Gilles Deleuze, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Transcendental empiricism is the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the outlines of the empirical — that is its most compressed formulation, and it is worth unpacking what the danger it names actually is.1 The standard error, the one Kant commits in a certain sense, is to take the forms of possible experience and project them back onto a transcendental level as if they were its conditions.
Kant reverses Hume's problem correctly — he sees that relations cannot be merely accidental agreements between subject and given — but his solution installs a transcendental activity that mirrors the empirical subject it was supposed to ground.2 The transcendental becomes a doubled image of the empirical, dressed in a priori clothing. What I want instead is a transcendental field that belongs to neither subject nor object, that does not refer to any empirical representation, that is given as a pure a-subjective stream — a pre-reflexive, impersonal consciousness, or the qualitative duration of consciousness without a self.3
Consciousness, on this account, becomes a fact only when a subject is produced simultaneously with its object, both thrown outside the field as transcendents. As long as consciousness traverses the transcendental field at infinite speed, everywhere diffused, it cannot be revealed — it eludes revelation precisely because it has not yet been reflected onto a subject that refers it to objects.4
The transcendental field is coextensive with consciousness but cannot be defined by it. What fills this field is not sensation in the simple empiricist sense — sensation merely cuts a slice in the continuous stream. It is rather the passage from one sensation to another, the becoming, the increase or decrease in power that I call virtual quantity.5
This is why the logic governing transcendental empiricism is a logic of AND prior and irreducible to the IS of predication: think with AND instead of thinking IS — that is empiricism's only secret, found first in Hume, elaborated by Bergson and Nietzsche.6 It is a constructivist logic of unfinished series, governed by conventions and problematizations rather than axioms and fixed rules of inference.7
At the level of the faculties, transcendental empiricism means that what carries each faculty to its proper limit is not a figure already mediated by representation but the free or untamed states of difference in itself. The element is intensity — pure difference in itself, imperceptible to empirical sensibility (which grasps it only already covered by the quality it gives rise to) and yet the very thing that can be apprehended immediately in the encounter, from the point of view of a transcendental sensibility.8
Memory at this limit is not similitude in reminiscence but the dissimilar in the pure form of time — the immemorial of a transcendent memory. And what thought is finally constrained to think is not the Same but that transcendent aleatory point, always Other by nature, in which all essences are enveloped as differentials of thought.9 The endpoint — the purest statement — is what I called immanence: a life.
A transcendental field stripped of subject and object, a habit of saying I that is nothing more than a habit, a habitus in a field of immanence.10 Bergson and James are better guides here than Husserl or Frege, because radical empiricism begins from the moment it defines the subject not as a constituting activity but as a habit — the habit of saying I.11
The transcendental is not above experience; it is the impersonal, pre-individual element in experience through which what I call "a life" becomes accessible in the materiality of living.12
transcendental empiricism is the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the outlines of the empirical.Difference and Repetition, p. 189
Kant reproaches Hume for having mistakenly raised the problem on this good terrain... We must relate the given to the subject, conceive the agreement as an agreement of the given with the subject, and of nature with the nature of reasonable beings.Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 123
It can be distinguished from experience, to the extent that it does not refer to any object nor belong to any subject (empirical representation). It is thus given as pure a-subjective stream of consciousness, as pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, or as the qualitative duration of consciousness without a self.Two Regimes of Madness Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, pp. 385–386
Consciousness becomes a fact only if a subject is produced simultaneously with its object, both outside the field, and both given as 'transcendents.' On the other hand, as long as consciousness traverses the transcendental field at an infinite speed everywhere diffused, consciousness can in no way be revealed.Two Regimes of Madness Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, pp. 385–386
it is the passage from one sensation to another, however close two sensations may be, but as becoming, as an increase or decrease in power (virtual quantity).Two Regimes of Madness Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, pp. 385–386
'Think with AND instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret.'Pure Immanence Essays on A Life, pp. 10–12
It is a constructivist logic of unfinished series rather than a calculus of distinct, countable collections; and it is governed by conventions and problematizations, not axioms and fixed rules of inference.Pure Immanence Essays on A Life, pp. 10–12
This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity only already covered or mediated by the quality to which it gives rise, and at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter.Difference and Repetition, p. 189
it is an I fractured by this form of time which finds itself constrained to think that which can only be thought; not the Same, but that transcendent 'aleatory point', always Other by nature, in which all the essences are enveloped like so many differentials of thought.Difference and Repetition, p. 189
transcendental empiricism is the term I will use to distinguish it from everything that makes up the world of subject and object.Two Regimes of Madness Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, pp. 385–386
the very idea of a 'plane of immanence' requires a kind of 'radical empiricism'... a habitus, a habit, nothing more than a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I.Pure Immanence Essays on A Life, pp. 10–12
Transcendental empiricism may then be said to be the experimental relation we have to that element in sensation that precedes the self as well as any 'we,' through which is attained, in the materiality of living, the powers of 'a life.'Pure Immanence Essays on A Life, pp. 10–12