The Resurrection of the Subject: Differential Ontology and Transcendental Thought

In this thesis I argue that the subject, as a ground and site of knowledge about the world, exists. In much contemporary thought, the transcendental subject - as described by Kant - is considered an outdated concept. Following Nietzsche, thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze have turned instead to theories of difference that preclude the subject's identity with itself. For them, the subject fails because it cannot support itself ontologically. I however claim that, within a proper conception of being, a particular idea of the transcendental subject does remain. I therefore make, to this end, three main points: 1. That post-Nietzschean differential ontology is not opposed to but depends on the category of the transcendental, where the transcendental is immanent to what it conditions. This immanence is then the basis of Deleuze's philosophy of transcendental empiricism. 2. That the place of the transcendental corresponds to a logicality of being as such, an "onto-logic", according to which the logical and the ontological are two sides of the same coin. With this the subject appears as an onto-logical entity. And 3. that this onto-logic determines the subject as ideological no less than as transcendental, and that the ideology of the subject is its logicality. The subject is thus, finally, not abstracted from but immanent to its expression in the world. Through this thesis I therefore hope to show that the subject is not opposed to difference but immanent to it, as an ontological given. I aim to thereby resolve the existing tension between ontological and transcendental thought, and so enable a more productive treatment of the philosophically central concepts of being and thought.