James and Deleuze: Trains and Planes

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between William James’s radical empiricism and Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism by considering how dominant technologies of locomotion and travel in their respective historical times influenced their thinking and the style of their prose. Highlighting the imagery of trains and ground movement in James and planes and flight in Deleuze, I suggest that each constructs an empiricism that resonates with and reacts to the emerging forms of mass movement in his own time. The essay serves as an invitation to read James and Deleuze together with attention to the aesthetic qualities of their writing and as united in an ongoing project of honing philosophy to the pace of its time.