochism can be defined neither as erotogenic and sensuous (pleasure-pain), nor as moral and sentimental (guilt-punishment).” Instead, “masochism is above all formal and dramatic,” since “its particular pleasure-pain complex is determined by a particular kind of formalism, and its experience of guilt by a specific story” (109). It is expressed thematically by the ideal of “coldness,” which in freezing the warmth of sensuality allows the severity of primary nature to emerge.

Yet, this pursuit of the supersensual realm of primary nature depends not only on the method of disavowal, but on the technique of the fetish. Deleuze understands the function of the fetish not as a compensation for what the mother lacks, but as a support for this supersensual ideal. He proposes that the fetish, and more specifically the “freezing of time” it effects, allows for the construction and formalization of primary nature.

Freud himself describes the fetish as the support for an “idea.” He observes that the fetishist’s refusal of the mother’s castration actually involves two distinct operations: “If we wish to differentiate between what happens to the idea as distinct from the affect,” he writes, “we can restrict ‘repression’ [Verdrängung] to relate to the affect; the correct word for what happens to the idea is then ‘disavowal’ [Verleugnung].”5 Repression concerns affect—namely, the castration anxiety provoked by the sight of the female genitals. Conversely, the “idea” at stake in disavowal is not castration anxiety, or even the perception of the mother as castrated, but rather the reality of the maternal phallus. In other words, disavowal does not merely deny castration, but posits or upholds the reality of an object whose existence cannot be perceived. The point is not merely that an expected object (the penis) is found to be lacking, but rather that a new object, a non-empirical object, is forced into reality by means of the fetish as a process or thing. In other words, the mere existence of the fetish, as a man-made thing or object, attests to the realness of the maternal phallus it figures by offering itself as a plastic support for an unconscious idea.

Freud shows that the fetish both sustains and exteriorizes the unconscious idea that has been negated by the evidence of the senses. He emphasizes that the fetishist does not fail to perceive the mother’s lack of a penis, of which he is perfectly conscious. Instead, two distinct and incompatible realities come to exist side-by-side: the perceptual reality in which the child knows that the mother has no penis, and a psychic reality, upheld by the fetish, in which the maternal phallus reigns supreme.

It is not true that the child emerges from his experience of seeing the female parts with an unchanged belief in the woman having a phallus. He retains this belief but he also gives it up; during the conflict between the deadweight of the unwelcome perception and the force of the opposite wish, a compromise is constructed such as is only possible in the realm of unconscious modes of thought—the primary processes. In the world of psychic reality the woman still has a penis in spite of all, but this penis is no longer the same as it once was. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its successor, so to speak, and now absorbs all the interest which formerly belonged to the penis. (“Fetishism,” 206)

In the terms of your argument about technics, I would suggest that the fetish is an object, technology or practice that allows for the exteriorization of thought, for something that exceeds and interrupts the auto-affectivity of self-experience. It enables a “writing” of the primary processes that are inaccessible to consciousness and experience.6

Disavowal can also make use of other technologies and practices. In Deleuze’s reading, photography is one of the best examples of this technique: it freezes movement, suspends the spontaneity of secondary nature, such that the cold mother of primary nature—an ideal with no sensual existence—can be glimpsed in and through the gestures and attitudes of the real woman who becomes her fetishistic support.7

In sum, then, here are what I see as the main contributions of Deleuze’s intervention on the pleasure principle and its beyond:

1. Freud has a speculative method, and it arises out of the difficulty of uniting pleasure and pain, which necessitates a “transcendental principle” that would explain their non-intuitive coordination.
2. The masochist’s disavowal of secondary nature (of the sensations of pleasure and pain) is a speculative method that “opens up a new horizon beyond the given and in place of it” through a retroaction of thought upon life.
3. The fabrication or staging of the fetish is the technics that enables the exteriorization of this thought that is inaccessible to experience or sense perception.

What is so unique about Deleuze’s way of proceeding, and in my opinion distinguishes him from virtually every other philosophical reader of Freud, is that he de-psychologizes the logic of disavowal and the practice of the fetish, extracting them from the sphere of auto-affection and isolating disavowal as a method that allows for a construction of primary nature—one he even goes so far as to associate with Platonic idealism.

What if this divided attitude, this dis-avowal, were itself the bond uniting not only pleasure and pain (inasmuch as both would be disavowed in favor of a supersensuous idea), but also, at least in some of its iterations, rationalism and empiricism? As a reading of the Bachelard quote with which I began, perhaps this would suggest that the binding force that is “as strong as” that binding pleasure and pain is not an equal and opposite force, as in your reading (where technics would supplant life), but the same (unbinding) bond: a technics that enables a retroaction of thought upon life that interrupts its spontaneity and auto-affection.

I see a number of affinities here between the questions I’m trying to raise through Deleuze and your own treatment of the “technics of prehension” in the photography of Nicolas Baier, which I find to be one of the most compelling chapters in the book. I’m thinking in particular of your discussion of Project Star (Black), the installation whose component pieces all explore in different ways the properties of an object—in this case, a meteorite—that no longer exists at the end of that process, because it is eventually ground into powder and used to paint a canvas. You show that even as that object ceases to exist, its primary properties are made manifest and shown to cohere across the different presentations of the object through the elaborate technical processes of digital scanning, 3-D printing, and manual craft that Baier employs. In a wonderful formulation, you state that “the object nowhere exists, but has become the coherence of its technical construction” (158). In one example, the sensuous object produced by 3-D printing—a massive reconstruction of the meteorite based on digital scans of its surface—actually supports or bodies forth the primary properties of the object that are apprehended rationally by a process of mathematical formalization. In another, you describe two pieces—Vanitas and Impact—that record the impact of Baier’s fist “acting like a meteorite,” rather than the impact of the meteorite itself; in your gloss, “they record an idea evoked by an object enacted by a body recorded in a substrate” (158). Finally, you state that “to encounter such an absent object, at once nowhere and everywhere present, is to recognize it as both objective and constructed: as the mediation of a real existence irreducible to a subjective correlate” (165).

When Deleuze defines disavowal as a process that consists in “neutralizing the given” such that “a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it,” I think this definition actually applies very well to what you see Baier doing with piece; it seems like a fetishistic project in the best—i.e., most Deleuzian—sense of the term.8 In the terms of his analysis, I wonder whether we could describe Baier as a photographer of “primary nature,” extracting and formalizing the primary (mathematical) nature from the sensory qualities of the object.

Questions

1. My first question concerns the place of Freud and of psychoanalysis more generally with respect to what you call Rationalist Empiricism. I realize that psychoanalysis is not central to your project, at least explicitly, but it seems to me that it’s not entirely alien, either. Could Freud, especially as Deleuze reads him here, be understood as engaging in a work of rational empiricism? Deleuze describes the beyond of the pleasure principle as a problem for “transcendental philosophy,” while Freud describes his own method as of “pure speculation.” From the vantage of your argument, however, are either of these terms really appropriate? Or do we need others?
2. To what extent do you think that the priority that Michel Henry gives to auto-affection and to the immediacy of experience applies to psychoanalysis? Whether or not you agree with Deleuze’s analysis in these examples, do you believe that there is something akin to technics / the exteriorization of thought in psychoanalysis? Many philosophical readers of psychoanalysis ultimately align psychoanalysis with auto-affection, including some of the very best. Although I assume, as I mentioned earlier, that Derrida’s argument in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” is influential for your own thinking about writing and technics, I wonder whether you agree with his conclusion at the end of the essay, which is that Freud ultimately reabsorbs the technics of writing into auto-affectivity and self-presence. Another example might be Catherine Malabou’s claim The New Wounded that psychoanalysis is inseparable from a certain auto-affectivity inasmuch as it relies upon a personal “history.”
3. Finally, what significance does Deleuze have, if any, for your thinking about rationalist empiricism and speculative critique? While one certainly couldn’t ask you to address a greater range of figures in the book than you already have, I’m curious as to why he is not central to your meditations given what I, at least, perceive to be his important contributions to these questions.

Rationalist Empiricism attests to the “lived practice” of what it means to philosophize. In a banal sense, this is perhaps true of every book of philosophy. However, this book sets itself apart by foregrounding the dissonance, the noise, that is all too often silenced as one’s “experience of the world enters into philosophical systematicity.”1 The book ends on a beautiful note in which we are left suspended between wonder and the uncanny: “How strange it is to be anything at all” (262). Rationalist empiricism is itself an effort to sustain the strangeness of being by attending to the force of philosophical estrangement that dissipates as one becomes comfortable with the conceptual machinery of a philosophical system. The book proposes to amplify the experience of discomfort by marshalling the gap between philosophical systems: between rationalism and empiricism, and, more fundamentally, between idealism and materialism. Rationalist empiricism is an operation of philosophical estrangement that highlights the requisite violence of the concept as a force of exteriorization that ruptures “the demands and standards of common sense.”2

As the young Hegel himself suggested in “Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt” [On the Essence of Philosophical Critique As Such]:

Philosophy by its very nature is esoteric; for itself it is neither made for the masses nor is it susceptible of being cooked up for them. It is philosophy only because it goes exactly contrary to the understanding and thus even more so to “sound common sense,” the so-called healthy human understanding, which actually means the local and temporary vision of some limited generation of human beings. To that generation the world of philosophy is in and for itself a topsy-turvy world, an inverted world.3

Rationalist empiricism is an effort to forestall the naturalization of this inversion by unsettling “the methodological unity of the tradition” (30). By constructing a framework, what Brown terms “a strange topology” (35), in which incompatible systems enter into “communication,” the practice of thought itself comes to be defined by an internal disruption in which its own exteriority is encountered in and through the exceptions produced by an encounter with the outside. To come to terms with the world in which we live, it does not suffice to simply interpret the world through a particular philosophical system, for thinking occurs only at the seams of the systems themselves and the impossible place of the thinking subject summoned to sustain their dissonant relation. “What is the world that we pass through, at the crux of concept and experience, when we do so? Where is the extra-systematic space of philosophical reflection, or of thought, in which we think the compossibility or communication of philosophical systems? Where, and what, is the world we recompose as we do so?” (37). Such questions haunt the book as a whole and can only be sustained by a philosophical approach that shifts the problem of philosophy away from a desire for either methodological unity or systematicity in order to attend to what Brown calls “the methodological gap between rationalism and empiricism” (30).

This gap which is itself produced by the theoretical practice of rationalist empiricism is the concern of speculative critique. The production of this gap between systems enables the determination of a gap in the real that thwarts systematicity itself. Reason interrupts experience through conceptual determination but it is in turn interrupted by an encounter with that which is exterior both to thought and experience. This exteriority is neither empirical nor rational and can only be thought through the determination of what is non-empirical in the empirical (the rationalist empiricism of scientific practice) and what is non-rational in reason (the rationalist empiricism of philosophical practice). “Rationalist empiricism,” Brown writes, “is an orientation toward the outside of experience and the outside of thought, and it unfolds on the outside of method” (261). Philosophy is as Hegel insists esoteric by its very nature. But nothing less is required if one is to think, with Brown, the rationality of the real (Wirklich: of the actual) without positing that the real is rational. It is the theory of the interruption of speculative identity that is at issue in speculative critique.

For the rationalist empiricist, the real is without reason because it is absolutely contingent. The determination of the absolute restores reason’s speculative vocation but the speculative proposition thus generated necessitates division not unification. Contingency itself is doubtless the central concept of the book. It traverses Brown’s treatment of politics (“Adequate knowledge of capital is precisely knowledge of its historical contingency” [208]), the aesthetic (“to stumble upon a singular unity of matter, life, and thought, in the element of feeling, and to experience this feeling as the implicit inscription of a statement—‘This is beautiful’” [256]), science (“the qualitative particularity of experimental procedures remains ineradicable” [138]), and ontology. Brown argues that to think in the wake of finitude, following the work of Quentin Meillassoux, requires the reformulation of the problem of the ontological difference where the being of beings is thought as absolute contingency.

Rationalist Empiricism thus implies a critique of Kant’s critical effort, and by extension transcendental philosophy tout court, to save necessity from the contingent vicissitudes of the empirical. The book is in large part inspired by Meillassoux’s intervention whose philosophical practice, for Brown, is itself an exemplary model of the methodological unorthodoxy of rationalist empiricism. Whereas the reception of Meillassoux’s work has been determined by his critique of correlationism, Brown emphasizes that this critique by no means gives license to hawk the resurrection of metaphysics. On the contrary, Brown positions Meillassoux as the inheritor of Hegel’s immanent critique of Kant, Althusser’s immanent critique of Marx, and Heidegger’s immanent critique of Hegel. To borrow Deleuze’s formula for Nietzsche’s relation to Kant, we can say that for Brown Meillassoux’s critique of transcendental philosophy is the “realization” of the very project of immanent critique inaugurated by the Critique of Pure Reason. The import of Meillassoux for Brown lies in his “critique of the subordination of science to philosophy” (112) and by extension his critique of the problem of ground and the principle of sufficient reason. Reason need not limit its scope methodologically in advance, restricting itself to the field of possible experience, since the encounter with contingency of the actual engenders reason through the very act in which it determines its absolute necessity. The rationalist empiricist draws “the rational from the empirical” (23). Kant’s critical exit from the battleground of metaphysics leaps over the problem of contingency, the facticity of being. Rationalist empiricism returns to the battleground not in order to reinstall thought within the element of pre-critical naivete, but to restore Critique itself to the fundamental antagonism that engendered its image of thought.

Put differently, rationalist empiricism extracts the problem of critique from its Kantian, transcendental solution. To this purpose, Brown forcefully returns us to the primal scene of critical philosophy: to Kant’s encounter with the thought of that “acute man,” David Hume. By bringing the full pressure of the empiria to bear on the concept of causality—what Kant in the Prolegommena to Any Future Metaphysics terms the “crux metaphysicorum” (§29)—Hume exposes that the dream of metaphysics, i.e., the a priori determination of being, has indeed been nothing but a dream, a “dogmatic slumber.” By imperiling the concept of causal necessity, Hume’s problem of induction threatens the very edifice of reason itself, since it calls into question its very foundation, its fundamental ground. If metaphysics consists “wholly and completely” of a priori statements and the a priori has no relation to and thus no bearing on experience, then metaphysics and by extension science as such is merely fictious: a game that may operate with logical consistency but that is in principle untouched by the real and whose provenance owes more to the imagination, to what Hume terms fancy, than to the logos. The problem with dogmatism is not a matter of its inconsistency. A dogma may indeed be logically valid, fully compliant with the principle of non-contradiction, but nonetheless be without ground. Hume’s “problematic concept of cause” forces a rupture at the heart of metaphysics and thus of reason between the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of ground (first formulated explicitly by Leibniz). Kantian Critique is the registration of this event in thought. The principle of ground (der Satz vom Grund) also known as the principle of sufficient reason states that nothing is without reason (nihil est sine ratione). Empiricism precisely because it claims that something is without reason exposes a fundamental division within reason itself between the demand of logical consistency (logical grounds) and what Kant on one occasion termed the problem of “real ground”4 and what will become the problem of the a priori condition of possible experience. Hume exposes a gap in the logos itself between its operation and its meaning or sense. And it is this gap that Kantian Critique attempts to close by attempting to ground logical judgement. The practice of rationalist empiricism entails reopening this gap.

The issue is not a matter of becoming Humean, since Hume does not make of the problem of induction what he ought. But one can think what remains unthought in Hume by attending to the shudder it doubtless induced in the thought of Kant. To do so requires that we at once recognize that Kant thought what he thought he must in order to preserve the real ground of reason from the contingency of the empiria, while discerning that he need not have. Although undertaken in the name of science, the effort to render congruent scientific objectivity with perceptual objectivity, betrays a lingering commitment to sound common sense, to the healthy human understanding. This is perhaps most strikingly evident in Kant’s treatment of “The Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination” from A edition of “The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” Kant argues that without a law proscribing the necessary connection between appearances the empirical imagination would be without rule and its very capacity for representation (Vorstellung) would be dead and unknown to us, a capacity buried and hidden in recess of the mind.

If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red; or if a certain word were attributed now to this thing, now to that, or if one and the same thing were sometimes called this, sometimes that, without the governance of a certain rule to which the appearances are already subjected in themselves, then no empirical synthesis of reproduction could take place.5

Such a situation seems to Kant unimaginable. If these are the consequences of a truly consistent empiricism, this is more than enough for Kant to render it dangerously absurd. Yet, thought need not take its guide from such human all too human imperatives. “That is, we do not have to think what Kant says we must think.” Brown writes, “In fact, there is no reason to think it” (27).

To think the fact that Kant “need not” have thought what he thought he must is to lodge contingency at the heart of thought and of its history; and thus to restore the import of Hume as the figure who forces reason to come to grips with the contingency not only of the objects of thought but of thought’s own occurrence. Reason is not thwarted by this encounter but engendered by the demand to think contingency. There is no reason to think it. If it so happens that it is thought, this itself is contingent. What is not contingent, according to Meillassoux and Brown, however, is contingency itself. Contingency is the sole necessity. Meillassoux terms this the principle of factiality. The principle is established on the basis of the peculiarity of this singular judgement. For to say that contingency is contingent is in fact to say the same thing as the assertion of its opposite: contingency is not contingent, which is to say, necessary. The obliteration of its sense is its sole sense. It asserts an indifference to its own negation. Interestingly, the negation does not call into question its identity but truly expresses it. It is the very thing it is not. Here we have a speculative proposition that is truly without ground, for it separates what it says (contingency is) from sense (contingency is not contingent) in its very saying (contingency is necessary). The determination of contingency absolves it from its sense. It is absolute and I am tempted to say, thinking with Brown, that it says its own non-sense. Meillassoux himself speaks of the impossibility of its sense being redoubled: “‘This non-redoubling reveals the origin of every necessary statement: a necessary statement has as its object not a being, but the contingency of beings’” (100).

Now the very fact that it has been thought does not entail the necessity of its having been thought. The determination of the necessity of contingency does not imply necessity of thinking. “‘The contingency of thought cannot depend upon the thought of contingency’” (103). To think it requires the exteriorization of what is thought—the necessity of contingency—from the contingent act of its being thought. Its necessity implies no necessity except that of its contingency. The in-itself that is here rationally determined, Brown stresses, does not imply that we can “think anything like appearance of the word as it would be without the phenomenal determinations of thinking and sensing beings. He claims that thinking the non-contingency of contingency forces a determination of the in-itself with no bearing whatsoever upon the appearance of the world or our existence within it: the very contingency of our own thought must be conceived as a determination of being and not only a determination thinking” (104). The given is thought as contingent only in the determining act that separates the given from any givenness. The in-itself, being, is non-manifest. Thinking is at once adequate to what is being thought—the being of beings—and this adequation includes the non-identity of being and thought. Being is not the ground of appearance. Nor is thought. Rather being is thought as the separation of being from sense, meaning. Thinking is the separation of being and appearance as Plato had proposed long ago. But what is thought as separate is becoming in itself, infinite because unconstrained by any law other than the necessity of the contingency of law as such.

Rationalist empiricism provides us a new image of what it means to overturn Platonism. It carries out this inversion of Plato through recasting Heidegger’s thought of the ontological difference. For Brown the question of being cannot, however, be posed in the manner Heidegger proposed: what is the meaning of being? What does being signify? Being thought as absolute contingency, “unsubordinated contingency,” does not make possible and hence ground meaning or sense of beings. Its event rather serves to separate being from all sense. Brown thus highlights a crucial tension in Heidegger’s Being and Time in which Heidegger determines the temporality of time not in terms of Dasein’s own ecstasis but as “the primordial “outside of itself” in and for itself.” I sadly cannot develop here the significance of Brown’s interpretation of Heidegger, the latter’s relation to Meillassoux, and their respective relations to Hegel. This is perhaps the most dense and rich part of an incredibly dense and rich book. However, I want to simply highlight that Brown here has marked in the fabric of Being and Time a certain exception that exceeds the limits of its framework and that forces us to call into question the very integrity of the book’s otherwise pristine methodological coherence. It is something that a thinker stumbles upon “as a punctual, a-successive rupture breaking with the existing order of succession, with the previous rule of succession” (119).

The question of the contingency or necessity of succession—Hume’s question—is, in my view, the fundamental question of Rationalist Empiricism: “Is there a reason the future should continue to resemble the past?” (52). The rationalist empiricist answers “No” and the book is an elegant and rigorous effort to dignify this negation. This negation is only dignified if it is not affirmed at the cost of onto-logy, i.e., at the cost of the logos. “Insofar as ontology is a rational discourse it is constrained, conditioned, by what has to be said of being. It cannot say just anything. And insofar as it is not a dogmatic discourse, but rather immanently critical, ontology has to unfold across the reflexive experience of what happens in thought” (89).

The book would itself be a farce if Brown himself did not say what he thought he must. And yet the reader cannot do justice to the book without registering what happened in the course of this thought and thus consigning it to its irreparable contingency. And it is a sign of the coherence of its methodological a-systematicity that Brown does not attempt a synthesis and thus to ground the relation between the contingency of thought’s historical occurrence and the ontological determination of the absolute. Only be leaving this gap open can Brown conceive of history as necessarily contingent and thus open to contestation. The book as a whole suggests that only by bringing the full force of reason to bear on the contingent are we able to see the truly contingent. And as the methodological reflections of the book make clear this is not to ensure that thought proceeds without stumbling. This is no discourse on method. Rather it hopes to provide a means of differentiating between a genuine trip and mere prat fall. The book ends with a certain encomium to Kant’s treatment of the beautiful and this is no doubt fitting. For it is here that Kant in his final effort to provide some ground for the unity of reason introduces perhaps his most stellar exception. A judgment whose singularity is defined by its very exception, by the exposure of reason to the rule of the contingent.