Kyle Muntz’s Reviews > Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature > Status Update

Therein are the seeds of his transcendental empiricism (that, and partly his review of Jean Hyppolite's Logique et existence). Something tells me you will like his book on Leibniz (The Fold). Also, Nietzsche and Philosophy is a deceptively slim but dense volume where forces enter into relation as quantity of quality, not quality (so he addresses N's rejection of equilibrium's impossibility). D's book on Hume was a major coup: the French intellectual tradition at that time was obsessed with three other H's instead: Hegel (for a great read on translation and reception of Hegel in France that precipitated the existentialist movement, see Bruce Baugh's 'French Hegel), Husserl, and Heidegger.

*edit: "he addresses N's rejection of equilibrium's POSSIBILITY." For N, if equilibrium were possible, and time is infinite, then it would have happened already. N appears to reject the law of entropy and Hegelian dialectic in one pen stroke.

I think this book is pretty amazing so far, both for its transition into Deleuze's own thought as well as his reading of Hume (my favorite pre-20th century philosopher). I find myself wanting to work through almost all of these books Deleuze did on other philosophers (with the exception of the one on Bergson). Almost all of them are short too, which is a pleasant surprise.

Well, as we know, Kant attributed some praise to Hume, saying that his work woke him from a "dogmatic slumber." Deleuze's own view of how he wrote on other philosophers takes on an interesting image in one of his interviews where he said that he "takes the philosopher from behind" and produces something new (which is his way of saying that interpretation and constructing the new is what we ought to do, not bland exegesis). If I could persuade you to reconsider the book on Bergson, you'll see how it is part of a triad for Deleuze's radical reconfiguration of time: Hume's notion of habit, Nietzsche's eternal return, and Bergson's notion of duration. It is those three components that are so essential to Deleuze's metaphysics of time where affirmative difference is generated (and thus sticking the boots to Hegelian dialectic). You might also like Deleuze's writings on literature (see the collected essays in Essays Critical and Clinical where he talks about stuttering in literature, Jarry, et al) and cinema (Cinema 1 & 2). I think you will be very surprised on how Deleuze deviates from stagnant literary criticism to say something expressive and surprising!