Phantasteon and Fanciful Flux: On Deleuze's Transcendental Imagination

In: Angelaki. Journal for the Theoretical Humanities,  vol. 31 issue 1: Imagination Taday. Between Theory and Practice of Phantasia. Ed. Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis, 2026.

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Abstract: In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes a transcendental use of the faculties, mainly in response to Plato and Kant, who according to him are not able to account for original thought, but only for recognition and representation. In this context, Deleuze distinguishes between an empirical and a transcendental use of the imagination. According to him, transcendental imagination constitutes a phantasteon — at the same time that which cannot be imagined and that which can only be — with the potential to trigger thought. But how should we understand Deleuze’s transcendental imagination? How exactly does he distinguish between this transcendental imagination and empirical imagination? I propose to clarify this distinction through an examination of what Deleuze writes on imagination in his monographies on Hume and Kant. Deleuze here distinguishes two senses of the imagination: one, whimsical, capricious, and fanciful; the other one, a deliberate human faculty of reproduction. Deleuze’s reading of Kant shows that transcendental subjectivity can be seen as a hierarchized system; a whole network of interests and of rules for the faculties to achieve these interests. At the very base of this system, Deleuze distinguishes a spontaneous, affective ground of the subject, where the faculties interact freely in a purely aesthetic contemplation. This spontaneous harmonizing of the faculties is of a different nature than the regulated use of the faculties that it conditions. For Deleuze, Kant is unable to account for this free accord of the faculties, and thus also not for the constitution of the adequate use of the faculties. This poses the question of the nature of this spontaneous aesthetic contemplation, as well as of the constitution of subjectivity. According to Deleuze, Hume’s empirical philosophy allows to account for the constitution of subjectivity. Through his reading of Hume, I will further develop Deleuze’s transcendental imagination in its distinction with empirical imagination. I will show how Deleuze discovers in Hume a critique of representation, which liberates the imagination from the duty of representing and determines a particular relation between the organized mind and phantasy. I will end by briefly indicating how this all relates to Deleuze’s definition of thought and of the unconscious in his later works.