Volume 4, Issue 9, Spring 2009
Daniel W. Smith
Pages 34-43
Deleuze’s Concept of the Virtual and the Critique of the Possible
This paper sketches out what I take to be the component elements of Deleuze’s concept of the virtual. Deleuze develops this concept in his 1968 Difference and Repetition, in which he offers a critique, following Bergson, of the concept of the possible. The virtual-actual couple is thus meant to replace the possible-real opposition, which is incapable of accounting for difference, or the production of new. In this way, I how that Deleuze develops the concept of the virtual in response to Salomon Maimon’s claim, against Kant, that transcendental philosophy must provide the conditions of real experience, and not merely the conditions of possible experience.