In this chapter, I want to explore the relationship between Kant’s account of the constitution of experience and the accounts developed by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze both hold ambivalent attitudes toward Kant’s account of how experience is to be understood. It is Kant who places synthesis at the centre of the constitution of the world, and who discovers the concept of a transcendental illusion, a concept central to the thought of both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Kant holds that basic ontological concepts such as that of an object are simply ways of organising experience, rather than fundamental structures given in space and time. Furthermore, Kant breaks with the metaphysical tradition in recognising that time itself has a positive existence outside of categorial thought. ‘Time is not a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition’ (Kant 1929: A32). Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze argue, however, that Kant leaves unexamined the nature of the world which is to be explained through the transcendental idealist method. Similarly, both seek to replace the notion of synthesis as a process that takes place from nowhere with one that unfolds within the temporality of the world. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty expresses this most clearly when he writes that:

Now, there are a number of key claims in this passage that will be central to both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s readings of Kant. First, we can note that Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction here between thinking and experience.