Experience and Empiricism: Hegel, Hume, and the Early Deleuze by Russell Ford offers a striking and deeply historical exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s initial forays into philosophy through his early writings, most notably his debut work, Empiricism and Subjectivity. Ford’s analysis examines Deleuze’s engagement with David Hume’s philosophy, not as a stand-alone study, but as a catalytic point of entry into the complex debates surrounding the nature of experience, empiricism, and subjectivity that permeated the European intellectual landscape of the 20th century. This work presents Deleuze’s turn to Hume’s empiricism as a conceptual choice shaped by and shaping his lifelong philosophical commitment to a project of pure immanence—a commitment that would later drive his exploration of difference over identity, thus grounding one of the 20th century’s most unique philosophical voices.
Ford positions Deleuze’s engagement with Hume as a provocative thought experiment. Instead of allowing the empiricism of Hume’s philosophy to rest unchallenged within its traditional framework, Deleuze reinterprets Hume’s notion of subjectivity, seeking to transcend its limitations without losing its core tenet of immanence. Ford argues that the project of Deleuze’s first book must be read in light of a philosophical question: What if Hume had responded to Kant’s rationalist critique of empiricism, reversing the traditional dominance of rationalism over empiricism that had reigned since Kant’s “dogmatic slumber”? Ford reveals how this inquiry drives Deleuze’s engagement with Hume, leading him to carve out a theoretical space where experience and empiricism converge without subordination to any transcendent authority. This, Ford asserts, is where Deleuze subtly but deliberately transforms the discourse on subjectivity, immanence, and experience itself, setting the stage for his future philosophical commitments to the concepts of difference, becoming, and multiplicity.
The book situates Deleuze within the intellectual landscape of postwar France, where he was influenced by debates on the conceptual structure of existence and its relation to both experience and empirical knowledge. Figures like Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite, central to these discussions, present two rival yet interposed philosophical orientations: Wahl with his existential leanings toward concrete lived experience and Hyppolite with his systematic, Hegelian-dialectical approach. Ford details how Deleuze’s study of Hume emerges as a philosophical intervention within these competing perspectives. In this context, Deleuze’s Hume becomes an emblem of an empiricism that challenges the Kantian and Hegelian legacy by refusing to subordinate the empirical to the rationalist domain of universal concepts and dialectical synthesis. Instead, Deleuze’s early thought implicitly questions the historical necessity of rationalist philosophy and its claim to foundational status in understanding subjectivity, marking a stark departure that would eventually undergird his lifelong resistance to representational thought.
Ford’s work further contextualizes Deleuze’s Humean project against a vivid backdrop of 20th-century French intellectual ferment, revealing the influences of philosophers like Alexandre Koyré and Wahl on Deleuze’s developing thought. Koyré’s insistence on a rational and systematic reading of Hegel as a thinker of transcendence over Wahl’s impassioned, existentially driven portrayal of Hegel as a theologically motivated thinker resonates within the broader intellectual landscape that Deleuze was entering. Ford uncovers how Deleuze’s reading of Hume positioned him as a mediator between these divergent viewpoints, engaging with Hyppolite’s systematic inclination but refusing to reduce subjectivity and experience to rationalist dialectics or Hegelian totality. Instead, Deleuze finds in Hume’s empiricism a non-dialectical, immanent approach to subjectivity, presenting a way of thinking that values difference, plurality, and process without collapsing them into the unity of an Absolute.
Ford examines how Deleuze’s nascent ideas of immanence and subjectivity intersect with the broader philosophical debate on language and temporality, particularly in Wahl and Koyré’s opposing interpretations of Hegelian dialectics. Wahl’s existential reading of Hegel foregrounds a tragedy of incompleteness and subjectivity in time, where the individual’s concrete, lived experience defies complete philosophical systematization, resonating with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjective existential truth. Koyré, on the other hand, highlights the systematic triumph of Hegelian dialectics, arguing for an anti-romantic optimism where history and thought reconcile temporal particularities within a unified Absolute. By situating Deleuze within this milieu, Ford illuminates how the young Deleuze navigated between these competing interpretations, utilizing Hume’s empiricism as a means of exploring a subjectivity liberated from the constraints of teleological or dialectical necessity. This choice would pave the way for Deleuze’s later explorations of temporality, movement, and the non-linear unfolding of existence.
Ford’s study reveals that Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, while germinating within the context of Humean empiricism, gradually begins to pivot toward a philosophy of difference that distinguishes his thought from both Hume and his philosophical predecessors. Deleuze’s reading of Hume was not an attempt to isolate a universal, empirical principle of experience but rather to articulate a form of empiricism capable of affirming the differences inherent in experience itself. Ford shows how, even in these early writings, Deleuze disrupts the traditional empirical focus on sensory input and passive perception, proposing instead a subjectivity that actively constitutes reality through a continuous engagement with difference. Here, Deleuze’s empiricism diverges significantly from both classical empiricism and Kantian transcendentalism, evolving into an immanent critique of representation itself—an approach that would reach its full philosophical expression in Deleuze’s later works.
Experience and Empiricism demonstrates that Deleuze’s philosophy is neither a straightforward rejection of Kantian or Hegelian rationalism nor a mere extension of Humean empiricism. Ford emphasizes that Deleuze’s early thought actively intervenes in the debates of his time, offering an alternative genealogy of subjectivity that defies both dialectical synthesis and transcendental idealism. Deleuze’s conception of subjectivity, Ford argues, rests on a uniquely affirmative empiricism, one that opens thought to the immanent multiplicity of experience and affirms the value of difference without subsuming it under the identity of an overarching system or concept. Ford’s work offers an indispensable contribution to the study of Deleuze, illuminating how Deleuze’s engagement with Hume anticipates and informs his lifelong philosophical project. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the evolution of Deleuze’s thought within the wider context of 20th-century French philosophy, the philosophical legacy of Humean empiricism, and the enduring problem of immanence and difference in modern European thought.
Simon Gros 
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