Consolidation

Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953)

IF IT SEEMS surprising that Deleuze would choose to work, at the beginning of his philosophical career, on the philosophy of nature, his earliest work had nevertheless already paved the way for this choice. Before ‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’ Deleuze had published, apart from a number of book reviews, five articles that Francois Dosse would consider as part of Deleuze's ‘portraits’ of other philosophers (2011: 108). Three of them were on Henri Bergson (‘Bergson, 1859–1941’, ‘Bergson's Conception of Difference’ and ‘Les etudes bergsonienne’), one on Nietzsche's differentiation of ‘signification and force’ (‘Nietzsche sens et valeur’), and ‘Du Christ a la bourgeoisie’. Deleuze's reading of Lucretius shows that although ‘On Gilbert Simondon’ is an important moment in the gradual crystallization of Deleuzian philosophy, Deleuze had already found a philosophy of multiplicity in the philosophy of nature, five years before he rediscovered it in modern science. Apart from the above articles, Deleuze had written, in 1953, Empiricism and Subjectivity, a short book on David Hume. In that book, before he was to deal with the infinitely short moment of the genesis of actual and virtual multiplicities from within both philosophical and scientific registers, he had conceptualized what processes take place within the planes of consistency and composition that develop within the plane of immanence. In this progression, Deleuze moves from the atomic to the molecular level.

One could easily extract from Lucretius’ text a concept of the natural world as a complex system of habits and customs. In fact, in ‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’, Deleuze maintained that ‘nature is not opposed to custom, for there are naturalcustoms’ (LS: 278). Perhaps this comment might be read as an echo of Empiricism and Subjectivity, in which Deleuze had dealt with Hume's philosophy as one of habit and habit formation that attributes to each other a ‘physicalism’ (ES: 119) and a perceptualism.