The Transcendental: Deleuze, P. B. Shelley, and the Freedom of Immobility

Robert Mitchell, Duke University

¹ Hereafter, all references are indicated parenthetically, with the following abbreviations employed: "DR" for Difference and Repetition; "KCP" for Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties; "WIP" for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?; "CPR" for Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; "CJ" for Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.
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² As David L. Clark notes, our ability to imagine beings such as aliens, angels, and animals that are constituted in other ways plays an important role in Kant's general system; see, for example, "Kant's Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others," pp. 201-289.
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³ As Deleuze notes in Difference and Repetition, "Kant defines the passive self in terms of simple receptivity, thereby assuming sensations already formed, then merely relating these to the a priori forms of their representation which are determined as time and space" (DR 98).
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⁴ What intrigues Deleuze especially about the account of the beautiful in the Critique of Judgment is Kant's account of the role of "free materials of nature" (KCP 54), such as colors and sounds, in our experience of the beautiful. As is well known, Kant's account of the beautiful stresses the role of form over colors and sounds: for Kant, "form" names that aspect of an object which the imagination alone can "reflect," whereas (as Deleuze notes) "color and sound are too material, too entrenched in the senses to be reflected in our imagination in this way" (KCP 47). But at the same time, Kant's subsequent account of symbolism acknowledges, even if circumspectly, the importance of colors and sounds for the emergence of an aesthetic accord of the faculties. For Kant suggests that in experiences of the beautiful, the free materials of nature such as colors and sounds "do not relate simply to the determinate concepts of the understanding," but also end up relating to an Idea of reason: the white lily, for example, is a kind of plant from the standpoint of the understanding, but a symbol of innocence from the standpoint of reason. And, Deleuze stresses,

Two consequences flow from this: the understanding itself sees its concepts enlarged in an unlimited way; [and] the imagination is freed from the constraint of the understanding to which it remained subject in the schematism and becomes capable of reflecting form freely. [And this means that] The accord between imagination as free and understanding as indeterminate is therefore not merely assumed: it is in a sense animated, enlivened, engendered by the interest of the beautiful (KCP 55).

It is true, of course, that Kant seeks to position these genetic movements—that is, the emergence within the subject of new forms of common-sense—within teleological, developmental frames. So, for example, Kant suggests that emergence of "the indeterminate unity and the free accord of the faculties" that takes place in experiences of "the beautiful" "do not merely constitute that which is deepest in the soul, but prepare the advent of that which is most elevated, that is to say the supremacy of the faculty of desire, and make possible the transition from the faculty of knowledge to the faculty of desire" (KCP 55-6).
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⁵ Or, as Deleuze puts it in Difference and Repetition, judgments of sublimity are useful insofar as they allow us to investigate the "triple violence" to which faculties can be submitted: namely, "the violence of that which forces [the faculty] to be exercised, [second,] of that which [the faculty] is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of [the faculty's] empirical exercise" (DR 143).
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⁶ Of course, Kant doesn't make this point directly; rather, Deleuze argues, it is in the changes that Kant makes to his account of the faculty of imagination—and the role of the human body and rhythm—between the first and third critiques that we can see that imagination's activities (apprehension, comprehension, recognition) must depend upon a prior synthesis of sensation.
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⁷ The precise nature of the threat differs considerably from reading to reading: critics inclined toward philosophical interpretations have tended to stress epistemological threats, while historicist critics have emphasized threats that are more political, social, or environmental in nature. Examples of philosophical interpretations include I. J. Kapstein's classic argument in "The Meaning of Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'" that the poem manifests the threat of logical inconsistency resulting from Shelley's apparent allegiance to both philosophical materialism and idealism; Charles H. Vivian's counter-proposal in "The One 'Mont Blanc'" that the poem is in fact "self-consistent," since it is "not a poem in which the problems [about the "ultimate nature of mind"] are solved," but is rather about "the very experience of coming to grapple with the problems, and about the nature of the evidence available for dealing with them" (55, 61); Earl Wasserman's suggestion in Shelley: A Critical Reading that the inhospitable ice is an index of the possibility that nature is fundamentally "vacant"; Frances Ferguson's contention in "Shelley's 'Mont-Blanc': What the Mountain Said" that while the poem "exhibits its own repeated failure to let Mont Blanc be merely a blank, merely a mass of stone" (173), it also attempts to remove this as a problem by turning "epistemological language into love language" (173, 178); and Christoph Bode's claim in "Shelley's 'Mont Blanc': The Aesthetic 'Aufhebung' of a Philosophical Antinomy": that the apparent conflict between the epistemology and ontology of the poem itself makes for a consistent argument for an idealist philosophy. Historicist interpretations include Nigel Leask's assertion in "Mont Blanc's Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth," that "Mont Blanc" constitutes a secular attempt to counter religious interpretations of the sublimity of the glacier and mountain and Alan Bewell's suggestion in Romanticism and Colonial Disease that the glaciers of the mountain—glaciers that "creep/ Like snakes that watch their prey"—register Shelley's fear of the threat of unstoppable global cooling (ll. 100-101).
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⁸ This image in Queen Mab was a poetic reworking of a line of thought that Shelley first developed in correspondence with Elizabeth Hitchener. In his 2 January 1812 letter to Hitchener, for example, he argued that an understanding of life as "infinite" was equivalent to the position that "every thing is animation" (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I:156).
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⁹ For an account of Shelley's more general interest in creating ruptures in his auditors' "time consciousness," see my Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity, pp. 163-204.
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¹⁰ It was this understanding of sensation, I suggest, that motivated Shelley's belief that "passive resistance" was an effective political strategy. Shelley's doctrine of passive resistance—exemplified in a poem such as "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819), and inspirational for later figures such as Mahatma Gandhi—has often been interpreted from a purely psychological view. From this perspective, passive resistance is effective because it "shames" aggressors. It is more productive, however, to approach Shelley's understanding of passive resistance from the perspective of suspended animation: by suspending one's own action, one enables greater capacities of sensation—that is, lines of linkage with systemic potentials—for others. Such a perspective avoids the dubious causal claims of the psychological approach—it is not at all clear why passive resistance ought "automatically" to produce shame in aggressors—while retaining the emphasis on system to which Shelley was committed.
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¹¹ See M. H. Abrams, "Keats's Poems: The Material Dimensions."
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¹² See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Rhythm and Meaning." While Gumbrecht draws on systems theory, rather than Deleuze, in his essay, his claims can be productively linked to a Deleuzean approach to rhythm and meaning.
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¹³ For an example of Dick's interest in the activity of passivity, see his brilliant novel Ubik, which depicts a cast of characters who travel all around the globe, as well as between the earth and moon. These characters slowly come to the realization that they are, in fact, in states of suspended animation, yet they nevertheless retain a capacity to affect events outside these states, in the "real" world.
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