Deleuze and Lyotard in Community: Two Readings of Kant's Concept of Common Sense

This article examines two interpretations of Kant's concept of common sense – those of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard. Its aim is to articulate the political dimension of this concept and to explore how each of these philosophers proposes to overcome the dogmatism and repressiveness associated with it. Deleuze conceptualizes common sense as part of what he calls ‘the dogmatic image of thought’. His reading of Kant's doctrine of the faculties shows how the different types of common sense (logical, moral, and aesthetic) establish restrictive regimes both within and between subjects. The deregulation of the order among the faculties that occurs in the experience of the sublime offers a line of flight from the regime of common sense without instituting a new one in its place. Lyotard also considers Kantian common sense in relation to the structured formation of the subject and the political community. However, in his reading, aesthetic common sense (sensus communis) exists outside the structure of subjectivity, making it possible and continuously reconstituting it. Common sense haunts the subject, destabilizes it, and serves as a constant reminder that its various components remain heterogeneous and can never be fully unified, complete, or identical to themselves over time. Similarly, the political community, for Lyotard, emerges as a polyphony freed from predetermined movement, capable of repeatedly reinventing itself thanks to a common sense that remains external to it, both enabling and disrupting it at once. Thus, while Deleuze ultimately interprets aesthetic common sense as belonging to a restrictive and dogmatic logic, Lyotard views it as a singular point existing outside of that logic, challenging it. Rather than adjudicate between the two readings – each of which is grounded in Kant's text – this article seeks to employ both in order to highlight the oppressive dimensions of seemingly self-evident structures of subjectivity and political life, and to articulate possible ways to disrupt them.