ABSTRACT

Chapters Four through Six develop an original reading of Kant pressured by the insights of Deleuze and Derrida, with the interpretations of Heidegger and Lyotard in the background. In this chapter I present Kant’s interpretation of time, self and imagination in the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason. The Kantian conceptions of time, self, and imagination are intended to assist the work of the understanding in order to secure the objectivity of empirical knowledge, even though such determinate knowledge is restricted to the phenomenal realm of appearances. In Kant’s Critical Philosophy, however, and also in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze troubles this interpretation by showing how Kant’s combination of temporality and subjectivity fissures the status of knowledge and the knowing subject within the realm of appearances. Chapter Five returns to the Critique of Judgment, and analyzes the relationship of imagination and understanding in the feelings of beauty and the sublime.1 This transformed awareness of the disturbing power of the imagination, along with the implicit impotence of the understanding, is then related back to the First Critique, where it has striking consequences. The breakdown or disappearance of the understanding in the Critique of Judgment compromises its objective or determinative status in the Critique of Pure Reason. Finally, all of these themes converge in Kant’s brief chapter on “the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding,” which is the subject of Chapter Six, where an analogy will be made between Kant’s transcendental imagination and Derrida’s notion of différance.