| The following study attempts to trace the divergent trajectories of an ontological problem that is initially engendered by Kant's critical attempt to shift the concern of philosophy from ontology, paraphrasing Kant, to the more humble prerogative of analyzing the transcendental logic that governs synthetic judgments. Despite the first Critique's epistemological leanings, I argue that the critical suspension of metaphysics leads to a new ontological problematic that is intimated but ultimately foreclosed by Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenological ontology of the event and only seized upon with Gilles Deleuze's conceptualization of a transcendental field that is accessible to thought, but not lived experience. This new problematic concerns the capacity of thought to immanently register the being of an event. Deleuze's renewal of ontology, I argue, marks a radical interruption of both the epistemological over-determination of philosophy that frames the question of being in terms of its relation to the understanding, but also the now hackneyed theme of the purported end of metaphysics. |
