The genius of Deleuze resides in his notion of "transcendental empiricism": in contrast to the standard notion of the transcendental as the formal conceptual network which structures the rich flow of empirical data, the Deleuzian "transcendental" is infinitely RICHER than reality - it is the infinite potential field of virtualities out of which reality is actualized. The term "transcendental" is here used in the strict philosophical sense of the a priori conditions of possibility of our experience of constituted reality. The paradoxical coupling of opposites (transcendental + empirical) points towards a field of experience beyond (or, rather, beneath) the experience of constituted/perceived reality. We remain here within the field of consciousness - Deleuze defines the field of transcendental empiricism as "a pure a-subjective current of consciousness, an impersonal prereflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self." [3] No wonder that (one of) his reference(s) here is the late Fichte, who tried to think the absolute process of self-positing as a flow of Life beyond the opposites of subject and object:
A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is sheer power, utter beatitude. Insofar as he overcomes the aporias of the subject and the object Fichte, in his later philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life which does not depend on a Being and is not subjected to an Act: an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers back to a being but ceaselessly posits itself in a life.
quoted from John Marks, Gilles Deleuze, London: Pluto Press 1998, p. 29..
Slavoj Zizek,
Organs without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze
