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Gilles Deleuze. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books, 2001.
Pure Immanence is a small book offering essays on Hume and Nietzsche from Deleuze's early phase as well as an introductory essay on immanence, which was Deleuze's last. The focus of his last essay is the "qualitative duration of consciousness without a self" in the transcendental field of experience. Deleuze defines and redefines the transcendental field in the eight short pages that comprise this essay. According to Deleuze, it is a field without a subject or an object. It presents a pre-- reflexive, a-subjective consciousness that is impersonal by its very nature. Contrary to common opinion, the field of transcendental empiricism is not filled solely by sensations; rather it offers "a break within the flow of absolute consciousness," which is ever pitched toward another sensation and another one after that. Sensations in and of themselves are not as important as the "passage" from one sensation to another, a passage into futurity that Deleuze calls "becoming." The process of becoming is one that evades subjectivity as it reproduces itself as a never ending process. It is expressed as a perceptible phenomenon, however, only when "it is reflected on a subject that refers it to objects." The transcendental field is defined, then, as a plane of "pure immanence," which does not depend on a subject or an object for its substance. Deleuze says that when this plane is referenced in terms of a subject or an object, it becomes part of the empirical's self-referential doubling process: "when the subject or object falling outside the plane of immanence is taken as a universal subject or as any object to which immanence...