A presentation copy, inscribed by the author ‘Pour Monsieur de Gandillac - qu’il soit indulgent pour ce livre - en sique de reconnaissance et d’affection profondes, Gilles Delueze’ in blue ink to the half title.
The recipient, Maurice de Gandillac (1906-2006), was Professor of History of the Middle Ages and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1946 to 1977, where he exercised considerable influence over Deleuze’s generation of philosophers; indeed, his list of students reads almost as a ‘who’s who’ of post-structuralist philosophers, including Deleuze as well as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jean-François Lyotard, amongst others.
Gandillac’s influence on Deleuze is particularly noteworthy as he supervised Deleuze’s principal thesis for the Doctorat D’Etat, what would become Deleuze’s principal original philosophical work, eventually published in 1968 as Difference and Repetition. Gandillac’s great specialism in the history of philosophical thought was also influential to the development of the Deleuze’s first published books, which responded to various key figures from across the history of philosophy, including David Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and the present book on Kant.
Systematising Kant’s three critiques in just over 100 pages, this short study is an astonishing act of intellectual compression on Deleuze’s part, one with which he is able to critique Kant’s project from within with great clarity and concision. As framed by Deleuze, Kant is a philosopher who ultimately reduces the transcendental dimension to a mere copy of the authenticated real; moving forwards, Deleuze’s project would become to seek instead in immanence the creative faculties of difference and the new.
A remark made several years after its 1963 publication goes some way to explaining Deleuze’s motivation to tackle Kantian philosophy head on: ‘I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs - the tribunal of Reason, the legitimate exercise of the faculties (our subjection to these made all the more hypocritical by our being characterised as legislators)’.
