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Topics in Historical Philosophy
Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence
From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze's transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness , Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze's thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze's independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition-- as well as his engagement with thinkers such as Kant, Maimon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism. What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant's analysis, Deleuze's metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze's project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze's thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology.
- GenresPhilosophy
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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175 people want to read
About the author
Levi Bryant
11 books28 followersLevi Bryant, born Paul Reginald Bryant, is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Bryant has also written extensively about post-structural and cultural theory, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek.
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May 31, 2025
Today’s Book of the Day is Difference and Givenness, written by Levi Bryant in 2008 and published by Northwestern University Press.
Levy R. Bryant is an American philosopher best known for his work in continental philosophy, particularly his engagements with ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology through the lenses of thinkers such as Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, and Derrida. He has contributed significantly to contemporary debates on realism and immanence, often integrating psychoanalytic and structuralist perspectives with post-Deleuzian ontology.
I have chosen this book as I cited it during a discussion on epistemology.
Difference and Givenness is not merely a commentary on Gilles Deleuze’s early philosophical work; it is a highly sophisticated and rigorously executed reconstruction that positions itself at the intersection of ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics. It highlights Deleuze’s thought into a sharper, more legible coherence without sacrificing its radical originality.
What distinguishes Bryant’s contribution in the already crowded field of Deleuzian exegesis is his insistence on conceptual precision, systematic reconstruction, and his refusal to dilute the complexity of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism into merely metaphorical or poetico-rhapsodic formulations, as is so often the case.
The virtue of Difference and Givenness lies in its refusal to reduce Deleuze’s philosophy to an aesthetic register or to a countercultural lexicon of difference for its own sake; rather, Bryant seeks to show that Deleuze articulates a genuine system of thought, grounded in a rigorous ontology of immanence, developed from a critical confrontation with the Kantian and post-Kantian transcendental tradition.
Bryant’s central thesis is that Deleuze’s philosophy—particularly in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense—presents a coherent and systematic transcendental empiricism that reconfigures the project of determining the conditions of real experience, not through an appeal to universality, form, or representation, but through the concept of differential conditions immanent to the actual itself. At the heart of Bryant’s reading is the notion of immanence: that the conditions of possibility for experience are not to be found in a separate, transcendent realm but within the very processes of individuation and becoming that constitute reality. This move enables Bryant to position Deleuze as a thinker of ontological univocity and intensive difference, challenging both representationalist epistemologies and substance-based metaphysics.
In foregrounding the concept of “givenness,” Bryant recuperates a term that is often either discarded as phenomenological or misread as naïvely empiricist. Instead, he shows that Deleuze’s account of givenness resists both Humean atomism and Husserlian intentionalism: the given is never simply “what is there” to be received passively by a subject, but rather the product of a genesis of sense, of a distribution of intensities that give rise to determinate objects and identities through processes of differentiation.
Bryant draws extensively on Deleuze’s engagements with Kant, Maimon, and Bergson to frame this argument, but he gives special weight to the often-overlooked importance of Salomon Maimon, whose critique of Kant’s dualism between concepts and intuitions serves as a pivotal moment in the genealogy of transcendental empiricism. Where Kant posits that concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind, Maimon insists that the real problem lies in how the manifold of intuition is synthesised and rendered determinate—a problem Deleuze radicalises by rejecting the identity-based synthesis of the manifold in favour of a generative principle of difference.
This generative principle is articulated in Deleuze’s conception of the virtual. Here, Bryant demonstrates his exceptional capacity to clarify notoriously opaque Deleuzian notions without reducing their philosophical density. The virtual, in Deleuze’s ontology, is not an unreal or potential counterpart to the actual but a real field of differential relations—problems, multiplicities, and singularities—that condition the actualisation of events.
Bryant is particularly astute in relating the virtual to Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, especially in showing how the second synthesis of habit (associated with the passive synthesis of the past) and the third synthesis of the pure past (memory) function as temporal conditions for individuation. He also draws a productive link between Deleuze’s virtual and Simondon’s notion of the preindividual, demonstrating that individuation is never a completion but an ongoing process of resolution of tensions within a metastable field.
The author’s interpretive finesse is most clearly evident in his engagement with the theme of problematicity. For Deleuze, problems are not epistemological deficits but ontological conditions. Problems, understood as the distribution of singularities within the virtual, are generative; they are what give rise to solutions. Importantly, the solution does not negate the problem, nor does it stand as its fulfilment. Rather, solutions are actualisations of the virtual problematic field, themselves giving rise to new configurations and further differentiations. Bryant understands this to entail a radical reversal of the traditional transcendental schema: instead of deducing conditions from the possibility of experience, Deleuze constructs conditions from the actual processes of individuation—conditions that are dynamic, temporal, and immanent.
Another crucial aspect of Bryant’s reconstruction is his treatment of the Deleuzian critique of representation. He does not merely repeat the now well-worn argument that Deleuze seeks to escape the image of thought. Instead, Bryant deepens this critique by tracing how representation, for Deleuze, is inextricably tied to a metaphysics of identity and recognition. By contrast, Deleuze’s alternative is grounded in the logic of the problematic, in which difference is not subordinated to identity but is itself the constitutive principle of the real. Difference, in this view, is not a negation or a deviation from the same but a positive, generative force. Bryant is particularly attentive to how this logic of difference disrupts the hylomorphic schema—the idea that form is imposed on passive matter—and how Deleuze’s ontology replaces it with an account of individuation as a morphogenetic process governed by internal differential relations.
In this light, Bryant’s insistence on Deleuze’s systematicity becomes especially illuminating. He argues that transcendental empiricism is not a methodological gesture or an epistemological stance but a metaphysical commitment to a plane of immanence where thought and being are co-extensive. In doing so, Bryant rebuts critiques that Deleuze is a merely anti-systematic thinker or that his work lacks rigour.
On the contrary, Bryant’s reading positions Deleuze as the inheritor and transformer of the transcendental tradition, offering a new framework for thinking the genesis of experience and the structure of reality. This reading also allows Bryant to stage a critical engagement with phenomenology, especially where Deleuze diverges from Husserlian intentionality. For Deleuze, sense is not constituted by a subject intending an object but emerges from the impersonal field of preindividual singularities—an assertion that Bryant frames in terms of ontological priority: the event precedes the object.
It is here that Bryant’s reading proves most powerful: in showing how Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is inseparable from his ontology of immanence.
The principle of univocity, that being is said in a single sense of all its individuating modalities, undermines the hierarchical metaphysics of substance and accidents, of form and matter, and instead posits a flat ontology in which all beings are expressions of differential processes. The univocity of being does not entail sameness but the equal ontological status of all differences. Bryant’s reconstruction, therefore, places Deleuze in conversation with Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, not as a derivative synthesiser but as a philosopher who fundamentally reconfigures the problem of being in terms of process, individuation, and difference.
Throughout the text, the author maintains an admirable balance between fidelity to Deleuze’s thought and his own philosophical interventions. He does not seek to overwrite Deleuze but to provide a scaffold for understanding the architecture of his system.
The result is an exceptionally clear and compelling argument that allows readers to enter into Deleuze’s conceptual world without simplifying its challenges. Moreover, Bryant’s philosophical lexicon is consistently precise and technically competent: terms such as “immanence”, “univocity”, “virtual”, “multiplicity”, “singularity”, “intensity”, and “problematic” are used with exactitude and are systematically developed throughout the book. This consistency not only reflects the coherence of Bryant’s interpretive project but also provides a model for how to read Deleuze philosophically rather than merely thematically or stylistically.
Difference and Givenness also contributes to the larger project of post-Kantian philosophy by articulating an alternative to both German Idealism and phenomenology.
Where the former remains trapped in the dialectic of subject and object and the latter in the intentional correlation, Deleuze, via Bryant, offers a third way: a transcendental empiricism that begins not from the transcendental subject but from the processes of individuation that generate subjectivity as a local and contingent effect. This move has profound implications not only for metaphysics but also for epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. It opens the possibility of thinking experience, thought, and reality outside the confines of human exceptionalism and anthropocentric teleologies.
Indeed, perhaps the most significant achievement of Bryant’s book is that it renders Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism into a plausible and powerful philosophical system, one that challenges the hegemony of representationalism and offers a new framework for understanding how the real is structured, conditioned, and actualised. This is not a matter of interpreting Deleuze “faithfully” in the narrow philological sense but of constructing a conceptual edifice that does justice to the ambitions of Deleuze’s project. Bryant succeeds in this regard not by paraphrasing Deleuze’s texts but by reconstructing the logic that underlies them, demonstrating how Deleuze’s concepts function together in a dynamic and coherent whole.
In conclusion, Difference and Givenness is one of the most philosophically rigorous and conceptually lucid studies of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism available in English.
It refuses both the poeticisation and the scholastic domestication of Deleuze, insisting instead on the systematic and ontological significance of his thought. For readers seeking an in-depth engagement with Deleuze’s metaphysics, and particularly with the problematic of how difference can serve as the condition of the given, Bryant’s book is an indispensable resource.
It not only clarifies but amplifies the stakes of Deleuze’s philosophy, offering a powerful intervention in contemporary metaphysical debates and reaffirming the possibility of a non-representational, immanent, and differential ontology.
Levy R. Bryant is an American philosopher best known for his work in continental philosophy, particularly his engagements with ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology through the lenses of thinkers such as Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, and Derrida. He has contributed significantly to contemporary debates on realism and immanence, often integrating psychoanalytic and structuralist perspectives with post-Deleuzian ontology.
I have chosen this book as I cited it during a discussion on epistemology.
Difference and Givenness is not merely a commentary on Gilles Deleuze’s early philosophical work; it is a highly sophisticated and rigorously executed reconstruction that positions itself at the intersection of ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics. It highlights Deleuze’s thought into a sharper, more legible coherence without sacrificing its radical originality.
What distinguishes Bryant’s contribution in the already crowded field of Deleuzian exegesis is his insistence on conceptual precision, systematic reconstruction, and his refusal to dilute the complexity of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism into merely metaphorical or poetico-rhapsodic formulations, as is so often the case.
The virtue of Difference and Givenness lies in its refusal to reduce Deleuze’s philosophy to an aesthetic register or to a countercultural lexicon of difference for its own sake; rather, Bryant seeks to show that Deleuze articulates a genuine system of thought, grounded in a rigorous ontology of immanence, developed from a critical confrontation with the Kantian and post-Kantian transcendental tradition.
Bryant’s central thesis is that Deleuze’s philosophy—particularly in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense—presents a coherent and systematic transcendental empiricism that reconfigures the project of determining the conditions of real experience, not through an appeal to universality, form, or representation, but through the concept of differential conditions immanent to the actual itself. At the heart of Bryant’s reading is the notion of immanence: that the conditions of possibility for experience are not to be found in a separate, transcendent realm but within the very processes of individuation and becoming that constitute reality. This move enables Bryant to position Deleuze as a thinker of ontological univocity and intensive difference, challenging both representationalist epistemologies and substance-based metaphysics.
In foregrounding the concept of “givenness,” Bryant recuperates a term that is often either discarded as phenomenological or misread as naïvely empiricist. Instead, he shows that Deleuze’s account of givenness resists both Humean atomism and Husserlian intentionalism: the given is never simply “what is there” to be received passively by a subject, but rather the product of a genesis of sense, of a distribution of intensities that give rise to determinate objects and identities through processes of differentiation.
Bryant draws extensively on Deleuze’s engagements with Kant, Maimon, and Bergson to frame this argument, but he gives special weight to the often-overlooked importance of Salomon Maimon, whose critique of Kant’s dualism between concepts and intuitions serves as a pivotal moment in the genealogy of transcendental empiricism. Where Kant posits that concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind, Maimon insists that the real problem lies in how the manifold of intuition is synthesised and rendered determinate—a problem Deleuze radicalises by rejecting the identity-based synthesis of the manifold in favour of a generative principle of difference.
This generative principle is articulated in Deleuze’s conception of the virtual. Here, Bryant demonstrates his exceptional capacity to clarify notoriously opaque Deleuzian notions without reducing their philosophical density. The virtual, in Deleuze’s ontology, is not an unreal or potential counterpart to the actual but a real field of differential relations—problems, multiplicities, and singularities—that condition the actualisation of events.
Bryant is particularly astute in relating the virtual to Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, especially in showing how the second synthesis of habit (associated with the passive synthesis of the past) and the third synthesis of the pure past (memory) function as temporal conditions for individuation. He also draws a productive link between Deleuze’s virtual and Simondon’s notion of the preindividual, demonstrating that individuation is never a completion but an ongoing process of resolution of tensions within a metastable field.
The author’s interpretive finesse is most clearly evident in his engagement with the theme of problematicity. For Deleuze, problems are not epistemological deficits but ontological conditions. Problems, understood as the distribution of singularities within the virtual, are generative; they are what give rise to solutions. Importantly, the solution does not negate the problem, nor does it stand as its fulfilment. Rather, solutions are actualisations of the virtual problematic field, themselves giving rise to new configurations and further differentiations. Bryant understands this to entail a radical reversal of the traditional transcendental schema: instead of deducing conditions from the possibility of experience, Deleuze constructs conditions from the actual processes of individuation—conditions that are dynamic, temporal, and immanent.
Another crucial aspect of Bryant’s reconstruction is his treatment of the Deleuzian critique of representation. He does not merely repeat the now well-worn argument that Deleuze seeks to escape the image of thought. Instead, Bryant deepens this critique by tracing how representation, for Deleuze, is inextricably tied to a metaphysics of identity and recognition. By contrast, Deleuze’s alternative is grounded in the logic of the problematic, in which difference is not subordinated to identity but is itself the constitutive principle of the real. Difference, in this view, is not a negation or a deviation from the same but a positive, generative force. Bryant is particularly attentive to how this logic of difference disrupts the hylomorphic schema—the idea that form is imposed on passive matter—and how Deleuze’s ontology replaces it with an account of individuation as a morphogenetic process governed by internal differential relations.
In this light, Bryant’s insistence on Deleuze’s systematicity becomes especially illuminating. He argues that transcendental empiricism is not a methodological gesture or an epistemological stance but a metaphysical commitment to a plane of immanence where thought and being are co-extensive. In doing so, Bryant rebuts critiques that Deleuze is a merely anti-systematic thinker or that his work lacks rigour.
On the contrary, Bryant’s reading positions Deleuze as the inheritor and transformer of the transcendental tradition, offering a new framework for thinking the genesis of experience and the structure of reality. This reading also allows Bryant to stage a critical engagement with phenomenology, especially where Deleuze diverges from Husserlian intentionality. For Deleuze, sense is not constituted by a subject intending an object but emerges from the impersonal field of preindividual singularities—an assertion that Bryant frames in terms of ontological priority: the event precedes the object.
It is here that Bryant’s reading proves most powerful: in showing how Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is inseparable from his ontology of immanence.
The principle of univocity, that being is said in a single sense of all its individuating modalities, undermines the hierarchical metaphysics of substance and accidents, of form and matter, and instead posits a flat ontology in which all beings are expressions of differential processes. The univocity of being does not entail sameness but the equal ontological status of all differences. Bryant’s reconstruction, therefore, places Deleuze in conversation with Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, not as a derivative synthesiser but as a philosopher who fundamentally reconfigures the problem of being in terms of process, individuation, and difference.
Throughout the text, the author maintains an admirable balance between fidelity to Deleuze’s thought and his own philosophical interventions. He does not seek to overwrite Deleuze but to provide a scaffold for understanding the architecture of his system.
The result is an exceptionally clear and compelling argument that allows readers to enter into Deleuze’s conceptual world without simplifying its challenges. Moreover, Bryant’s philosophical lexicon is consistently precise and technically competent: terms such as “immanence”, “univocity”, “virtual”, “multiplicity”, “singularity”, “intensity”, and “problematic” are used with exactitude and are systematically developed throughout the book. This consistency not only reflects the coherence of Bryant’s interpretive project but also provides a model for how to read Deleuze philosophically rather than merely thematically or stylistically.
Difference and Givenness also contributes to the larger project of post-Kantian philosophy by articulating an alternative to both German Idealism and phenomenology.
Where the former remains trapped in the dialectic of subject and object and the latter in the intentional correlation, Deleuze, via Bryant, offers a third way: a transcendental empiricism that begins not from the transcendental subject but from the processes of individuation that generate subjectivity as a local and contingent effect. This move has profound implications not only for metaphysics but also for epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. It opens the possibility of thinking experience, thought, and reality outside the confines of human exceptionalism and anthropocentric teleologies.
Indeed, perhaps the most significant achievement of Bryant’s book is that it renders Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism into a plausible and powerful philosophical system, one that challenges the hegemony of representationalism and offers a new framework for understanding how the real is structured, conditioned, and actualised. This is not a matter of interpreting Deleuze “faithfully” in the narrow philological sense but of constructing a conceptual edifice that does justice to the ambitions of Deleuze’s project. Bryant succeeds in this regard not by paraphrasing Deleuze’s texts but by reconstructing the logic that underlies them, demonstrating how Deleuze’s concepts function together in a dynamic and coherent whole.
In conclusion, Difference and Givenness is one of the most philosophically rigorous and conceptually lucid studies of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism available in English.
It refuses both the poeticisation and the scholastic domestication of Deleuze, insisting instead on the systematic and ontological significance of his thought. For readers seeking an in-depth engagement with Deleuze’s metaphysics, and particularly with the problematic of how difference can serve as the condition of the given, Bryant’s book is an indispensable resource.
It not only clarifies but amplifies the stakes of Deleuze’s philosophy, offering a powerful intervention in contemporary metaphysical debates and reaffirming the possibility of a non-representational, immanent, and differential ontology.
August 2, 2010
Bryant's project is important and I think he's right to critique the (many) people who are only too happy to cherry-pick Deleuze's conclusions without understanding how he arrives at them. It's an important work for philosophers, especially those who want to better understand Deleuze in terms of his relation to Kant and transcendental philosophy. However, I did not enjoy this book. It's very dense, overuses block quotes (they're practically on every page), and offers few applied examples of the concepts discussed. Further, Bryant works so close to Deleuze, often citing him at length to explain an argument, that one would be better served by simply reading the source texts (mostly “Difference & Repetition” and “Logic of Sense", but “Bergsonism” and "Proust and Signs" too) carefully. This is especially true since the book does not do a great job of presenting these dense ideas in a more digestible format than their original incarnations.
Overall, I would recommend Bryant's blog, Larval Subjects, to anyone remotely interested in philosophy, and I still intend to read his forthcoming “Democracy of Objects”, but I would only recommend this book to a certain subset of academic philosopher.
Overall, I would recommend Bryant's blog, Larval Subjects, to anyone remotely interested in philosophy, and I still intend to read his forthcoming “Democracy of Objects”, but I would only recommend this book to a certain subset of academic philosopher.
December 18, 2012
Bryant's book should be considered a great effort to make a proper philosophical engagement to Deleuze's thought, something needed thanks to the lack of understanding of his project and the harmful habit to dismiss Deleuze (and especially Deleuze&Guattari) as plain philosophical bullsh$t. This book is centered on both most important books by Deleuze: "Difference and Repetition" and "Logic of Sense". The great thing about this book is that it shows Deleuze's decisions responding to specific and classical philosophical problems situating Deleuze in a traditional philosophical lineage. It shows the close relationship with the tradition and how Deleuze's work departs from it in a revolutionary way. Deleuze as a "pure metaphysician".
As far as the writing style goes, it is a little technical and dense, but unlike Deleuze's books you can tell Bryant is searching for order and clarity by adopting careful, rigorous and linear argumentation.
This book makes me happy. Go for it.
As far as the writing style goes, it is a little technical and dense, but unlike Deleuze's books you can tell Bryant is searching for order and clarity by adopting careful, rigorous and linear argumentation.
This book makes me happy. Go for it.
June 14, 2025
Excellent book which really clarified my severely confused reading of Deleuze.
The classic summary of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, that it is an investigation of the "actual conditions of experience" rather than the "possible conditions of experience" made no sense to me until this book.
The conditions of possible experience for Kant is the production of sensibility through space and time. Kant takes it a given there are qualities, his goal is to demonstrate how space and time 'format' these things.
Space and time makes our experience possible.
The conditions of actual experience for Deleuze is focused on the moment of qualitative inception, how our minds produces intensities.
The integration of differential points (this sounds like meaningless jargon, but to really appreciate it you have to read Salmon Maimon's work) is what makes our experience actual.
But it's clear to me now how radical Deleuze's project is. Deleuze is repudiating the, rather unphilosophical, carelessness with which the western metaphysical cannon has had with the idea of "quality". Even Bergson, *the* archetypal thinker of qualities, merely describes the activity and relations between qualities, rather than qualities in themselves.
Deleuze's description of intensities as equivalent to difference-in-itself is brilliant, and a proper account would take too long. In essence intensities (and all qualities) refer to a qualitative ordinality (an ordinal number is a pure relation, i.e. fourth has no content but refers only to its relationship to fifth and third), and qualitative ordinalities are difference.
The classic summary of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, that it is an investigation of the "actual conditions of experience" rather than the "possible conditions of experience" made no sense to me until this book.
The conditions of possible experience for Kant is the production of sensibility through space and time. Kant takes it a given there are qualities, his goal is to demonstrate how space and time 'format' these things.
Space and time makes our experience possible.
The conditions of actual experience for Deleuze is focused on the moment of qualitative inception, how our minds produces intensities.
The integration of differential points (this sounds like meaningless jargon, but to really appreciate it you have to read Salmon Maimon's work) is what makes our experience actual.
But it's clear to me now how radical Deleuze's project is. Deleuze is repudiating the, rather unphilosophical, carelessness with which the western metaphysical cannon has had with the idea of "quality". Even Bergson, *the* archetypal thinker of qualities, merely describes the activity and relations between qualities, rather than qualities in themselves.
Deleuze's description of intensities as equivalent to difference-in-itself is brilliant, and a proper account would take too long. In essence intensities (and all qualities) refer to a qualitative ordinality (an ordinal number is a pure relation, i.e. fourth has no content but refers only to its relationship to fifth and third), and qualitative ordinalities are difference.
June 20, 2024
Completely disappointing. Plays pretend at erudition with the endless block citations and over-states it's uniqueness. Even if you want to like the book, something about it is just soooooo off-putting. Actually, a sentence like "Deleuze's "phenomenology" of the encounter" so explicitly reveals a poor understanding of the philosophy. You may as well read Deleuze's corpus and figure out what transcendental empiricism means by yourself.
January 9, 2018
acquaintance with D and his consorts (esp. Kant and Bergson) pretty much presupposed
November 17, 2022
A great book. Clear, thorough and original.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews