As is well known, Deleuze reproaches Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and other classical phenomenologists for having burdened their descriptions of experience with structures derived from the empirical (in which the world is differentiated into objects of consciousness). His transcendental empiricism, by contrast, investigates the very genesis of the empirical within the immediate flow of an asubjective transcendental field. However, both Deleuze in his texts and Deleuzian literature dealing with his relationship with phenomenology almost completely ignore contemporary French phenomenology focusing, similarly to (...) Deleuze, on the dynamic or eventful dimension of reality. This article examines some of the intersections between contemporary phenomenology in France (Maldiney, Richir, Marion) and Deleuze’s metaphysics with regard to the question common both to phenomenology and Deleuze: that of the crisis of humanity, especially with regard to its social aspect. The article’s main thesis is that the only possible solution to the crisis is an ethics of events, which includes a description of the deepest existential basis of social bonds, that is, the ‘common presence’ or ‘transcendental interfacticity’. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to extract what I call an empiricist mode of existence through a combined reading of two under-researched vectors of Gilles Deleuze's thought: his ‘transcendental empiricism’ and his ‘affirmative naturalism’. This empiricist mode of existence co-positions Deleuze's empiricism and naturalism as pertaining to a stylistics of life which is ontologically experimentalist, epistemologically open, and immanently engaged in the world. That is, a processual praxis of demystification and organising encounters towards joy.