Deleuze, Hume, Subjectivity

Deleuze's earliest major work, a study of Hume, while more conventional than the pieces from his mature period, anticipates some of their main themes, and still presents a relatively unorthodox reading of Hume. The predominant tradition is primarily interested in Hume's Atomistic Empiricism, based on the principle that all experience is based on simple sense impressions, and in two of its most significant derivations--the 'Self' as a 'bundle of perceptions' and 'Causality' as 'constant conjunction'. Retrospectively, the attraction of both to Deleuze is obvious--they are each examples of internal difference, but his primary ambition at this juncture is to combine them to produce a concept of Selfhood that is not the standard interpretation of Hume's. He begins by noticing that 'constant conjunction', i. e. an association of a perception and perception, is, for Hume, more precisely, an association of a perception and an expectation, an association that is habitual. In other words, the 'bundler' in the cognition of Causality is Habit, which Deleuze extends to all experiential associations, including that between a perception and an action. Hence, on Deleuze's interpretation, the Humean subject is primarily practical, not cognitive, as the standard reading tends to have it. Consequently, Deleuze's conclusion in the book is that "Philosophy must constitute itself as a theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what there is", an affirmation of Pragmatism that seems more applicable to his book on Spinoza than to Difference and Repetition.