Two messengers, one spear, one gate: Deleuze, empiricism, and the primacy of the practical

Abstract The work of both Lawlor and Bell was invaluable as I tried to join together the two main lines of argumentation in Experience and Empiricism : one concerning the development of the philosophical problematic in which Deleuze worked during his earliest years as a professional philosopher; the other arguing for the distinctive relevance of Hume's philosophy, as read by Deleuze, for advancing a novel philosophical claim in the midst of that problematic. If I was successful in making these arguments, then I hope to have reconstituted the important—but obscured—philosophical debate between immanent and transcendent accounts of human experience and existence and to have made clear the way that Deleuze's earliest philosophical work on Hume was a novel intervention in that debate. And, finally, I hope to have shown that Deleuze's repetition of Hume's empiricism amidst the rapidly shifting problematics of postwar French philosophy is an indispensable and unavoidable moment in the development of his distinctive philosophical trajectory.