L’expérience et le surhumain. Une lecture croisée de Ibn Tufayl et Gilles Deleuze

Experience and the Superhuman: A Comparative Reading of Ibn Tufayl and Gilles Deleuze

This paper explores the philosophical resonance between Ibn Tufayl’s Vivant fils d’Éveillé (Hayy ibn Yaqzān) and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, focusing on their shared vision of philosophy as an intensive empiricism grounded in transformative experience. While Deleuze explicitly breaks with the epistemological tradition of modern philosophy, Ibn Tufayl, writing in a pre-modern context, articulates a conception of experience that is not reducible to knowledge or conceptual representation. In both thinkers, philosophy arises from a violent encounter with the unrepresentable – an event that compels thought to go beyond recognition. For Tufayl, this encounter initiates Hayy’s solitary ascent from sensory engagement to mystical union (musāhada), while for Deleuze, it marks the genesis of a thought culminating in the ‘eternal return’ of pure difference. Central to both is the figure of apprenticeship: philosophy is not a method but a practice of interpreting signs, leading to a dissolution of the self – into the supra-human for Tufayl, or into the impersonal field of difference for Deleuze. Assuming familiarity with Hayy ibn Yaqzān, the paper argues that both texts construct philosophy as a double movement – ethical (as apprenticeship) and metaphysical (as a search for the conditions of real experience) – toward a limit where thought and experience converge. Their ‘superior empiricism’ thus emerges as a mysticism of the concept, bridging medieval Sufism and post-structuralist continental thought.

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