From Transcendental to Dynamical Structuralism: Deleuze and Petitot

In his early, programmatic essay “How do we recognize structuralism?” (1967), Gilles Deleuze presents a confrontation between structuralism and transcendental philosophy with the aim of demonstrating (1) how structuralism transforms transcendental philosophy, and (2) how a new transcendental structuralism becomes compatible with contemporary ideas in topology and dynamical systems theory concerning self-organization, singularities, complexity, etc. Concerning the first point, the key innovation of structuralism is the idea that the constitution of meaning in language does not presuppose an ideal, transcendental subject. Instead, linguistic structure is conceived as a transcendental field without a subject, which is generative of both meaning and subjectivity. Deleuze’s second key idea in this essay is that the foundations of structuralism are not only transcendental but also topological, and not logical. As such, psychic structure should be conceived as a topological, spatial order defined by differential relations of emergence and divided by a system of energetic differences and singularities, which organize the structural space. The aim of this paper is to evaluate these two key ideas underlying Deleuze’s transcendental structuralism: how does structuralism transform transcendental philosophy, and how should the foundations of structuralism be conceived topologically? To address the second question, the paper will turn to Jean Petitot’s dynamical structuralism, which has meticulously developed Deleuze’s proposal of a topological foundation. The key issue then becomes the naturalization of transcendental, constituent structure: either one conceives the foundations of structuralism and transcendental philosophy in a purely logicist manner, thereby adopting a resolutely dualist stance and leaving the naturalization of structure wanting, or one conceives these foundations in a dynamical and topological manner, thereby naturalizing constituent structure in physical, morphological and ultimately symbolic terms.