If thought is always already a given-thought, we must then ask with Deleuze, “what is the given?”1 In his preliminary analysis of subjectivity, Deleuze describes the given as a “collection” and the imagination as the direct experience of this collection.2 This description ultimately leads Deleuze to his schematization of generic thought as the moment of sense, the hiatus of touch, the fleeting brush of contact with the world: purposiveness.3 Thought so conceived can only be given in the world, not posited over against the world. We find ourselves necessarily “referred to nature” and the question of the given.4

So, what is the given? A collection, to be sure, but Deleuze now takes up the question with greater systematicity. The given is “the totality of that which appears, being which equals appearance.”5 Insofar as being is its appearing, the given is “movement and change without identity or law,” an “animated succession,” a differential manifold: “everything separable is distinguishable and everything distinguishable is different.”6 This manifold “does not presuppose anything else and nothing else precedes it.”7 Empirical philosophy “must begin with this experience,” the experience of the manifold, “because it is the experience,” that which has “no need of any thing to support [its] existence.”8

“The mind is identical to ideas in the mind,” Deleuze reminds us, and we should recall Deleuze’s earlier argument the “place [of the mind] is not different from what takes place in it; the representation does not take place in a subject.”9 Experience has no support because it is pure difference: “a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions.”10 Indeed, in experience there is no re-presentation at all, only the self-presentation of being. Being is not an ideal “substrate” that appears but is ultimately inaccessible to perception; rather, its “substance” is its appearing, which makes “every perception,” as a sense of the appearing, “a substance.”11 Sense is substance, substance is sensible, and the totality of substance is sensibility as such.

We see, then, that for Deleuze, experience is always experience of.12 This is where empiricism begins. Consequently, empiricism constitutes a dual critique, “not only the critique of a philosophy of substance but also the critique of a philosophy of nature.”13 Substance is appearance; nature is that which appears.14 In empiricism, Deleuze sees the collapse of the “two kinds of qualities”—primary (observer-independent properties) and secondary (observer-dependent properties)—into each other, because “perception,” now redefined as sensibility or sense-substance, “gives us no difference between two kinds of qualities.”15 Thought is always thought of the given, begins and ends with the given.

In this qualitative collapse, Deleuze sees the “negation of the principle of sufficient reason,” that “everything must have a reason, cause, or ground.”16 There is no reason for the given, only sheer fact—it cannot call upon anything other than itself.17 But if the given can only call upon itself, “what exactly is it calling upon”?18 This is the problem that Deleuze must now address. In a field of pure difference, what “consistency” is there to be found?19 In his empirical analysis of the subject, Deleuze restores the given to its proper place, antecedent to and encompassing the subject: the subject is constituted in the given.20 In so doing, the possibility of a transcendental critique is annihilated, the certainty of essence destroyed: empiricism discovers the “principle of difference” to be the very principle of the given.21 But, if difference is the principle of the given, how can it be said that the subject is constituted by principles that “impos[e] constancy on the imagination”?22 How can the given mobilize such constancy if the given is in itself difference, flux, change? Previously, Deleuze was not concerned with the sheer fact of the principles of association: the “cause cannot be known; principles have neither cause nor an origin of their power”; “philosophy has nothing to say on what causes the principles and on the origin of their power. There, it is the place of God.”23 Now, however, Deleuze recognizes that the principle of difference threatens to undermine his argument as a whole.24 So we must ask: how can difference be its own principle?25

Empiricism begins with the “distinct and independent,” with “divisibility,” with the “moment of the mind.”26 This moment of the mind is the pure function of sensibility that we have taken pains to articulate in the previous two essays, the hyphen of sense-substance that is the possibility of sensibility as such. The mind’s “constant,” its only constant, is purposiveness, the vacuous diagram, the empty form, difference calling upon itself as its own base case.27 The moment of sense is, for Deleuze, the “smallest idea,” the “indivisible” as infinitesimal unit of divisibility, the kernel of a recursive operation that is the very differential movement of the given.28 This is in no way an idealism: the indivisible idea is the genesis of sense in pure difference—as much the “sense” of the electromagnetic field as the “sense” of the perceiving body. So, Deleuze contends, “the problem of the status of the mind is the same as the problem of space.”29 Again, this is not an idealism, not some transcendental panpsychism, but rather an immanent pansensibilism. The indivisible idea is the “minimum” of thought, the “terminating idea,” the “idea-limit” beyond which “no other idea” nor “no other thing in general” exists: neither “mathematical” nor “physical” but “sensible.”30 The sensible point is the indivisible unit of “real existence” and the existence that “itself belongs to the unit.”31 This point “has no extension, and yet it exists,” exceeding the “nonexistence” of the purely mathematical point while remaining indivisible—it is the concrete nothingness of sense, the sensibility of the given.32

In this challenging line of reasoning, the purpose of the layering and repetition of arguments throughout Empiricism and Subjectivity comes into focus. In Chapter 4, Deleuze walks his readers through his idiosyncratic interpretation of the impulses of polytheism and theism, which are in turn exemplary instances of the general rules discussed in the previous chapters. From the correction of these impulses Deleuze derives the schema of purposiveness, the diagram of causation: polytheism operates according to the principle of “continuous existence”, theism according to that of “distinct existence”, and the dual system of these principles is what we call causation, the “belief in the distinct and continuous existence of bodies.”33 In Chapter 5, then, in order to answer the question of how the subject is constituted in the given, Deleuze situates the dual system of causation in its proper place in the given as the very principle of difference, which is the principle of the given as such. Continuity and distinguishability are the defining “characteristics” of the given, characteristics which are now reformulated as “indivisibility” and “distribution.”34 This reformulation reveals the rather stunning philosophical manoeuvre that Deleuze has performed: polytheism and theism are in fact the cultural expressions of the two fundamental characteristics of the given, which Deleuze can now plainly identify as time and space.

In a manifold of pure difference, time is “the perceptible succession of changing objects” (continuous existence) and space is the “arrangement of visible or tangible objects” (distinct existence).35 Causation as the principle of difference is the schematism of continuity and distinguishability, indivisibility and distribution. It is the concrete nothingness of sense, the sensible unit, the idea-limit of the given. Space and time, in turn, are emergent structures of difference, characteristics of the given in its constitution as a differential manifold.36 We discover Deleuze’s project in Empiricism and Subjectivity to be much more than a science of humanity (though it is certainly such a science); it is his first attempt at an ontology of pure difference.37


Notes

  1. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 1953, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 87. ↩

  2. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 22-23. ↩

  3. I explicated this schematization in “Sensible Subjects,” November 23, 2025, https://steinea.ca/2025/11/23/sensible-subjects/. Infinitesimal sensibility we might also give the name hapticality, to draw from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 97-99. Hapticality is “a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you. This is modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand laugh” (98). ↩

  4. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 84. Compare Heisenberg’s quotation of von Weizsäcker in Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, 1958 (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 2000), 23: “Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.” ↩

  5. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. Compare Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle,” 1929, in Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, 86-95, eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 89: “In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere: all experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed and can often be grasped only in parts. Everything is accessible to man; and man is the measure of all things”; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), 1-2: “The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior nor exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to appearances, and none of them is privileged … an electric current does not have a secret reverse side … it indicates only itself and the total series … The appearance refers to the total series of appearances and not to a hidden reality which would drain to itself all the being of the existent … the appearance becomes full positivity; its essence is an ‘appearing’ which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it. For the being of an existent is exactly what it appears … it is absolutely indicative of itself”; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960, trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2013), 112: “self-presentation is a universal ontological characteristic of nature”; and Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, 2015, trans. Erik Butler (London, UK: Verso, 2016), 21: “reality has no double: everything is right there, before our eyes.” ↩

  6. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87, and Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. ↩

  7. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. ↩

  8. Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88, Deleuze’s insertion. ↩

  9. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88, 23. ↩

  10. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩

  11. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88, and Hume, cited in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. Compare Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44-45: “The matter, the continuum about which and through which signs speak, is always the same … The matter segmented in order to express something expresses other segmentations of that matter.” Eco, like the later Deleuze, works closely with Louis Hjelmslev’s glossematics, as laid out in the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 1943, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). ↩

  12. Deleuze is profoundly Sartrean, and in so being, profoundly Husserlian. See Being and Nothingness, 7: “All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content.’ We must renounce those neutral ‘givens’ which, according to the system of reference chosen, find their place either ‘in the world’ or ‘in the psyche.’ A table is not in consciousness—not even in the capacity of a representation. A table is in space, beside the window, etc … The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.” Sartre will start to write this “consciousness of” instead as “consciousness (of),” which we might collapse even further with a hyphen: consciousness of world is consciousness (of) world is consciousness-world (given-thought simply turned around). Contemporary analogs may be found in Riccardo Manzotti, The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (New York, NY: OR Books, 2018) and Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). The latter of these is a recent discovery, so I have yet to engage with Hutto and Myin’s arguments closely. ↩

  13. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. ↩

  14. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. ↩

  15. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88. A later work of Deleuze’s, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 99-100, gives us more tools for thinking of Deleuzian qualities: the “canvas” (the world) is full of “figurative and probabilistic givens” and the painter’s work with these givens is a kind of “catastrophe” that “overc[omes] the canvas”; the givens are transformed, the canvas is qualified; the painter’s marks emerge from the canvas, “irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random,” the very “traits of sensation.” ↩

  16. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 88 and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 14, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/. Compare also Marc Lange, Because Without Cause: Non-Causal Explanations in Science and Mathematics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016). ↩

  17. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 89. Reading Deleuze with Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2006, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2008), provides us with a useful corrective. In his denial of primary and secondary qualities, Deleuze walks right up to the trap of “correlationism,” that is, “the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant … the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). Indeed, the schema “given-thought” could very easily be taken as yet another instance of the correlationism that Meillassoux challenges. However, as I hope this and the preceding essays have demonstrated, Deleuze is working to resolve precisely the same philosophical problem as Meillassoux, to escape the trap of post-Kantian critical philosophy. Deleuze’s focus on Hume in Empiricism and Subjectivity should indicate as much. In his chapter on “Hume’s Problem,” Meillassoux writes: “So long as we believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things … we must transform our perspective on unreason, stop construing it as the form of our deficient grasp of the world and turn it into the veridical content of this world as such” (82). This is the “principle of factiality,” the “absolute necessity of everything’s non-necessity” (50, 62), the “absolute” as “hyper-Chaos” (64). Deleuze’s empiricism should be understood, therefore, in Meillassoux’s terms, as a “factial” speculation (79). I leave the intricacies of an interreading of these texts to a future work. ↩

  18. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 89. ↩

  19. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 90. ↩

  20. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. To pull more language from Meillassoux, the given is “what is whether we are or not.” After Finitude, 27. ↩

  21. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87. ↩

  22. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. ↩

  23. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 25, 77. ↩

  24. François Laruelle, while not entirely fair to Deleuze, does excellent work moving beyond this challenge in his Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, 1986, trans. Rocco Gangle (London, UK: Continuum, 2010). Likewise, Quentin Meillassoux’s project in the wake of After Finitude has been much concerned with the elaboration of “supercontingency,” which we might describe with Deleuze as the “principle of difference” as absolute. See Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (Milan, IT: Mimesis International, 2014), and S. C. Hickman, “Quentin Meillassoux: Hyper-Chaos and the Real,” The Dark Forest, May 29, 2015, https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/quentin-meillassoux-hyper-chaos-and-the-real/. ↩

  25. To use language perhaps more significant to contemporary readers, the question that Deleuze raises here is that of how complexity emerges from chaos. Deleuze does not appear, as of yet, to have embarked upon his study of the literature in the natural sciences that will so influence later works like A Thousand Plateaus. The following pages of Empiricism and Subjectivity are very difficult, given their strict adherence to Hume’s terms without recourse to the other theories that run through Deleuze’s later thought. Reading Deleuze at this point in history, however, there are some texts to which the motivated reader can turn for additional insight: Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 1958, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1980); Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, 1972 (Dordrecht, ND: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980); Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2006, trans. Ray Brassier (London, UK: Continuum, 2008); Leonard Smith, Chaos: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); John H. Holland, Complexity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London, UK: Verso, 2018); and Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). ↩

  26. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87, 90. ↩

  27. As I have discussed in an earlier essay, “Pure Indetermination,” March 5, 2021, https://steinea.ca/2021/03/05/pure-indetermination/, this is Alain Badiou’s logic of the determination of the void, from Ø → {Ø} → 1. ↩

  28. Refer to my elaboration of the Pythagorean concept of the “unit-point” in “Pure Indetermination,” n.p. ↩

  29. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 90. ↩

  30. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 91. Again, echoes of the unit-point are strong here. ↩

  31. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 91. ↩

  32. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 91. Compare Carlo Rovelli, “This Granular Life,” Aeon, January 23, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-atomic-theory-the-most-important-idea-in-human-history: “And there is the simple idea of the finite divisibility of things—the granular quality of the world. It is the idea that stops the infinite between our fingers.” ↩

  33. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 78. ↩

  34. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩

  35. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 92. ↩

  36. Recent debates in physics on the nature of space-time are illuminating, here. Sean Carroll, amongst others, is “quite confident that space-time is emergent. It arises fairly robustly from the mutual requirements of quantum mechanics and gravity.” See “The Unraveling of Space-Time,” Quanta Magazine, September 25, 2024, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-20240925/. Similarly, the concepts of “mass” and “length” may also be emergent. See Natalie Wolchover, “At Multiverse Impasse, a New Theory of Scale,” Quanta Magazine, August 18, 2014, https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-avoid-the-multiverse-physicists-propose-a-symmetry-of-scales-20140818/. ↩

  37. And indeed, it is Deleuze’s first attempt to break out of the correlationist circle, to think what is, whether humanity is or not. ↩