Deleuze, Hume, Kant

One of Deleuze's primary ambitions in Empiricism and Subjectivity is to defend Hume against Kant's critique of his theory of Experience. That critique holds that Hume's Atomisim and Associationism do not suffice to account for the synthetic structures of experience. Deleuze's response shows how Imagination accomplishes for Hume the same constructions that Schematism and the Categories do for Kant. Furthermore, he demonstrates how Sympathy extends itself from a partial to a general bonding with others. However, Deleuze, following Hume, does not seem to appreciate the significance of the distinction between Universality and Generality--the latter only approximates to the former, which, according to Kant, can never be derived from the particular or the contingent, e. g. from Imagination or Sympathy, but only from Pure Reason. This shortcoming is profoundly crucial to Kant's Moral theory, which is based on precisely that distinction. In other words, Deleuze fails to argue away how antithetical to Kantianism Hume's formulation 'Reason is the slave of the Passions' is.