Grounding Deleuze

The article discusses the significance of What Is Grounding?, a text based on a lecturecourse given by Deleuze at the Lycée Louis le Grand. This course is crucial forunderstanding Deleuze’s thought, as it presents his ideas in a focused manner andalso establishes the differences between various approaches to the philosophical taskof (self)grounding and the beginning of philosophy as a whole. Deleuze begins withmythology: mythological thinking accompanied by the endless task of ritual repetitionforms the first step towards attaining reason as infinite. With Hume, Kantand post-Kantianism we arrive at the grounding of reason, and Deleuze’s text itselfis also concerned with the capacity of finite creatures to “realize reason”. Knowledgeafter Hume, however, is grounded on subjective principles and in it the subjectbegins to assert its right to grounding through “questioning”.The structures of questioning are three: the existential, the logical-rational andthe critical, and they are not opposed, but rather form a triple function of grounding.They could also have a relation either to knowledge or to expressing things asthey are in themselves. Deleuze calls the first relation “method” and the second “system,” and takes a positive view of post-Kantian philosophers and even Hegel because they had moved towards system after Kant could not choose between it and method and yet had emphasized the constitutive character of human finitude. The deepest aspect of grounding, however, remains “groundlessness/ungrounding” — in these lectures Deleuze is already turning toward an encounter with the dark ground of the unconscious, an idea he borrowed from Schelling and related to individuation. Thus,grounding brings difference into ground, and this is what the immanent realizationof reason consists of.