Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics.

Parker, Kelly A.

SHAVIRO, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Technologies of Lived Abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009. xvi + 174pp. Cloth, $28.00--Shaviro's aim in this book is to "unearth [ai subterranean dimension of Kant's argument [in the Critique of Judgment], and to track its crucial role in the metaphysical speculations of Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze." The argument in question is one that appears in the "Analytic of the Beautiful," and which in Shaviro's reading is used by Kant %o problematize universalization and legitimation themselves." Though this dimension of Kant's philosophy was undeveloped by him, it provides the basis for what Shaviro calls a critical aestheticism, an approach to metaphysics that renders the judgment of singular, aesthetically affective phenomena to be the fundamental dimension of experience and of reality. Shaviro's book is mainly a study of the development of this view in Whitehead--Deleuze plays more of a supporting role, being cited regularly to elucidate and extend Whitehead's ideas. Thus, this is hot, first of all, a book about aesthetics, as one might expect from the subtitle. It is, rather, an exploration of Whitehead's speculative metaphysics, a sweeping system of general ideas about the world, following Kant's undeveloped insight. This system identifies the aesthetic dimension as the most primitive level of world-experience, and the lure of feeling toward Beauty as the cause of the world.

In an engaging "Preface," Shaviro (Department of English, Wayne State University) presents his project in terms of "a philosophical fantasy": "imagine a world in which Whitehead takes the place of Heidegger" in twentieth-century philosophy, where Process and Reality had the influence over our views of metaphysics, language, art, technology, and the history of philosophy (and in particular, our understanding of Kant), that was in fact exercised by Being and Time. We would still be postmodern, Shaviro suggests, in that we would still have questioned and rejected modernist epistemological and ethical foundations, we would have lost confidence in the ancient project of metaphysics as the first and absolute science, and we would still have taken a linguistic turn. But our postmodernism would emphasize the constructive power of speculative thought to develop ideas that work for the future (if only ever provisionally and temporarily); we would not be caught, as so many seem to have been, in the endless task of deconstructing the thought of the past.

Robert C. Neville made a similar case for an alternative, speculative-metaphysics-friendly postmodernism in The High Road around Modernism. Whereas Neville advocated a distinctively pragmatist alternative by pairing Whitehead with Peirce, and by devoting a third of his book to considering the practical implications of his proposed philosophy, Shaviro casts his project in such a way as to bridge the pragmatist-continental divide in academic philosophy. This in fact seems to be the main reason Deleuze appears as Whitehead's main interlocutor and elucidator. Deleuze does provide a bridge by which to bring Whiteheadian philosophy into dialogue with Marx (chapter 5; Whitehead never undertook an adequate dialogue with Marxism), but most of the other insights Shaviro introduces from Deleuze are either already well worked out by Whitehead, or are identified by Shaviro as having been inspired by Whitehead's own predecessors (including William James). Shaviro's rhetorical approach seems to work well, though: as a reader with only a passing familiarity with Deleuze, I felt that I learned a great deal about his thought in reading Shaviro's book. No doubt readers who are unfamiliar with Whitehead will experience a similar sense of edification.

After the introductory "what-if" scenario of the preface, Without Criteria progresses from an overview of Kant's aesthetics (Chapter 1), to a primer on Whitehead and Deleuze (Chapter 2), to more detailed explanation of Whitehead's process philosophy--expanded by themes from Deleuze--as successor to Kant (Chapters 3-5), to a short final chapter titled "Consequences." The exposition is clear throughout and the argument both persuasive and inspiring. Of particular note are Shaviro's rehabilitation of the Kantian concept of aesthetic disinterest (interestingly rendered here as "passion"), the explanation of how Whitehead reverses Kant's Copernican revolution to develop a "transcendental empiricism" in which the subject is constituted by the world, and the account of Whitehead's concept of God (and its parallel in Deleuze, "the body without organs"). Shaviro's case for the relevance of an aesthetics-based process philosophy is persuasive: even if one does not follow his lead entirely, his warning against "the endeavor of scientists, philosophers, political despots, and religious fanatics to impose a unified field of assessment, in which the same fundamental critical standards would apply across all disciplines" merits loud and frequent repeating. His Whiteheadean alternative of valid judgment without appeal to ultimate or totalizing criteria is worthy of serious consideration.--Kelly A. Parker, Grand Valley State University.