In his comment to Idealism and the Plane of Immanence, Pete writes:

…although it is certainly not the case that Deleuze is a subtractive thinker, we should be careful of following the Badiouian line of thought, whereby, if there is a totality it must therefore be a presented or presentable situation in its own right. It is possible not to read the structure of Being as the structure of presentation or givenness to thought (which both Badiou and Heidegger do, even if Badiou’s conception of thought is far more austere, i.e., purely quantificational), and despite Deleuze’s discussions of givenness (his transcendental empiricism) I would suggest we read him this way, insofar as there is no pre-defined term which plays the role of thought in his work (unlike Dasein in its multiple guises in Heidegger, and the quantificational structure of the count as one in Badiou).

The problem I have with this is very simple. If we take this line of argumentation, we are completely ignoring one of the perennial aspects of Deleuze’s thinking – his constructivism. Continue reading