Deleuze and the Immanent Sublime

Shedding new light on Deleuze and Kant's Critique of Judgment, Louis Schreel situates the importance of the Kantian sublime to Deleuze's overall metaphysics. To trace this lesser-known intellectual history, Schreel explores Deleuze's transcendental structuralism through central concepts of psychic individuation, transcendental ideas, and the experience of the sublime.

Through this history, the concept of the sublime emerges in Deleuze's naturalistic philosophy in a timely and novel way. Not as a transcendent quality of human reason, but as an immanent quality of creative processes of self-organization in complex cognitive systems. In this way, Schreel provides a truly novel perspective on the philosophy of Kant and Deleuze, whilst opening up new areas of research between transcendental philosophy and cognitive science. Engagement with previously untranslated writings from French and German thinkers including Jean Petitot, Gilbert Simondon, Henri Maldiney and Erwin Straus, adds further breadth to the development of Deleuze's ideas on the sublime in this systematic study.