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Vernon, Jim
David Kolb
John McCumber
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Anthony J. Steinbock
HEGEL AND
DELEUZE
Together Again for the First Time
Contents
Abbreviations
vii
Introduction
Karen Houle and Jim Vernon
xi
Part 1. Disjunction/Contradiction
1
18
38
54
76
97
3
4
5
6
115
Part 2. Connection/Synthesis
8
vi
C O NT ENT S
10
173
11
12
204
223
Contributors
253
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the text for frequently cited works.
Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
EPR
HL
Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
LPR
PG
PM
PN
PR
PS
SL
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DI
Desert Islands and Other Texts: 19531974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans.
Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004).
DR
ES
LS
The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
NP
TP
WP
BT
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962). Originally
published as Sein und Zeit (Tbingen, Ger.: Max Niemeyer, 1927).
CJ
GS
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ILH
IRH
LE
Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
NSP
Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime,
trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966).
RLE Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, in Hyppolite, Logic and
Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997).
Introduction
Karen Houle and Jim Vernon
A century and a half separates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles
Deleuze. It would be hard to overstate the impact of these two major
European intellectuals, individually, on what has come to be called Continental philosophy. What has proved equally hard, however, is to determine the impact the thought of each thinker has on that of the other
when considered in tandem. Helping to bring to light the various relationshipssympathetic, antipathetic, and otherwisethat may hold
between them is the goal of this anthology.
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Of course, Deleuzians exhibiting this tic would counter by reminding us that, while their rhetoric is perhaps unpleasanteven at times
unfairit is certainly not unwarranted given Deleuzes own comments.
There are repeated moments, from his early writings all the way through
to his final works, where Deleuze makes precisely those sorts of unbridled
jabs. Hegel and Hegelianism are routinely name-called: the long perversion,6 the long history of the distortion, the dead end (DR, 268),
a philosophy that betrays and distorts the immediate, animating no
more than ghostly puppets (DR, 10). Hegelians are singled out as those
lacking the wit to laugh.7 The arc of Deleuzes anti-Hegelian rhetoric
perhaps reaches its apex in Difference and Repetition: It is only in relation
to the identical, as a function of the identical, that contradiction is the
greatest difference. The intoxications and giddinesses are feigned, the
obscure is already clarified from the outset. Nothing shows this more
clearly than the insipid monocentricity of the circles in the Hegelian dialectic (DR, 263). Less jab than bald confession, Deleuze eventually tells
us what I detested most was Hegelianism and the dialectic.8
This looks like disdain, and perhaps there was real hatred; however,
a closer and more careful look at his texts reveals that there isnt only disdain. Something between Deleuze and Hegel also expresses itself therein
which is far less easy to define, represent, or characterize.
True, among those figures credited with being Deleuzes intellectual forefathersDavid Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, William
James, Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, and so onone never finds the brass nameplate of Hegel. Unlike the equally hated Kant, Deleuze does not even devote to Hegel a
book about an enemy.9 Yet, unlike so many other philosophers who also
dont make his bastard lineSaint Anselm, Niccol Machiavelli, or
Hannah Arendt, to name a random fewHegel makes regular appearances in Deleuzes writings: once or twice in A Thousand Plateaus, The
Logic of Sense and What Is Philosophy?, frequent mentions in the final chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, and then about a hundred times in Difference and Repetition. Such a pattern testifies to the fact that, even if he was
not a straightforward intellectual kin, Hegel was in no way a negligible
figure for Deleuzes thought. Deleuze, after all, was taught by Jean Hyppolite, and even wrote an early review of Logic and Existence.10 Given Deleuzes own education, and the intellectual climate in Paris at that time,
the need to engage with Hegel and Hegelianismparticularly if one
wished to escape itsurely impressed itself upon him early and often.
Indeed, a closer and sustained look at Deleuzes texts reveals that
Hegel was neither simply ignored, nor hated. A number of times Deleuze
offers qualified praise, for example: The Hegelian idea of alienation
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Double Vision?
This collection hopes to more adequately limn the various resonances
and dissonances between these two major philosophers. It represents the
best in contemporary scholarship on Hegel and Deleuze, neither presuming they occupy incompossible worlds nor collapsing them into
each other. The contributing authors inhabit the as-yet uncharted space
between Deleuze and Hegel, collectively addressing most of the major
tensions/resonances therein and laying a solid ground for futureand
necessaryscholarship. The chapters are organized thematically into
two groups: those that maintain a firm but nuanced disjunction or opposition between the thinkers, and those that chart possible connections
and/or syntheses.
Disjunction/Contradiction
The chapters in this section corroborate, with varying degrees of intensity and import, the thesis that the fundamental relation between Hegel
and Deleuze is divergence. This claim demands a close focus on those
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themes within their respective texts that do, in fact, draw the figures together if only to ultimately push them apart again.
Brent Adkins, in At the Crossroads of Philosophy and Religion:
Deleuzes Critique of Hegel, focuses on the distinction between religion
and philosophy in the two thinkers. On his reading, Hegel develops this
conflict into an opposition between conceptual thought and representational image. Religion is the lived experience of the community, mediated by representations that crystallize unconscious feeling. Philosophy
is the necessary, ordering thought that abstracts from such content into
pure form. By raising the difference between philosophy and religion to
the level of contradiction, Hegel can resolve the two in synthesis, leading
to his famous account of religion as the content of philosophy, allowing
(properly ordered) unity between the two, through which the truth of religion is preserved by being superseded into philosophical thought. Deleuze, Adkins argues, likewise differentiates religion and philosophy but
according to their different forms of creation: religion creates (representational) figures, while philosophy creates concepts. Rather than seeking
any ultimate unity of these creations, however, Adkins seeks, through
Deleuze, to maintain and deepen the divide between them. Philosophy
must create concepts precisely by remaining at the level of feeling and
contingency; it operates immanently and is directly tied to affects. Religion, to the contrary, arises when lived immanence is subsumed under
another level, raised to something higher, or transcended, as in Hegels
dialectical system. Thus, Adkins argues, Hegels philosophy abstracts
from lived experience, but only by subsuming it under something transcendent from it. As such, Hegel can neither do justice to lived affect, nor
explain the genesis of the abstract; errors Adkins thinks are corrected by
the thoroughly immanent Spinozism of Deleuze.
Nathan Widder, in Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of
Forces: Deleuzes Critique of Hegel, also defendsalbeit less starkly
a disjunction between the two thinkers via abstraction and immanence,
using their respective accounts of force as the fulcrum. Hegel, having
like Deleuze found that both (actual) objects and the (actual) subject experiencing them necessarily presuppose the play of (virtual) forces that
cannot exist in isolation but always already differentiate from each other,
seeks to show that such differences necessarily rise to the level of opposition and contradiction. The advent of such opposites produces a dialectic that culminates in the realization of the Absolute. However, Widder
argues, Hegel can only move this dialectic of forces forward through a
cheat, that is, by presupposing the completion of the dialectic, or the
goal, as that toward which the play tends (represented by the observing,
phenomenological we). As such, Hegel subsumes the immanent play
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are defined by the lack of central subject internal to them, and thus are
capable of an infinite series of relations and configurations. However,
Hegel also shows that plants can only enter into assemblages because of
the light that, while external to them, uniformly feeds them all. Thus, all
plants are inherently unified by their relation to light, which organizes
their movements and relations. Thus, Hegel shows that multiplicity alone
is not enough to eliminate or fend off the unified subject, for the latter
can arise from, or be presupposed by, externally related assemblages.
Somers-Hall concludes, however, by suggesting that Deleuze answers this
challenge through his discussion of the fascicle which, while constructing (like the rhizome) a multiple of open connections, remains open to
recapture by, or implicitly presupposes, an external unity. True Deleuzian
multiplicity, then, must be carefully constructed by subtracting the subject not just from trees, but from false multiple assemblages.
Bruce Baugh, in Actualization: Enrichment and Loss, charts the
differential accounts of the ethical value of actualization in the pair. For
Hegel, the process of becoming actual (determinate, concrete, explicit)
marks an enrichment of power and truth from the inchoate, unexpressed potential that precedes it. By contrast, Deleuze finds in actualization a loss or impoverishment, in that it limits what was previously an
inexhaustible virtuality of determinations, connections, and expressions.
As such, Deleuze partially echoes the sentiments of the romantics targeted by Hegels critique of immediacy, the focus here. Theoretically,
Hegel argues, romanticism posits an immediate experience that is indeterminate, ineffable, and ultimately indistinguishable from nothingness;
ethically, it valorizes a beautiful soul incapable of acting lest its smug
self-certainty be thrown into question. In both cases, it affirms the least rational, objective, and inter-subjective aspects of experience as the highest
and truest, destroying the very foundations of philosophy and morality.
Deleuze, Baugh recognizes, is concerned to distinguish his philosophy of
immanence from inactive romanticism and thus begins with a fully determined, if virtual, structure, rather than a determinable, but indeterminate state. For Deleuze, the virtual is a differentiated, problematic system
of intensities, which is then differenciated into actual individuals without
ever exhausting the virtual. Actualizations arise from, and cover over, an
inexhaustible virtual which is more powerful and profound than its creations. However, this leads Deleuze to defend an ethics aimed at retrieving
the powers of the virtual via the progressive dismantling of the actual. As
Baugh argues, such an ethics can by definition only retrieve undeveloped
potentials in their purity, rather than manifesting new, more ethical actualizations. It may be, then, that Hegels critique of the beautiful souls
inaction applies equally to Deleuzes Body Without Organs.
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argues that, like Deleuze, Hegel is concerned with the restraining effect
of habit. Because many seemingly necessary relations are in fact merely
habitual, Hegel evacuates all relations from thought, positing the complete discreteness of all mental contents from one another to see what, if
any, relations apply universally to the thinkable. For Hegel, the discreteness of any term essentially implies its relation with others in the form
of identity-in-difference, through which the determination of any discrete term is only graspable through its difference from, and in relation
to, others. Such identifying relations take the form of predicating judgments, thus demanding more explicit, precise, and varied forms through
which all such terms may be related. Vernon closes by considering some
of the practical consequences of these divergent theories of relation.
Connection/Synthesis
The chapters in this section varyingly defend the compossibility of the
Hegelian and Deleuzian images of thought. Doing so, of course, requires
confronting the thinkers at the points wherein they seem most distant,
thus often opening up different textual avenues than those guiding the
preceding chapters.
Simon Lumsdens orienting concern in Deleuze and Hegel on
the Limits of Self-Determined Subjectivity is their respective responses
to the Kantian bifurcation of apperception and sense. While seeking to
complete modernitys drive toward a self-identical self-consciousness,
Kant actually problematizes it by leaving unclear how subject and object,
concept and intuition, can be determinately unified. Lumsden argues
that Hegel and Deleuze can both be read as productively responding to
the Kantian problematic by seeking to overcome its dualism, albeit in
divergent ways. On the one hand, Hegel confronts the Kantian problematic by essentially eliminating the purely given, demonstrating it to always
already have been mediated by historical and social forces. As such, for
Hegel all determination of the given is the historically progressive selfdetermination of the inherently social subject, and thus concept and
intuition are united on the side of the concept. On the other hand, Deleuze contends that thought is not the self-mediation of a willing, intending subject, but is forced upon the subject by the shock of the given. In
Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, concepts arise from the passive
exposure of subjectivity to the sensuous manifold. As such, thought is not
spontaneously applied to the given, nor has it already stamped sensation
as mediated, but is incessantly produced through the impact of some-
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of difference (its tearing itself away from totalizing relations of resemblance). Simont responds to the first of these charges via Hegels account
of quantity. Rather than forsaking merely quantitative difference for a
higher quality, she argues that Hegel liberates quantity from the quality
that hems it in, that is, the fixed point from which ordered quanta proceed. His dialectic of quantity thus offers a restitution of quantity as quantity, rather than enveloping it in a unifying quality. She then treats the
second critique through Hegels account of form and content, arguing
that there must be a gap between the two in order for any synthesized
pair to proceed toward each other in the first place. Thus, synthesis does
not eradicate difference by reducing it to the same, but allows differences
to flourish as different even in relation. As such, Hegel relates unilateral difference and its convergence in unities in a manner resonant with
Deleuzes critical account. While demonstrating points of convergence
between their systems, however, Simont also uses them to reveal the irresolvable distinction between their systems. While offering remarkably
similar accounts of the relation between unilateral difference and the
reciprocity of form and content, and so on, each thinker tilts this relation
in different directionstoward thought and its unity for Hegel, toward
nature and its contingent matters for Deleuze. As her analysis of their
respective accounts of lightning storms reveals, the divergence between
the thinkers may largely be one of emphasis and valuation, rather than
essential content.
Through a close reading of Deleuzes most sustained reading of
Hegel, Jay Lamperts Limit, Ground, Judgment . . . Syllogism: Hegel,
Deleuze, Hegel, and Deleuze throws into question many of the stock
Deleuzian myths regarding Hegel, most notably those regarding the role
contradiction plays in the dialectic. While eventually critical of Hegel,
Deleuze, as Lampert notes, does credit Hegel with having overcome organic philosophy (grounded in genus-species relations, under which
differences are determined strictly as parts of a whole) for a more orgiastic model of thought (within which differences continually emerge
and vanish in a non-totalizable field). Both Deleuze and Hegel move
beyond categories such as substrate or essence to posit the necessity of
ground, which is orgiastic in so far as its productivity brings forth
determinations which mutate as they interact. By tracing his explication
of ground into various expressions (the infinite, judgment, syllogism,
mechanism, etc.), Lampert reveals the limited role merely oppositional
contradiction plays in Hegels logic of difference. Rather than proceeding via struggle to ideal synthesis, Hegelian contradiction reflects the
forcing effect differences have on each other across a field, or the difference differences make to other differences. Hegelian differences do not
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haps . . .? Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum,
2004), 33.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 164.
7. Jean Granier, Nomad Thought, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 147.
8. Deleuze, Letter to a Harsh Critic, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.
9. Deleuze, Negotiations, 6.
10. Available as an appendix in Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans.
Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),
19195.
11. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 259.
12. Paul Patton, Anti-Platonism and Art, in Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of
Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkwoski (New York: Routledge, 1994), 146.
13. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 259.
14. Todd G. May, The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze,
SubStance 66 (1991): 25.
15. Paul Patton, Conceptual Politics and the War-Machine in Mille Plateaux, SubStance 4445 (1984): 62. Patton is quoting from Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 467.
16. Notable exceptions include Malabou and Stephen Houlgate, Hegel,
Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
17. Deleuze and Guatarri, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60.
18. G. W. F.Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3: Medieval and
Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S.Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 289.
19. See, e.g., Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3;
and Out of This World: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso,
2006), 6.
20. Ernesto Laclau, Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity, in Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996), 21.
For Hegel and Deleuze both religion and philosophy are undeniable
facts of human existence. Thus neither Hegel nor Deleuze can avoid
an account of how religion and philosophy relate to one another. For
Hegel religion and philosophy are related to one another as content
and form. For Deleuze religion and philosophy are two different types
of creation, which are often confused with each other but ultimately are
distinguishable by what they create. Religion creates figures, while philosophy creates concepts. Crucially, since for Hegel the content of philosophy cannot be any religion, but must rather be Trinitarian Protestant
Christianity, he is dependent on a progressive notion of religious history.1
In contrast to this, since philosophy and religion have different tasks, Deleuze is not required to think of either as progressive. After articulating
both Hegels and Deleuzes positions with regard to philosophy and religion, I will show that Deleuzes account of philosophy exceeds Hegels in
its ability to think the contingent and affective nature of human existence.
Hegel
In 1785 F. H.Jacobi upended the German intellectual community with
the revelation of G. E.Lessings Spinozism. Moses Mendelssohn took up
Lessings defense, while Jacobi widened his offensive to include all of philosophy. Jacobi argued that all philosophy, insofar as it is thought consistently, tends toward Spinozism, atheism, and nihilism (a term coined by
Jacobi).2 Jacobis scathing condemnation of philosophy had wide-ranging
consequences for years to come. J. G. Fichte lost his position at Jena
when he was charged with atheism. F. W. J.Schelling and G. W. F.Hegel,
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nor objective but out of which this opposition is produced. This is the
absolute, the philosophy that is able to take up faith as its content and
not something opposed to philosophy.
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel maintains the fundamental position that he outlines in Faith and Knowledge and explicates
in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The culmination of religion, defined as the
self-consciousness of God, lies in Protestant Christianity.10 Furthermore,
not only are religion and philosophy intimately related as content and
form, but also insofar as philosophy takes up this content in its logical
form, it is orthodox par excellence.11 What Hegel adds in these lectures
that go beyond his fundamental position might best be construed as a response to the heresy of modalism. The modalist heresy argues against the
eternality of the Trinity. It argues, rather, that the single God is manifested
historically in three different and mutually exclusive modes. Thus, Father,
Son, and Spirit can never appear together. The Phenomenology might easily
be read modalistically, since it pictures the three persons of the Trinity as
corresponding to different historical epochs. Indeed, it seems that iek
in his most recent work on Hegel and Christianity proposes just such a
reading.12 In the Lectures, though, Hegel is at great pains to show that the
relation of Father, Son, and Spirit lies beyond time in what Hegel calls
the kingdom of the Father.13 However, the very same act that is the eternal begetting of the Son is also the creation of the world. Thus, in the
eternal self-diremption that is the life of the spirit lie both the Trinity and
the creation of the world. It is only in ordinary thought that the two are
regarded as separate, as two absolutely distinct spheres and acts (LPR,
3:38). This is the kingdom of the Son (LPR, 3:33 and following). The
creation of the world, however, inaugurates the divine history that culminates in the reconciliation of God and world, infinite and finite, universal
and particular. This reconciliation is actualized in the community of believers known as the church, the kingdom of Spirit (LPR, 3:100 and
following). What we have, then, in Hegels fullest account of religion is
not a simplistic and heretical modalism, but a highly complex, orthodox
Trinitarianism.14
Hegel thus avoids the false dichotomies of faith or reason, pantheism or theism, subject or object, immanence or transcendence, infinite
or finite, human or divine, universal or particular. Each side of these
dichotomies reveals something essential about the world, but in their
one-sidedness they remain abstract. It is only by thinking both sides in
their difference from and relation to one another that one arrives at
the thought of the absolute. The absolute can only be thought through
negation, can only be actualized through negation. The Trinity is, then,
the very thought of the negative made actual in the world through the
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Deleuze
In contrast to Hegel who begins with the difference between philosophy
and religion and argues for their ultimate unity as form and content, Deleuze begins from the point at which philosophy differentiates itself from
religion and argues that in order for philosophy to be philosophy it must
maintain that difference. In his account of the origins of philosophy Deleuze is heavily reliant on Jean-Pierre Vernant, although undoubtedly
lying behind both is Nietzsches argument from the Genealogy that to conceal themselves the first philosophers took up the mask of religion.15
How is philosophy distinct from the wisdom traditions of the East? How
does the sage, the one possessing wisdom, differ from the philosopher,
the friend of wisdom?
In The Origins of Greek Thought, Vernant argues that what sets the
sage of ancient religious traditions apart from the philosophers of Greece
is a complex interrelation of social and political factors. The Greeks were
not merely being modest in saying that they were the friends of wisdom, while the sages were able to make the more grandiose claim that
they possessed wisdom. Rather, changes in political and social organization made possible the formation of a city in which all the citizens were
seen as being in competition with one another. For example, Xenophon
writes concerning the Spartans in The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians:
But Lycurgus thought the labour of slave women sufficient to supply
clothing. He believed motherhood to be the most important function
of freeborn woman. Therefore in the first place, he insisted on physical
training for the female no less than the male sex: moreover trials of
strength for women competitors as for men, believing that if both parents are strong they produce more vigorous offspring.16
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rial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy
whenever there is immanence (WP, 43). The primary exception here is
Spinoza:
Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was
only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by
movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher
never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it
down everywhere . . . He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. (WP, 48).
Spinoza thus becomes the hero (and savior) in Deleuzes history of philosophy, the only one who understands the true nature of philosophy,
which he pursues relentlessly.
In his description of the nature of philosophy and his evaluation of
Spinozas role in it, Deleuze seems to come remarkably close to Jacobi.
For both, religion and philosophy are mutually exclusive. For both, Spinoza represents the culmination of philosophical endeavor; that is, to
the degree that philosophy consistently follows its own presuppositions
it tends toward Spinozism. All philosophers are Spinozists of some kind.
The only issue is whether they are consistent in their Spinozism. The crucial difference, of course, is that Jacobi recoils in horror at this possibility,
while Deleuze embraces it as the path to freedom. If Deleuzes account
is accurate, though, it would seem that philosophy has rarely been philosophy. The history of philosophy has rather been dominated by the
continual attempt to subdue immanence, make it immanent to something. Within this context Hegel errs by confusing plane and concept. He
makes his plane of immanence immanent to the concept. On Deleuzes
terms then, Hegel does not successfully differentiate philosophy and religion as form and content. Hegel remains a religious thinker, but not
because he takes the Trinity as the content of philosophy. He remains a
religious thinker because the dialectic, difference itself is subordinated
to the concept, which unifies the difference.
Hegels rejoinder to this criticism, of course, is that Deleuze misunderstands the task of philosophy. Without pursuing an underlying unity,
an absolute, philosophy simply abandons itself to feeling and contingency. As a result, Deleuzes philosophy ends up being another version
of the subjectivism that he sees as endemic to the philosophies of his
age, whether in Jacobi or Schleiermacher. Deleuze essentially agrees with
what Hegels assessment of his thought would be. It is based on contin-
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Philosophy as Productive
As we saw above, for Hegel, philosophy cannot be philosophy without
thinking the negative. Deleuzes thought in general, along with his work
with Guattari, can be seen as an attempt to remove the thought of the
negative from philosophy. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues that
negation is the last bastion of representation, the means by which Hegel
stretches difference to the point of contradiction (DR, 26263). The dialectic, however, only ensures that difference remains external and subjugated to a greater unity, the identity of identity and difference, as Hegel
says in the Logic. It is precisely here that we see why Deleuze accuses
Hegel of a false Spinozism.21 Hegel has taken the plane of immanence
and made it immanent to something else, namely the absolute in the
Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia or the Idea in the Logic.22
In contrast to the Hegelian dialectic, Deleuze proposes a different
model of thought and experience. Rather than introducing negation
as the means by which movement is introduced into thought, Deleuze
proposes that thought is self-moving, that it already differs from itself
without this difference being a negation or rising to the level of contradiction, which would externalize the difference. Deleuzes first attempts
to think internal difference come from an early essay titled Bergsons
Conception of Difference. Deleuze writes, In Bergson, thanks to the
notion of the virtual, the thing differs from itself first, immediately. According to Hegel the thing differs from itself because it differs first from
everything it is not, and thus difference goes as far as contradiction.23
There are numerous ways that Deleuze takes up the notion of internal
self-differentiation throughout his work. In many texts he retains the notion of the virtual as the abstract, machinic account of actual processes.
He also pursues this same notion in terms of possible connections among
partial objects and the way in which these connections are channeled by
their limit. At bottom, though, lies a conception of philosophy, even life
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Conclusion
For Deleuze, then, philosophy is precisely the account of the contingent
and affective. This account, however, does not result, as Hegel would
argue, in a one-sided subjectivism. Rather, the subject is the impotent
result of contingent and affective processes and grounds nothing. The
question that remains, though, is what is gained by reconceiving philosophy in this way? What is gained is precisely the contingent and the affective. For Hegel the contingent and affective either remain inscrutable
or are subordinated to the greater unity of the concept, at which point,
of course, they are neither contingent nor affective. The problem with
Hegels account of thoughts movement from abstract to concrete is that
(to paraphrase Deleuze) it is neither abstract nor concrete enough. It is
not abstract enough because it cannot give an account of the affective
or contingent as such. In Deleuze this abstract account is in terms of
the virtual or the diagrammatic. Even more crucially, though, it is the
very interaction of the contingent and affective in their concreteness that
gives rise to the abstract. Neither the abstract nor the concrete is more
real than the other. Neither is superseded by the other. Each is required
in its distinctness to think the contingent and affective. Philosophy for
Deleuze is the creation of concepts. It is only insofar as these concepts
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of New York Press, 1994). While I wont deny that Hegel veers toward a kind of
Gnosticism under the influence of Bhme and the drama of sin and redemption
becomes Bildungsroman, his account of the Trinity strikes me as thoroughly Augustinian and Lutheran.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 11516.
16. Xenophon, Scripta Minora: Loeb Classical Library, Xenophon VII, trans. E. C.
Marchant and G. W.Bowersock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1925), 4:5.
17. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 89.
18. At this point two related issues arise: (1) what is the relation between
philosophical and religious thinkers? (2) what do we make of Deleuzes language of belief in Cinema 2 and What Is Philosophy? On the first issue, Deleuzes
claim would be that anything, even religious thought, can provide impetus for
philosophical thought. Thus Kierkegaard and Pascal can reenergize philosophy
through their thoughts of transcendence (WP, 74). On the second issue, belief for
Deleuze need not entail transcendence. In this respect his call for belief in the
world as it is is parallel to Nietzsches critique of the Beyond in Christian thought
(see Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 172). See also Katherine Thieles
To Believe in This World, as It Is: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism, Deleuze Studies 4 (2010): 2845.
19. On this point see Dan Smiths very helpful The Conditions of the New,
Deleuze Studies 1 (2007): 121.
20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
21. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 12829.
22. In the Phenomenology, for example, Hegel notes that the task of consciousness is to arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being
burdened with something alien . . . so that its exposition will coincide . . . with
the authentic science of spirit (89).
23. Deleuze, Bergsons Conception of Difference, in Desert Islands and
Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 42.
24. Hegel, Phenomenology, 25.
25. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Paperback Library, 1989), 7071.
26. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 17.
27. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 27.
28. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 20.
I would like in this chapter to examine the relationship Deleuze establishes with Hegel with a view to avoiding the false alternative often bandied between Deleuzes critics and defenders: that either Deleuze is a
naive and ill-informed reader whose polemic against his rival misunderstands how dialectical his own thinking is, or that Hegel is unimportant
to Deleuzes thought and thus any misreading of Hegel is irrelevant. The
textual evidence to support both sides of this exchange is easy enough
to find. Deleuze, for example, states that what he most detested in his
education in the history of philosophy was Hegelianism and dialectics.1
And he famously declares in his seminal work on Nietzsche that there
is no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsches
philosophy . . . forms an absolute antidialectics and sets out to expose
all the mystifications that find a final refuge in the dialectic,2 which presumably means that Deleuze sees no possible compromise between his
own thought and Hegels. Without dismissing these harsh statements,
and while acknowledging that Deleuzes general approach to Hegel is
quite an exception to his creative (if not always faithful) readings of both
friendly and rival figures in the history of philosophy, I nevertheless
maintain that there is a real sophistication to Deleuzes critique of dialectics, and a subtle and complex relation that is established underneath
his language of blunt opposition.
To advance this view, I will examine the discussions of force, consciousness, self-consciousness, and desire in the early chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit,3 locating the moments where Hegels dialectic falters
in such a way that Deleuze can provide new formulations of these terms.
I will then examine these new formulations as they appear first in the
theory of forces presented in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and then in the account of desire found in the appendices of The Logic of Sense. In engag18
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ing the Phenomenology in this way, it is less important to me whether Deleuze actually had the same critical reading in mind when launching his
attacks on Hegel than whether such a reading and critique can make
sense of Deleuzes moves in a way that provides a more complex and
sophisticated portrayal of the Hegel-Deleuze relation. What I hope to
make clear is that Deleuzes position against Hegel, including his declaration of irreconcilability, can be redeemed through a rigorous and
critical reading of Hegel, even if Deleuze did not provide this himself. I
believe that what emerges from this enterprise is a Deleuze who neither
neglects Hegel nor reads him poorly, but who rather rivals and completes Hegels thought, much like Nietzsche, for Deleuze, rivals and
completes Kant.4
Readers familiar with Deleuzes wider corpus know of his indebtedness to a particular reading of Hegel and a line of critique that emerges
from it. In his 1954 review of Jean Hyppolites Logic and Existence,5 Deleuze aligns Hegels project with what will become the general thrust of
his own, holding the lesson of Hyppolites Hegel to be: Philosophy must
be ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is
only an ontology of sense.6 This notion of sense provides the general terrain on which Deleuzes relation to Hegel must first be approached.7
Hyppolites text challenges the humanist or anthropomorphic readings
of Hegel that, la Kojve,8 take human collective spirit to be the Absolute Subject.9 To dispute this view, Hyppolite concentrates on the second
of two appearances of the Absolute in the Phenomenology, where, in the
closing pages, phenomenology transitions into logic. The nature of this
transition demonstrates that human self-consciousness and history are
merely focal points where an Absolute beyond humanity is actualized
concretely, these focal points, in turn, negating themselves and returning
to this Absolute. In this way, the Absolute is immanent to the empirical
and human even while remaining different from them, allowing Hyppolite to argue that it provides the sense and direction for human being
and history without becoming an essence standing above or behind
them. Thus, the Phenomenology studies the anthropological conditions
of this reflection [the self-reflexivity that is the sense of the Absolute]; it
starts from human, properly subjective, reflection in order to sublate it,
in order to show that this Phenomenology, this human itinerary, leads to
absolute knowledge, to an ontological reflection which the Phenomenology
presupposes (LE, 34).
Moving away from the anthropological interpretation, however,
Hyppolite encounters a fundamental difficulty he is not the first to locatenamely, that there is no negation internal to history that returns it
to the Absolute: History is indeed the place of this passage, but this pas-
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sage is not itself a historical fact (LE, 189). A disconnect thereby emerges
between the successive time of human history and the eternal nature of
the Absolute, leaving the latter opaque to the former and reinstating the
very transcendence the dialectic is meant to raze. For Hyppolite at least,
this quandary does not arise in the Absolutes first appearance, which
occurs at the end of the Phenomenologys third chapter when consciousness, finding itself in its object, passes into self-consciousness. This is the
point at which consciousness is no longer burdened by some alien other,
the point that, as Hegel promises in the Introduction, will signify the
nature of absolute knowledge itself (PS, 89). Deleuze seems to accept
this difference, declaring in his review that the relation between ontology and empirical man [resolved in the Absolutes first appearance] is
perfectly determined, but not the relation between ontology and historical man (RLE, 194). The lack of a properly dialectical transition
from history back to the Absolute indicates that the moments of the
Phenomenology and the moments of the Logic are not moments in the
same sense (RLE, 195), and this equivocation in Hegelian sense suggests, for Deleuze, that a route from Hegel may be found in a difference
that differs from dialectical contradiction. If Hyppolites Hegel is correct
in his view that the Absolute as sense is becoming (RLE, 194), this
becoming, Deleuze contends, must be grounded in a notion of Being as
difference, wherein contradiction would be less than difference and not
more (RLE, 195).
Deleuzes early review presents his most direct and detailed critique
of Hegel, and its distinction between difference and contradiction remains pertinent to all his later work. But it certainly does not tell the
whole story of Deleuzes relation to Hegel, insofar as Nietzsche and Philosophy takes aim at a rather different target. Moreover, the contention
that the relation between ontology and empirical man is perfectly determined seems implausible, and it is doubtful that even the young Deleuze
held it himself, for it suggests an adequacy of ontological negation or
contradiction that is fundamentally incompatible with his entire philosophy. Indeed, a disconnect arises in the Absolutes first appearance that
is as problematic as what Hyppolite identifies in the second, and while it
is perhaps not as relevant to the task of rebutting the anthropomorphic
readings of Hegel, it is significant for the critical path Deleuze pursues.
To appreciate the role played by the Absolutes first appearance,
it is worth noting, with Heidegger, the dual position the Phenomenology
holds in Hegels thought.10 On the one hand, it provides the groundwork
for the never completed System of Science, and as such, it functions
as a foundation that articulates the entirety of a system that Hegel had
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intended to present also as logic and as a philosophy of nature and psychology. On the other hand, it is merely one component of the system,
allowing Hegel, as his structure evolves into that of the Encyclopedia, to
relegate it to a subsection of the philosophy of spirit, which comprises the
final part. As a foundation and complete account of the system, the Phenomenology displays a miniature version of the path Hegel pursues later,
wherein an ontological derivation of the Notionwhat Taylor calls the
strict dialecticis followed by an empirical or historical dialectic that
demonstrates how this Notion is actualized and how it returns to itself.11
In the Phenomenology, the first three chapters, which form the Dialectic
of Consciousness, comprise the strict ontological dialectic (PS, 220),
although they differ from the Logic in deriving the Absolute from an
empirical starting pointconsciousnesss immediate experience of a
thing. The transition from the strict to the historical dialectic should
occur seamlesslyand, indeed, it must do so for the relation between
empirical man and the Absolute to have any temporal dimension. Otherwise, the relation remains no more than that of an abstract and merely
formal Notion that is presupposed by the immediate and abstract experience of an isolated and abstract consciousness. In short, the Absolutes
appearance must immediately effect this transition or it will remain abstract itself. Thus, the culmination of the dialectical path consciousness
follows to find its truth in self-consciousness should yield two fundamental results: consciousness must find its foundation in the Absolute and
also attain a more concrete conception of itself as self-consciousness. This
would allow the Dialectic of Self-Consciousness to trace the same route
as the Dialectic of Consciousness, but at a more concrete level, reaching
the still more concrete Notion understood as Reason. Through similar
transitions from the abstract to the concrete the dialectic can then progress through Reason, Spirit, Religion, and finally Absolute Knowing. As
will be seen, however, it is precisely in the first dual move that quandaries
arise, impacting not only the Absolutes relation to self-consciousnesss
development through historical time but also its relation to empirical
consciousness encountering its world.
It is on this empirical level that the attacks in Nietzsche and Philosophy
are launched. Early in the text, Deleuze explicitly connects the philosophy of sense to force: We will never find the sense of something . . . if
we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits
it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it (NP, 3). He quickly
adds that this Nietzschean conception of force must be rigorously distinguished from Hegels, that Nietzsches anti-Hegelianism is already apparent in the theory of forces (NP, 8) and its idea that the essential relation
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these others are also internal to it: In this, there is immediately present
both the repression within itself of Force, or its being-for-self, as well as
its expression . . . Force, as actual, exists simply and solely in its expression, which at the same time is nothing else than a supersession of itself
(PS, 141). In this way, the concept of force also sublates the distinction between essence and appearance: since force is nothing but its expression, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its filling (PS, 147). It
therefore becomes a movement from being-in-itself to being-for-another
and back to being-for-self through being-for-another, leaving no opaque
thing-in-itself conditioning this movement from outside. Consciousness
is thereby given the internal mechanisms needed to overcome the aporia
that characterizes the Understanding, where it remains detached from its
world, grasping reality through laws that never fully reconcile universal
and singular. The movement of force demonstrates that, in being separated from its object, consciousness is also negatively related to it, so that
each is part of the others identity. The subject finding itself in its object
in this way, consciousness realizes itself as self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness, presenting a being that separates itself from its
world to examine it as an object while also remaining fully immersed
within this world, is a more concrete conception of the science of phenomena than the portrayal of an isolated consciousness examining an external and independent reality. The Dialectic of Self-Consciousness thus
works out the truth of self-consciousnessthe conditions under which
its self-certainty has objective truthbut also traces the same path as the
Dialectic of Consciousness on a more concrete level. However, it does not
begin with an internal contradiction that shows how self-consciousnesss
initial certainty negates itself. On the contrary, Hegel prefaces this new
stage with a review of the previous developments, declaring that with
consciousnesss return to itself from otherness, we have . . . entered the
native realm of truth (PS, 167). Self-consciousness is then said to consist of two moments: first, it relates to itself alone and is negatively separated from an otherness given to it in sense certainty and perception as
a substantial and enduringbut not self-consciousexistence; second,
it unites with this other, whose difference consequently becomes mere
appearance.13 This negation and absorption of otherness, a negation of
negation that moves self-consciousness from the first to the second moment, leads Hegel to define self-consciousness as desire in general. Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is
the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second,
viz. itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only
as opposed to the first object (PS, 167). As a movement of desire, self-
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sible as an abstract image of the real, one that reality already resembles
and to which existence is merely added, leaving the conditions of possible experience too loose and general for the reality they are meant to
grasp.19 On the face of it, Hegels dialectic seems to avoid this criticism,
since it is structured as an internal movement that progressively explicates the real in its full complexity. Beginning with the most abstract and
one-sided depiction of reality, the dialectic demonstrates how this thesis
contradicts itself and engenders its opposite; the subsequent synthesis
of these opposites thereby presents a more complex, two-sided image of
the real, so that as the dialectic advances it progressively encompasses the
richness of a concrete Absolute, whereby the rationalthe Notionis
real and the real is rational. The only requirement is to show that contradiction and opposition arise internally, so that the dialectics movement
remains immanent and never refers to a beyond that cannot be synthesized. Indeed, such a beyond is impossible, since anything beyond the
Absolute would have a negative relationship to it and hence would be
subject to mediation.
Nevertheless, Deleuze maintains that this progression fails, because
the real cannot be constructed through a synthesis of abstractions. Dialectics can no more lead to the concrete than if one tried to recompose a
real object by gluing together two-dimensional photographs taken from
all possible angles.20 This critique does not entail a return to a predialectical conception of reality. Instead, for Deleuze, the abstractness of
dialectical negation and sublation points to differences that, exceeding
opposition and contradiction, are excluded from dialectical synthesis.
The inclusion of these fugitive differences within a synthetic structure,
however, precisely because they are incompatible with an Identity of identity and opposition, necessarily breaks with dialectics. A truly concrete
synthesis of differences, Deleuze maintains, must therefore be a synthesis
of disjunction that connects heterogeneities. Dialectics does maintain a
disjunction among differences, but Deleuze holds that in treating differences as opposites, it allows them to communicate only to the degree they
mirror one another, thereby submitting them to the principles of identity.
In contrast, the challenge, Deleuze states, is to make divergence . . . no
longer a principle of exclusion, and disjunction no longer a means of
separation . . . the whole question, and rightly so, is to know under what
conditions the disjunction is a veritable synthesis.21 This requires that
everything happens through the resonance of disparates, point of view
on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiation of difference, and not through the identity of contraries (LS, 175). A disjunctive
synthesis involves a relation to an Other, but one from which no return
to establish an identity-for-itself is possible. Under these conditions, the
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rational and the real remain connected, but in no way resemble each
other.
In general terms, the conception of force Deleuze develops through
Nietzsche shares with Hegels the contention that the thing-in-itself is abstract because any thing in its concreteness refers outside itself, making its
identity as an isolated thing merely a moment in a more comprehensive
synthetic relation. Neither physical atomism nor psychological egoism
can account for the necessary plurality and difference of their objects,
and only become coherent if they are translated into the terminology
of force (NP, 67). At first sight, Deleuzes Nietzschean account of force
appears far too metaphorical and vitalist to have any substantive connection to Hegels. His statements that all force is appropriation, domination, exploitation of a quantity of reality (NP, 3), that a new force
can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the
mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object (NP, 5),
and that a superior force affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference (NP, 9) seem completely removed from the language in the
Phenomenology, or any other properly philosophical treatise. Nevertheless,
despite the apparent philosophical sloppiness in this personification of
forces, Deleuze maintains that it is Hegels language of opposition, contradiction, and negation that lacks the necessary rigor. Forces remain abstract when they are determined simply through reciprocal opposition.
Hegels account remains one-sided and incomplete because his seemingly more analytical and philosophical language removes the forcefulness
that makes forces what they are:
Hegel . . . proposes an abstract movement of concepts instead of a
movement of the Physis and the Psyche. Hegel substitutes the abstract
relation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation
of the singular and the universal in the Idea. He thus remains in the
reflected element of representation, within simple generality. He represents concepts instead of dramatizing Ideas. (DR, 10)
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as active and reactive forces. Affirmation expresses active forces becoming dominant, while negation expresses forces in their becoming-reactive
(NP, 54) This, of course, distinguishes the wills to power Nietzsche calls
noble and slavish. The former expresses and affirms strife, conflict,
and a will not to secure its identity but to transcend its limits and overcome itself; the latter condemns strife and conflict as evil and affirms its
identity as good through contrast. In this way, Deleuze ties dialectics itself
to a slavish conception of the world: the entire master/slave dialectic,
he states, is the slaves conception, it is the image that the man of ressentiment has of power. . . . Underneath the Hegelian image of the master
we always find the slave (NP, 10). As Nietzsche says of opposing values,
they are merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as
it were.24 In this way, dialectical abstractions are not mere errors: they
express the sense of a limited perspective, and, indeed, are engendered
by this perspective.
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the link between a desiring subject and a desired object, including those
objects that are themselves desiring others. Deleuze acknowledges that
through desire self-consciousness and subjectivity are achievedthere is
some truth to the Hegelian thesis about recognitionbut this idea captures only a limited aspect of desires operations, and presents only one
form that Otherness may take. More profoundly, desire also institutes an
overcoming and a deterritorialization of subjectivity and identity, a dissolution of the bond of identity attained through opposition.
Deleuzes analysis of Michel Tourniers Friday, a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, illustrates all of these aspects. In contrast to Daniel
Defoes version, which places Robinson in an original state of isolation
and follows him as he builds a new rigorous orderan exploration already falsified by Robinsons having access to tools of civilization from
the shipwreck and having already repressed his desires so as to be able
to workTournier frames the story in terms of Robinsons dehumanization through a process that does not reproduce the world but rather
deviates from it (LS, 3024). Robinsons island presents a world without
Others, revealing the significance of Others through their absence in
several respects. First, Deleuze maintains, Others ensure that around
each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the organization of a marginal world, a mantle or background, where other objects
and other ideas may come forth in accordance with laws of transition
which regulate the passage from one to another (LS, 305). In this respect, the Other is a virtual excess and a conduit that connects ideas and
objects to one another: the Other assures the margins and transitions
in the world (LS, 305). But the Other also enables the subject to embed
objects and itself in the world: The part of the object that I do not see I
posit as visible to Others, so that when I will have walked around to reach
this hidden part, I will have joined the Others behind the object, and I
will have totalized it in the way that I had already anticipated. As for the
objects behind my back, I sense them coming together and forming a
world, precisely because they are visible to, and are seen by, Others (LS,
305). Finally, the Other relates the subject to its object, as my desire
passes through Others, and through Others it receives an object. I desire
nothing that cannot be seen, thought, or possessed by a possible Other.
That is the basis of my desire. It is always Others who relate my desire
to an object (LS, 306). This relation is one of temporal discontinuity,
as the Other causes my consciousness to tip necessarily into an I was,
into a past which no longer coincides with the object. . . . The mistake of
theories of knowledge is that they postulate the contemporaneity of subject and object, whereas one is constituted only through the annihilation
of the other (LS, 310). In all these ways, the Other exceeds the order of
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Other, not a replica but a Double: one who reveals pure elements and
dissolves objects, bodies, and the earth (LS, 317). Whereas the Other is
a strange detour that brings my desires down to objects, and my love
to worlds (LS, 317), Friday, this otherwise-Other (LS, 319), is able to
separate desire from its object, from its detour through the body, in order
to relate it to a pure cause (LS, 317). This is desires perversionor,
rather, its manifestation as a perverse structure . . . which is opposed to
the structure-Other and takes its place (LS, 319). In being released from
its object, this perversion effects a desubjectivation (LS, 320). This is
the sense of the Robinson fiction (LS, 318).
In declaring that philosophy must be an ontology of sense, Deleuze
places his project and Hegels on the same terrain, and in affirming difference and disjunction against negation and contradiction, he follows
Hegels own refusal to leave thought in the realm of abstractions, divorced from any relation to the concrete and sensible. Deleuze in this
way completes Hegels project even while breaking with dialectics and its
movement to secure the subject. In this way, their common philosophical
direction in no way prevents Hegels and Deleuzes respective philosophies from remaining fundamentally incompatible and irreconcilable.
How, then, should the Deleuze-Hegel relation be understood? I would
suggest that it be seen in terms of disjunction, whereby Hegels and Deleuzes thinking are intimately intertwined but never subject to mediation or resolution, separated even in their proximity to each other by
the deepest of chasms. In Derridean terms, each is the others diffrance,
with any final specification of their relationship being always differed and
deferred. This is certainly reason enough to read and reread both Hegel
and Deleuze, and perhaps also to give Deleuze a certain credit: while he
may seem to establish a crude opposition to Hegel, this opposition is in
fact only a surface effect of the disjunctive relationship his philosophy
has always affirmed.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 6.
2. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 195.
3. G. W. F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
4. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1, 8797.
5. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
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ground, and is fatal to Hegels project: what the text does is introduce something of a linguistic moment into the relation of life and consciousness and,
in doing so, threatens to render impossible not only the emergence of selfconsciousness (as self-consciousness) out of life but also the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as such. Lifes pointing introduces this threat because it opens
the possibility of an unmediatable break or gap between life and consciousness:
that is, if the relation between life and consciousness is mediated, not by a
determinate negation but, rather, by an act of pointing that can, perhaps, point
to many living things ( just as it can point to their other, many dead things) but
that, by itself, can never make the other of lifeconsciousness as consciousness,
knowing as knowingappear, then this relation would in fact be a disjunction,
the falling apart of life and consciousness. And when life and consciousness are
un-mediated or de-mediated in this way, then the possibility of spirits appearingthe possibility of a phenomeno-logic of spirits appearing in the phenomena of its own self-negationswould also be very much in question (Warminski,
Hegel/Marx: Consciousness, 13132).
16. Kojve, An Introduction, chaps. 12.
17. Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged objectthe estranged essential reality of manis nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merelyestrangements abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is
therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty abstractionthe negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity
of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativityan abstraction which is again fixed as such and thought of as an independent activityas sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but
the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be
merely a formal content begotten by abstraction from all content. As a result there
are general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that
account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all contentthe thoughtforms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature (Karl Marx,
The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: W. W.Norton, 1978], 122).
18. Nietzsches relation to Kant is like Marxs to Hegel: Nietzsche stands
critique on its feet, just as Marx does with the dialectic. But this analogy, far from
reconciling Marx and Nietzsche, separates them still further. For the dialectic
comes from the original Kantian form of critique. There would have been no
need to put the dialectic back on its feet, nor to do any form of dialectics if critique itself had not been standing on its head from the start (NP, 89).
19. The elementary concepts of representation are the categories defined
as the conditions of possible experience. These, however, are too general or too
large for the real. The net is so loose that the largest fish pass through. . . . Everything changes once we determine the conditions of real experience, which are
not larger than the conditioned and which differ in kind from the categories
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 68). See also Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
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Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 23; and Henri Bergson, An
Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), chap. 3.
20. We are told that the Self is one (thesis) and it is multiple (antithesis),
then it is the unity of the multiple (synthesis). Or else we are told that the One is
already multiple, that Being passes into nonbeing and produces becoming. . . .
To Bergson, it seems that in this type of dialectical method, one begins with concepts that, like baggy clothes, are much too big. The One in general, the multiple
in general, nonbeing in general. . . . In such cases the real is recomposed with
abstracts; but of what use is a dialectic that believes itself to be reunited with the
real when it compensates for the inadequacy of a concept that is too broad or too
general by invoking the opposite concept, which is no less broad and general?
The concrete will never be attained by combining the inadequacy of one concept
with the inadequacy of its opposite (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 44).
21. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 174.
22. Hegel, Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, trans. William Wallace with foreword by J. N.Findlay (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975).
23. Also, difference in quantity . . . is . . . the quality which belongs to quantity (DR, 232). Nietzsche himself proclaims: Our knowing limits itself to establishing quantities; but we cannot help feeling these differences in quantity as
qualities . . . we sense bigness and smallness in relation to the conditions of our
existence . . . with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations
between magnitudes as qualities (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale [New York: Vintage Books, 1968], 563).
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 2.
25. Deleuze, Desire and Pleasure, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. A. I.
Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 189.
In the foreword to Difference and Repetition,1 Deleuze locates his philosophical program in what he thinks is a broad current of anti-Hegelianism,
and indicates that difference and repetition must take the place of identity, negativity, and contradiction. This programmatic statement deliberately foregrounds his theoretical quarrel with Hegelian-type dialectics,
where difference is glossed in a negative manner as a point of contradiction in so far as it is made subordinate to that which is identical. Thus
interpreted, the Deleuzian critique of Hegel can be viewed as unfolding in three steps. First, there is the 1962 chapter criticizingwith the
help of Nietzschethe notion of negativity. Second, the critique of
Hegel manifests itself with the introduction of Gilbert Simondon in Difference and Repetition, who is important for establishing Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, and whose influence should not be underestimated. Finally, thanks to Foucault and Guattari and the new theory of
history that Deleuze sets up after 1968, the debate over Hegel stabilizes
itself around the question of history, henceforth construed as the empirical and political domain of complex modes of subjectivation; a heterogeneous necessity comprised of an admixture of fortuitousness and
continuity.
The intellectual milieu from which Deleuze emerged made staking out a position with regards to Hegel a veritable rite of passage. With
respect to Sartre, Deleuze claimed, he was my teacher, noting the
widespread influence of Sartre-inspired phenomenology in the postwar
period. Still, for Deleuze, philosophy begins by challenging phenomenology in the broadest sense, including philosophies of consciousness,
in a lineage that combines the Kantian transcendental subject and Husserlian phenomenology (via the efforts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and
other phenomenological accounts of mind) in a trajectory that meets up
with Hegel, historical dialectics, and the historicism of some of Marxs
successors.
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ference that is never liable to be withdrawn. The asymmetrythe problematic differenceproduces the individuation, not as a synthesis, but
rather as a response to a metastable situation. The synthesis is not implemented by reducing the contradiction; on the contrary, it is precisely because the asymmetry is maintained that it provokes, as a creative solution,
the invention of a dimension which does not absorb that asymmetry but
gives it a renewed expression.
The Hegelian construal of contradiction remains internal to the
terms which it encompasses in the dialectical relation, while in Simondonian disparation the heterogeneity stays external to the terms which
it brings into relation. Simondon must therefore be understood, along
with Nietzsche, as one of the key thinkers whom Deleuze strategically calls
upon in his bid to distinguish himself from Hegel. In the brief preface
that opens Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explicitly locates his project
in a climate of general anti-Hegelianism, and stresses the central place
of Simondon alongside Nietzsche: the problematic [Simondon] and the
differential [Nietzsche] determine struggles or destructions in relation
to which those of the negative are only appearances (DR, xx). In those
passages of Difference and Repetition devoted to Simondon, Deleuze always
insists on the fact that the status of difference depends on the principium
individuationis. With contradiction, difference is brought to a level of
existence that is purely logical. To that extent, Hegel pursues a philosophy of representation despite his claim to be breaking from it. Indeed,
he subordinates difference to a process of unitary differentiation of the
Absolute such that the contradiction which underwrites the negative role
of difference is arguably nothing but the discovery of the Self by the
mind in a phenomenology of the identical.
The Hegelian dialectic, in spite of being framed by its founder as a
struggle against the traditional idea of representation, thus becomes the
foil of choice for Deleuze. According to Deleuze, transductive disparation and the eternal recurrence of difference combine to effectively overturn the dominance of negativity and representation, which until then
reigned supreme as a misguided construal of difference subordinated
to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude and
analogy (DR, 50).
Difference is subordinated to identity whenever it fails to sustain
the heterogeneity of the terms which it relates. As Deleuze argues in his
1962 book on Nietzsche, the contact of one force with another never
implies a negative element of essence, and so the anti-Hegelianism (an
expression of Difference and Repetition already present in that earlier work)
which permeates Nietzsches oeuvre is manifest in his theory of forces.
The negative is shown under closer scrutiny to be a false concept: For
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the speculative element of negation, opposition or contradiction Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of affirmation and enjoyment.8 Although the pluralism at work can appear akin to
the dialectic inasmuch as a force is always thought in its essential relation
with another force, it nevertheless remains the only profound enemy
of the Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, the pluralism of forces never wholly
succumbs to the dialectics appeal to contradiction, but rather affirms it
directly and unilaterally as a plural singularity that is both positive and
conflictual. Force is always given in the plural, as a complex network.
In sum, Deleuze subjects Hegelian difference and negativity to an argument which echoes the concept of multiplicity that is so important to
his oeuvre. With the help of Bergson and Riemann, Deleuze shows how
we must go from a multiplicity composed of parts, still held captive by a
schema of difference between the one and the many and a conception
of the multiple as a body of amorphously plural and discontinuous unitiestoward a truly substantive multiplicity.
The Hegelian notion of difference, which is abstract and merely
nominal, conserves the unity and homogeneity of its terms, and maintains the difference in the order of the identical without ever managing
to produce a difference that is truly substantive, precisely in the manner that an abstract multiplicity adds stable unities. Instead of the internal difference of the concept where the movement stays dialectical and
homogeneous, Deleuze proposes a difference that is plural and irreduciblea veritable asymmetry of the different. For difference implies the
negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent
that its subordination to the identical is maintained, says Deleuze at
the opening of Difference and Repetition (DR, xix). Hegelian logic thus remains a false movement, from the mediation posed as a movement of
the concept, to the contradiction imitating difference in the progression
toward the Minds self-apprehension, to the similarity of the contradictory terms which the synthesis yields by giving birth to the identical. Deleuze will never cease fighting this mediation of the concept as the movement of speculative thought, which he supplants with the Leibnizian
idea of vice-diction, inserting small differences tongue-in-cheek where
the grand Hegelian contra-diction countenanced a unitary difference
in the concepts. Resolutely turning his back on these ways of approaching the issue, Deleuze thus proposes a new picture of difference. Arising
from the general failure of representation, his proposal sees the modern
world as a world of simulacra in the sense of going beyond the old, tired
differences that could do little else but pit essence against existence,
model against copy.
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Simondons Dialectic
By all accounts, Simondonian disparation is a powerful ally in the polemic against a Hegelian conception of dialectics, where negation leads
to Aufhebung. Why then does Deleuze feel the need to apply the term
dialectic to Simondon himself? Because, says Deleuze, in Simondons
dialectic, the problematic replaces the negative (DI, 88). This caveat
not only helps pinpoint a divergence between the two thinkers, it also
demonstrates the massive influence of the Hegelian setup, an influence
Deleuze acknowledges perpetually as the most formidable theoretical
adversary of a philosophy of difference.
Simondon construes disparation as holding between two preexisting dimensions of individuation: a field of pre-individual singularitieswhich Deleuze pays homage to as a new definition of the transcendental fieldto which is annexed a field of trans-individual individuation
that basically encompasses the process of individuation in a domineering
dimension. In this way, individuation does not escape an undifferentiated virtual canvas but rather modulates between the two successive dimensions of the pre-individual and the trans-individual. Simondon treats
these twin dimensions as the boundaries of the de-phasing operative
in the process of individuation, such that it is sandwiched, so to speak,
between a Large and a Small. All the explicit references to Simondon
made by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition bear on this point, since it is
the issue where the two thinkers differ most markedly.
For Deleuze, construing difference as a disparation between a preindividual dimension and a trans-individual dimension is meaningful
only to the extent that it reestablishes an analogical resemblance between
those very dimensions which the theory of disparation as a whole sought
to avoid. The moment difference is taken to come first, any reification
of differences as steps in the ladder of being is barred, and if Simondon
continues to appeal to this, Deleuze believes it is because it safeguards a
dimension of unity understood as the most and leastthe very site where
Deleuze will locate the multiplicity of becoming. Deleuzes entire philosophical effort consists in trying to turn these modal dimensions into
variations without making any presuppositions as to their size or scale
with respect to some all-encompassing being.
This allows us to better appreciate the rationale that sees Deleuze
distancing himself from Simondon whilst helping himself to ample portions of his insights. The locus of Deleuze and Simondons disagreement
has to do with the regime of multiplicities and the progressive order
of dimensions across which individuation unfolds. By holding fast to a
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sort of successive movement going from the pre-individual to the transindividual, Deleuze thinks Simondon tacitly conserves a form of dialectical progress which incorporates the various differences in an unbroken
development. In ordering the pre-individual, the individual, and the
trans-individual along a curve that ostensibly manifests a logical and
temporal evolution, Simondon unwittingly reinstates a sort of graduated
scale of being. His superb analysis of individuation can nevertheless thus
be said to founder into conservatism. The reproach is particularly salient
in a political key, especially when we consider the sociological analyses
that Simondons thesis generates; but the criticism applies across the
board. By maintaining a psychic individuation between the dimensions
of the organically pre-individual and the trans-individual, Simondon harbors a unifying teleology and reintroduce[s] the form of the Self which
he had averted in his theory of disparity, that is, his theory of the individual conceived as dephased and multiphased being (DI, 89).
To avoid this Simondonian precept of an already-established scale
of sizes, Deleuze insists on difference as difference in itself. In the first
footnote devoted to a critical treatment of the Large and the Small, he
opts to refer back to Simondon: On the importance of disparate series
and their internal resonance in the constitution of systems, see Gilbert
Simondon (DR, 318, n. 25). But, he quickly adds: However, Simondon maintains as a condition the requirement of resemblance between
series (DR, 318, n. 25). Deleuze stresses the place of virtuality in the actual, and refuses to situate it between the preexisting poles of the Large
and Small, thereby giving difference the potential to explain the emergence of individuation. Instead of a dyad of Large and Small resulting in
a phased individuation, Deleuze posits a vibration of the virtual and the
actual. This stakes out the key theoretical divergence that separates Deleuze and Simondonalthough, as we have striven to underscore, there
are many powerful areas of agreement between the two.
Simondons influence on Deleuze is thus much more subtle and
convoluted than what can be gleaned from the comments made in Difference and Repetition. The Hegelian dialectic, defined as a contradiction
which is resolved thanks to the contribution of negativity, is Deleuzes
chief adversary, and by making disparation the prime theoretical alternative to opposition, he confirms the centrality of Simondons ideas.
Care must be taken to not let the point of disagreement between the
two thinkers described above downplay the pivotal importance Simondon had on the development of Deleuzes account of differentiation, an influence one can see clearly in case studies of individuation
Deleuze explores like the physicochemical crystal and the biological
membrane.
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ence by subjecting it to the representational logic of identity. The speculative Hegelian tenets are thus not speculative enough, and his ontology
is held captive by the subjective structure of representation. It attains
difference only underneath quality, within extensivity, and retains only
a qualified opposition, not the true movement of difference.
Hegelianism approaches difference only in its actualized mode, and
thus misses its becoming, which for Deleuze means the tension that determines the passage from virtuality to actualization. Again, this argument is distinctly Hegelian: thought does not rise above the speculative
proposition but rather stays trapped in the antinomies of representation. Deleuze here defines the negative as a difference inverted, seen
from below (DR, 235), walking on its head, to echo Marx. However, the
Marxian argument is used by Deleuze in a vitalist, not political sense, one
which moreover is not even explicitly materialist: it isnt that thought
fails to understand the sociopolitical conditions that subtend it or the
very material conditions of its existence, but rather that it approaches
the thrust for actualization the other way round. Instead of considering
thought as it springs forth toward that which is higher (a rise in altitude
that marks an elevation of potential), it instead looks at it from below,
where all that potential collapses back.
Finally, there is a third feature: intensity is an implied quantity that
is wrapped up and embryonic. The appeal to Hegelian risk is effected
in a threefold manner: by means of the theory of enveloped expressions which the Renaissance inherited from Neoplatonism, by means of
the embryonic quantities of Leibnizs differential infinitesimals, and by
means of the theory of intensive variation developed by Geoffroy SaintHilaire. All three theoretical sources allow for a more focused insistence
on the problem of the virtual under actualization. They let Deleuze define the impenetrability of meaning, the ideational portion of the event,
and the construal of Difference as Idea. Only the joint collaboration of
these three features, Deleuze argues, allows us to escape the Hegelian
contradiction. To the extent that difference is affirmative, it is because
it is disparative. Difference is therefore not an opposition which, by negating its asymmetry, produces a synthesis which nullifies it because its
real movement is that of a productive differenciation (actualization). It
isnt surprising that the example Deleuze systematically chooses to buttress this point is that of disparation in the typical sense used in stereoscopy, to which Deleuze applies the Simondonian extension. Oppositions are always flat: they lack the stereoscopic depth of reality. Instead
of the superficial synthesis of differences according to their opposition
and merely mental reconciliation, Deleuze prefers a real and intensive
affirmation of the difference, bereft of any reconciliation. We have seen
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Deleuze is quite close to Bergson. The lan vital puts paid to Hegelian negation: negation stays entropic and secondary because it travels
the layered slope of the concept instead of the differentiating lines of
becoming. Intensity is thereby very much given in things. It is a transcendental principle which hugs the vital movement of thought itself and is
totally distinct from the quantities which science manipulates and conceptualizeseven if the transcendental logic of difference requires the
substitution of a physics of individuation, of an energetics of difference
of potential, of a mechanics of fluids, and of a biology of individuation
which replaces the old mechanics of solids of classical physics and the
biology of genera and species. Hence the aesthetic of difference implies
an altogether new logic, not to mention its own dialectic. Transcendental yet empirical, it rejects the Kantian dichotomy between the empirical
and the a priori. Still, it remains transcendental since it retains intensity
as the insensible limit of difference itself. That is what Deleuze, following
the Bergsonian expression revived by Wahl, calls a superior empiricism,
whose object is precisely this intense world of differences, where qualities
find their rationale and the sensible finds its being (see, e.g., DR, 5657).
This superior empiricism, which is transcendental, construes the
sign as a heterogeneity. The sign is shown to be triply heterogeneous:
with respect to the object it emits, since it emerges as a disparation
between two kinds of scales; with respect to itself, since it refers to the objects which it envelops, and thus incarnates a natural or spiritual power
(an Idea) (DR, 2223); and heterogeneous with respect to the response
it elicits, since it does not resemble it. It is this heterogeneity of the sign
which allows Deleuze to articulate literature and philosophy in their constitutive disparity. It is also what underwrites the label of empiricism for
thought which, as we have just seen, does not back away from pure speculation, and moves, for the time being, in the sole medium of thought.
This conception of heterogeneity, according to Deleuze, allows one not
to surpass but to render powerless the very concept of contradiction.
Translated from the French by Marc Champagne, with Niels Feuerhahn and
Jim Vernon
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
2. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts: 19531974, ed. David Lapoujade,
trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 87.
3. Compare to Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique:
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Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation (Grenoble, Fr.: Millon, 1995), 203, n. 15. See also DR, 51.
4. Translated from French: La dcouverte perceptive nest pas une abstraction rductrice, mais une intgration, une opration amplifiante.
5. Translated from French: Les termes extrmes atteints par lopration
transductive ne prexistent pas cette opration; son dynamisme provient de la
primitive tension du systme de ltre htrogne qui se dphase et dveloppe
des dimensions selon lesquelles il se structure; il ne vient pas dune tension entre
les termes qui seront atteints et dposs aux extrmes limites de la transduction.
6. Translated from French: non-identit de ltre par rapport lui-mme.
7. Deleuze, Lle dserte et autres textes: Textes et entretiens 19531974, ed. David
Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 122.
8. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 9.
9. Juliette Simont, Essai sur la quantit, la qualit, la relation chez Kant, Hegel,
Deleuze: Les fleurs noires de la logique philosophique (Paris: LHarmattan, 1997), 250.
10. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit
Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 97.
11. Deleuze, Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, in Hyppolite,
Logic and Existence, 19195.
12. Compare Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 14.
13. On the passage from entropic mechanism to negentropic life, see
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998);
Albert Dalcq, Luf et son dynamisme organisateur (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941); and
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La nouvelle alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
The aim of this chapter is to provide an account of Deleuze and Guattaris model of the rhizome, and to look at a possible Hegelian line of
response to it. After outlining why Deleuze and Guattari feel the need to
move away from an arborescent model of thought, such as underlies the
structure of judgment, I look at Hegels description of plant life in the
Philosophy of Nature, and show how this can be related to the dialectic of
the finite and infinite in the Science of Logic. This leads to the question: as
a Hegelian riposte to Deleuze, can we see rhizomatic thought simply as
an example of the spurious infinite at play? I want to conclude by showing that Deleuze and Guattari are well aware of this interpretation, and
show how Deleuzes distinction between the decentered and the polycentered, and his characterization of multiplicity as an alternative to the
many, allow him to avoid these implications. I want to begin by looking
at why Deleuze and Guattari believe we need to move to a new model of
thinking.
Arborescent Thought
In this first section, I want to look at why Deleuze feels that we need
to move away from a classical conception of thinking, typically tied to
the structure of judgment. While Deleuzes critique of judgment occurs
throughout his work, I want to focus here in particular on the arguments offered in his collaboration with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
It is here that Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of rhizomatic
thought as an alternative to what they characterize as the image of the
world, which they call either a tree or root-book. To understand why
Deleuze and Guattari feel the need to introduce the concept of a rhizome, we first need to understand the limitations of the classical model
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The first difficulty with such an approach is that it creates a sharp distinction between nature and the image of nature. Porphyrys hierarchy of
terms operates according to sharply opposed differences, but it appears
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that in nature we have more gradated distinctions between different objects: opposed differences do not mix, but opposed accidents may mix.4
It doesnt help to replace the binary opposition between categories with
a larger set of categories, however, as in this case, we still presuppose
the notion of a unity from which all of the other categories are divided:
On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural
method, to go directly from One to three, four, or five, but only if there
is a strong principal unity available, that of the pivotal taproot supporting
the secondary roots. That doesnt get us very far (TP, 5). This difficulty
in fact stems from a deeper problem: the need to explain both aberrant
cases, where the entity falls within a species without having the property
which is supposed to govern species membership, and the differences
which are not to be taken into account when we consider what a thing
is. Thus, on the one hand, we need to take account of the fact that some
men are not rational, but are still to be counted as men. On the other we
need to deal with the fact that men may have different skin color, without
this affecting their nature as men. To deal with these questions, we need
to make a distinction between what is essential to something, and what
properties that thing has merely accidentally. Such a distinction seems
to require a further ontological dichotomy, however, between the ideal
image of the thing, its essence, and its actual, worldly, and often imperfect state. The dichotomy between essence and appearance therefore
leads to the distinction between the image of the world (essence) and
the world itself (appearance).
Deleuze provides an extended discussion of judgment in Difference
and Repetition, and although we have to be careful moving between his
sole-authored and collaborative works, the distinction he makes there
between two kinds of sense will be useful in diagnosing exactly where
the problem with arborescent thought lies. In Difference and Repetition,
Deleuze argues for two conditions that must be fulfilled when making a
judgment. He argues that the subject must possess both good sense and
common sense. Deleuze defines good sense and common sense as follows: For while common sense is the norm of identity from the point of
view of the pure Self and the form of the unspecified object which corresponds to it, good sense is the norm of distribution from the point of
view of the empirical selves and the objects qualified as this or that kind
of thing (which is why it is considered to be universally distributed)
(DR, 13334). Of these two problems, the problem of accidental and
essential properties is one of good sense. It amounts to the ability to attribute predicates appropriately, and to correctly assign things their positions within the hierarchy. Thus, problems of good sense occur when we
have difficulties in knowing when to attribute a property to something
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and when not to, such as in the degenerate cases which Aristotle discovers in The Parts of Animals: The sea-anemones or sea-nettles, as they are
variously called, are not Testacea at all, but lie outside the recognised
groups. Their constitution approximates them on one side to plants, on
the other to animals.5 In these cases, the possibility of successfully making a judgment is thrown into doubt by the purely empirical question of
whether or not a particular entity belongs to the species in question or
not. We may be able to deal with these errors of good sense by increasing the sophistication of our hierarchyby, for instance, as Deleuze and
Guattari suggest, moving from bivalent to polyvalent categorical distinctions. Good sense is not the sole presupposition of judgment, however,
and it is the case that even the failure of good sense still leaves judgment
intact: It is as though error were a kind of failure of good sense within
the form of a common sense which remains integral and intact (DR,
149). Rather than simply address the grounds for good judgment, Deleuzes project is to examine the grounds for judgment in general. Even
when the subject exhibits poor judgment (when good sense fails), we are
still dealing with thought in terms of a hierarchy of terms. The subject
falls into error by subsuming the particular under the wrong universal,
or failing to recognize the essential difference.
Deleuzes criticism of common sense instead attacks the nature of
judgment itself. Judgment involves the attribution of a predicate to a
subject, and Deleuze follows Kant in claiming that such an attribution
relies on the notion of a pure subject and a transcendental object.6 This
requires, prior to the attribution of properties themselves, a theory about
what is to count as a substance or an individual. That is, prior to the
specification of the properties of a subject, judgment already requires
a subject to be individuated. In Deleuze and Guattaris terminology, it
already assumes a certain form of territorialization. If we look at the
dichotomous approach, we discover that although it can provide an
account of the qualification of the subject, it cannot provide an account
of its constitution. At the top of the hierarchy, we simply already have the
notion of a being (albeit an empty one): in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity (TP, 7).
In other words, the principal unity must always precede the determination of the object, ruling out an account of the emergence of this unity
itself. On Deleuzes reading, there are therefore two principal postulates
of judgment. First, judgment presupposes that what exists is a world of
objects. Second, judgment presupposes a certain distribution of objects
throughout the world. This closes off the possibility of anything like a
theory of the genesis of objectivity itself, or a formulation of an ontology that does not presuppose the division of the world into subjects and
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properties. Deleuze and Guattari express this by noting that multiplicities in arborescent structures presuppose a point of unity in addition to
the multiplicity of properties itself.
How are we to overcome these limitations? Deleuze and Guattari
propose that rather than conceiving of thought on the model of the tree
or root, we need to develop a new form of thinking, in this case based
on the model of the rhizome. Whereas both trees and roots exhibit a
branching structure from a central point, much as we found in the Arbor Porphyriana, rhizomatic plants do not exhibit this structure. Rather
than a vertical branching structure, rhizomes have stem systems which
are horizontal in nature, which are not organized around a central point.
Further, they are adventitious root systems, which means that root systems
do not simply develop from a specific part of the plantlet (the radical),
but are also capable of developing from other parts of the plant, such as
the stem or leaf.7 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the rhizome provides
a better model for thought, as it does not require a central point, is not
hierarchical, and allows heterogeneous connections between parts to be
formed. To see how the alternative model functions, it is worth looking
at a system which is archetypally rhizomatic for Deleuze and Guattari:
the wasp and the orchid. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the Ophyrs genus
of orchids which attract wasps with a modified petal resembling a female
wasp. As the male wasp attempts to copulate with the petal, pollinia become attached to its body.8 The line or block of becoming that unites
the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the
wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchids reproductive
system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm
in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction (TP, 293). If we
take the case given above, it would seem that if we were to explain the
symbiotic relationship between the wasp and the orchid on the model of
judgment, we would have to presuppose some kind of unified center for
the interaction. This amounts to in effect seeing the one as a property
of the other (the wasp is a moment in the reproductive system of the orchid, or the orchid as a moment in the instinctual system of the wasp), or
seeing both as contained in a higher unity. Deleuze and Guattari argue,
however, that such an approach ultimately is incapable of explaining the
generation not merely of an additive unity of the two organisms, but of
an entirely new system: Whenever there is transcoding, we can be sure
that there is not a simple addition, but the constitution of a new plane, as
of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value of passage
or bridging (TP, 314). Instead, Deleuze and Guattari stress the importance of transversal relations between organisms, and also the openness
of biological systems.9 In this sense, they want to see the wasp-orchid as
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While Deleuze is careful to distinguish Hegel from other thinkers of representation, he argues that every philosophy of categories takes judgment for its modelas we see in the case of Kant, and still even in the
case of Hegel (DR, 33). That is, in spite of Hegels attempt to move away
from the concept of judgment, the speculative proposition is still too
close to the form of judgment to provide the kind of account Deleuze
thinks we need.15 I do not want to explore here the extent to which Deleuzes criticism of Hegel can be upheld, but rather to reflect on Hegels
own discussion of conjunctive logic in the Philosophy of Nature and the
Science of Logic. The aim will be to see whether it is possible to formulate
a Hegelian riposte to the move to a rhizomatic model of thought.
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hibit the same structural features that we find in lower plants. For Hegel,
the distinction will not be between the rhizome and the root/tree, but
between the plant and the animal. It is plant life as a whole that exhibits
a structure which escapes from the hierarchical form of judgment criticized by Deleuze. Thus, immediately after providing the example of the
rhizome, Hegel introduces the example of the mangrove tree, where
a single tree will cover the moist banks of rivers or lakes for a mile or
more with a forest consisting of numerous trunks which meet at the top
like close-clipped foliage (PN, 313). In what sense, therefore, is Hegels
conception of the plant to be compared to Deleuzes concept of the rhizome? In both cases, we have systems without a central point of unity, and
which do not operate according to the binary logic of diremption which
governs the structure of judgment.
Whereas the animal forms a natural unity with each part internally
related to each other, the plant lacks what Hegel calls a soul, and forms
merely external relations between parts. Whereas the body of the animal
is an organized body, the plant has not at the same time acquired a system of viscera (PN, 305). The lack of a central unity means that each
part of the organism can be connected with each other, and for Hegel,
the difference of the organic parts is only a superficial metamorphosis and
one part can easily assume the function of the other (PN, 303). Therefore rather than having parts inhering in the unity of the whole, we have
for Hegel a system where there is no longer any distinction between parts
and wholes (or between subjects and properties): in short, any part of
the plant can exist as a complete individual; this can never be the case
with animals with the exception of the polyps and other quite undeveloped species of animals (PN, 314). As we saw above, the classical differentiation of species occurs through a movement of division, with an
object being determined through the attribution of a specific difference
to the subject. As the plant does not have a central subject, it likewise escapes from the logic of opposition.18 Differences are no longer presented
as oppositions governed by a common center of identity as we found in
the Arbor Porphyriana.
It therefore appears as if the plant escapes from the kind of arborescent logic which Deleuze criticizes. Rather than operating through
a logic of opposition and hierarchy, it operates linearly, and through a
process of conjunction. As we shall see, Hegel argues however that this
conception of life necessarily collapses back into a model with a definite
center, and an oppositional structure, in this case the organized body of
animal life. This should already be partially apparent in Hegels suggestion that difference in this case can only be understood as a superficial
metamorphosis of form rather than a genuine difference. As we saw, De-
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leuzes focus on the rhizome implies an underlying logic, and this is also
the case with Hegels discussion of plant life. The philosophy of nature
is an expression of reason in its externality, and so we can see it as correlated with the logical categories provided in the Science of Logic. The
question, therefore, is, which of the categories of the Science of Logic correspond to plant life? In this case, the dialectic which embodies the transition from plant life to animal life is the dialectic of the finite and the
infinite. I want to turn briefly to this dialectic before returning to Hegels
account in the Philosophy of Nature. By doing so, I want to show exactly why
Hegel thinks the account given there proves to be insupportable.
The dialectic of infinity occurs in the first part of the Science of Logic,
in the doctrine of Being. As Hegels dialectic proceeds immanently,
we will begin at the stage where the dialectic has reached the notion of
something. The notion of something which Hegel develops is perhaps
the most basic which we could conceive of, merely that of the unity of a
being and a quality. For Hegel, something also contains a moment of
self-relation, in that as a unified concept, it is the negation of the difference between being and quality. As self-relating negation, however, we
can see it as containing two moments. Whilst it is a determinate being, it
is also the negation of this determinate being. It is something other than
something: the second is equally a determinate being, but determined as
a negative of the somethingan other.19 Something therefore contains
two moments of being. It implies the existence of another. We should be
able to see, however, that each of these moments, the something and the
other, have the same structure. The labels, something and other, only
apply to the extent that we began our analysis from one of these two entities. Each is therefore both a something, and an other to its other. We
can reverse this understanding of each being a something, and recognize
that each is also, in its own self, an other: if of two things we call one A,
and the other B, then in the first instance B is determined as the other.
But A is just as much the other of B. Both are, in the same way, others (SL,
117). As such, we have a continual process of something becoming other
than itself. As its nature is to be other than itself, however, this negation
is a constant return into itself. That is, in the other negating itself, it becomes other to this other, a something.
While something at first appeared to be a self-contained moment,
we can see now that it is in fact better characterized by this moment of
openness to another. We should note that we now have an understanding
as something being constituted by this relation to the other. Becoming
other is a key feature of the structure of something, and to this extent, we
can now see something as having a particular constitution. This aspect of
constitution is double for something. It is constituted by relating to, and
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being distinct from, something other. In other words, it is this, rather than
that. These two moments are the foundation of the distinction between
being in itself and being for another, as it is both self-enclosed, but also
other related. We can now ask how this essential relation to another plays
out in the determination of something. If something is to be determined
by its relations to another, it should be the case that at least two conditions must be met: first, it must form some kind of relation to this other,
in order that determination can take place. Second, it must differ from
the other, as without this difference, there is no other to determine it.
These two conditions imply the need for a further concept, that of limit,
which will both separate the two somethings, and yet as they share this
limit, relate them. The limit circumscribes what a thing is by defining
the point at which it transitions into its other. But as such, the limit has
a paradoxical quality, as it is the ground for the existence of something
(as something requires this relation and separation from another), but
is also the point at which something is not. Something is what it is within
its limit. Here we transition to another category, however. What is fundamental to the structure of something is its relation to its limit, but its limit
is what it is not. This fundamental relationship toward its own negation
leads us to recognize that at the heart of something is finitude.
For finitude, therefore, limit is not merely something indifferent,
but is rather a fundamental moment in its structure. Without this limit,
finitude would become infinitudeit would go beyond itself. This is the
first sense of the infinite, as a pure beyond. The limit therefore acts to
prevent the finite from becoming something other than itself. As we cannot at this stage countenance the possibility of the finite containing the
infinite, the notion of limit does not simply signify an arbitrary point in
somethings relation to another something, but is also a limitationthat
which prevents finitude from becoming infinite. This brings in a new
moment into the concept of finitude. As finitude now contains this essential moment of limitation, we can say that it also brings in a notion that
it ought to overcome this limitation. This ought captures the complex
structure of finitude. It contains both its being and its limitation. In fact,
these two moments are in tension with one another. Finitude wants to
transcend its limitation, but as the limitation is integral to finitude, it resists the force of the ought. As the moment of transcendence provided by
the ought is integral to finitude, however, it does go beyond itself. These
two moments do not collapse into a unity, however. Instead, we have a
constant process of moving between the two moments. Finitude perishes
because it transcends its limitation, but this perishing simply leads to the
emergence of another moment of finitude, as the ought includes the
moment of limitation within it. We have, therefore, a perpetual series of
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of organization. In the earlier Jena Logic, Hegel explicitly relates the question of the bad infinite to the question of the one and the many. He
writes that the subsistence of the many qualities as of the many quanta
has simply the beyond of a unity that has not yet been taken up into
them and would sublate the subsistence if it were so taken up.20 Hegels
point, therefore, is that any mode of organization which simply relies
on a series of properties related without a central notion cannot but immanently develop, under dialectical analysis, a central moment of unity
(whereby the series presented by finitude is recognized as containing
the infinite). Systems of organization such as that proposed by Deleuze
rely on an artificial suspension of this moment of unity: In order to subsist, the aggregate is not allowed to take up this beyond into itself, but
just as little can it free itself from it and cease to go beyond itself (The
Jena System, 33). On this reading, therefore, Deleuzes strategy would rely
on an artificial suspension of the movement of the dialectic. If Deleuze
were consistent, he would allow the nonhierarchical field to immanently
develop a central moment of unity. Of course, this does not mean that
Hegel fully supports a model of subsumptive logic such as that which
Deleuze criticizes. Rather, Hegel is arguing that the notion of a subject
is both necessary, and nonarbitrary for philosophical enquiry. That is, it
emerges dialectically from the matter itself. The multiple imposes unity
on itself, rather than simply presupposing a moment of unity. We do not,
therefore, have the fixed moment of a subject which is central to Deleuze
and Guattaris critique of arborescent thought.
The movement of the infinite is the key to understanding Hegels
account of life. The plant is explicitly characterized as an infinite, conjunctive multiplicity, lacking any notion of a center: Each plant is therefore only an infinite number of subjects; and the togetherness whereby
it appears as one subject is only superficial (PN, 276). The structure of
the plant, therefore, is the expression of the bad infinite. We can now
ask, what is the inherent limitation of the structure of plant life? As we
saw with the structure of finitude, the infinite series of the bad infinite
eventually showed itself to require a moment of unity, which was provided by the recognition that in the good infinite, the determinations of
the finite and the infinite were unified, while each moment preserved
its determinacy. Deleuze brings forth the rhizome as the archetype of a
system without a central unifying principle. Hegel, however, has an analysis of such a form of life that shows that it does have a central point of
unity: The plant has an essential, infinite relationship with light . . . This
simple principle of selfhood which is outside of the plant is the supreme
power over it; Schelling therefore says that, if the plant had consciousness, it would worship light as its god (PN, 306). The plant therefore
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fibrous roots, with no obvious center. Deleuze and Guattari identify the
fascicular root with a certain reaction of modernism against arborescent
or linear thought. The three examples they provide are of Burroughss
cut-up poetry, Joyces attempt to provide a decentered narrative, particularly in his Finnegans Wake, and Nietzsches move to an aphoristic notion
of philosophy. Burroughss cut-up poetry operates by combining texts in
a random manner, breaking down the inherent unity of the texts which
provide the material for his compositions. In Naked Lunch, we are presented with the fractured account of William Lee, a junkie. Burroughs
interjects into the narrative to tell us:
You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point. . . . I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the
little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro
race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe
bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her
Afghan Hound.22
In all of these cases, however, Deleuze and Guattari ask whether reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by demanding a more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality (TP, 6). They give three examples of how this unity functions. In
the case of Burroughs, it is through the fact that the work itself created
exists as a unity in its own rightthe most resolutely fragmented work
can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus (TP, 6). For
Nietzsche and Joyce, it is in the form of a cyclical ordering. Thus Nietzsche brings in the notion of the eternal return to unify the field of differences,23 while Joyce, in his most radical attempt to break with linear narrative, Finnegans Wake, relies on the form of circularity by developing a
structure where the final sentence trails off only to be taken up again at
the beginning of the work. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the lack of
an overarching unity in nature is only preserved on the basis of positing
a subjective unification in the form of a past, or yet to come (TP, 5).
Ultimately, therefore, the field of difference relies on an underlying substratum. Likewise, the world of differences for Nietzsche is unified by the
eternal return. Deleuze and Guattaris relationship with these figures is
thus ambivalent. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for
being fragmented (TP, 6). Their reference to these thinkers as the angelic doctors evokes Aquinass attempt to provide a consistent equivocal
concept of being through the concept of analogy.24 Deleuze and Guattari
are therefore going to attempt to show that despite the recognition of
the fragmented nature of the world within modernism, this recognition
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still in some sense relies on an implicit moment of unity. While arborescent thought leads us to an equivocal ontology, with representation
standing opposed to the world, the fascicular thought of modernism tries
to break with this ontology by problematizing it, but in fact sets up a
problem which demands an equivocal solution. Thus, while the roots
do not have a center, they are unified by their relation to the plant as a
whole. In this case, therefore, we can apply Hegels criticism of the bad
infinite. While these thinkers generate a field of differences, ultimately,
this is only on the basis of an external concept of unity. In these cases,
therefore, the subject provides a point of unity for the system, much as
the sun was the external point of unity in Hegels account of plant life.
Just as Hegels spurious infinite immanently transforms itself into the
good infinite, in the case of the logic of modernism, its ostensibly
nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally
hierarchical solution (TP, 17). Deleuze and Guattaris analysis of modernism thus characterizes it in a way that resonates strongly with Hegels
criticism of finite thinking.
Conclusion
The question thus remains, how do Deleuze and Guattari develop a
theory of the multiplicity which is not susceptible to the Hegelian critique? They argue that the multiple must be made, not by always adding
a dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with
the number of dimensions one already has availablealways n - 1 (TP, 6).
The question therefore is, how do we form a multiplicity without a point
of unification? Here we come to the key difference between Deleuze and
Guattaris rhizomatic structures and those of the root-book. Rather than
the unification of elements within a substratum (a species of entities in
the classical model of thought), or by way of a super-stratum (the sun as
an external reference which unifies the various moments of the plant),
Deleuze and Guattari propose that we reconceive the notion of elements
themselves. So long as they are viewed as a discrete collection of entities,
we will be drawn to introduce a further element, which is the unity of the
elements themselves. As long as the plant is conceived of along Hegelian
lines as an infinite set of discrete plants, the immanent movement of our
image of thought itself will force us to recognize a necessary point of unity
and identity above and beyond these elements. Thus we will be returned
to the situation of the subsumptive logic of judgment and the associated
structures of good sense and common sense. This is not the place to
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centered. While opposing hierarchy, it does not do so by recourse to linear series. This chapter has provided a via negativa of rhizomatic thought:
it is not the thought of judgment, nor the attempt to incorporate judgment into the movement of infinite thought which we find in the dialectic. A positive account of rhizomatics would require us to see exactly
how Riemann allows the move from dialectics to topology, and why we
naturally believe judgment to provide an adequate understanding of the
world. Only with such an account could we truly evaluate Deleuze and
Guattaris concept of the rhizome.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 5.
2. Deleuze refers to Porphyrys Isagoge in his discussion of Aristotle in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 3035.
3. Porphyry, Isagoge, trans. Edward W. Warren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), 37.
4. Ibid., 60.
5. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. W. Ogle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995),
681a37681b5. See Ermanno Bencivenga, Hegels Dialectical Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1, for a full discussion of these border cases
in Aristotle.
6. This is one of the main results of Kants transcendental deduction. See
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1929), A84/B116A130/B170.
7. Kingsley Stern, Introductory Plant Biology (Burr Ridge, Ill.: McGraw-Hill
Higher Education, 2000), 63.
8. Ibid., 42829.
9. A good example of a transversal connection is Raoul Benveniste and
George Todaros Evolution of C-Type Viral Genes: Inheritance of Exogenously
Acquired Viral Genes, Nature 252 (December 1974): 45659, which is referred
to by Deleuze and Guattari (TP, 29). Benveniste and Todaro show that as well as
DNA passing between organisms through descent, it can also be incorporated
into the genome as a result of virus infection. Through infection, virus DNA
becomes part of the genome of the host organism, which is then transferred by
lineal descent to the hosts progeny. In this case, we have a horizontal (or transversal), rather than vertical, transmission of DNA.
10. Deleuze and Guattari define an assemblage as follows: A multiplicity
has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions
that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the
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new relations, as the function of the mitochondria change by entering into new
relations with other organelles (whereas on the organismic model, the part is
defined by its purpose, and therefore cannot enter into new relations without
ceasing to be what it is). The ability for the same element to play different roles
in different assemblages is a cornerstone of an evolutionary understanding of
life. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari expand this rhizomatic model
of conjunctive logic to other domains, such as the social and the technological.
Their discussion of the stirrup, for instance, shows how the introduction of new
elements into an assemblage allows for new forms of interaction, and hence new
functions for preexisting parts:
The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage over
the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons. Weapons
and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has often been
remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat organization it is
bound up with . . . The lance and the sword came into being in the Bronze
Age only by virtue of the man-horse assemblage, which caused a lengthening
of the dagger and pike, and made the first infantry weapons, the morning star
and the battle-ax, obsolete. The stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of
the man-horse assemblage, entailing a new type of lance and new weapons;
and this man-horse-stirrup constellation is itself variable, and has different
effects depending on whether it is bound up with the general conditions of
nomadism, or later readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism. (TP,
39899)
Actualization: Enrichment
and Loss
Bruce Baugh
One aspect of the difference between Deleuze and Hegel which has not
received sufficient attention is their opposing views on actualization,
the becoming actual of a potential or of what Deleuze calls the virtual.
For Hegel, actualization is the outward manifestation and expression of a
truth or reality that had only been implicit. This process of manifestation
is at the same time an articulation of what had been inchoate, a determination of the indeterminate, a becoming concrete of what had been
abstract. In short, for Hegel, actualization is a process of enrichment:
the actualized, whether it be truth, a shape of spirit, or an idea, is
infinitely richer than the unactualized potential. We see this in Hegels
critique of inarticulate sense-certainty and of the beautiful soul which
refuses to express itself in action.1 Truth, or the Absolute, must manifest
itself as a differentiated totality, as a system: The power of Spirit is only
as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread
itself out and lose itself in its exposition (PS, 6). Unexpressed potential,
such as an unexpressed feeling or an intention not expressed in action,
is merely the untrue, the irrational (PS, 66), pure abstraction (PS,
407), pure being or empty nothingness,2 self-willed impotence that
flees the world for the inwardness of pure intentions and fine sentiments
(PS, 400403).
For Deleuze, by contrast, every actualization involves a loss of the
infinite richness of the virtual. The virtual contains a multiplicity or manifold of divergent tendencies, any number of which can be actualized
depending on the circumstances, but each actualization is an impoverishment relative to the richness of the virtual. Thus we read that every
solution in the form of an organ is a relative success in relation to the
conditions of the problem or the environment but is nevertheless a
relative failure (chec) in relation to the movement which invents it; life
as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualizing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses contact with the rest of itself. 3
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the purity of conscience and such like have been mentioned (PS, 42).
But rather than being the apogee of humanity and humaneness, staying within the sphere of feeling and being able to communicate only at
that level, that is, through the poetic expression of feeling, is the antihuman, the merely animal; human nature exists only in a community
of minds that brings the recesses of what is inner into the broad light
of day through the communication of rational thoughts, which are neither common sense nor sky-rockets of inspiration, not ruined by the
conceit of genius, but fully developed, perfected knowledge (PS, 42
43);7 the scientific system of truth that dares to spread itself out and
lose itself in its exposition (PS, 3, 6). Consequently, the mind that clings
to immediate intuition, whether in the form of sensuous intuition or
the moral intuition of conscience, contents itself with rapturous haziness, an intensity without content, the bare feeling of the divine,
and not only deprives itself of the human and rationally communicable
content of its experience but also is conscious of this loss of its human
essence (PS, 36). It does so out of fear of losing its own, natural self, attached to the animalistic life of feeling and sensation. For the natural
and intuitive philosopher, the loss of its beliefs and convictions counts
for it as the loss of its own self, and in anxiety, it shrinks from articulating itself in the form of a rational system, holding on to its immediacy
and inwardness at all costs (PS, 4951).
The cult of natural sentimentality and feeling, the authority of
individual conscience over law and convention, and intuitive apprehension of the divine took its chief inspiration from Rousseaus mile,
or on Education (1762), which presents childhood as a realm of infinite
potential that is limited, cramped, and restricted by adult mores, duties,
artifice, and hypocrisy. By Hegels time, this view had numerous German exponents: Friedrich Schiller, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, the poet Novalis. Schiller, for example, in Naive and Sentimental
Poetry (179596), who refers to our lost childhood, which eternally remains most dear to us but also fills us with melancholy because in beholding childhood, we are touched . . . because we look upward from
the limitation of our condition, which is inseparable from the determination
[Bestimmung] to which we have attained, to the unlimited determinability
[Bestimmtbarkeit] of the child and its pure innocence. . . . In the child, disposition and determinability are represented; in us, the fulfillment that forever remains far short of these; our childhood is the only undisfigured
nature that we still encounter in civilized humanity.8 In adults, only the
naive temperament (Gesinnung) retains a childlike innocence and simplicity in the midst of the artificial circumstances of fashionable society
(NSP, 9293);9 it achieves its highest form in genius, which, led only
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liss Hymns to the Night, where melancholy and infinite longing for his
dead beloved allows the poet to behold her transfigured features in the
night sky and makes him long for eternal night, . . . eternal slumber.13
The cult of feeling, intuition, and moral genius (moralische Genialitt) gives rise to the moral doctrine that places individual moral conviction above public law and morals and immediate intuition above articulated conceptual knowledge, such that the individuals inner life is held
to contain greater riches than can ever be expressed in words or deeds,
and the acts and thoughts that give outward reality and determinacy to
inwardness rob it of its truth: Why cannot living Spirit appear to Spirit?
Once the soul speaks, thenalas!it is no longer the soul speaking.14
All these elements are found together in the philosophy of F. H.Jacobi, probably the main target of Hegels critique of immediacy. Jacobi
ranges himself firmly on the side of the individual subject, individual
conscience, and inexpressible intuitions, both sensory intuitions and
direct personal apprehensions of God; he is opposed to universal laws of
thought, nature, and morality, all of which he regards as a negation of
the true self and of concrete, sensible nature and a concrete, personal
God. In his Open Letter to Fichte (1799), Jacobi denounces the living
death of the absolutely universal law of reason, the unconditional
universal laws, rules without exception, and rigid obedience that the
ego imposes on itself and which negate all otherness. The hollow nut
of autonomy leaves man trapped within Fichtes empty, pure and bare
ego, the I = I that lacks real selfhood.15 Only the heart, he says, can
raise man above himself and give him a distant presentiment of goodness in itself, just as an instinctive reason based on love forces me to
believe the conceptually impossible and informs me of a highest being
above and outside me, the God of faith, and not Fichtes divinized autonomous Ego. Against divine Reason and its laws, Jacobi declares himself an atheist and ungodly one who . . . wants to lie as Desdemona lied
while dying, . . . wants to break the law and oath like Epaminondas,16
like Johan de Wit;17 . . . to attempt temple robbery like David18yes, to
pull out ears of corn on the Sabbath if only because I am hungry and
law is made for man, not man for the law.19 Duty for duty, freedom
in the absolute indefinite, is nihilism, the will that wills nothing.
Only feeling, of the heart and the senses, brings man into contact with
an external and absolute reality: goodness, God, nature. Feeling is an
intuition of an external reality, faith or belief (Glaube) in an existence
that transcends the Ego and gives content to the Self; both immediate
self-knowledge (Wissen) and conscience (Gewissen) are the work of a secret something in which our heart, understanding and sense combine
(HL, 315).20
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the cost of leading a purely literary existence (ILH, 151) in which what
is recognized is not the actuality of ones deeds but the sincerity of ones
expressed convictions (GS, 512). Only the echo of ones speech returns
from the community (Gemeinde) or circle of friends, who rejoice in the
mutual assurance of their conscientiousness and good intentions, but
this unmediated unity of self and others is just the emptiness of the I = I
writ large (PS, 39799; PG, 48083). Such indeterminate subjectivity
does not attain existence or the objective determinacy of action, but remains within itself and has no actuality (EPR, 192). It lacks the power of
externalization because it lives in fear of besmirching the splendor of
its inner being by action, and in order to preserve the purity of its heart,
it flees from contact with actuality and persists in its self-willed powerlessness, wanting its moral judgment to be taken for actual deeds, and expressing lofty sentiments (Gesinnungen) in literary productions instead of
acting (PS, 399403; PG, 48387; ILH, 150; GS, 521). Entangled in the
contradiction between its pure self and the necessity to externalize itself
in actuality, the beautiful soul is unable to realize its vision of oneness
with others, and goes mad or wastes away in yearning and consumption
(PS, 4067; PG, 491).
To attain actuality, it is necessary to act, and all action carries with
it the one-sidedness of partiality of a particular individual acting in particular circumstances, that is, a selfishness that contradicts the universality of duty (PS, 404; PG, 489); only a stone is innocent (GS, 502).
In wanting to love all, in choosing for all and against none, the beautiful soul hopes to preserve the unlimited, infinite determinability of
its full humanity in its purity and integrity (Schiller), but in refusing to
pass from determinability to a determination that will limit it by actualizing one potentiality at the expense of others and helping some at the
expense of others, it in fact chooses no one and does nothing for anyone, and loves only itself. Not even its self-sacrifice in madness (Friedrich
Hlderlin) or consumption (Novalis) benefits anyone; its feeling and
moral vision accomplish no real change in the world. Real action would
involve adapting itself to the world and finding effective means of realizing its ends, which would inevitably involve compromises, risks, and partiality, actualizing some potentialities and sacrificing others, benefiting
some particular others at the expense of others. Not willing to do this,
the beautiful souls supposed richness of moral sentiments is exposed
as bankrupt, its supposed selflessness revealed as self-worship (PS, 397).
Whether at the level of sensory experience or moral action, the unexpressed and the unactualized is the most impoverished and least real, not
the richest and most infinite. Actualization requires determination, and
so limitation, but without such limitation, infinite potential remains as
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vague, empty, and amorphous as unformed clay, much as children represent infinite potential, but have no definite character.
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distributes itself into lines or parts that cannot be added up (B, 4243,
94, 9798, 101, 104)
On the one hand, actualization is genuinely creative (B, 98; DR,
212): lines of differentiation actualize by invention, they create in these
conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level which they incarnate without being restricted by preestablished
ends (B, 1013). On the other hand, the Whole must create the divergent lines by which it actualizes itself, it is forced to create its lines of
differentiation in order to actualize itself (B, 106, 97). It must because
even though the virtual is already in itself completely determinate as a
problematic field, it lacks the set of determinations belonging to actual
existence and which are incarnated in the object-solution that results
from actualization, as a system of differential relations is incarnated
both in a species and in the organic parts that compose it and differentiate it from other species (DR, 209). So although this actualization of
the virtual is necessary to produce an integral and complete solution to the
problem (DR, 20910), it at the same time involves a separation of the actual species from the lan vital, as if each living being were a slice shaved
off the original virtual whole. Each slice, by virtue of its integrality or
integrity, bears witness to its origin in a virtual whole (B, 95), and yet as
divided up into divergent and exclusive series (matter-life, plant-animal,
instinct-intelligence) (B, 94, 108), it loses contact with the rest of the lan
vital. Between actual terms and real relations, negative relations appear;
the virtual, like the unconscious, however, knows nothing of the negative
(DR, 108, 207, 235).
What has happened here? As with the romantics, it is as if actualization were in a sense a betrayal of the infinite potential of the virtual. Yet
Deleuze does not start off from a determinable but indeterminate state, as
Schiller does, but from the virtual, which is already fully differentiated and
fully real: it is a structure (DR, 209), a fully determined and differentiated
problem with its ideal positions, functions, and coordinates (DR, 207), a
system of differences or intensities, a virtual multiplicity. The structuralvirtual elements are not actual (DR, 183), but they are completely determined along with the determination of the problem which establishes
the field of its solutions. The movement from virtual to actual is thus
not from indeterminate to determinate, but from a virtually differentiated problem or Idea, differential relations among members of a set, to
divergent actualizations or differenciation into solutions to the problem:
species and parts, actual divergent tendencies, individuated individuals
(DR, 183, 20712, 220, 25558). Yet these solutions never exhaust the
problem: A problem does not exist outside of its solutions. But far from
disappearing, it insists and persists in the solutions that cover it over
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(DR, 163). The actual, products of actualization, never exhaust the virtual; the virtual always retains something of its potential and points to
the possibility of other actualizations, other solutions. In that respect, the
virtual stands higher than the actualizations deriving from it, its power is
more profound and subterranean. Conversely, the actual never rises to
the heights or descends to the depths of the virtual. In fact, the actual
is a flattening out and taming of the wild differences contained in the
virtual, both a separation and ordering of divergent tendencies in the
process of actualization itself, and then a blending and homogenizing
of differences in the mixed objects of empirical experience (B, 2227).
Difference in itselfdifference as virtual multiplicity, the virtual whole
from which all divergent lines emerge, the ultimate unity that differentiates itself and causes each difference to pass through all the others in a
system of complications and implications (DR, 5657), difference which
affirms disparity, dissemblance, and the many (DR, 300), can indeed be
thought independently of all forms of negation (limitation, opposition,
degradation) (B, 46), but actualized difference appears as a degradation
of virtual difference.
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spontaneity of which I am conscious in the I think cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only
as the affection of a passive self which feels that its own thought, its own
intelligence, that by which it says I, is exercised in it and on it but not
by it (DR, 86). Between the I think and the I am is interposed the
passive self, the receptivity of intuition, and between the determination
and the undetermined, time must be interposed as the form of determinability. The result is that the passive subject lives its thinking activity as an
Other within itself: already, JE est un autre (DR, 58, 86; LS, 29899);
another always thinks in me (DR, 199200). The I is fractured from
end to end by the pure and empty form of time (DR, 8687, 276, 284),
and because time is out of joint, unevenly distributed on two sides of
the caesura between past and present, present and future, time is internally and unequally divided, and divides the self into a thousand pieces,
each unequal to the others (DR, 8990). The I then is fractured by
time, and the Self or Me is dissolved, the moments of the self no longer
being glued together by relations of similarity and homogeneity. The
I is the form of identity (I = I), the Self or Me is the matter of identity constituted by the resemblance of thought with thought (DR, 257).
Both are, as Hegel also argued, abstract universals (DR, 258), but for
Deleuze, they find their truth not in an actualization through action,
but in the fractured I and the dissolved Me (DR, 259). At this point,
says Deleuze, for a brief moment, we have entered that schizophrenia
in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought and opens
directly onto difference (DR, 58). The empirical, lived self holds schizophrenia at bay by the cogito, the JE ME pense by which thinking unifies
I and Me (DR, 257) and welds together the different facultiesfeeling, thinkingthrough a supposed common sense by which we are
supposed to think what we feel and feel what we think (DR, 133). The
empirical self of the cogito repels and retreats from the differences that
constitute it; the actual represses its virtual differences.
Rather than being a simple unity (I = Me), selves are larval subjects (DR, 78), or rather, a system of local selves endowed with forms
of receptivity (DR, 98), the system of the dissolved self (DR, 254, 259).
This larval, dissolved self more directly displays the power of metamorphosis of virtual difference than does the empirical ego (DR, 57; 219).
Its model is the egg or embryo (DR, 215). An egg is an intensive field
distinguished by orientations, axes of development, differential speeds
and rhythms, as primary factors of the actualization of a [virtual] structure (DR, 214), crisscrossed with axes and thresholds . . . traversed by
gradients marking transitions and becomings (A-O, 19, 84), both the
milieu of pure intensity and an already differentiated intensive system
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all the other possible actualizations which could have been realized. In
Schillers words, after actualization, after maturation and development,
reality is then there, but infinity is lost (AEM, 12829). The power of
becoming and transformation of the egg or embryo is lost and alienated in the stability and rigidity of the organized and unified body of the
adult, in which organs have their determinate functions within a hierarchical system of needs and ends, and which would be destroyed if it
underwent the embryos Dionysian transports.
Just as Schiller sought to recapture the potential of childhood in its
full infinity through aesthetic freedom from the determinations of
the senses or reason, the practical question for Deleuze is: how can the
self open itself up and liberate the acosmic, impersonal, preindividual
singularities which it had imprisoned within the bounds of identity and
resemblance? (LS, 213). How can the self be dismantled to liberate the
flows these singularities are capable of receiving or transmitting? (A-O,
362). How can the full, positive powerthe full infinityof the intensive individual be recovered? It would be necessary for the body to
lose its organic unity and the self to lose its identity (LS, 29899). The
adult experience in which this occurs has already been alluded to: schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not just the fractured I and dissolved Self;
it is also an experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a
point that is almost unbearable . . . an intense feeling of transition, states
of pure, naked intensity, stripped of all shape and form (A-O, 18). To
this experience corresponds the body without organs, that is, a body
that resists the organization of organs into a unified, hierarchical, and
functional system of separated, extended parts (A-O, 8, 32627; TP, 158).
Here, there is no longer a self that feels, acts and recalls but a system
of affects and movements without a subject (TP, 162); no longer an integrated, organized body, but non-stratified, unformed, intense matter
through which intensities pass and circulate, a pure determination of
intensity, intensive difference (TP, 153, 164), matter that always fills space
to given degrees of intensity (A-O, 32627). The body without organs
is not fragmented or dismembered, but complete in itself, an intensive
multiplicity (LS, 18992; TP, 16465), just as schizophrenia is the process
involving the dissolution of the self, a process and not a goal, a desire
lacking nothing, a flux or flow (A-O, 13133; LS, 18889) or a connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities (TP, 161)
where these flows know nothing of meaning and aims but are part of a
pure process that fulfills and enjoys itself as desire, creation, and experimentation (A-O, 37071; TP, 156). It is a matter of de-actualizing the self,
of a counter-actualization that brings the individual closer to the side of
the virtual, the potential (A-O, 376)the protest of the individual who
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never recognizes himself in the limits of the Me and the I (DR, 259). It
is the recovery of the pre-individual singularities and intensities of the
virtual from their alienation in the I = Me in a pure process of becoming
which is manifested in intensities of feeling free from the determinations of reason and from the actualization of the powers of sensing in
the organized sense organs. If this is not exactly the romantic cult of immediacy, with its emphasis on subjectivity, it is not far from Schillers idea
that aesthetic feeling, free from the determinations of reason and the
senses, is a feeling of total potentiality as yet unimpaired by external
forces which limit and determine potentiality in a particular way (AEM,
14445), as well as Jacobis valorization of the hearts pure feeling as a
way of breaking the hollow nut of the empty, pure and bare ego.27
Similarly, Deleuzes valorization of schizophrenia as a pure process without a goal which opens us up to a field of pure intensities in their pure
state through an intense feeling of transition at the very least recalls
the romantic infatuation with madness as a way of retaining the purity of
the self, uncontaminated by actualization through deeds (PS, 399407).
For Hegel, Deleuzes valorization of potentiality and intense feeling over
the actualization of the self through the actions it performs in the world
amounts to self-willed impotence, the choice of potentiality for itself,
as the pure matter of experience, rather than for what can be done with
it. It is the attitude of the Beautiful Soul, which chooses death and madness over action.
True, Deleuze and Guattari write that dismantling the organism
has never meant killing yourself (TP, 160), and they are careful to distinguish schizophrenia as a pure process from the medical and medicalized form that renders its sufferers mentally ill. Nevertheless, death and
madness haunt schizophrenia and the body without organs. Just as the
romantic infatuation with the intensities of the inner life of feeling can
too easily lead to a longing for death (Novalis, Keats), so too one must
wonder to what degree Deleuzes setting the virtual over the actual reflects an attitude of being half in love with easeful death. We have seen
that for Hegel, feeling and sensation and potentialities for becoming,
taken in themselves and apart from their actualization in determinate
thought, word, and deed, are mere irrationality and indeterminacy, a
mere Nothing (PS, 5866; HL, 31, 12527). Yet, although Deleuzes virtual is not the merely indeterminate, but an already determinate system
of intensities, the suspicion remains that counter-actualization and the
dismantling of the empirical ego, founded on the protest of the individual who never recognizes himself in the limits of the Me and the I
(DR, 259), amounts to the desire to be rid of ones self, and is in that
sense a pursuit of nothingness. Indeed, Deleuze writes that death is im-
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plicit in the I and the Me as an internal power which frees the individuating elements [of intensity] from the form of the I and the matter of
the Me in which they are imprisoned . . . a liberation of the little differences that it involves in intensity (DR, 259; LS, 222). Of course, this is
death in its transcendental sense, as a process which never ends for as
long as one is alive, as opposed to the empirical death that always comes
from outside in the form of external forces that cause the dissolution
of the body or of its vital organization. Still, the body without organs is
the model of the death instinct: it is the nonproductive and inconsumable, outside production-consumption, outside work (A-O, 8), a refusal
of working organs and a zero intensity (A-O, 329). It may be that this
zero point of intensity is implicit in every feeling, every feeling and affect registering an increase or decrease in the bodys vital powers (A-O,
330), but to make oneself a body without organs is to pursue this zero
intensity, to seek to jam the functioning of the organs, to intensify the
organs by liberating them from the work they perform to support the organic life of the body, that is, by disorganizing them. At that point, little
larval selves may indeed emerge from beneath the skin (A-O, 9) in much
the way Lucretius describes that boneless and bloodless horde exuded
from the body when its vital functions have ceased and its soul has been
fragmented.28
Conclusion
In sum, in Deleuzes philosophy, the actualization of the virtual represents both the creative actualization of divergent tendencies and a degradation and loss of potential. In the virtual, intensities, fluxes, powers, and
potentialities coexist, interpenetrate, and mingle; as actualized in species, organic bodies, qualities, and selves, these virtual intensities are flattened out, homogenized and covered over, subjected to the rule of the
same which governs extension. We see this degradation when the lan
vital differentiates itself into species which are external to each other and
cut off from life as a whole; when intensity as the imperceptible being of
sensation is covered over by extended perceived sensible qualities; when
the individual as a field of intensities or egg is actualized in the empirical
self and a body of extended organized parts. Rather than being fulfilled
in its actualizations, the already-full virtual suffers a loss relative to the
whole of its potentials. The model for this is the egg or embryo: it is a
field of intensity, capable of great forced movements which no developed adult could withstand, the site of bands of intensity in flux, and
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the schizophrenic marks a partial return to this state of pure, tremendous potential. For both the egg and the schizophrenic, its potential
and power remain inward and within itself, even in its interactions with
its milieu through the exchanges of flows and fluxes with its outside,
which it lives as intense affect. But this intensity of affect is not translated
into actions by which the individual would express and actualize itself in
the world; it is rather a pathos, the tremendous capacity for undergoing
metamorphoses and intense feeling of a passive subject (DR, 21415).
The tremendous potential and capacity of the egg and the schizophrenic
remains in itself, undeveloped, capable of living and undergoing unimaginable transitions and intensities, but incapable of actually acting.
It is in this sense that it shares much in common with the beautiful soul
and its life of intense feeling. Just as the beautiful soul does not act because any outward action would compromise the purity of its feelings
when the soul speaks, it is no longer the soul which speaksso too for
Deleuze, any actualization compromises the purity of the virtual: pure
tendencies (B, 2223), pure intensities, pure impersonal individuating
intensive systems, virtual multiplicities in which differences coexist and
differentiate each other and which constitute the true substance, substance itself (DR, 18283), rather than the actual in which parts are external to each other and moments of time succeed each other in a linear
fashion (DR, 84).
So, for Deleuze, it seems that what counts are two extremes and not
the middle term. On the one hand, there is the pure potentiality of the
virtual whole; on the other hand, there is the liberation of potentials and
intensities in the dissolved self of the schizophrenic and the body without organs. Between, there is actualization and the actual: the world of
extended space, linear time, the thinking and acting self with its bodily
and mental faculties. Between the larval and embryonic subject and the
shattered and dissolved self, there is the adult self, the mark of which
is the courage to risk the purity of its intense feelings by deciding and
acting in the world. It is not by intensive systems that one becomes an
individual, Hegel argues, but by risking compromising the purity of intensity in action in the outer world. Speech, action, physical movement:
it is through these that the individual develops capacities in an active way,
capacities for acting, not just for undergoing experiences. It is through
these that the individual is recognized by others and so achieves selfknowledge: one is what one does. It is in this way, says Hegel, one passes
from the empty universality of the I and Me to concrete individuality.
For Hegel, that is a process of determining the indeterminate.
For Deleuze, as we have seen, the virtual is already fully differentiated, and individuation is a function of a system of intensities that differentiates one individual from others. Nevertheless, Deleuzes individua-
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Notes
1. G. W. F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
2. Hegel, Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 82105.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 104.
4. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 236.
5. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Light Books, 1988); Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
6. Deleuze, Nietzsche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), referred to parenthetically in text as NP, followed by page
number
7. See also Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol.
3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp
Taschenbuch, 1970), 65.
8. Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime,
trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 85, 87, 103.
9. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), sec. 54; trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 206 (referred to in the text as CJ ): navet is the eruption of the sincerity that originally was natural to humanity and
which is opposed to the art of dissimulation that has become our second nature.
10. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, bilingual
edition, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A.Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967), 12829. Referred to parenthetically in text as AEM, followed by page
number.
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11. Schillers On Grace and Dignity in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New
Translation, ed. Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden
House, 2005).
12. Hegel, Spirit: Chapter Six of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Daniel
Shannon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 21216.
13. Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans. R. M.Browning, in German Poetry
from 17501900, ed. Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 1984), 112
13, 12829.
14. Schiller, Die Sprache, in Schiller, Werke in Zwei Banden, ed. Erwin
Ackerknecht (Munich: Droemersche Verlaganstalt, 1964), 1:200.
15. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Open Letter to Fichte (1799), trans. Diana I. Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi and Schelling, ed. Ernst
Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 11941.
16. Theban general and statesman (c. 410362 B.C.E.) who liberated Thebes
and other Greek territories from Spartan subjugation.
17. Dutch statesman (16251672) of republican convictions, assassinated
by followers of William of Orange.
18. 1 Samuel 21:16.
19. A reference to Mark 2:2328; The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath; compare Matthew 12:18 (I have altered Behlers translation to capture the biblical allusion).
20. This note by Hegels translator William Wallace cites Jacobis novel
Woldemar (1781 edition), Jacobi, Werke (Leipzig, Ger.: G. Fleischer), 5:122.
21. See also Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17879.
22. See also Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), 82108.
23. Hegel here seems to be parodying Jacobis Open Letter to Fichte:
the law is made for man, not man for the law. See Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and
Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 5045.
24. See also Alexandre Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, 2nd edition,
ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1985 [1947]), 14951.
25. Bruce Baugh, Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuzes Response to
Hegel, Man and World 25, no. 2 (1992): 13348; Bruce Baugh, Deleuze and
Empiricism, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24 (1993): 1531.
26. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press).
27. Jacobi, Open Letter to Fichte.
28. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E.Latham (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1971), 11718.
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tification of the state with reason, which has been interpreted as an example of state absolutism in which the state and the status quo it governs
and administers cannot be questioned because it is the sole embodiment
of reason. Hegels infamous dictum from the Preface of the Philosophy
of Right, What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational [Was
vernnftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernnftig]has
been read as an authoritarian justification of existing political institutions as rational by the likes of Rosenzweig, Popper, and so on.5
For present purposes, two features of Hegels political philosophy
are important. First, the organismic metaphor in Hegels account of the
state is so thoroughly pervasive that he even says at moments that the
state is a living organism. Second, far from subordinating the members
of the organism to the whole, the self-relation of an organism that constitutes its life is such that the individuality of each member can only
develop to its fullest by returning or being related back to the whole
even as the strength of the wholeits vitality or healthis essentially this
capacity of self-return and self-relation. As we will see, it is precisely this
account of life that Deleuze seeks to question.
But what exactly does Hegel mean by life and what are the consequences of understanding the state in organismic terms?
A bad state is one which merely exists; a sick body also exists, but it has
no true reality. A hand which has been cut off still looks like a hand
and exists, but it has no actuality . . . The state is indeed essentially
secular and finite, and has particular ends and particular powers; but
its secularity is only one of its aspects, and only a spiritless perception
can regard it as merely finite. For the state has a soul which animates it
[eine belebende Seele], and this animating soul is subjectivity, which creates
distinctions on the one hand but preserves their unity on the other . . .
[To contend] that the secular spirit, that is, the state, is purely finite is
a one-sided view, for actuality is not irrational. A bad state, of course, is
purely secular and finite, but the rational state is infinite within itself.
(PR, 270Z, 3023; 429)
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(PN, 350Z, 352; 430). The organism thereby achieves a complete unity
of ideal form and particular material content, inward subjectivity and
external objectivity.
When an organism becomes diseased, it comes into conflict with an
external power that is not organic. Here, an individual member of the
organism establishes itself in isolation and persists in its particular activity against the activity of the whole, the fluidity and all-pervading process
of which is thus obstructed [dessen Flssigkeit und durch alle Momente hindurchgehender Proze hiermit gehemmt ist] (PN, 371, 428; 520). Disease is
that which undermines the organismic living process. Whereas the living process involves a limitation of the relation to alterity that reduces
otherness to a form of self-mediation, in disease, otherness arrests and
obstructs the process of self-mediation. Thus, whereas health designates
the right proportion of the organic self to its existence (Dasein), a commensurate relationship of the organic to the nonorganic, so that for the
organism there is nothing nonorganic which it cannot overcome, disease arises from a disproportion between the self and its external being,
an alienation or non-properness in which the negative (the external
shape the organism takes in immediate existence) is not sublated (aufgehoben) and does not return to the organism itself but fights with it such
that a dehiscence is introduced in the organism between its inner self
and its external shape (Gestalt) (PN, 371Z, 428; 521):
Disease arises when the organism, as simply immediate, is separated
from its inner sideswhich are not factors, but whole, real sides. The
cause of disease lies partly in the organism itself, like ageing, dying, and
congenital defects: partly also in the susceptibility of the organism, in its
simply immediate being, to external influences, so that one side is increased beyond the power of the inner resources of the organism. The
organism is then in the opposed forms of being and self; and the self is
precisely that for which the negative of itself is. A stone cannot become
diseased, because it is destroyed in the negative of itself, is chemically
decomposed and its form does not endure: because it is not the negative of itself which overlaps its opposite, as in illness and self-feeling.
(PN, 371Z, 429; 521)
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the formal activity of the whole over the particular irritation, when an
organism succumbs to this dividedness, it will die.
If we return now to the deployment of the organismic metaphor in
the political sphere, we see that the living process requires the full development of the subjective freedom of individual members. In Hegels words:
In an organic relationship, the units in question are not parts [Teile]
but members [Glieder], and each maintains the others while fulfilling
its own function; the substantial end [Zweck] and product of each is to
maintain the other members while simultaneously maintaining itself.
(PR, 286A, 328; 457)
The essence of the modern state is that the universal should be linked
with the complete freedom of particularity [Besonderheit] and the wellbeing of individuals . . . Thus, the universal must be activated, but subjectivity on the other hand must be developed as a living whole [ganz und
lebendig entwickelt werden]. Only when both moments are present [bestehen]
in full measure can the state be regarded as articulated and truly organized [gegliedert und wahrhaft organisierter werden]. (PR, 260Z, 283; 407)
We can see from the above that Hegels political philosophy is not politically conservative insofar as it does not forestall critical resistance to
state domination. For just as not all existing shapes or objects have actuality (Wirklichkeit), not all existing states are actual or inherently rational.
Hegel notes that there are inadequate, deficient states that merely exist
because they are sunk in contingency and arbitrariness. In contradistinction, the ideal state has genuine actuality and is the vehicle of the infinite,
but only insofar as it embodies the vital organismic process in which the
full subjectivity of individual members is developed:
The state is not a work of art [Kunstwerk]; it exists in the world, and
hence in the sphere of arbitrariness, contingency, and error, and bad
behaviour may disfigure it in many respects. But the ugliest man, the
criminal, the invalid, or the cripple is still a living human being [ein lebender Mensch]; the affirmative aspectlife [das Leben]survives [besteht]
in spite of such deficiencies. (PR, 258Z, 279; 404)
The problem rather lies with Hegels understanding of the affirmation that is life as the self-affirmation of reason in which the members
are brought back under the rule of universality, that is, affirmation as the
negation of the negation, as the self-mediation of reason, the return to
self of reason and the self-identity of the concept. In the political sphere,
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tion where the development of forms and the formation of subjects take
place.12 But the organism, Deleuze argues, does not genuinely embody
life. It merely traps and imprisons the play of singularity and multiplicity
that characterizes nonorganic life within an organized form, after the
latter has been actualized in subjects and objects.
Using a geological analogy, Deleuze suggests that the organism or
the process of organization is a movement of stratification. It coagulates
or condenses the plane of immanence by compressing the flow of forces
between two layers or strata (TP, 4041, 26970). But whereas organisms
will die, the plane of immanence is where life itself is liberated from
these limited forms. If everything is alive, it is not because everything
is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a
diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and
intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive
for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms (TP, 499).
Nonorganic life, the life of a body without organs (BwO), exceeds the life
and death of any subject or form. It is the movement at the membrane of
an organism, where it begins to quiver with virtuality and can break down
into potentiality and recombine again. Deleuze describes this movement
as the releasing of a life: there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and
yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of
internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of
what happens . . . A singular essence, a life.13 The indefinite article of a
life indexes virtual singularities prior to their actualization as forms, and
the in-between of already actualized forms that are always pulsing with
singularity and virtual force. The body without organs is . . . a living body
all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and
its organization (TP, 30).
The dissolution of the organism into and by the BwO is not a negation. It is the releasing of intensity and, therefore, of positive forces that
are adjacent to the organism, before stratification, before they are
articulated into an organism. Hence, it is not destructive. It frees up the
flow of forces that enable further generation and creation, which will
require the re-stratification of the released flows. The relation between
the two planes, between the organism and the BwO, is the ontological
version of Foucaults more concrete account of the relation between biopower and the power of life. Deleuze and Guattari characterize it as a relation between two poles of a continuum rather than a relation of mutual
exclusion. The two poles struggle with each other with regard to any
being, but this struggle is unceasing and cannot be resolved because both
planes are necessary to the existence of any being. Without the release of
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Why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible,
and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane
of organization of the World and the States? For once again, the world
and its States are no more masters of their plane than revolutionaries are
condemned to the deformation of theirs (Many Politics, 147, emphasis added). Indeed, insofar as the global capitalist economy has become
axiomatic because it has no outside and, thus, functions according to
laws that are entirely immanent to it and can repeatedly set and repel
its own limits, movements of becoming-minority are by definition immanent to it. What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the
nondenumerable, even if that minority is composed of a single member.
That is the formula for multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or
becoming-everybody/everything (devenir tout le monde [literally, becoming the whole world]) . . . The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization . . . but a calculation or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may
have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure
becoming of minorities . . . At the same time as capitalism is effectuated in the
denumerable sets serving as its models, it necessarily constitutes nondenumerable
sets that cut across and disrupt those models (TP, 47072, emphasis added).
The tacit model here is most likely the collapse of the totalitarian
socialist regimes of the Eastern bloc as a result of economic globalization.
However, as I have argued elsewhere, complete openness to flows is not
as salutary for countries outside the economically hegemonic North, as illustrated by the Asian financial crises of 1997.18 This is an ironic historical
performance of the dangers of deterritorialization. Falling currencies
triggered investor panic, leading to a crashing stock market and falling
property prices. As the result of a contagion or domino effect, the
pattern was repeated with some variations in countries throughout the
region, some of which were generally perceived to have much stronger
economic fundamentals than Thailand, for instance, Malaysia and South
Korea. The reversal of short-term capital inflows led to a severe liquidity
crunch that caused the collapse of local corporations and massive unemployment even as inflation grew as a result of the devalued local currencies. The combined effect was a drastic deterioration of living standards,
especially for the millions of poor people, and this suffering escalated
into social and political upheaval, riots, destruction, and death. Certainly,
the crises hastened the demise of corrupt political regimes such as the
Suharto regime of Indonesia. The social movements that intensified and
led to the collapse of these authoritarian regimes can be interpreted as
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2. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 162. The previous quote comes from page 8.
3. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M.
Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 12.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 278A, 315;
Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:443.
Referred to parenthetically in the text as PR, with page references to the translation followed by the German text. Translation modified as appropriate.
5. The dictum comes from PR, 20; 24. For an overview of the pathologization of Hegel before and after the Second World War, see Hegels Political Philosophy, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Atherton, 1970).
6. Aristotle, De Anima: Books II and III, trans. D. W.Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), II.i, 412a2228.
7. Aristotle, The Politics, I.ii, 1253a, in The Politics and the Constitution of
Athens, ed. Stephen Everson, trans. B. Jowett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
8. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1830), trans. A. V.Miller (London: Clarendon, 1970), 350, p. 351; Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II: Zweiter Teil: Die Naturphilosophie, in
Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 350, vol. 9, 430. Referred to parenthetically in the
text as PN, with page references to the translation followed by the German text.
Translation modified as appropriate.
9. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 12432.
10. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 133.
11. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 261.
12. On the distinction between the planes of immanence and organization, see TP, 26670.
13. Deleuze, Immanence: A Life, in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans.
Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), 2829.
14. See TP, chap. 9, titled 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity; and
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Many Politics, in Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Referred to parenthetically in the text as Many Politics.
15. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224.
16. Ibid., 23940, 24546. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject here Samir
Amins caution that Third World countries should delink from the global capitalist system.
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Deleuze
While the thesis of external relations pervades Deleuzes philosophy,2 and
thus can be approached through a variety of angles and figures, it is most
explicitly and substantially developed in Deleuzes first major work, Empiricism and Subjectivity,3 a commentary on Humes empiricism, which will
accordingly be my focus.4 Deleuze, there, credits Hume with creat[ing]
the first great logic of relations [by] showing that all relations . . . were
external to their terms (ES, x).5 It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Deleuze
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nization, but rather [as] a particular set of the given (ES, 87; 93). This
set is particular just because it is experienced in a mind (of whose nature
we presuppose nothing) rather than being unexperienced, or being in
another such mind. Mind, then, is simply some given collection of impressions and separate ideas, or a kind of empty container that comes
through experience to hold any ideas at all, which are in turn unrelated
beyond their being contained in mind (ES, 132; 150).12 Thus, mind is
the mechanism only of distinct perceptions contained only as different
(ES, 9697; 1067). Mind mechanistically retains, rather than organically
relating.
Of course, in positing the complete lack of relation between terms,
Deleuze presupposes that such a mind contains no composite ideas, for
the composite is the related. Thus, the mind and the given are not derived from such-and-such an idea, but rather from the smallest idea precisely because it is not under the category of quality that we must consider the mind as mind, but rather from the viewpoint of quantity (ES,
90; 9697). One might object that the very distinction between ideas, let
alone between simple and complex ones, presupposes a qualitative distinction between them. After all, one must be able to distinguish between
gold, mountain, and gold mountain to grasp not only that the former two are not only distinct but also the simple ideas from which the latters complexity arises. Nothing essential changes, however, in Deleuzes
account if mind cannot distinguish simple from complex ideas, for it is
simply the mechanistic collection of any ideas whatsoever, considered
only as different from each other. What does this imply?
Discrete ideas are, in themselves, neither spatial nor temporal;
however, the collecting together of such ideas in mind makes them spatiotemporal.13 A distinct idea, in its singularity, is not successive to another; however, the difference between terms ensures that they are not
experienced together (or else they would be given as related in themselves), but the mind experiencing them, just by experiencing and therefore collecting them, holds them all together within mind, counting
them all as part of the same experience, and thus orders them in succession. Similarly, no unrelated point occupies a space next to or distant from another, but any two such points perceived by the same mind
are grasped in their distance and proximity in the same space. That is,
space and time are merely the idea[s] . . . distributed in a certain order
(ES, 91; 99).
Space and time are, of course, not identical. All ideas are collected within one mind, and thus are related within the temporal flow
of its experience; only some of these ideas, however, lead us to think/
perceive them as being in the same space as well. Extension, therefore,
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is only the quality of certain perceptions. This is not the case with time,
which is effectively presented as the quality of any set of perceptions whatsoever (ES, 91; 99). We should note the necessary appeal to the qualitative distinction between what are still meant to be strictly quantitative
units. It seems that Deleuze is forced to admit, even in the basic differentiation of terms from each other, that ideas are different not only as
numerically distinct but also as qualitatively something, even if only minimally. However, this does not undermine Deleuzes claim that space and
time are in the mind rather than in the ideas themselves (ES, 91; 99),
for quality does not necessarily imply relation without a mind ordering
its ideas. Thus, we can say that the discrete elements in mind already
possess two objective characteristics: indivisibility of an element and distribution of elements: atom and structure (ES, 91; 99). What form does
this structure take?
Successively ordering discrete ideas requires that mind bring together previously experienced ideas with those that came after, and this
can only be done in a time that is not any of the past ideas, that is, the
present. That is, linking discrete, past atoms into structured succession
is a synthesis of them into one contracted present. The temporalization
of ideas is thus a synthesis of time, or, what is the same thing, a synthesis of the mind (ES, 92; 100). It is in this collecting of different ideas
successively within mind that empiricism discovers a principle (ES, 91;
98). Mind structures certain ideas as preceded or followed by certain
other ideas and, thus, its experience is actually not of atomic ideas, but
of related ones. As such, the experience of any idea is the experience of
expecting its successively associated ideas to follow. Thus, the synthesis
posits the past as a rule for the future (ES, 94; 103), thereby creating
habits in mind, inciting us to move from one [idea] to a second (ES, 96;
105). Mind, in other words, is the habit of contracting certain ideas into
syntheses, and thereby becomes the anticipation of similar syntheses in
the future.14
Whenever an experiencing mind is given in the given, its experience of discrete ideas inevitably leads habit to enter the mind as a principle, relating previously experienced ideas into present expectations
that anticipate future connections between similar ideas. Mind, thus, inevitably takes on a spontaneity of relation (ES, 96; 106), giving itself a
structure of habit-anticipation independent of given ideas, transforming itself into what Deleuze calls a subject, which transcends the given
by imposing upon it relations not derived therein. The subject, then, is
essentially the spontaneity of the relations that, under the influence of
principles, it establishes between ideas (ES, 97; 107), and the principle
of habit explains how a subject is constituted in the given.
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to habit, reactive rather than active, and thus constrains the possibility for
novelty, of both thought and action.
In sum: Deleuze affirms the empiricist logic of external relations
specifically to escape from rationalist idealisms. Building from external
terms collected mechanically within mind, he accounts for necessary
relations as arising from contingent, subjective habits which enslave us to
unjustifiable expectations and interests.
Hegel
In the Psychology section of the Philosophy of Mind,15 Hegel likewise explores the development of a consciousness that immediately experiences
things, or intuits (anschauen) a given world (PM, 446). Intuition consists
of some outside content experienced by a mind constituted such that
it can receive it. While Hegel previously (PM, 387412) argues for the
arising of a conscious mind within the given, we will here presuppose
nothing more than Deleuze, and begin with a mind that simply finds
itself determined by given content (PM, 445).
Unlike Deleuze, Hegel clarifies the distinction that must exist between perceiver and perceived. Minimally, this difference manifests itself
in the fact that mind is necessarily a particular view on the given, for it is
only in so far as the given falls within minds view that it is experienced.
In other words, while the specific content perceived leads mind to have
the ideas that it does, it also has to be attended to to be perceived, for
apart from . . . attention there is nothing for the mind (PM, 448).
Thus, within experience itself, what is particular and contingent are the
given contents, whilebecause it can equally experience any particular
content and must be present for any particular content to be experiencedmind is both universal and necessary. As such, whenever mind
arises in the given, it arises as the necessary and universal condition for
the possibility of each contingent experience.
The consequences Hegel draws from this, initially, are not that far
from those developed by Deleuze. Mind experiences given individual
contents, but does so only in so far as it collects each into its unified attention, specifically as its time and also its place, its when and where (PM,
453). Thus all objects are experienced as related in a time and space
brought to them by the subject, and mind inevitably takes the relations it
brings to bear on the given to be, like itself, necessary and universal. Unlike Deleuze, however, Hegel draws attention to the fact that this lawful
subjectivity is in fact presupposed in immediate experience. Because im-
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such relations can be undone, liberating both them and the given from
the strictures and interests they unjustifiably impose. As such, the key
practical prescription that can arise from this theory of relations is that
which seeks to undermine relations as they currently exist; thus Deleuzes
concern for novelty and creation. Mind relates content by necessity, but
this inevitably makes it a slavish subject; to emancipate mind from subjective slavery would be to actively undo imposed relations, regardless of
their specific nature. Of course, this cannot be achieved by simply evacuating relation entirely; the merely given will always result in habitual, reactive subjects whenever it is collected. Rather, one must keep enough
of the organisms [habits and relations required] to turn them against
their own systems.19 One should not eliminate the relational subject;
one should rather experiment with it, in a continual effort to gently
tip the assemblage over to the plane of consistency,20 rereleasing presubjective forces, inevitably to be related anew, but always to be released
again, staying as close to the principle of difference as possible.
The political consequences are both obvious and well-known, so
we will rehearse them rather quickly. Our habitual interests, for Deleuze,
force us to seek to conserve what we have, leading us politically to erect
public institutions and laws that provide for the satisfaction of our interests. Given Deleuzes antipathy toward such interests, it should thus
come as no surprise that in his political works he evacuates the ties of
communal solidarity, institutional determinacy, and committed action in
favor of missing people, the indiscernibility of the public and private
spheres and fragmented, impersonal action.21 Deleuzes politics is not
only devoid of subjective interest but also dedicated to the perpetual
dismantling of interested subjects/collectives.22 Assuredly this process requires the dedicated work of individual subjects who direct their pursuits
away from both social institutions that facilitate inter-subjective recognition and defend individual right, as well perhaps as concerted actions
against those institutions. And assuredly it is dedicated to constructing
experimental relations, each possessing its own dangers, and thus needing to be experimentally undone in turn, thus the prescription: keep
moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectivization.23 However, Deleuzes politics necessarily prizes impersonal
creation above personal interest, missing people over collective struggle,
and novelty over progress.
For Hegel, on the other hand, while the evacuation of habitual
interest is essential, it does not entail the evacuation of subjective or collective interest. Equally cognizant of the fact that merely existent relations
both lack justification and thwart possibilities for action and thought,
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subjects either as external forces or given habits. This does not, however,
mean that there are no emancipatory relations. It simply demonstrates
that for Hegel, as for Deleuze, the process of emancipation must be incessant; unlike Deleuze, however, for Hegel it is also progressive, producing freer institutions over time. That is, as Hegel puts it, free spirits
deed is to . . . comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself . . . The
spirit which comprehends this comprehension anew and whichand
this amounts to the same thingreturns to itself from its alienation, is
spirit at a higher stage than that at which it stood in its earlier [phase of]
comprehension (PR, 343).
Thus, for Hegel the absolute determination or, if one prefers, absolute drive, of the free spirit . . . is to make its freedom into its object
(PR, 27). Freedom is driven to make itself exist as free, thereby creating
new givens which constrain it, driving us further to expand actualized
freedom. Hegels politics thus defends the continual, progressive expansion of actualized freedom through concrete social institutions.24
In sum: Hegel and Deleuze, given their respective logics of relations, both articulate political philosophies focused on emancipating
the subject from merely imposed relations. Deleuze begins from prepersonal, fragmented material and essentially proposes a practical means
for retrieving it (in so far as it is possible) from the inevitable constraints
that subjective interest and action place upon it. He thus proposes our
incessant emancipation from all relations, releasing pre-subjective, disinterested forces from the bodily and mental habits that constrain thought,
experience, and action. Such a process is directed toward the creation
of the new, that is, nonhabitual, and is perpetual, but it is also creative
and experimental, rather than teleological or progressive. Hegel, to the
contrary, begins with given relations, but proposes a practical method
for abstracting from them to reveal the relations truly internal to our rational essence. Hegels politics also advocates achieving freedom-from
contingently given relations, but demands the correlative production of
our freedom-to actualize our rational, free essence. This process is likewise perpetual, but progressive, directed toward the teleological (rather
than eschatological) actualization of free spirit through emancipatory
changes to increasingly free concrete social institutions.
Deleuze is arguably our most compelling philosopher of external
relations and the experimental politics of creative becoming that proceeds from them, while Hegel should rightly be recognized as our finest
exponent of internal relations and the progressive politics of institutional
change that they ground. While I have sought to show that Hegels logic
is, in fact, more consistent, the question starkly posed by their debate
might be: which political philosophy is truly emancipatory?
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Notes
1. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society (London: Continuum, 2006),
for example, opposes Hegelian, organic relations of interiority to Deleuzian,
pragmatic relations of exteriority (especially 825); and Bruce Baugh, Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuzes Response to Hegel, Man and World 25 (1992):
13348, sees Deleuzes logic of external relations as a way of resisting Hegel
(140). Nick Nesbitt, Deleuze, Adorno, and the Composition of Musical Multiplicity, in Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 5475, while raising a critique of Deleuze with
which I am somewhat sympathetic, incorrectly opposes Deleuzian relation[s] of
strict interiority to exterior, dialectical relations (67).
2. Daniel W. Smith, IntroductionA Life of Pure Immanence: Deleuzes
Critique et Clinique Project, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), xiliii (xxiii).
3. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human
Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivit: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1953). Cited as ES, the French pagination following the English, in the form ES, 21; 1. Roman numerals signify the Preface
to the English Edition, and thus no French follows.
4. Here I follow, for example, DeLanda, Baugh, and Patrick Hayden, From
Relation to Practice in the Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, Man and World 28
(1995): 283302.
5. This no doubt explains why Deleuze usually cites the thesis in discussions of empiricism. See, for example, On the Superiority of Anglo-American
Literature, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press), 3676
(55); or Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 206.
6. Deleuze, Letter to a Harsh Critic, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 312 (56). It is of course at precisely this point in this essay that Deleuze makes his infamous claim, What I
detested most was Hegelianism and dialectics (6).
7. As Deleuze claims, I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a
pluralist, Dialogues II (vii). It is important to recall, however, that for Deleuze,
Spinoza and Leibniz would qualify as empiricists against rationalism, due to
their pluralist accounts of relations. As Hayden notes, the thesis of external relations was also brought to bear against British idealism by G. E.Moore and Bertrand Russell (301, n. 11). It may be, then, that Kant (his other avowed enemy),
and especially Hegel, are the primary targets of this critique, not what we normally term rationalism.
8. In Cinema 1 (2025), while discussing the particular presentation of relations offered in several films by Hitchcock, Deleuze seems to suggest that terms
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are perhaps secondary to relations. However, in praising Humes logic of relations, he makes the opposite move, specifically to trace the origin of the knowing
subject: We start from atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages, tendencies, which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give
rise to habits. Isnt this the answer to the question what are we? We are habits,
nothing but habitsthe habit of saying I (ES, x).
9. It may, in fact, be that Deleuzes philosophy only poses this single question, in variant wordings, from Must difference have been mediated to render it
thinkable and livable? to How can desire desire its own repression?
10. The fact is that the given never joins its separate elements into a whole
(ES, 133; 152), thus there must be given a qualified something which will subsequently account for the presence of relations.
11. See, for example, in Cinema 1, by positing a world of universal variation within which the infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane of
immanence wherein each image exists in itself on this plane (5859). These
images are not for anyone and are not addressed to anyone but are images for
themselves. If they do not appear to anyone . . . that is because [the image] is not
yet reflected or stopped . . . If, subsequently, a de facto consciousness is constituted . . . at a particular place on the plane of immanence, it is because very special images will have stopped or reflected the images (6061). In fact, already
in ES, Deleuze claims it is not necessary to force the texts in order to find in the
[account of the subject as] habit-anticipation most of the characteristics of the
Bergsonian dure or memory (ES, 92; 101).
12. Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History (London: Continuum, 2006) rightly notes that for [Deleuzes] Hume, experience need not
be founded on subjectivity; it is first of all a conjunction that allows data to count
as one (13).
13. Here, Deleuze anticipates arguments he will develop more famously,
again through Hume, in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 7079.
14. Anticipation is the synthesis of the past and present brought about by
habit (ES, 93; 102).
15. The following section draws on the accounts of Hegels account of
memory and judgment defended in my Hegels Philosophy of Language (London:
Continuum, 2007), especially chaps. 2 and 3, and Universal Grammar: The Necessity of the Linguistic Judgment, Owl of Minerva 39, nos. 12 (Spring 2009):
124. G. W. F.Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol. 10, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp,
1970). Cited as PM by paragraph number (for example, PM, 455). Our discussion will also extend to Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Amherst,
N.Y.: Humanities Press, 1999); Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, Werke, vol. 6, cited
as SL, the German pagination following the English; and Hegel, Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B.Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge,
1991), cited as PR by paragraph number.
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16. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), 159.
17. This does not stop many of Deleuzes sympathetic commentators from
seeking to ground better relations in practices that allow us to do more or
inhibit experimentation less, as in, for example, both Hayden and Baugh.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 227.
19. Ibid., 160.
20. Ibid., 161.
21. I draw this list from one of his most explicit texts on political subjects,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London:
Athlone Press, 1989), especially 21524.
22. Speaking this way, of course, I echo the criticisms of Peter Hallward,
first presented in Deleuze and Redemption from Interest, Radical Philosophy 81
( January 1997): 621. While broadly sympathetic with his charges against Deleuze,
it is unclear to me on what grounds he applies the same critique to Hegel. See,
for example, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3; and Out of This World, 6.
23. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159.
24. For more complete accounts of this Hegelian politics, see my Siding with Freedom: Towards a Prescriptive Hegelianism, Critical Horizons 12, no.
1 (2011): 4969, and Free Love: A Hegelian Defense of Same-Sex Marriage
Rights, Southern Journal of Philosophy 47, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 6989.
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the past is based on its ongoing contestation of norms and the basis of
normative categories. The ideal of modernity is that it subjects its norms
to constant criticism and contention, and this persistent self-criticism is
what gives it its dynamism. Modernity in this sense makes implicit the
freedom and reflective capacity of the human subject. This beautiful passage from the Encyclopaedia Logic encapsulates the self-determining ethos
of the Enlightenment as well as the freedom of philosophical reflection:
When we think freely, voyaging on the open sea, with nothing under
us and nothing over us, in solitude, alone by ourselvesthen we are
purely at home with ourselves.5 What Hegel takes to be missing from
early modern philosophy and early modern life itself are the social and
political conditions in which this kind of freedom could be realized. Modernity had set the world in motion, freeing it from all dogmatism with
a self-determining subject as the center of the legitimation of norms.
But that subject could not realize itself or actualize its freedom without
the objective conditions that could facilitate that freedom. This modern
subject who now knows it is set in motion had to recognize and identify
these conditions as the objective expression of its subjective freedom.
For Hegel the modern state and the civil society that emerges at
the end of the eighteenth century have the potential to be the objective conditions for the subjective freedom that the Enlightenment had
finally brought to self-consciousness. We can recognize the development
and satisfaction of the objective criteria for freedom in the pages of the
Philosophy of Right in an idealized form. In that work freedom realizes
itself, and Spirit is satisfied or at home with itself in modern social and
political life, because the various problems that emerged in the Enlightenment formulation of individual and collective self-authorization, as
well as the limitations of individual autonomy as the model for freedom,
have been corrected by expanding the model of autonomy to the social
and political level. Modern life provides for Hegel the best conditions
for achieving a collective self-understanding because its institutions both
mirror and enable subjective freedom. The development of these objective conditions of freedom is a collective achievement. The critical issue
for Hegel is that notions of self-production and self-transformation are
explicit in the idea of modern life. Because we comprehend ourselves
as self-determining this in turn provides the optimal conditions for the
ongoing transformations of our self-understanding, that is, it allows for
the continual revision of habituated reasons and norms. This constant
transformation does not as with premodern societies cause the collapse
of the social order, since the very idea of self-transformation is the essential principle of modern society.
The fluidity and movement of, in particular modern self-
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sche too had self-consciously questioned the hegemony of this secularized God and had tried to displace it with an ontology of forces. Both
these critiques of the philosophical tradition are a powerful influence
on Deleuze, but even in Kants thought Deleuze sees an unacknowledged fracture line that had already challenged the unified subject. The
brief moment in which the hegemony of the Cartesian subject is challenged has its origin in Kants distinction, in the transcendental deduction, between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego. Deleuze
describes it in this way: the self of the I think includes in its essence a
receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other . . . for a
brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought, and opens being directly onto
difference (DR, 58/82). The empirical ego is that aspect of self that is
open to the manifold. This openness allows the subject to be affected by
the sheer diversity of the empirical. By contrast, the transcendental ego
is what allows judgments to be held together over time and provides the
requisite unity for self-consciousness. The passivity of the empirical ego
opens it to difference, because it is the site of its exposure to the manifold. The thinking activity of the subject, its spontaneity, can represent
to itself only its own thinking, nevertheless it is affected by the receptivity
of the manifold, though it has no resources to express it other than the
discursive. In this sense it is a divided subject. The receptivity of intuition
makes the I already another, since it opens subjectivity to something other
than thought.
This division maps at the level of subjectivity the central division
in the Critique of Pure Reason between concept and intuition, that is,
between the active and passive components of experience. Overcoming
the dualism of concept and intuition is one of the defining problems
of post-Kantian philosophy. Deleuze, however, thinks that the attempt
to synthesize this division is the profound mistake of German idealism.
Deleuze embraces this division; the tension between these two ways of
seeing the world is emblematic of the highest power of thought (DR,
58/82), since it raised a problem that required a genuinely new response.
Kant, however, shies away from embracing the irresolvable ambiguity of
this problem, instead sacrificing the empirical at the altar of the selfdetermining subject. It is worth dwelling a little while on this tension
between the transcendental and the empirical ego in Kant, since for both
Hegel and Deleuze it is an important distinction. The different way they
respond to this problem is instructive for their respective conceptions of
subjectivity.
In the reflection on the self, the self makes itself an object; in so
doing, it must make use of the I to judge the I. This is Kants famous in-
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Hegel and Deleuze are in effect in agreement regarding the dualistic nature of Kants subject, but they have very different approaches as to
how to confront the division between these two components of Kantian
selfhood. Hegel thinks there is a structural mistake in this way of conceiving self-consciousness that is indicative of the general way Kant frames
his entire project; we will see this again shortly in the concept-intuition
dualism. For Hegel, it is a mistake to assume that, first of all, there are
objects which form the content of our representations, and then our
subjective activity comes in afterward to form concepts of them.13 Hegel
undermines this division between intuited object and concept by showing that the categories of thought are the only way in which there is a
world for us. The way Kant conceived of the transcendental subject generally suffered from a vestigial Cartesianism because it grounded experience in an abstract formal ego. Such a beginning point was unstable
and arbitrary for Hegel since once we begin with such a subject, we have
the problem of how to connect the world to it. The separation of the
empirical and the discursive into two distinct aspects of experience raised
the problem of how they could be reconnected. Deleuze disputes this
analysis, arguing that there is an irrevocable connection between these
spheres that should not be resolved by transforming the empirical into
a subset of the discursive, and moreover the empirical ought not to play
second fiddle to the conceptual.
By in effect beginning with the whole, that is with a historicized
Spirit, Hegel strives to avoid the whole set of problems that come with
Cartesian consciousness (self-reflection, inner and outer sense, isolation,
distanced spectator). The language of Spirit and the Concept is designed
to correct the deficiencies in this approach. There are two closely intertwined issues, which we can only touch on here, to show why Hegel
focuses on the spontaneous side of self-consciousness to overcome the
tensions in Kants view of subjectivity: the concept-intuition distinction
and the transcendental unity of apperception.
Kant had tried to unify the traditional opposition between empiricism and rationalism by arguing that these two represented legitimate
but opposed forms of knowing. In his critical philosophy he brings these
two ways of knowing together by asserting there was a single unified cognition that had two faculties: receptivity and spontaneity. Post-Kantian
idealism is united in arguing that the division between rationalism and
empiricism that Kant had sought to reconcile is reproduced in his own
thought, precisely because Kants two-faculty approach to cognition divided consciousness from world. Kant had claimed that concept and intuition were inseparable. Hegel, however, argued that intuitions role in
cognition retains too much of its empiricist origins, and consequently still
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preserved truth as a given sensuous reality cut off from knowing. Kantian
intuition, just as with empiricism, assumes an immediate and given empirical domain that is not mediated through concepts (SL, 45/28).14 Kant
preserved the importance of the empirical because thought needed to
be constrained by representations of what is received through intuition.
Without a nonconceptual intuitive faculty providing the content to experience, knowledge appeared unable to make any claims to objectivity. The idea that there was something that was a constitutive element
of knowledge and experience and yet was immediate and given was for
Hegel an unsustainable claim. Moreover, despite Kants claim that intuitions and concepts were distinct aspects or a unified knowledge, the way
in which concepts connected with the raw intuitive experiential content
was unclear and unpersuasive.
Hegel overcomes this dualism of concept and intuition by stripping
the intuitive of any appeal to the given. Experience is not of a given empirical reality that concepts then mold into meaning. Hegel reconceives
intuition such that it is not purely conceptual but neither is it empirically given. Just how successful Hegel is in preserving this balancing act
is beyond the scope of this chapter; nevertheless we can see why Hegel
takes this path. As we have already seen in the discussion of Kants transcendental subject, Kant thought that concepts were bound to a subjective sphere that frames the way in which subjects make judgments and
with which they experience the world. Beyond this sphere, on Hegels
reading of Kant, is an unreachable supersensible or noumenal sphere
that is not accessible to this subjective sphere. It is a realm completely
other to human mindedness. The end result for Hegel was that the only
way to avoid appealing to the given, and hence the view that the empirical world constrains thought by making it answerable to experience,
was to conceive of Spirit and the Concept as in the broadest sense selfdetermined. For Hegel experience must instead be understood as embedded in forms of life or shapes of Spirit that have to be conceived in a
historically and socially mediated way, that is, they must be understood in
some minimal sense to be discursive. Experience has to be in some sense
understood to be thoroughly conceptual; only then could world not be
positioned over and against us as a given.
The problem then, however, is that once you relinquish the role of
nonconceptual content in experience then the constraint of the world
on concepts is lost. Without appeal to either Platonism or an empirical
given as arbiters of an independent truth one has to be able to see all
meaning determination as self-determined. Once the standards of judgment and the concepts employed in judgment are taken to be inherently
self-determined this produces a host of problems, alluded to previously,
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actively think the object, but the truth of the object is not simply in the
comprehension by a singular subject; rather, it is only as it is in thought
that the object is truly in and for itself (SL, 585/14). In our judging activity, which is for Hegel the essential feature of experience and thought,
there is no representational or correspondence authentication that takes
place by which our judgments are compared to an otherthe object
in itself or the given. All we have for Hegel is the judging activity. The
possible ways in which we can experience and consider the object are
produced through a complex unfolding of historical and social forces.
These are the conditions by which we think and judge as well as being
the basis of our self-consciousness. This is the only way in which objects
can be experienced. Objects have no status outside of the whole, that is,
outside of our collective sense-making practices.
One could not simply reflect on oneself, as consciousness tries to in
the early chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and disclose the determinations of ones own self-consciousness in some singular sense. And this
is precisely because the conceptuality that is constitutive of consciousness, and the object world of which it is conscious, is not visible in this
sense; its meaningfulness overarches this subject-object relation. In this
way self-knowledge is not available to reflection. Self-reflection cannot be
to the mind what the reflection of the mirror is to ones physical appearance. This kind of reflection is incapable of grasping the conditions that
are constitutive of self-consciousness. Hegel is thoroughly anti-Cartesian.
The revised self-consciousness that emerges in Absolute Knowing recognizes the delusion that one could know, as it were, transparently both
oneself and the conditions for ones cognition and experience in an ahistorical or transcendental manner. The version of self-consciousness that
Deleuze is so critical of does not take into full consideration the idealist
view of self-consciousness but is instead focused very much on the Cartesian reflective model of self-consciousness. In Hegels case, while the
conditions and categories that constitute the various ways in which we
understand ourselves and the world have to be understood to be selfdetermined, we could never understand them all or make them present to us, indeed they are always being transformed. Our knowledge
is dependent on conditions as with Kantian self-consciousness, but we
can never know these in any definitive way. If this is the case then our
autonomy appears challenged and limited since the Kantian idea of
autonomy presupposes that these cognitive conditions could be understood. While Hegel accepts the latter view, he cannot give up on the idea
of a self-determined whole. The necessity for resolving the dualism of
concept and intuition and for connecting mind and world means that
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This categorical structure is the unifying frame through which all meaning is interpreted. For both Kant and Hegel, this is the condition for any
possible experience, and in this sense at least it is transcendental (DR,
139/182). The implication of this strategy for Deleuze is that the sensible
and difference are reduced to the categories of judgment and the activities of the subject. Judgment is the faculty by which the world is parceled
up through analogy and recognition. Kant and Hegel employ mediating
categories to make sense of being. These categories are the defining expression of idealist thought; they are the tools of mind by which it tries
to know and manage the world.
We have already seen that Deleuze thinks that Kant abandons a
great insight by privileging the spontaneous and the apperceptive over
the sensible. For Deleuze self-determining subjectivity and spontaneity,
which is the focus of the Fichtean-Hegelian branch of post-Kantian
idealism, as well as the whole edifice of Spirit, the Concept, and dialec-
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tic, all employ difference in the service of identity. Of the two paths that
Kants subject opens, determined, spontaneous, and active on the one
hand and undetermined, passive, and receptive on the other, it is the
former that holds the most sway with Kant. The active side is the one
taken up by Kant and explicitly developed in the transcendental unity of
apperception and is associated with the great achievements of his practical philosophy. It is also the line preserved and pursued by Fichte and
Hegel. The reason that Hegel in particular focuses on the subjective side
is partly because he is convinced of self-determination as the highest
realization of human freedom but it is also, as we have seen, the only way
to resolve intractable problems in the way Kant conceives the conceptintuition distinction.
Deleuze returns to the scene of the Kantian crime. In Deleuzes
case the transcendental empirical that he lays claim to is of an entirely
different order; it is not an interpretative schema through which reality
is interpreted. Existence cannot be reduced to the categorical frame of
the transcendental subject. What is instructive in Deleuzes claim for a
transcendental status for the empirical is that Deleuze, like Hegel, is making a much more robust claim for thought than Kant is. Both Hegel and
Deleuze reject the idea of the thing-in-itself cut off from thought. The
sensible is not for Deleuze something intuited by a distinct faculty cut off
from the discursive aspect of experience; rather, the sensible has a transcendental status. The sensible is the condition of experience and provides its constitutive content nonconceptually (or at least not concepts as
the idealists conceive them) and it is not molded into a digestible form
by a subjectively derived set of categories. The sensible is existence and
the origin of diversity and difference. While Deleuze thinks the focus on
subjectivity is tyrannical and the transcendental subject distorting, nevertheless the sensible as he conceives it is not isolated from discursivity. To
escape from the Kantian dualism, which would leave the sensible cut off
from the discursive, he needs the empirical to be affective on thought.
That is, both Deleuze and Hegel respond to the subject-object division
that results from the concept-intuition distinction and Kants transcendental subject by trying to reconnect subject and object, though they take
different approaches to this. We have already seen how Hegel strives to
achieve this in his account of self-consciousness, by focusing on a revised
apperceptive and spontaneous subject.
Deleuze by contrast begins with a transcendental empirical, a real
difference as opposed to a conceptual difference. This difference is not
a metaphysical truth that lies behind appearance, of which the latter is
an inadequate expression. Difference, as Deleuze conceives it, has a relation to appearance and thought that is subtler than this. Individuating
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not, as with classical empiricism or the empiricism of analytic philosophy, appeal to direct immediate knowledge or a given to justify knowledge claims. Deleuzes sensible does not have a verifying function in this
sense, but it does share with classical empiricists and Kant the idea that
consciousness intuits the sensible, that sensory consciousness has some
kind of receptive function that impacts on experience. But the transcendental characterization of the empirical positions it absolutely against
the Hegelian position for whom the empirical could have no explanatory
potential, precisely because as we have seen it is nonconceptual. But the
empirical is not passively received in the subject in the way it is in empiricism and in Kantian intuition. Deleuzes passive synthesis is not receptive; the passivity is a system of habituated contractions that constitutes
the organism before it constitutes the sensations (DR, 78/107). Deleuze
takes this form of habituated biological organization to be the basis of
difference and of self-formation. We do not develop ourselves through
acts of individual or collective self-determination or through some kind
of self-contemplation but through habits of contemplation, contraction,
or satisfaction. This biopsychic system is what allows the system to modify
itself, not reflective acts of self-determining subjects. The inherent diversity and fluidity of this basic domain of the subject is what makes it
multiple.
While Deleuze thinks the self-determining subject is an illusion of
good will, the empirical is not cut off from thought, and this has implications for how he conceives subjectivity. Because the empirical is passively
synthesized by the subject, its transformation of thought is unregulated
by the standard unifying categories of the philosophical tradition. The
uniformity of the transcendental subject and its thought because they
are affected by the sensible cannot maintain its self-sufficient stability.
Difference and singularity are embedded in the character of the subject in a manner that ensures it cannot maintain its claims to coherence
and unity. We cannot explore here the immensely complex way in which
sense operates for Deleuze; it is, however, worth stressing that sense and
habit reconfigure thought in a way that educates thought such that
it engenders the new. There is no straightforward and mappable way
in which singularity and sense affects the subject and thought; they are
described variously as provocations and generating problems as well as
migrating and swarming. Deleuzes subject could not thereby in any way
represent itself to itself in any coherent manner, since differences so conceived are not able to be present to the self as definable conditions or
concepts (DR, 57/80). They evade such mediations but they are, by virtue of the unique way he conceives sense and passive synthesis, nevertheless constitutive determinations of the subject. The biopsychic model he
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tion of cultural life in the modern world mean the animating German
idealist concern, that a subject could be at home with itself in modern
life, is a form of philosophical self-comprehension that is inadequate to
late capitalism. We are perpetually displaced by these events and we need
a conception of subjectivity that is adequate to this world that is fractured
and fluid. For Hegel the question would remain for him as to what exactly freedom could mean for the subject that inhabits this world.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 58; Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968), 81. French page numbers follow page numbers from the English translation. Referred to in text as DR, followed by page
numbers.
2. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 13134/17175; and Deleuze,
Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 103.
3. For an extended discussion of this issue, see Simon Lumsden, Philosophy and the Logic of Modernity: Hegels Dissatisfied Spirit, Review of Metaphysics 65, no. 1 (2009): 5589; and Angelica Nuzzos exceptional analysis of the dialectic in Dialectic as Logic of Transformative Processes, in Hegel: New Directions,
ed. Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham, U.K.: Acumen, 2006).
4. G. W. F.Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans.
T. M.Knox and A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 183.
5. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical
Sciences with the Zustze, trans. Theodore F. Geraets, Wallis Arthur Suchting, and
Henry Silton Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 31z.
6. This is why much of the recent discussion of Hegels thought, which
frames it in terms of sociality of reason, usefully appeals to Sellarss idea of the
space of reasons to assist them in this.
7. Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12.
8. This does not mean that we can of course understand everything and
everyone within modern life as at home as in Hegels well-known discussion of
poverty. Moreover, there are a number of pathologies that play themselves out
through the experience of either being left behind by changes in norms or the
failure of these changes to actually correct what was indeterminate in a given
society. For a discussion of this, see Axel Honneths Suffering from Indeterminacy:
An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegels Philosophy of Right (Assen, Neth.: Van
Gorcum, 2000).
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A402.
10. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 335.
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principle is not original, but is a development within and transformation of experience organized around the pleasure principle, where
experience governed by the pleasure principle is not a well-organized
network of clear and systematic relationships between well-defined identities, but is a patchwork of processes of localized sense-making that link
partial subjects to partial objects by the relations of condensation and
displacement that constitute the logic of affective, desiring life.15 Let
me quote a passage from Anti-Oedipus:
Partial objects now seem to be taken from people, rather than from the
nonpersonal flows that pass from one person to another. . . . Oedipus
has as its formula 3 + 1, the One of the transcendent phallus without
which the terms considered would not take the form of a triangle. It is
as if the so-called signifying chain, made up of elements that are themselves nonsignifyingof polyvocal writing and detachable fragments
were the object of a special treatment, a crushing operation that
extracted a detached object from the chain, a despotic signifier from
whose law the entire chain seems consequently to be suspended, each
link triangulated. There we have a curious paralogism implying a transcendent use of the syntheses of the unconscious: we pass from detachable
partial objects to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by
an assigning of lack. (A-O, 85, 8687; 71, 73, emphasis in original)
What has happened is that the subject that is the residuum of production
has been treated as productions ground, with the result that desiring
production is seen to belong to the subject (where it, too, now, is further
understood as dependent on the complete object it lacks). The world of
desire, on its own quite satisfied with its own regional sense-making, is
now reinterpreted as participating in a reality governed by the demand
for universal sense. The multiple desires are seen as so many expressions
of the total person (whose identity is their telos), and therefore seen as
secondary and incomplete on their own, whereas they are in fact originary, and on their own terms not at all incomplete, not at all defined in
terms of any lack.
What this entails is that the very notion of objectivity is inseparable
from the notion of the Oedipal subjectKants analysis of objectivity
depends on his ability to refer the sense within experience to the sense
of a coherent subject/substance of experience, but Deleuze and Guattari show that this subject is the Oedipal subject of psychoanalysis (the
subject itself made one only as its lack of the phallus). Kant has thus
wrongly imported the demands of meaning within the Oedipal world
an aspect of empirical lifeinto the realm of transcendental synthesis;
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or, we could say that he has taken the notion of subject, which properly
is only the passing synthesis of consummation, and hypostasized it into
a transcendent substance which is then used as the basis for analyzing
the original synthesis. In this way, then, Deleuze and Guattari follow out
Kants project to the point of showing Kant himself to be guilty of the
very offense he attributes to rationalist metaphysics:
A consciousness is nothing without the synthesis of unification, but
there is no synthesis of unification of consciousness without the form of
the I, or the point of view of the self. . . . Only when the world, teeming
with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and preindividual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last the field of the transcendental.16
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ferent from the immediacy of desire, and, inasmuch as this is the one
and only arena, that happening of sense within which any further sense
emerges, the immediacy of sense and desire is no different from the
immediacy of the real. Thus, in what is perhaps the most extreme phenomenology, knowledge of reality simply amounts to a description of the
flows and interruptions that characterize our desire. The ever-changing
multiplicity of desiring-production is the only phenomenological subjectit is to the parameters of desire that we must turn to determine
the parameters of the real. Consequently (a) the analysis of practical life
cannot be separated from the analysis of theoretical life, as Kant does
in the first two critiques, and (b) desire cannot be subordinated to or
regulated by any other source of meaning, since all meaning is simply
desiring-production. Thus with the critique of objectivity comes the installation of desire at the very heart of meaning (rather than its Kantian
location as a separate force applied to the world of objectivity).
In sum, then, the rigorous adherence to the Kantian demand that
we reveal phenomenologically the immanent bases of sense amounts to
a radical critique of the Kantian philosophy that both abandons the primacy of the ideal of objectivity within meaningful experience and installs desire at the foundation of all sense. Deleuze and Guattari have
attempted to radicalize Kants project, articulating the implications of
staying true to the limits of immanence (the transcendental, in Kants
language), rejecting any attempt to explain experiencesenseon
the basis of alien, transcendent standards. Rejecting the importation of
alien norms and standards, however, does not by itself entail that norms
and standards as such are inherently alien to sense, inherently alien to
immanence. Indeed, turning now to Hegel, we will see precisely that desire immanently gives rise to a certain telos of normalization and objectivity. We will see this specifically by describing the experience of other
subjects, an experience, I will argue, that is insufficiently comprehended
by the conceptual tools that Deleuze and Guattari provide.
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the recognition in principle of other desires. In other words, to be a selfconsciousness is to be open in principle to other self-consciousnesses: It
is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness (PG, 177, 144). To be the
kind of being who can recognize itself is to be the kind of being who can
recognize others.
But what is it to recognize others? The other, as the desire that exceeds determinacy, the negativity that contextualizes positivity, is precisely
what cannot be present, and, thus, to be open to others is precisely to be
open to what cannot be present. Desires own constitutive premise, however, is that this what cannot be present is the essential and independent reality that defines the sense of determinacy: A self-consciousness,
in being an object, is just as much I as object (PG, 177, 145). Being
an explicit self-consciousness thus opens one to the realm of negativityfor-itselfabsolute negation23as the reality beyond immediate determinacy, and thus, even as desire is the experience of self-certainty, even
as desire experiences its own negativity as what is determinative of the
sense of the determinacy in which it is absorbed, desire is equally the
experience of itself as heldthrough this determinacyin essential relation to a defining reality that eludes its grasp: it is held by the negativity
that is the other self-consciousness, the other possible self-certainties that
equally enact themselves in this same determinacy. Self-consciousness is
faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. . . . It has
lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being (PG, 179, 146). One can live
ones mineness, ones self-certainty, without having to notice it as such:
desire, precisely, is an orientation toward the object. This relationship to
the object is definitive of desire: Desire and the self-certainty obtained
in its gratification are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes
from superseding this other: in order that this supersession can take place,
there must be this other (PG, 175, 143). In encountering the object, however, one encounters the site that is the fulfillment of the trajectory of
someone elses desire, someone elses self-certainty. To act from desire is
implicitly to enter into the mine-field of other self-consciousness.
Hegels point is that, inasmuch as desire experiences itself as the
truth of its object, its own activity naturally involves it in asserting itself
over the exactly parallel claims of other desiresother self-certainties
that assert themselves in and through precisely the same determinacies
that are the objects of the first desire. The attitude of desire thus always
has competition with other desires on its horizon. Let me complete the
above quotation:
Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come
out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for
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itythe absence for itselfof the other. The absent other who offers
resistance is not experienced simply as an instrumental impediment to
the project of suckling or not-feeding. On the contrary, the experience
of breast-feedingboth from the side of the child and from the side of
the mothercan itself be a way of engaging with the others subjectivity, that is, breast-feeding can precisely be a site of communication, of
inter-subjective contact: the child can suckle at the breast precisely out of
a desire to engage with the mother as subject, and the enjoyment of suckling can be an enjoyment of community as much as it is sensually gratifying: as Brian Massumi, describing the babys behavior, notes, The joy of
eye-to-eye contact with its mother resonates through its body and comes
out the far end in a kick.25 The child, in other words, is responding to
whatever determinacy it is encountering in the world as the presence of
the mother: the absence that is the other self is precisely one of the elements of the assemblage, of the machine. But such an assemblage can
no longer be accounted for without invoking the language of subjectivity
and inter-subjectivity, that is, a language that acknowledges the irreducible ontological autonomy of the self-defined absences that constitute
desiring subjectivity.
But because the other is precisely an absence, that is, because it is
precisely that which can never be explained on the basis of present actualities, there would be no possibility of experiencing such an other if one
were only open to apprehending determinacy. Only a beinga desire
that is already constitutively open to the sense other person could come
to recognize another person. This sense other person is precisely the
sense of a self-defined absence that exceeds any possible determinacy
and is thus not reducible to the syntheses of production, recording, and
consumption; nor can it be explained by an Oedipal imposition.26 If desire were not always already open to the sense other self, no such sense
could ever arise within its experience.
For this reason, the sense of I or me is thus destined to emerge
within desiring production. What Hegel describes in his analysis of desire
in the Phenomenology of Spirit is precisely this situation in which desire,
open in principle to the desire of the other, is destined to encounter that
other as an immanently motivated experience of transcendence, a sense
of other for itself emerging within the domain of the for me. This
other for itself first emerges as that which opposes me; in other words,
me is originally the sense with which the other challenges my desire,
demanding of me that I reciprocate with my own sense of me (PG,
17684, 14447). The relevant self within desire, then, is not so much
the residue that is the synthesis of consumption, but is, rather, the self
to whom I must answer, the self whose autonomy and irreducibility is al-
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ready woven into the very sense of the elements fused together into the
assemblages of the desiring machines themselves, a self that demands of
me that I similarly be an autonomous and irreducible subjectivity.
In this sense, then, the sense of I is something very much like the
telos of desire, for it is the natural response to the natural emerging sense
of someone elses that is forced upon me by the immanent logic of desiring production itself, inasmuch as desire already sets flows in motion
that cross boundaries of the mine. It is precisely in such mine fields
that desire operates. Once desire takes the form of a challenge to one desire by another, the question cannot fail to be an opposition of mine vs.
mine, so the demand for coherent self-identity is already immanent in
the very logic of desire, the very logic of sense. This telos, though, is an
immanent telos. In other words, it is not something someone planted
there, and it is not something that preexists as a desired goal. It is a telos,
rather, in the sense that it arises as the natural consequence of the internal dynamismin Hegels language, the dialecticof desire.
Desire, in other words, is inherently defined by answerability to the
other and thus by the immanent demand that its own self-certainty be reconciled to the self-certainty of the other. Desire, then, is not satisfactory
to itself in its immediacy, but immanently projects for itself a standard to
which it must answer by transforming itself: desire itself has a natural trajectory of growth toward a reconciled experience of inter-subjectivity, or
what Hegel calls mutual recognition or spirit (Geist), which is itself an
experience of shared, objective world.27 In other words, the very aspects
of Kants portrayal of experience that Deleuze and Guattari criticize as
the result of illegitimate, transcendent uses of synthesis are, on the
contrary, immanent to the self-development of desiring production itself.
Conclusion
There is tremendous parallel between the arguments of Anti-Oedipus and
those of the Critique of Pure Reason, and in general, the schizoanalytic
revision of Kant covers the ground of bodily, pre-personal experience
initially laid out by the German idealists. What is lacking in Deleuze and
Guattari, though, is the acknowledgment that desire implicates us in the
domain of inter-subjective conflict and thereby inaugurates the dialectics
of inter-subjective recognition. This points to a general deficiency in the
way in which Deleuze and Guattari discuss desire, giving insufficient ontological weight to the other as an autonomous realm of sense. Hegels
analysis of the desire for recognition, on the contrary, precisely shows
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Effect, and Reciprocity are the categories of relation. They are centrally discussed under the heading Analogies of Experience. See A80/B106 and A176
218/B21865. The study of the categories is the general subject of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole.
6. For a detailed and thorough analysis of Kants argument, see Beatrice
Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
7. This is the subject of the Transcendental Dialectic. See Critique of Pure
Reason, A29398/B34955 and A32132/B37789. On transcendent vs. transcendental/immanent, see A29596/B352. On the cognitive value of the categories as limited to the realm of possible experience, see B14650.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 5. I have pursued some parallels
between the arguments of Kant and Merleau-Ponty in The Spatiality of SelfConsciousness: Originary Passivity in Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, Chiasmi
International 9 (2007): 21932.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers: 19721990 (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1990), 13.
10. See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, LAnti-dipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrnie 1, nouvelle dition augmente (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1972/73), 88; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 75: In what he termed
the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence
of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as
appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysicsits name is Oedipus. And that a revolutionthis
time materialistcan proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal
psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the
immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis. LAnti-dipe is referred to in text as A-O, with the French pagination
first, followed by the English pagination; all quotations are from the English translation. See also Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike
Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), 309: The ambition of Anti-Oedipus
was Kantian in spirit. We attempted a kind of Critique of Pure Reason for the unconscious: hence the determination of those syntheses proper to the unconscious;
the unfolding of history as the functioning of these syntheses; and the denunciation of Oedipus as the inevitable illusion falsifying all historical production.
Compare Eugene W. Holland, The Anti-Oedipus: Postmodernism in Theory; or
the Post-Lacanian Historical Contextualization of Psychoanalysis, Boundary 2 14
(1985): 291307, 293.
11. On the connective synthesis, see Brian Massumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.:
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MIT Press, 1992), 4748, 56. On the notion of the machine (and the significance of Deleuze and Guattaris analysis in Anti-Oedipus in general), see Todd May,
Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
12129.
12. On the recording synthesis, see Massumi, Users Guide, 4950; on the
body without organs, see 7071. For the notion of the virtual, see May, Gilles
Deleuze, 4655.
13. On the synthesis of consumption, see Massumi, Users Guide, 5051. On
the nature of the subject, see Massumis excellent summary discussion on 8081,
and compare also 3334.
14. Deleuze, Kants Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1516. The transcendental object = X and the transcendental unity of apperception are both introduced in the discussion of the synthesis
of recognition in a concept, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A10310.
15. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, vol. 21 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 6668. The
logic of condensation and displacement is central to Freuds analysis of dreams
throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 5 of The Standard Edition.
16. Deleuze, Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
102, 103.
17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 1516, especially pages 1023.
18. G. W. F.Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, vol. 10 of Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970),
13739 and 14345; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraphs 16667 and 17377. Referred to parenthetically in text as PG, followed by the paragraph number of the English
translation and the pagination of the German text in the form (166, 137). The
best analysis of Hegels account of the dialectic of desire with which I am familiar
is David Ciavatta, Hegel on Desires Knowledge, Review of Metaphysics 61 (2008):
52754. My own analysis of desire closely parallels Ciavattas.
19. See Ciavatta, Hegel, 52930.
20. See ibid., 54344.
21. See ibid., 534 and 546 for the notion of desire as a lived, performative
refutation of realism.
22. Hegel identifies the self-related negativity of desire, such that it relates
to itself in relating to what is not itself, in PG, 167, 13839, and 175, 14344; for
the logic of negative self-relation in general, see Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vols.
5 and 6 of Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1986); Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller
(New York: Humanities Press, 1976), vol. 1, bk. 2, sec. 1, chap. 1, pt. C, Reflection
(Reflexion). For the logic of reflection as it first emerges in Hegels Logic, see
Dieter Henrich, Hegels Logik der Reflexion: Neue Fassung, in Die Wissenschaft
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der Logik und die Logik der Reflexion, ed. Dieter Henrich, Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 18
(Bonn, Ger.: Bouvier, 1978), 203324.
23. But this universal independent nature in which negation is present as
absolute negation is the genus as such or the genus as self-consciousness (PG,
175, 144).
24. The scenario of the baby at the breast is itself discussed (very well) by
Massumi, Users Guide, 7173. Massumis entire discussion of personal development (6880) should be compared with my discussion in this final section. Massumi offers a compelling and subtle schizoanalytic account of the development
of a person, which addresses at many levels the conflictual experience of other
selves, which is my topic in this final section. Excellent as this analysis is, however,
it still presumes rather than explains the fundamental meaning other person
with which we contend in our experience. Note especially the initial discussion
(7374) of the inconsistent availability of the mothers breast; I am arguing that
the terms offered by Deleuze and Guattari for explaining our experience of experiencing another as another person always falls short of explaining that meaning fully. Such an objection is not answered by identifying the process by which
a sense of self is developed in the mirror stage, for such an account still requires a justification in principle for how it is that we are able to engage with
such a sense (demonstrating such conditions of possibility is, of course, precisely
Kants transcendental project, the project to which Deleuze and Guattari commit
themselves in Anti-Oedipus). On the significance of the mirror stage, see Holland,
The Anti-Oedipus, 29394. Compare Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book XI: Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 207, 214,
221, and 235; and Luke Caldwell, Schizophrenizing Lacan: Deleuze, [Guattari],
and Anti-Oedipus, intersections 10 (2009): 1827.
25. Massumi, Users Guide, 68. See also 69: The supermolecule [baby] sees
its father and the smile is translated into a curl of the toes; it sees its mother and
kicks.
26. In The Bodily Unconscious in Freuds Three Essays, in Rereading Freud:
Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, ed. Jon Mills (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2004), 3350, I have made a parallel argument to show that Freuds
psychoanalytic categories similarly fall short in principle of being able to explain
the sense other person upon which his analyses in fact rely.
27. The goal of mutual recognition is identified in PG, 184, 147; 177, 145
as spirit.
10
According to Deleuze, Hegelian contradiction is nothing but a false appearance which does not even resemble difference. According to this
interpretation, the dialectic is completely governed by the privileged position it bestows on identity: there is contradiction only in light of this
principle. Difference is judged from the start with reference to the calm
reign of identity, and is thereby barred from ever truly sojourning in
thought. As such, it is effectively damned, its slightest occurrence seemingly incapable of manifesting itself save as that horrifying extreme which
is the torn, exacerbated, provocative domain of contradiction ( just as,
for an honest man, the slightest gap with respect to his norms is constituted in an explosive transgression). At the same time, contradiction
provides the dialectic with the scandalous figure it needs to tame difference and bring it back within the fold of identity, imprisoning it there
forever. In other words, difference is only extreme (contradictory) with
respect to a presupposed identity, and since it is extreme it must be reconciled at all cost. But we see that, really, it is already reconciled, such that
what we have is only an illusory extremism, a scandal making much ado
about nothing, a scandal without autonomy that has emerged only from
the necessity of the Same: It is said that difference . . . must extend to
the point of contradiction once it is taken to the limit. . . . [This] is true
only to the extent that it is identity that pushes it to that point . . . Hegels
innovation is the final and most powerful homage rendered to the old
principle. . . . [Its] delirium is only a preformed delirium which poses no
threat to the repose or serenity of the identical.1 Nothing has changed,
then, from the Ens quo nihil majus of theology to the dialectical contradiction: they are in fact one and the same.
Grard Lebrun, having read Difference and Repetition shortly upon
completing his own book, La Patience du Concept (The Patience of the Concept), asked this of the Deleuzian dialectic: When reading this, the problem that must rightly be addressed (a task I shall not here undertake)
is roughly this: what is this identity which is burdened with taming the
greatest of differences? Is it once more the identity of the classics?2 This
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blends itself with thinking, such that difference knows no limits. Yet a
further consequence of Hegels infinite representation is that thought
expands its government: nothing escapes it anymore. No longer content
with reigning over the essences, it annexes what is inessential in existents and thereby legislates all that finite representation had left in its
original state as falling beyond its jurisdiction, outside of identity, outside
of thought.
In setting up such a confrontation between Hegelian and Deleuzian thought, we must attend to the ideas of Leibniz. There are, according
to Deleuze, basically two ways to recover the infinity of essence and the
inessentiality of existence at work in infinite representation: either from
the essence or from the inessential. In other wordsand these are Deleuzes termsone can begin from essence as something infinitely large,
encompassing everything that is itself and its parts, and everything which
it does not contradict, as its figures, to better capture them in its essential identity; such would be the meaning of the Hegelian Concept. Or
one can start from the series of the infinitely small, from the fog of the
inessential, from a continuum that is not encompassing but which, on
the contrary, is included in its entirety in each individual essence, this
individuating itself only because it sheds light on, turns down, or bends
differently that continuum. Such would be the meaning of the Leibnizian monadology. If, in Hegel, one speaks of a Substance-subject that
always subtends things as a meeting point of unity where differences melt
into each other, in Leibniz, one speaks instead of a superjet (Deleuzes
term), that is, a subject that is adjacent, appended to a world which always
precedes it and which it differentiates by differentiating itself as an individuality. God, says Leibniz, did not make Adam a sinner, but rather the
world where Adam sins; or again the Adam-monad is the condensation of
a series of singularities which it casts upon the backdrop of an indistinct
world: living in a garden of earthly delights, generating a woman from
his own rib, being the first man, sinning.3
Of these two modalities of infinite representation, Deleuze prefers
the Leibnizian modality. This is because it seems to assign a legitimate
place to difference, manifesting it in its very emergence, at that inopportune moment when it extracts itself from the obscure continuity of the
inessential, from the ashes of the multiple. The dialectical contradiction,
that spectacular symmetrical play of the Self and the Other, preempts the
very possibility of such an autonomous difference: the moment difference happens is never grasped in the force of its alteration, but is rather
construed as a reflection or splitting of the other term, which the other
of a Same differentiates from itself by reappropriating that very difference. Vice-diction, owing to the fact that it is asymmetrical and nonre-
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Pitting Hegel against Deleuzian thought amounts to verifying if the dialectic is indeed, as Deleuze maintains, unfit to grasp the two constitutive
dimensions of vice-diction, namely the serial multiplicity of cases and the
unilateral condensation of difference. Does the dialectic reject this in the
name of the greater unity of all intrinsic condensation of multiplicities?
Does it really fail to take into account the mild noise of the insignificant?
Does it dilute into a transparent reciprocity the unilateral condensation
of difference, as Deleuze so forcefully contends?
Let us address the series first. It would indeed seem that the series
is the sworn enemy of the dialectic. Bad infinites, all of them serial, are
scattered throughout the Doctrine of Being in the Science of Logic, awaiting their dialectical overcoming. For instance, in the dialectic of quantity,
they go from the Hallerian description of eternity in terms of a piling
of worlds, to those tendentious Newtonian methods of calculation which
juggle approximation. In all cases, the object of the Hegelian critique is
the series, with its flagrant deficiencies.
On this view, it is wise to keep track of the bad series, since its
aimless progression is akin to a trampling, a repetitive liquefaction which
spreads out without ever bothering to synthesize itself. In sum, one ought
to remain on guard because the vagrant multiplicity of the bad series
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refuses to submit itself to the dialectic. Is the series of numbers not the
most appropriate target of the Hegelian critique of quantity? It is well
known that Hegel does not hold quantity in high regard. Evolution from
the quantitative element is, for him, tantamount to mov[ing] in a realm
of thoughtlessness.4 It is apparently devoid of concept (SL, 216, trans.
modified) because whatever is worthwhile in a normally constituted concept usually owes its complexity to the concreteness of those relations
which it institutes between various contents of thought, to the organic or
interior unity by which it links them. But quantity is a barbarian concept
of counter-nature which seems made only of absence-of-relation, of externalization without any return to itself. In other words, it is philosophically worthless.
But, upon further reflection, we find that Hegels relationship to
the notion quantity is far from simple. Contrary to what is usually held,
if he criticizes quantity, it is less in the name of a restoration of more
unityof a qualitative or organic synthesis found anewthan because
quantity fails to anchor itself to a fixed point in its hurried flight, giving
itself something beyond its own mobility. In other words, quantity harbors a vain nostalgia for a quality that has suffered an irremediable defeat
at the hands of the quantitative. The dialectic of quantity must therefore
be understood as a record of the resistance which the quantum (or determinate quantity) opposes to its own quantitative status by trying to
latch onto a quality. It must be glossed as the story of how those acts of
resistance exhausted themselves, revealing their futility.
Let us retrace the principal events of this tale: (a) the first way quantity tries to stay anchored to quality is in the elaboration of two species of
distinct sizes (extensive size, obtained by adding a multiplicity of parts,
and intensive size, whose univocal nature, always given as a totality before
its parts, would account quantitatively of quality itself); (b) as a case in
point, it becomes impossible to assign in any stable manner these types of
sizes to a truly different being. Both are unity and multiplicity; they differ
only by virtue of the accentuation of one term over the other. But they
are not totally different: in the twentieth degree (intensive size apprehended in its univocity) there is also twenty degrees, just as there are one
hundred centimeters in a meter (extensive size); and inversely, in extensive size, there is also the unity of one meter, and not just the summation
of the hundred centimeters. Quantity therefore tries to escape this instability by displacing quality to another field: in one respect (which Hegel
calls the being-there of quantity), it is condemned to change, that is,
to oscillate between the intensive and the extensive, but it would also have
a portion of essentiality withdrawn from the reach of all change. (c) From
the fact that it is impossible to fix difference between its essentiality and
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that they are the variable balancing or multiple evaluation of a lack of equilibrium
that is internal to thought. The differences do not have a fixed being, one
cannot tie them to indubitable foundations, they ruin each other; they
do not disappear in some definitive identity. But their presence is no longer explicable solely by an appeal to this resource: since they are not, they
remain to be done, they do themselves, they pose themselves in this or that fashion, orin keeping with the term one encounters time and time again
in the Science of Logic and which Deleuze could not disown (given the importance he gives it in his reading of Nietzsche)5they are worth or assert
their value for, difference. In other words, they tear themselves away from
their lack of necessity, like the lightning bolt of the formless [linforme].
The dialectical formless, that dark sky of the Logic, is thus seen to be the
internal relation of terms, their always-menacing equivalence, which acts
as a perpetual impulse driving their unilateral differentiation, positioning them with respect to themselves, as momentarily crystallized categories which shine in the midst of a constantly unstable exchange. And,
just as Deleuze holds that there is no difficulty in maintaining together
the law of continuity and the principle of the indiscernibles, we might
say that there is no tension whatsoever, but rather a coherence that is one
and the same between the relational reciprocal dialectic of the terms and
the unilaterality of difference, and through which is carried that relation
which is always preferentially inclined to one side or the other.
It is indeed the value of difference that is at stake in the dialectic.
In the dialectic of quality, despite the malleability which the concept of
the qualitative limit is capable of, there is very much a struggle between
different qualities. Nothing principled is established in the qualitative
relation of things, neither in their respective determinations, nor in the
distance which digs between them their limit; and that is why such a limit
cannot do otherwise than assert its value: Something . . . shows its limit
as a being-in-itself and asserts its value [geltend machen] in its being-other,
even if this is not kept away from itself.6
The same goes for the dialectic of quantity. However one happens
to find the rotating equivalence of moments, one will find a continuity
and discretion there, as well as intensity and extensity. But this is true
only so long as each time they assert their value as such, that they interpret
in a given direction, without any prior necessity determining them to
carry their evaluation this way instead of that. There is indeed continuity
and discretion; quantity is continuous in the sense of being the uninterrupted flow or melt[ing] away (SL, 187) that carries away all limits; but
it comprises in itself the interruption or discretion which is denied. Since
each is the moment of the other, is Hegel forced to conclude that their
difference is thereby effaced? Not at all: what we find is that he insists on
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becoming-thought (which is why there is a Philosophy of Nature). In keeping with the theme of lightning, let me conclude by briefly glossing
Hegels remarks on the storm in the Encyclopedia.
A dialectico-cosmic fable: the Earth is the individual body, the absolute planet, which alone is able to bring together in a point of ipseity
the rigidity through which bodies corporalize themselves by opposing
themselves to the simple self of light (which cannot make anything visible if corporeal opacities do not stand between itself and itself). There
are bodies only to the extent that their seizure of autonomy with respect
to the light entails a loss. Accordingly, the moon is a rigidity held captive
by its tendency toward opposition, exhausting itself in it, without any
return to itself, destined to sterility and servitude with respect to that
other body which it has in its axis. The comets are those disheveled bodies which retain from the opposition only the process of mobility, without
giving themselves any rigid consistency. They are pure occurrences of dissociation, eccentric vagrants in a fugue, incapable of holding themselves
together and thus impotent to prevent their gradual crumbling to dust.
But the Earth is the rigidity which opens up into genuine differences,
and it manages to hold these into cohesion. The differences at hand are
the elements: air, that undifferentiated and insidious simplicity, sublimating the differences. Fire, which is air gathered by compression, a negative individuality or active difference consuming the other bodies which
cannot help but consume itself in this process, so that the oppositional
power which animates its being-for-itself is suppressed by itself and comes
to a neutral state, namely water. Water is that plastic element, the means
par excellence, without individuality or form, that which receives its determinations from without (as a vaporous sublimation or icy compact).
Terrestrial earth is the global element which animates the exchange of
these various elements by way of a meteorological process, of which the
storm is the unfinished form: the complete manifestation of this process is
the thunderstorm, to which the other meteorological phenomena attach
themselves as rudiments, moments or unripe realizations.8
Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the fruit of a playful exchange between earth and fire, and the rain is beholden to water; but only
the storm brings together in one event the sudden clash of air with itself,
the devastating power of fire, waters gaseous volatilization, its condensation into clouds, which foretells a return to the planetary soil whence
they arose. The storm alone lassos together all the elements.
We see, then, what separates this Hegelian vision of the storm from
Deleuzian lightning. In the latter, the violent flash of electric current
serves but one function: to bring Earthiness back to oneself thanks to
differentiation, furthering the Earths individuality by and within the cir-
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11
Deleuzes longest discussion of Hegel, the fifteen-page passage in Difference and Repetition, chapter 1, 6176/4254,1 is (until the end of it) his
most positive. What interests me is not his criticisms of Hegel, but the
way Deleuze forces Hegels dialectic into more becoming, and Hegel
forces Deleuzes differences into more history. Deleuze discusses three
themes in Hegels logic: limit and the infinite; contradiction and ground;
and judgment and proposition. These are drawn from the three books
of Hegels Science of Logic: Being, Essence, and Concept. Deleuze shows
Hegel to be an opponent of organic philosophy (perhaps a surprising
point, but a good one), and a proponent of the orgiastic. He shows how
Hegel connects difference with the infinite rather than the finite (the
large infinite, in contrast with Leibnizs small infinite).2 Deleuze uses
these Hegelian points to drive his own theory of difference, implying
that Hegels Logic offers untapped potential.3 Deleuzes passage on Hegel
does not exhaust his theory of difference, and Hegels chapter on Ground
is not his last word on dialectics, but the encounter of the two texts is
symptomatic of each and of both together.
We can summarize DR 6176/4254 as follows: Hegel succeeds in
avoiding the subsumption of difference under a pregiven larger whole.
To do this, he pushes to infinity the interplay at the limit between self
and other. This drives each difference to the extreme of contradiction, at
which point differences vanish into their ground. Yet this ground is the
source of still more difference. Hegels ground is almost primordial difference. Unfortunately, Deleuze concludes, Hegel articulates difference
in unidimensional judgments (49/33), like Leibniz assuming wrongly
that differences converge rather than diverge.
To emphasize Hegels potential with a Deleuzian eye, I take up three
doctrines.
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Hegels categories of limit, finitude, and the infinite focus on selfothering, where selves reciprocally make themselves inside each other.
The instability of the surface of otherness is infinite.4
Hegels category of ground cancels every totality via the contradiction
of its members. The whole is groundless; or, difference is the only ground
it has. Hegel squeezes more difference out of the infinite than Deleuze
thought possible. But it is Deleuze who discovered this potential in Hegel.
Hegels theory of judgment shows how disjunctive judgments express infinite possibilities. A judgment is only completed in a syllogism,
and the ultimate syllogism is a mechanical object.
I examine Deleuzes DR 6176/4254 paragraph by paragraph. To
define ground, I turn to DR 34955/27277 from the Conclusion
chapter where Deleuze returns to Hegel. Deleuzes text merits line-byline analysis. There is no value in the generalizations either that Hegel is
ontologically totalitarian or that Deleuze is a poor reader, or in hoping
that Deleuze will reduce to Hegel or vice versa. Two great philosophies
are not diminished by their confrontation. Still, even a strong Deleuze
advocate (like myself) cannot accept Deleuzes claims without precise
arguments, and cannot assume that if a given argument does not work,
his point is profound anyway.5
Deleuzes DR passage on Hegel has a momentum. Deleuze introduces Hegel as a success story in the history of difference, and only later
introduces Hegels failings. But if Deleuze is right in the first caseas I
think he isit undermines his later criticisms.
The passage on Hegel picks up after Deleuze has argued that finite distinctions suppress difference in the service of identity. In whole-part and
genus-species relations, the parts and species are small differentia, which
have meaning only as divisions of the larger wholes or universals. Deleuze
associates these relations with the organic, a connection that is not obvious. Deleuze does not define the organic in terms of interactive functions across an auto-affective lived body in an environment, which might
be a standard definition. Still, it is fair to say that living bodies persevere
as wholes, and reproduce as members of a species. Though the analogy is
stretched, Deleuzes thesis that Hegel is anti-organic is a good corrective
to popular interpretation.
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range of activity, but to be itself by altering itself, and sometimes perishing, in relation to its own outside. From chemistry, to plant life, to moral
duty (SL, 13335; Hegel thinks calculus is a specific case, not a model),
everything persists beyond its borders. And since that same process takes
place in other things that are outside it, a thing and its neighbor share
the work of othering. Each reflects (SL, 120), or inwardizes, the work
that it does inside other things. Hegel uses terms like identity and initself only to emphasize how strange it is that the in-itself of every thing
is in another thing. One might describe this negatively: the negation of
its other is the quality of the something (SL, 125). But the meaning is
that the constitution of each thing is open to external influences, at
the unstable surface of its otherness (SL, 124). If otherness is negation
(externality), it is also negation of that negation (immanence). Negation
is the unrest wherein each spontaneously repels itself from itself and
becomes its other instead of itself (SL, 128). Encounters are forced
(SL, 129). The surface where others equally conjoin and disjoin is the
limit. If the perishing of identity makes us sad, we call it finite; if we
find it affirmative, we call it infinite (ibid.).
The finite can never contain its own othering relation; infinity,
the logic of beyonds, is irreducible. But an infinite series of finites is
made of nothing but finites. This raises the problem of the bad infinite
(SL, 146). The infinite is neither inside nor outside the finite; it must be
found in the recursive alternation between the finite and its beyonds,
all of them enunciated as a presence (SL, 141). The good or affirmative infinite is just the process of becoming, a being-for-self
that arises when something moves through the other and becomes one
there. To store and access these excesses as excess, we need not a series,
but a second level. Hegel first calls this a substrate, but since it takes on
the features of the becomings it contains, Hegel renames it essence.
But limit-surpassing in turn contradicts every essence. The only true essence is the level of reality from which that strange becoming emerges;
Hegel calls it ground.
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sors, since a quality is a challenge as much as a reason. Finite determinations have reasons; but the sufficient reason for infinites can be anywhere.
Ground for Hegel is not a line of explanation, but a volume of appearance.
(2) By the second definition, ground refers to a foundational level behind appearances. The difficulty with foundationalism, of course, is that
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ground must in turn be grounded. But this need not be viciously regressive. In hermeneutical circles, for example, mutual grounding makes
meaningful history; and in phenomenological apodicticity, the transcendental ego is verified by recursive regeneration. Affirming a second level
of determinacy need not be an illegitimate appeal to transcendence; it
can instead refer to the excess of self over self. To assign the cause of
something to its transcendental version would indeed be viciously regressive. But to assign its cause to moving foreground and background
determinacies is, if less explanatory, more descriptive.
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determinately on a shifting determinacy. Deleuze half-convincingly associates Descartess I think with determinacy, and I am with indeterminacy. The point is that Deleuze does not simply prioritize the indeterminate; grounding events in groundlessness is supposed to account for
their determinacy even better than sufficient reason would. Groundlessness explains not only the directly causal elements in a determinacy but
also its accidental, shifting, ambiguous elements distributed over many
groupings across disparate historical events. It is only nonsufficient reason, that is, the extra-sufficient ungroundable reasons, that ground determinacies, by showing how even unpredictable connections have a
form: namely, the pure empty form of time.
The time it takes to produce infinite variations characterizes the difference between the indeterminate and the determinate, and explains
how in the absence of images or rules, thought makes connections visible. The determinations effective being keeps coming into form out of
time, its ungrounded, counter-effectuating, stratum of othernessthat
is, its alter-strate.
Paragraphs 35455/27677
No matter how well designed a theory of ground is, Deleuze says, that is,
no matter how rich in potential the groundless is, the fact that it is posited to explain representations leaves it too indeterminate, so it cannot
sustain difference. In fact, this is virtually Hegels conclusion as well.
Instead of the dual term representation-ground, we need each determination to be its own determinate indeterminacy, a single pre-individual
singular, less than determinate in design, but excessively determinate
in emergence. Without originally being what it is, it becomes its own appearances. Deleuze calls it a simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard treats simulacra as cultural images that insist on their nonreality while parading
ironically as real. But a simulacrum for Deleuze is simply a stand-alone
that exists only insofar as it appears.
Just as Deleuze moves from ground to simulacra, Hegel moves from
ground (through Existence) to Appearance. The existence of a determination is not brute fact, but the thorough grounding in a sum of
conditions. A thing appears in all the ways made possible by the facets
that force it to manifest.
To sum up, the orgy of determinations seems to imply a ground.
But determinations make and de-model their own appearances. Instead
of presupposing something else, a determination presupposes itself by
posing for, and from, its past. The ground of a determination is not its
original stuff, but its self-surpassing self-past-ing.
Deleuze suggests that although Hegel ridicules Schellings undif-
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ferentiated absolute as the night when all cows are black, Hegel rejects
difference just as badly. But in truth, Hegel is all about categorizing the
shapes of hidden difference. If Deleuze pushes Hegel to give up the remnants of teleology in appearance, Hegel pushes Deleuze to pin down the
history of appearance. They push each other not toward the unground
of in-difference but the unground in difference.
Deleuze and Hegel often use the same reason to choose opposite terminology. They agree that to express an infinite situation, the terms of the
expression should do the work of producing infinite variantsHegel
calls this judgment, Deleuze calls it proposition. If the expression
itself does not do that work, a subject with contingent psychological dispositions (the last resort for both Hegel and Deleuze) would have to be
brought in to do so. More important than the choice of terms, is what
Hegel offers to Deleuzes account of expression. A case in point concerns
disjunction in infinite judgment.
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An exhaustive disjunction, A is B or C or D . . . describes the singular situation comprehensively, hence universally, by its particulars. Disjunction thus fulfills the goal of judgment: attaching universals to particulars inside singulars. The single subject includes all disjuncts, albeit
most of them by exclusion, a totality whose All need not be activated
(SL, 655).
What decides among disjuncts has to be made explicit (SL, 657).
Some difference, an additional premise, has to differentiate differences.
The task of laying out the differentiation of differentiators is performed
by Syllogism. In Hegels spin, hypothetical syllogism (by which he means
Modus Ponens) does this most explicitly. The first premise, If A then B,
is a normal judgment. The second premise, A, is a direct appeal to external fact: a thing in the world intervenes in logic. The conclusion, B,
is then half judgment, half actuality. In Hegels hypothetical syllogism, as
in Aristotles practical syllogism, the real world enters into the premise
as an interface between mind and body. Such a syllogism is an identity
that differentiates itself and gathers itself into itself through that difference (SL, 701).
Of all the possibilities of the world, one is split off in reality. Take
exclusive disjunction: A is either B or C or D; A is B; Therefore A is neither C nor D (SL, 701). In premise 1, A is the universal term; in premise
2, A is an individual; in the conclusion, A is particularized (SL, 702). The
subject term circulates through its variants and conditions. A is the
topic, so it is what is mediated; but it also undergoes changing focus, so
in its various positions, it interprets itself. In fact, this is no longer really
a syllogism at all, Hegel says, since technically, there is no middle term.
The whole argument takes place in the middle (SL, 703).
This auto-affection of terms through disjunction explains Hegels
transition from syllogism to Mechanism (SL, 704).6 A syllogism is a thought
that works itself out without depending on a subject. Such an operation,
according to Hegel, is machinic.
For Deleuze, like Hegel, finite terms, being distinct, need to be coordinated by an interpreter. But infinite terms produce infinite variants,
filling up the space between the terms, thereby interpreting themselves.
Theorems regarding irrational numbers generate infinitely dense objects, as do theorems about political multitudes. They express not a fact
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other. The issue is not that there are extremes on a continuum (for example, that light contrasts with dark, intelligence with ignorance, and
democracy with suppression), but that properties expand in operation
(for example, that light introduced into a dark scene blows out images in
the shadows, ideas apply beyond their original subject matter, and desires
catch on). Determinations are what they are when they move through
each other. In isolation, if that were possible, differences would not implicate each other. But in a charged field, no determination resists the
tendency to become like its others, and thereby to get contradicted and
evolve. Difference is in this way implicitly contradiction, and is activated
only when contradicted. This is what Deleuze rightly says about difference in Hegel. He makes three more excellent points on Hegel, then a
questionable one.
First, the fact that a difference is en route toward an extreme of
pervasiveness or disappearance paradoxically makes each indifferent to
others. Abstracted from movement, each would have a particular position relative to its neighbors. But in reality, that is, in flux, each enjoys
a trajectory of its own, and the trajectory detaches it from its immediate
context. This independence has a price: to be free, it expels its identity
as it becomes its extreme other.
Deleuzes second excellent Hegelian point is that a determination
indifferent to context is an object. The stretching process of difference
reflects back into an objects plastic identity. It hardly matters whether
we call a given object positive or negative, flowing or interrupted, individual or field.
Deleuzes third Hegelian point is that if we think of the outside as
the negative of the particular, what is positive (or posited) in difference
is exactly that negative. Deleuzes objections begin here, but he objects
less to contradiction than to negation. It is worth emphasizing that in
Hegel, contradiction is not negative. The supposedly original identity of
objective boundaries is contradicted, but the moving ground that renews
them is too unstable to be contradicted. At some level, Deleuze sees that
difference for Hegel is more positive than negative (or at least, that it is
positive because it is negative) even when it destroys identity. But he criticizes Hegel for negativity anyway.
Deleuzes fourth point is that negative movement no longer allows
indifference to subsist. Strictly speaking, it is true that indifference does
not subsist in a substrate. But the point of Hegels ground is to put determinations into contact no matter what their likenesses or contraries.
Every determination, by its claims and products, intervenes completely
in every other, challenging it to the maximum, indifferent to its qualities. Contradiction is thus a minimal step away from indifferent ground.
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matter how difference is defined? As long as a finite determination contacts an other (and then through that one, another), located by its own
shape but forcing an encounter with its outside, then the same logical
relations that the large unit faces, should be faced by the small.
Deleuzes best case would be differences too fine to intuit, too objective to need subjects, too singular to compare, and too primary to contradict. Yet the exemplars he gives are not autonomous differences, but
relational ones, not minimally visible but ultra-measurable. He cites differential proportions across parameters, in the form dx/dy (as in formulas for curves), rather than simply dx. Deleuze calls interactive difference
complete, though not completed, distributions of distinctive points.
This model is nice, but it does not really make difference too small for the
logic of limit: it multiplies differential relations rather than singularizing
them; it depends on continua rather than innovation; and it punctuates
coordinates. Ultimately, it is not clear why Deleuze prefers Leibnizian
differences of measure over Hegelian differences of intuitive exchange.
Furthermore, when Deleuze criticizes Leibniz for assuming that differences converge rather than diverge, it is not clear how he distinguishes
divergence from contradiction. Divergence sounds positive; nothing is
annulled when different paths split off a mainline. But divergence is after
all more than diversity; it forces the issue, chooses among rivals, and
changes the result. Divergence may not reject any pathway; but contradiction too rejects nothing (it leaves nothing out of the picture), instead
tying rivals at the hip.
Deleuze should at least agree with Hegel that divergence is in each
case real and not just potential. Lines of difference do not remain separate once enacted, but re-present. Divergence points are not only incompossible but also in-com-actual; they make actual, irreversible differences.
In short, Deleuze should agree that difference cannot make determinations irrelevant to each other; the smallest difference makes a maximum
difference to another, and this forcing effect is what Hegel means by contradiction. Furthermore, the forcing effect of contradiction, for Hegel,
is what leads past the logic of essence, into the nonexplanatory ground,
and finally into the ontology of appearance.
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Deleuze finds two similarities between Leibniz and Hegel, four criticisms
of Hegel, and five senses of original difference; the last two senses express Deleuzes own view.
Deleuze sees that Hegels essences are not abstract, but selfexpansions (like monadic selves), implications of elastic nonorganic autoaffection. Nevertheless, Deleuze has two reservations about Hegels appeal to the infinite.
(1) Deleuze complains that the dialectic of finite and infinite is a
double discourse: one level for the particular and one for supersession.
In an interesting way, Deleuze rejects Hegel for retaining finitude, preferring a purer universal, a more abstract logic machine. Deleuze often says
that the reason we need not posit essences is that singulars are already
abstract and conceptual. The problem for Deleuze is not with the infinite
as such, but with deriving the infinite from the finite. If infinites needed
to start and end with finite particulars, they would either encircle the finite (with Leibniz) or each other (with Hegel) monocentrically. In fact,
Hegels circle metaphor imagines inter-cutting orbits. But this aside, Deleuze makes a good point that to describe difference, the infinite needs
to suppress the finite. Yet Hegel himself is often said to suppress the finite, and if this is true, he does what Deleuze wants him to.
(2) Deleuzes second complaint is that while infinite ground contradicts one kind of identity, it installs more serious kinds, by assuming there are local identities needing explanation. It is unclear whether
Deleuze thinks that there should be any explanation at all for local determinations. Orgiastic indifference suggests not; machinic assemblage
suggests the reverse. In any case, if Deleuze criticizes the notion of orgiastic ground, which he had earlier praised in Hegel and Leibniz, his own
account of difference is thrown open. In fact, Deleuze soon reaffirms the
orgiastic ground under the metaphor of swarming.
Assuming that Hegels identity-destroying ground, and the logic of
contradiction it uses to overcome essences, are nevertheless in the service
of identity, Deleuze mounts four challenges.
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(a) Opposition (Deleuze sometimes conflates opposition and contradiction) ties difference too closely to existence and finitude. It is as
if Kierkegaards criticism that Hegel neglects existence is exactly wrong.
Clearly, existence should not limit the virtual. But is Hegel wrong if he
says that difference exists?
(b) Hegels logical monsters, like A does not equal not-A, assume the identity of their atomic elements. That is, Hegel assumes that
in order for different things to be opposed, each must exist as a selfidentical unit. This position does not sound much like Hegel, who posits rather the infinite splitting of each term in opposition, and the reinstantiations of each in the other.
(c) When Hegels determinacies do diverge, their oppositional
structure runs too far, generating a new kind of totalitynot of substance, but the reverse: infinitely communicated interjection. Now, Deleuze might prefer that differences stop diverging, so as to escape forming new wholes, but it is not clear that he should. Difference immune
from identity-building would also be a kind of identity. And preferable
or not, no difference is exempt from passage. The only way to be nonnegatable would be to have nothing of interest outside it. But such an
affirmation would be unmachinic and empty.
There is, however, a more interesting way that differences might
not add up to a totality, namely if they have always added up already;
that is, if original difference means that there was never a difference; if
no finite difference ever existed. We might envisage a difference that
does have a limit, and does move and connect with another, yet is not
negated in that process since it had no identity to lose. If each determination is already its differences, then making it different will not negate
it. But does this mean that difference has no determinate content? If
each determination were a general mixture (mlange, which Deleuze
rejects in Logic of Sense),8 then while the upside would be that identity
were lost, the downside would be that so was difference. But if differences are indeed determinate, why not call them negative? After all, they
would override boundaries, flee constraints, abstract from properties,
become-other, and so on.
Deleuze says that Hegels ground permits only a pre-formed false
delirium, where identity circulates. But perhaps circulation for Hegel
is like Deleuzes distribution of lines of force on a plane of immanence.
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The ontological issue of difference in relation to finite and infinite, identity and other, existence and negation, cannot be displaced onto moral
or aesthetic questions about destruction. Deleuze is right that difference
is a source of affirmation. But that is what Hegel too means in making
negation and its yes-saying Aufhebung the source of imagination, memory,
singularity, nature, logic, and subjectivity.
Finally, the question whether negation is the thesis or the antithesis,
perseverance or destruction, oversimplifies Hegel. In dialectics, it is not
that one term is positive and the other negative; terms alternate function. For example, it may appear that in a state, revolution is negative,
and stability positive; but sometimes it is the reverse, and stabilization is
alienating, and revolution liberating. The topic of whether philosophers
who reject negation are beautiful souls, and whether philosophers who
affirm difference reject negation, is off the mark. The question is how
differences have an effect on one another.
Notes
1. I will refer not to page numbers, but to paragraphs in the text in the
form paragraph 6263/4243, meaning the paragraph that starts on page 62
and ends on page 63 in the original French edition, and starts on page 42 and
ends on page 43 in the English translation. Gilles Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
2. To emphasize Deleuzes encounter with Hegel, I deemphasize Deleuzes
comparison of Hegel and Leibniz (and Nietzsche).
3. Deleuze learned much of what is positive in Hegel from Hyppolite, but
I will bypass Hyppolite.
4. G. W. F.Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969), 124.
5. This puts a lot of pressure on Deleuzes text. Deleuze writes 15 pages on
Hegel; Hegel has 20,000 by way of response.
6. A being that is identical with the mediation is just what we mean by a
fact [eine Sache] in and for itself, or in other words, Objectivity (SL, 704).
7. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 17679.
8. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 5 and throughout.
9. Before concluding, Deleuze declares that Leibniz goes deeper than
Hegel: first, because he distributes the distinctive points and the differential elements of a multiple throughout the ground (something that Hegel could equally
be said to do); second, because he discovers a play in the creation of the world
(neither play nor world-creation are particularly differentiating categories).
12
In this chapter I draw Hegel and Deleuze into slightly closer proximity
than either Deleuze or most scholarship on Deleuze (or Hegel) might
admit. I take up Alexandre Kojves1 and Andrzej Warminskis2 semiotic
readings of Hegel and then contrast these with Deleuze. This contrast
is warranted since, against semiotics, Deleuze locates the sign and sense
outside of consciousness, and in the fold of Life. Deleuze reverses the
old question of what is to an epistemology3 asking what does sense
do,4 and thus restores the sign as the receiving of thought (much like
the receiving of the other) to the power of its dignity. For Deleuze, a
mere modifier of the ontic-ontological difference between beings and
Being, for example, Dasein as a structure that questions,5 is not adequate
to capture what runs below judgment as beneath or prior to knowledge
(F, 109). Similarly, Foucaults reduction to Power-Being, as we shall see,
falls short of Deleuzes inquiry into the rarity or dispersion [of space]
and into bursts of passion that cut space up into new dimensions (F, 3).
Rather, since Deleuze eliminates interiority, the intensive time reduction
to sense expresses the present always in two times, the corporeal series of
bodies and the incorporeal, quasi-causal series of delayed effects without
bodies, Chronos and Aion respectively.6
Via Warminski, I claim that, contra Deleuze, it is important to find
in Hegel an order or ordering, a sensitivity of sorts, prior to the universal
idea and structure, yet crucial to the genesis of the idea; in other words,
a sense very much like the sense (sens) that is so central to Deleuze.7 As
Warminski has shown, the sign in Hegel, while minimally structured, calls
for a transition to self-consciousness; as such, instead of a desire that supersedes and is external to life (as in Kojves absolutization of the sign
as Selbstbewusstsein), we find a self-consciousness that relates back to and
springs forth from a sense (sens) already present in life. The issue of
limit, relation, and end is, in Hegel, one of death, and completing the
universal requires comprehending the death of the individual. Because
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of the sense inherent in life, death could not equate to the sign as actual
anthropogenesis. Death, however, has only extrinsic status in Deleuzian
singularity and is excluded from the plane of life as difference immanent
in itself. Taking up Warminskis Hegel, I suggest that, on Deleuzes theory
of exclusion, even what is definitive of singularity would in fact entail a
substantive notion of relation, limit, and indeed, death.8
For Hegel, life is substance and the simplicity of Spirit, which does not
grasp itself: life does what is right or wrong for life, but does not know that
this is right or wrong for it. As immediate, life does not appear to itself as
such. This failure to appear, according to Warminski, founds what Hegel
calls desire, and thus gives rise to consciousness as self-consciousness.
Thus, on Warminskis view, the human significance of life that desire represents cannot serve as a delimitation of the human from within
the human (contrary to Kojve, for whom desire is an anthropogenetic
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it does not truly know itself as independent but only in result; it knows
itself as itself thanks to a dialectic that assigns to it the universal (mediate)
unity in which it is reflected in itselfit knows itself only through a selfconsciousness that is not yet sufficiently awakened to itself. Life seems,
however, to be self-negating enough for self-consciousness (ibid.). Underscoring this point in Hegel, Warminskis use of enough here is ironic:
lifes failure to appear or mark itself as determinate through self-negation
is enough to anticipate and entice the phenomenon of self-consciousness.
Desire as self-consciousness, then, concerns a kind of knowledge
that is faced with the problem about lifes lack of appearancethe
nothingand with the coming into being of the nothing knowledge
ceases to be related to an object external to itself; knowledge is thus selfknowledge. For Hegel, knowledge of ourselves is not knowledge of man
as anthropological object, but a philosophy of self-consciousness. This
divide between the question of knowledge as anthropology and a philosophy of self-consciousness is announced in the introduction to the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Loosely put by Warminski, Hegels interest lies in
the question: There is knowing, Consciousness, what does it have to be
to be what it is, for it is? (HM, 190). The Phenomenology of Spirit does
not simply raise this question; it also makes a decision (Unterscheidung),
that is, enacts the very division between anthropology and philosophy
as its own self-conscious object. Furthermore, this is a decision to be accounted for, on the arbitrary distinction between man as a living creature (the object of anthropology), which Hegel is not interested in, and
man as knowing, as consciousness (the object of phenomenology), which
Hegel pursues (HM, 190; see also PG, 8082).
It is precisely attention to this arbitrary distinction between anthropology and phenomenology, and the authors need to decide between
them that marks what I call semiotic readings of Hegel. Yet, as we shall
see, there is a difference in the way that Kojve and Warminski construe
this arbitrariness. For Warminski, the arbitrariness is worked out of the
absence of the appearance of life, which figures as the absence of lifes
own other, that is, deaththe arbitrariness emerges out of a sort of
stopgap that life introjects into itself by way of phenomenalization, a
doubling of sense that is the birth of the linguistic sign by way of selfconsciousness.10 On Kojves reading, however, Hegel insists that the
non-being that humans should desire is desire; that is, what humans
desire is another self-consciousness, a desired desire.11 Desire desires
suicide, the death of man: it desires the end of man, a supersession and
delimitation of man as finite living being that thereby arrives at the infinite self-concept of man. Hegels claim, for Kojve, is thus that the sign is
anthropogenetic discourse, or the vehicle of a spiritual transformation.
Kojve understands the sign, Barnett suggests, in a decidedly modern
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light:12 (a) that spirits precondition is the arbitrariness of the sign; (b)
that because of this arbitrariness the question with respect to the terminus or limit must take on entirely new shape, a rational philosophy as
praxis; and finally (c) that consciousness is coterminus with history. For
Kojve, Hegel approaches the end of man as a move away from metaphysics and to the material conditions of praxis. The death of man as
metaphysical entity and his birth as object of desire just means that selfconsciousness is desire for another self-consciousness within a historical
limit.13 As Kojve writes: This power that thought has to separate and
recombine things [namely, the sign] is in effect absolute, because no
real force of connection or repulsion is sufficiently powerful to oppose
it (IRH, 126). For Kojve, the praxis of man is the meaning of the sign,
whose power to separate and recombine things ad infinitum is unlimited,
in effect, absolute (IRH, 13133). The finite work of man in history
and the universality of the species result from historical reproduction,
which, as reproduction, is the work of the sign. This entails equating the
sign to substantive individual, the master and slave relation, and privileging anthropogenesis as reproduction of the notion/life, namely, the sign.
In the next section, I will arguecontra Kojve, and with Warminski
that the sign is neither structural nor senseless, but that, for Hegel, it is
sense that bestows meaning upon the sign.
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that of consciousness with its object. The life of the concept will ultimately
prove for consciousness, through cognition, that there is no boundary
between cognition and the Absolute that separates them (PG, 73).
Hegel does not establish life by external standardsit is not life
that we desire. The burden of self-consciousness is that it has to become
identical with consciousness as its object. Hegel argues that wanting to
get hold of Absolute being is explicitly the moving principle of experience, the movement in which consciousness, alienated from itself,
returns to itself from this alienation (PG, 73). Returning to itself is a
pattern or entire series in necessary sequence, for with every new
pattern there is always a new essence . . . something different from what
it was in the preceding stage (PG, 87). There is thus no need to import
criteria, Hegel argues, since in the movement of consciousness . . . there
occurs a moment of being-in-itself or being-for-us which is not present to the
consciousness (ibid.). This momentthe origination of a new object
occurring in the movement of consciousnessis necessity itself [Notwendigkeit] (ibid.). Can it be that life is at every stage the new object?
Necessity itself occurs every time with origination of the new object
(destruction of the old making room for the new), and this process presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens,
which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness (PG,
87). Furthermore, in attending to the new object, a second series opens
up, which no longer has the status of a mere positing by consciousness,
established outside and alongside the particular. The new object is universal, and cannot be seen, for while it appears by way of a second
object which we come upon by chance and externally, it is in fact something contributed by us, through a reversal of consciousness, or scientific progression of consciousnessthis, however, is not known to the
consciousness that we are observing, which remains within false appearance (ibid.). Moreover, precisely the nothing of what was true in the
preceding stage, now sinks for consciousness to the level of its way of
knowing it and since the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the
in-itself, this latter is now the new object (ibid.). It is only at this moment, through determinate negation of the universal, then, that a new
pattern of consciousness comes on the scene (ibid.).
For Hegel, then, necessity itself involves dissolution, power, becoming, and Spiritwhat is effectively the repeating movement of the new
object, and with it, the raising of Life to the universal. On a par with Life,
Time is the form of the true, and as this form it ek-statically separates
itself in this movement into a ground outside. Time, the only form
of both the true and the actual, is the Subject (as Substance) that as to
its content, for us, appears simultaneously as movement and as a pro-
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cess of becoming; the tarrying with the negative that gives determinateness an existence, superseding abstract immediacy, is mediation itself
(PG, 32). Hegel invests dissolution with the power of the process of
becoming and Spirit is this power (ibid.). The circle that remains selfenclosed is Deathif it is what we want to call this actualityyet this
works to make the life of Spirit not the life that shrinks from death
(ibid.).
Thus, in this exquisite explanation of the eliding movement of consciousness, Hegel anticipates Heidegger and as well Deleuze: sign, life,
and time are expressions in the present. Completion of the series (Absolute Knowledge) in this down-spiraling movement simultaneously repeats
and suffers multiple shocks. Tarrying with the negative defies bondage
to end or a limit (neither the death of man nor the death of God)
but might accommodate a version of the death instinct and death drive
(Freud, Lacan):
Consciousness [unlike natural life], however, is explicitly the Notion
[Begriff ] of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and
these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. . . . Thus
consciousness suffers violence at its own hands . . . Its anxiety may well
make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state
of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its
own unrest disturbs this inertia. (PG, 80)
Consciousness suffers from neither a defect nor a void, yet rushes in unhalting progress toward its goal (the concept itself), admitting nothing except as it is comprehended [begreifen] in speculative science [begreifende Wissenschaft] in terms of the concept (PG, 80). This, then, is
an imperative that explains consciousnesss inability to find peace, its
unrest, and its disturbance out of inertia (ibid.). In sum, Life (as in
Warminski) satisfies a better reading criterion than anthropogenesis.
As such, Hegel owes a debt to Deleuze, for opening up the fold of
difference to which the I relates. Yet it would be inadequate, given ongoing exchanges in the second half of twentieth-century Europe, to ask
for a direct correspondence between Hegel and Deleuze, and this is not
the aim of what follows. With the transformation entered through Heidegger, a major rethinking of negation and negativity, notably the facticity of Dasein, its task of interpretation, and whether and how it derives
from the articulation of the question of Being, centers these debates (BT,
43337). With the debates in mind, Deleuze contests whether death in
Hegel is a negation. What I want to clarify here is that and how the no-
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tion of Thought, and finally Life, for Deleuze, carries more peculiarity
than for his interlocutors.
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down into the average-everydayness of being out of their distantiality (Abstndigkeit) (BT, 12627). To support Daseins transcendental dispersion
(Zerstreuung), in Heideggers universe, utterances depend upon reflecting back in and for themselves world and worldhood, the referential totality of sign, to adjust the usefulness of the tool, ready-to-hand (equipment,
das Zeug) (BT, 7779). Efficiency here implies a subordination of consciousness, sign, work, and the family, to individual being-in-the-world.
By contrast, Deleuze grants to Time as differential of Thought and the
given (the Unthought) an imaginary function: as the operation of the
eternal recurrence of forces (to be affirmed, related to, and so on), time
is imaginary throughout, it therefore more radically negates (frees up
into immanence) than does negation in consciousness (in the proposition, not here and not there). In other words, the exceptional status
of the temporizing instant lies in the fact that it shocks, displaces out of
arrest, since the difference out of which it expresses is not necessity, nor
nature, nor even freedom and destiny, but Eternity behind affirmation
and force, the power of relation. The event is that no one ever dies, but
has always just died or is always going to die, in the empty present of the
Aion, that is, in eternity (LS, 63). Now, recall that, for Heidegger, Beings
subordination to time, even to the propriative event, is premised upon
being interrupted, irruption in the midst of the world and as well outside of Beings epochal History. For Heidegger, the phenomenon of the
world, the having been of past-present has been covered over (forgetting of the forgetting of Being)and yet freeing up of the forgetting of
forgetting to another forgetting before (mans and ontologys) forgetting is nevertheless an an-archaic aim (BT, 2). Something similar is going
on with Deleuzes communication of eternitys aim, and the interest in
the unthought and the nonlinguistic in Heidegger might be closer positioned to the third form of man/God in Deleuze (indicated above).
This is exactly where Foucault, Deleuze appears to argue, surrenders to a utopian idea, appearing like a severe form of hallucination
or the hallucinatory theme of the double (F, 112). Deleuze chides Foucault for this surrender since it implies an onto-theological warrantee at
the source of meaning, Being trapped in the hands of the god of Chronos, cutting off the truth that it produces from its thread to the infinite.
As Daniel Smith puts it, for Deleuze, the problem with language and the
structure-sign is that one is led astray if one analyzes language in its full
blown, adult state, so to speak, without adopting a genetic point of view.14
Deleuzes geneticism of Thought repeats without Subject, for time as
subject is called memory and absolute memory doubles the present
and the Outside, while, for its part the Outside is a repetition (F, 107).
As Foucaults Theatrum Philosophicum established, Deleuzes phantasm
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It may, thus, be that questions concerning even the alterity of the Other
in Levinas are coincidental with what Deleuze calls Life; divesting the
first-person singular of personhood (possession, egology, mastery) establishes the being-brought-before of an ethics in which being-with is
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in raising the individual to the universal and the absolute (the story of
Desire). For Deleuze, We/I, the privileged member, consciousness, Ariadne, the agent of her desireobserve. What we cannot do is witness
thoughts own geneticism to testify, to engage in knowledge. Authenticating death proper, witnessing desire, speaking about it, entails completion
of the story, drawing the thread to a closewhich Deleuze does not want
to do. Nonetheless, only doing so, which is what we do when we speak,
when we make ontological claims, entails imposing a limit on the field
that the field itself excludes and expels. On the level of accessibility, I
have tried to show, we see a limitation at work in the singularities of the
field of sense, and thence an echo between Deleuze and Hegels position
that the self grasps itself through the limits of the other as pointing to
the sense of life.
Notes
1. Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1969).
2. Andrzej Warminski, Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life, in Hegel
After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), 17193.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), 109.
4. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 195.
5. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962), 4243. Referred to
parenthetically in the text as BT, followed by the page number.
6. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 62.
7. The proper way to say this in Warminski via Paul de Man is that the sign
is catachrestic in nature. For the purposes of this chapter I simplify this usage
and call it simply sign. See HM, 18486.
8. An echo of my approach can be found in Deleuzes review of Hyppolites Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997), 19197, which argues that, for Hyppolites
Hegel, sense is related to ontology and becoming, something beyond the merely
anthropological. However, that encounter between Deleuze and Hegel is framed
by Hegels Science of Logic and the issue of becoming, and here I wish to approach
the issue through the Phenomenology and the issue of life.
9. G. W. F.Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, vol. 3 of Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970);
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
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13
In the Postface to the Anglo-American Edition of his Variations, JeanClet Martin surprised his readers with the announcement of a new book
on Hegel. I begin to feel, he wrote, the need for a book on the Phenomenology of the Spirit, where the enemy will find a better place in the network of friendships, introduced by Deleuze in What Is Philosophy?, than
he has found in the smiles of the most ardent disciples. In this book,
there would be a follow up, a fugue for a new variation seeking counterpoints and singularities in the patience of the negative, instead of in the
joys and affirmations that Deleuze has legitimately found in Spinoza.1
We did not have to wait long. Recently, this book has been published by
La Dcouverte with the title Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie: Lire
la Phenomnologie de lEsprit de Hegel.2 And what a surprise it is! It asks a
philosophically bearded Hegel to yield his place to a Hegel with the long
nails and yellow eyes of Deleuze. The accursed share and the stubborn remainder of the dimanches qui chantent are now shown to be figures of a
criminal plot that labors to find the Absolute in what is most improbable:
It is the most improbable, but also the most quarrelsome and indefinable that strives to come to being (236).
In the title of Martins book, the word intrigue has the same amphisemy as the English word plot. It refers to the structure of a story,
the articulation of a play, or to the paratactic and hypotactic concatenation of episodes in a diegesis. But it also refers to the unanticipated twists
and turns, to the improbable sequence of events in a detective story that
holds us breathless. Hegels Phenomenology is, for Martin, an intrigue in
both senses. To prepare the reader to approach Hegels book as one
would a fable or a tale, Martin introduces his chapters with o lon apprend or o il est question or o lon dcouvre. Take, for example,
the first chapterThe Circle of Consciousnessthat Martin refers
to as First Scene. The summary that follows, placed in the center of
the page and surrounded by empty space, begins with the following sen223
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tence: O LON APPREND que le philosophe porte secours aux criminels et que la philosophie sentend en un sens extra-moral. The second
sceneunder the title The Roads of Desirehas the curtain go up
with this passage: O IL EST QUESTION de la rumination animale, du
dsir . . . and so on and so forth. Now, neither a play nor a tale nor a
detective story could be an example of their genre if their plot were arranged according to the deductive necessity of formal logic. It would not
be an intrigue. To present itself with intrigue, Hegels Phenomenology has
to attest to the contingency of becoming. History, writes Martin, cannot be conceived under the yoke of nature or the mechanical linking
of social facts . . . The Spirit has to tear itself off this double determination . . . in order to enter History successfully and to achieve the freedom
of its deployment (103).
But in what sense is the Phenomenologys intrigue criminal? In what
sense is it the tale of crime? Initially, Martin unearths an essay from 1807,
Who Thinks Abstractly?3 in which Hegel supports the philosopher,
who, in his effort to gather all factors relevant to the crime committed,
appears to side with the criminal, against the facile abstractions of doxa.
And then Martin goes on to write: We must assume a rapture, a scratch,
in order to reach lifean inaugural crime that creates an opening . . .
Only in the death, the crime and the sacrifice of its perfectiononly in
the contestation of the angelic perfection of the Ideadoes the Spirit
find the means to open itself unto existence . . . The Absolute does not
bring about a separation in the direction of the heights; it does not detach itself from the world in transcendence. On the contrary, it separates
itself in a Fall, which is a movement of being submerged and divided according to a trajectory of immanence. In the last analysis, it is evil that
stands for the root of creation (23637).
Now, instead of heaping quotations upon quotations, I invited JeanClet Martin to present his book to us by answering a few questions that
occurred to me as I was reading it. He graciously accepted my invitation,
and what follows is the transcript of an interview that I had with him in
October of 2010.
CVB: I would like to leave for others a discussion on your books fidelity to Hegel. I was intrigued by the fact that you, one of the best readers of Deleuze today, chose to write it without even setting aside your
Deleuze-colored spectacles. You have written on Borges, Van Gogh, Aristotle, and Nancy, but to us Anglo-Americans, you are best known as a
reader of Deleuzeand for good reason. When in 1989, I approached
Deleuze and asked him to help me choose contributors for the volume
on his philosophy that Dorothea Olkowski and I were then collaborating
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on, Deleuze spoke of you with total confidence. You were, at that time,
completing your Ossuaire and your Variations had not yet been published.
He knew, of course, of your bookhe had already composed the Letter
that now prefaces itand we know it, too, thanks to the translation that
Edinburgh University Press has made available. Your profound understanding of Deleuzes positions that emerges from its pages, your creative
fidelity to his work, and your dexterity at weaving variations that follow
the modulations of his thought fully justify Deleuzes confidence in you
and showcase your ability to think and write in accordance with Deleuzes
lines of flight. But I cannot hide from you the surprise I felt when I read
in the Postface of your book that you were experiencing the need to
compose one more variationthis time, with Hegel in mindwhere
the enemy will find a better place in the network of friendships introduced by Deleuze. As your reference to the enemy reveals, you do
not overlook the fact that, with very few exceptions, friends and foes of
Deleuze continue to emphasize the abyss that separates the identity of
the one from the difference of the other, to the point of assessing the
raison dtre of Deleuzes libidinal deconstruction as the dismantling
of Hegels Absolute Knowledge.4 We may then begin our discussion of
your book at this point.
One recent essay speaks of Deleuzes resentment towards Hegel
and adds that, of all major philosophers discussed by Deleuze . . . Hegel
receives by far the least sympathetic treatment; whereas in all the other
cases, Deleuze is able to retrieve something useful for his own philosophy,
his critique of Hegel is almost unrelentingly negative.5 As our interview
continues, we could try to come to grips with the specific arguments
Hegels is a philosophy of identity; the Phenomenology is a humanism; the
centrality of the negative muffles the voices of affirmation; desire collapses into need, and so onthat ground the conclusion of this author
and then bring your own assessments of Hegels intentions to bear on
your obvious disagreement. But, before we follow this road, could you
perhaps take us back to an earlier timethe time of the birth and origin
of your need to seek counterpoints and singularities in the patience of
the negative? How and why does a reader today experience the need to
reopen the files on the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel?
J-CM: This is a broad and complex question; therefore, I will be able to
focus on only a few of its points. Really, why would we want to return to
Hegel if we follow in the footsteps of Deleuze, who obviously does not
owe a great deal to Hegel? And I would not forgive myself were I to suggest that Hegel had anticipated the multiplicities or the variations of
Deleuze. To claim, like Slavoj iek, that Hegel had already sketched
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the horizon of contemporary thought is, in the last analysis, to say that
Deleuze and Derrida did not exist, that they invented nothing and it
would be enough to return to these more interesting precursors, Hegel
or Schelling. This way of canceling out the specificity of contemporary
thought by returning to Marx or to Hegel does not correspond at all with
my own position. Surely, Deleuzes reading of Marx would have been very
different from Marxs own. One must really be very nearsighted not to
understand that Deleuze and Hegel do not participate in the same century
or the same epoch and that it is impossible to find in Hegel what Deleuze
deploys from the perspective of another image of thought. It seems to
me that Hegel himself would have refused to give up the singularity of Deleuze, if he could have read him, precisely because he was determined to
keep the ages of the world distinct from one another and to show how the
experience of consciousness presupposes a form of empiricism. It is impossible not to discern in the Phenomenology of Spirit this form that returns
to the appearances instead of finding satisfaction with essences.
Well then, Why could not Deleuze appreciate Hegel? is a different question whose answer depends on the way in which Deleuze thought about
difference and repetition. The ritornello does not follow the movement
of a circle or an encyclopedia. This is itwe are on very different terrains, on milieus that cannot be superimposed. The ethologies of their
concepts cannot be compared with one another because their images
of thought are incompatible. It seems to me that, if Hegel is Deleuzes
enemy, the enemys position becomes interesting when we relate it to the
way that Deleuzein What Is Philosophy? 6 transforms the friend into
the engine of philosophy. Friends and enemies are found at the heart of
the history of philosophy. We see it in Seneca, for example, whoat the
center of an empire (where people switch positions constantly)reveals
a friendship that is stronger than any family tie. Nevertheless, this friendship is ever-changing, open to encounters; meanwhile the Greek city was
preoccupied with the rivalry of clans and the oppositions and quarrels
that Hegel himself denounces in his analysis of the family. I think that
every epoch finds its definition in the posture of the friend. Facebook
today offers us one example: each of us now has so many friends that
we would love to have a few enemies to really read our profiles, instead
of merely glancing over the simple clichs and announcements that are
buzzing around. Friends like these are, indeed, very sad companions. It
seems to me that Hegel is truly the enemy that Deleuze was waiting for
the enemy worthy of himhe who would oblige us to reread Deleuze by
way of a new strategy, instead of being satisfied with the often ridiculous
repetition of those friends who use deterritorialization and rhizome
without ever thinking about their actual meaning.
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So, Hegel and Deleuze are enemies. So be it! But how the enemy
sees the friendthis is something really interesting! What does she find
in him so remarkable that it makes her transcend the commonplace of
indifference? How does the ordinary become something remarkable and
singular? I think that the way in which I bring Hegel to bear on Deleuze
is the result of the respect that makes Nietzsche say that we need a bit of
air, that the friend suffocates us; that the one who has friends has many
more problems with them than with the enemies against whom he really
measures himself. As a personal anecdote, I would say that my book on
Hegel corresponds to an event of my own trajectory. I had submitted an
M.A. thesis on Hegel to the University of Strasbourg. The title was Critique
of Negative Difference. It was a reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit that I
often discussed with Deleuze, who used to tell me that it is good, this
workHegel is the first to think movement in the concept, to think
the concept in terms of movement. Well, when Deleuze says that so and
so is the first to . . . he really considers him a creator, the inventor of a
notion that he endorses with his own name. Hegel is the name of movement. No doubt about it! However, this movement is not the movement
of Deleuzethe rhythm and danse are not the same, the negative does
not proceed from affirmation in the same manner as Spinozas, its powers
are not of the same nature. But it is this difference of nature that makes
Hegel interesting as a dancer, as a wrestler, even if reluctantly and at an
inopportune moment one must fight to discover a different way of thinking. This makes me think of a remark Borges made about tango: it is a
duel, a danse of two enemy brothers, performed with knivesa mannerism of martial arts. In this context, my reading of Hegel makes possible
a radiography of Deleuze: a negativein the photographic sense of this
wordthat makes room for a new visibility. But under no circumstances
is it a question of Hegel making the same movement as Deleuzein the
place of Deleuzewhen we, the readers of Deleuze, know full well that
this place has its own signature.
CVB: Readers of Deleuze know that philosophies of difference are not
compatible with the thought of the negative, and that the Hegelian dialectic is an expression and a subterfuge of the servile will. In Nietzsche
and Philosophy, we read that for the affirmation of difference, [Hegels
dialectic] substitutes the negation of that which differs; for the affirmation of self, it substitutes the negation of the other; and for the affirmation of affirmation, it substitutes the famous negation of the negation.7
And we realize that this list of substitutions succinctly expresses Deleuzes
critique of Hegel. Even Jean Wahl, in an attempt to safeguard the prerogatives of dialectic, and despite his otherwise complimentary review
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of Deleuzes book, could not help but express his reservations toward
Deleuzes sustained effort to wipe out all vestiges of the dialectic from
Nietzsches philosophy.8 Among Anglo-American readers of Deleuze, there
is an ongoing dispute between those who believe that Deleuze remained
a dialectician of some sort, despite his denunciation of (a certain kind
of) dialectics, and those who prefer to hold on to his anti-dialectic stance,
without any qualifications. As you know well, this quarrel is not about
who has the better grasp of the texts or who can claim her unshakeable
fidelity to the legacy of the master. The quarrel has politico-philosophical
implications. It is, therefore, intriguing to discover in your book subtle
qualifications and circumspect hesitations that would prevent the negative and the dialectic from becoming the sworn enemies of a thought that
takes its flight from the joys of Spinoza and the affirmations of Nietzsche.
You hold that those who emphasize the omnipotence of the negative in
Hegels philosophy must not obscure the fact that it is the negative that
prevents the system from closing in upon itself. Moreover, you write, the
negative [would not] be able to operate . . . if the thing [did not] possess . . . the power and the capacity to bear the lack that torments it from
the inside. On the other side of lack, we have the force of an entity that
manifests its aptitude to transcend itself (29). Or again, as you speak of
need and desire, you say: We are far from a sheer lack, far from the void
of a desire that passively submits to the object that would mechanically fill
it . . . [It is not a question] of the expression of a privation but rather of
a veritable force, a push and a tendency that comes from the organism,
which is ready to take up this division that causes its inside to relate to
an outside (57). And, for good measure, you quote from Hegels Logic:
Negativity is the immanent pulsation of an autonomous, spontaneous
and living movement.9 Finally, when you speak of the Hegelian dialectic,
you characterize it in a way that brings it closer to the critical unmasking
that we are accustomed to associating with the genealogy: Hegel calls
. . . dialectical overturning a critical enterprise that attempts to bring
about the fall of all maskseven those that are to be found in the most
sublime nooks and crannies, being dissimulated behind the morality of
the master and the servant (191). But what would you say to the one who
voices his suspicion that your qualifications subordinate the negative to
an originary affirmation and fail to emphasize, beyond its critical function, the creative potential of the dialectic movement? Unmasking and
creating are not the same thingare they?
J-CM: It seems to me that Deleuze dislikes the dialectic not only for moral
but also for instrumental reasons. The dialectic is a tool. The eternal
recurrence is a completely different tool. The question then is what is
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the value of these tools from a functional point of view? Is not morality dependent upon functions whose distant effectsbut also the least
expected ones from the point of view of symptomatologywere discovered by Nietzsche? It is true that the dialectic is the tool of the weak, according to the reading that Deleuze reserves for Nietzsche, and that the
active forces do not operate in accordance with a dialectical mode. We
could speak of anti-dialectics in this context, if it were not for the fact that
anti is already dialectical. Affirmation abandons the dialectical scheme
because from the beginning it is pointed toward the futurea javelin
thrown in the direction of a distant target whose rules are not typical.
The dialectic, on the other hand, repeats in an identical style the
forms of exploration that depend on memory and, as a result, it remains
a prisoner of the pastnot unlike the donkey. We should leave behind
the obstinacy of the donkey. It is a question of forgetting, of the salutary
forgetting of those who affirm and the creative cry of a force liberated
from the same old refrain.
However, we cannot cling to this vision and extend it over the totality of Deleuzes work. Obviously it is a significant moment, absolutely
valid in the context of Deleuzes interpretation of Nietzsche. The mistake
will be to forget its instrumentality and to conclude that the tool of this
selective distinction of the passive from the active may be projected as an
absolute over the rest of Deleuzes texts. Can we ever imagine Deleuze in
the rigid posture of one who forces this scheme past the territory of its
own validity? Can we expand or exchange territories without modifying
the concepts themselves? We must take care not to freeze the opposition
and not to tinker with dualisms because of our obstinacy and our fidelity
to Deleuze. As soon as Deleuze reads Bergson, he is suddenly before notions that demand a new toolbox. It is easy to understand that the couple
Matter and Memory will not be able to function with accordance
to the mode active/reactive. A new machine must be built. Forgetting
may very well be a good thing as long as we are situated inside the break
within which Nietzsche operates. But quite the contrary, it is memory
that we need inside Bergsons break. We must then be prudent when we
read Deleuze, and be aware of the plateau whereupon we find ourselves.
Notice, after all, that in What Is Philosophy? Hegel strikes Deleuze as an
important dramaturgist when it comes to organizing the moments and
figures that compose the dimensions of the concept. This is not a contradiction in the economy of Hegels work; it is a simple redeployment
of tools. That Deleuze is not a dialectician does not prevent him from
creating an immense arrangement with the help of Bergson, with Creative
Evolution providing the historial montage and Matter and Memory the
counterpart, Logic. It is in the new reading of Bergson that Deleuze
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discovers the multiplicities and the new pair, actual/virtual, which is very
different from the active/reactive pair. In view of the newly discovered
territory, we are now measured against planes that overlap, that bring
about stratifications, extensions, and envelopments, while diffused in
matter and contracted in memory. Even if we were to try both machines
and taste similar intensities in different contexts, Bergsons cone is a
much more complicated machine than the twists and turns of the eternal return. On the other hand, it seems to me that, on this plane, the
fabrication of machines demands other alliances, friends other than the
Nietzscheanswhose avid reader I have never ceased to be. Inside this
factory, the enemy Hegel may come across as a partner, and as interesting
as Nietzsche, provided that we focus on the texts that Hegel dedicates to
the idea of life or even to the machine before we begin to discuss desire.
I return, however, to the question of the dialectic. There isnt the
slightest doubt that the Hegelians transformed it into a hackneyed tale;
it is the same mistake that a Deleuzian makes when he forcibly stretches
a concept over every plateau of his work. For my part, what I retain from
the dialectic is its dialect aspecta dialect that insinuates itself inside
the margins and infiltrates the seediest parts of Western culture to listen
to a language very different from that of morality, and to reveal from time
to time what morality, with its mask of good and common sense, often
dissimulates. Dialectics, therefore, I understand to be a dialect and even,
underneath the dialect and its operatic folklore, I see dialectics as a diabolical forcethe devil [diable] in his essence being diabolicalinside
minor dialects that shipwreck the power of the unilectic language. The
word unilectic, of course, does not exist but we should invent it when it
comes to the discourse of authoritythe pontifical language.
Deleuze is therefore elsewherebeyond the simple opposition dialectic/anti-dialecticno matter how clear the stakes of this pair may be,
as long as we stick with Nietzsche and Philosophy. Deleuze lives in an epoch
in which the infinite no longer exists as a problem: it has lost its appeal
and no longer has the same impact, especially when placed next to Chaos.
The Hegelian dialectic, I think, responds to the question of the modern
infinite, whereas the logic of multiplicities is rather a response to the
Chaos that the contemporary epoch requires us to face. I try to confront
this problem in my latest book, Plurivers: Essai sur la fin du monde,10 where
no dialectics would remember how to fabricate a world. Not even the
devil would be able to promise us a new lifeas he does in Faust. Only
the strange entities that Deleuze has us encounter through the impersonality of becoming-animal could do this. I think this is the real novelty of Deleuze: that he places us in front of the animalface-to-face
with animal sensations and animal spirits that the West must understand
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before they become extinct, and face-to-face with machines that we must
learn to handle before we leave this life. In Hegels philosophy, on the
other hand, becoming is still thought of in terms of the opposition nature/
culture: the question here is how to transcend the animal and how to be
free of the machine. And yet, inside the Phenomenology of Spirit where the
animals are often shown the door in the name of an essentially anthropological desire, my reading finds them reentering from the windows.
As for machines, we will undoubtedly have the opportunity to talk again.
CVB: That Hegel is the severe critic of Kant and his moral vision of the
world is beyond dispute. He sees that a grandiloquent morality grounded
on duty is the expression of a servile willand an empty expression, to
boot. You expose this critique masterfully. But does this critique make
him a genealogist of beyond good and evil? And if it does, are you
still entitled to read the Phenomenology as a criminal intrigue? It seems to
me that the clearest statement as to why the intrigue is criminal comes
at the very end of your book. You write: The Absolute does not bring
about a separation in the direction of the heights. It is separated from
itself through a Fall, and in accordance with a movement that causes it
to sink and to be divided along a line of immanence. In the last analysis,
it is evil that stands at the root of creation (237, emphasis mine). Now, if
Hegel holds evil to be the root of creation, you are right in receiving the
Phenomenology as a criminal plot. But then it will be difficult to maintain
that Hegels critique of the moral vision leads to a space beyond good
and evil. A space beyond good and evil can be maintained only if the
Fall ushers in a disease (not a crime) which, like pregnancy, gives rise
to the new, the better, and the nobler. In other words, the conclusion of
your book should accommodate crime and the evildoer as little as your
earlier discussions of figures of bad consciencestoicism, skepticism,
and so onhave done. It was, you recall, with these figures in mind that
you invoked Nietzsches diagnosis of pregnancy. And, despite your qualifications, to assimilate the Fall of the Absolute to crime will cause the
negative to have the last word; not to mention the fact that the God thinking His own thought of the Science of Logic will not match the arche and
the eschaton of the Hegelian saga.
J-CM: It seems to me that Hegels philosophy is not a moral philosophy,
and in this respect he is among the first to consider moral judgments to
be constructions whose histories must be accounted for. Indeed, morality has a history of morality and this is important when we think of Kant,
who posits morality as a fact of reason that cannot admit any outside
interference. Nothing touches it; nothing can affect it other than moral-
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ity itself. For Kant, the fact of reason that the categorical imperative
represents is a universal understanding with an absolutely unconditioned
causality that is autonomous with respect to natural causality. The imperative is the first factthe only fact that we can respect, without deriving it from any prior determination. Nothing exists before it! In the last
analysis, the Kantian critique gives itself ready-made what it should have
investigated. Is it possible to launch a different and stronger critique?
Hegels critique precisely consists of showing that morality itself is
a phenomenona historically determined mode of appearing. Leaving
behind the presumption that morality is given as an absolute, we must
reexamine its real formation. The claim that morality is autonomous
leads Kant in the direction of the phenomenon of an inaugural fact that
is valid for all places and all times. He is, therefore, doing everything
possible to keep morality away from phenomenology. In contrast, Hegel
thinks that a real critique must be less naive and that the critique of reason that considers itself pure must move beyond, very much beyond, the
aspirationsthemselves metaphysical and illusoryof theoretical reason to swallow the practical field. Produce a history of practical reason
no one had thought of it, with the exception of the Enlightenment with
which Hegel would very carefully establish relations. To say that there is
an origin of moral judgments means to assert that such and such a figure
has not always existed, that it behooves us to discover the point where this
figure begins, and to acknowledge that it manifests itself here; whereas
different forms prevail elsewhere. Such a submission of morality to an
origin and a beginning that it does not want to acknowledge I call a genealogy of morals. However, Hegels genealogy differs over many points
from Nietzsches, because Nietzsches pays more attention to the psychic
and instinctual [pulsionnelle] moral arrangement; whereas Hegel insists
on social facts and the geo-historical variation of moral judgments. Is it
criminal to think this way or is the term I use a mere metaphor?
A gesture of this nature seems criminal to me with respect to German idealism. I think that Hegels adventure would appear dangerously
insane to Fichte, taken up, as he was, in the splendor of the I = I. It would
come across as insensible to the splendor of morality inside which idealism
will try to drown theoretical reason, having taken the categorical imperative as the origin of the worldthe world as Will. (It seems to me that
Schopenhauer owes everything to Kant as far as this point is concerned; he
represents the last stage of idealism becoming skeptic.) I tried to rethink
of Hegel within the context of the image of thought that was dominant in
his time, and place him inside the philosophies of absolute identity, only to
realize that Hegel is not a member of the family because he has difficulties
with the Universitythe thing that endeared him to me, I should say . . .
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complicated point that I leave hanging for the time being, as I am already
at some distance from your question.
CVB: You wrote: Hegels philosophy is not an anthropology . . . With
a gesture comparable to Nietzsches own, Hegel demands that man be
overcome. It is not possible to bring this philosophy over to Feuerbachs
humanism . . . The Phenomenology of Spirit can never be confused with
humanism, and the existence in the name of which Hegel offers us his
instructions cannot be reduced to the freedom of man (218). And you
went on to say: The Hegelian intrigue rises toward a logical arrangement,
toward the apprehension of a thought whose notions are no longer at
the mercy of man, but they rather demand the creation of a mode of impersonal and inhuman narration indebted to the Concept capable of explicating itself in accordance with its own ways (221). Nevertheless, you
do admit that between the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic there is
difference in form and content. The Phenomenology is a tale of initiation;
the Science of Logic asks that logic be understood as the system of pure
reason . . . [Its] content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal
essence, before the creation of nature and a finite mind.11 Now, it seems
to me that this difference demands that you offer a more elaborate explanation than the one you give of the relation between the Phenomenology
and the Logic. What is the relationship between the tale of initiation and
the noesis noeseos? How can one be initiated to the thought of God before
Creation if the road to initiation goes by the way of Dasein? How does
Hegel succeed where Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann have failed? It
seems that we need a more elaborate demonstration; that Hegel is in fact
an antihumanist; and that his antihumanism can be considered a variation on Deleuzes own. There is one more claim of yours that makes me
wonder: Man, you say, in the finitude of his most rudimentary values . . .
experiences a desire in view of which he appears to himself as a being
that must be overcome (218). Now, I grant you that Hegel thinks so. But
then you add: It is this desire that derails the merely organic life and
sends it over to the inorganic of art and philosophy. This may be Deleuzian, but I am not yet convinced that it is Hegelian. In derailing desire
and overcoming man, some of Hegels readers seem to have established
mans deification, rather than the production of the life of the inorganic.
J-CM: Well, this is a very complicated question and I do not exactly know
how to approach it. Let us begin with Heidegger. In Hegel, there is an
apprehension of modes of existence, the association of which is given the
name Spirit, and not at all the name of subject or substance. We cannot
count on any subject that is either given or can be logically constructed,
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forest clearings. If Hegel is not Nietzschean, it is because of the accidental manner through which he envisages the relationship between Logic
and Existence.
Now, the inorganic, for me, means two things. It is, first, in the
Logic, which I understand on the basis of the Phenomenology, a desire to
recompose the faculties according to a new arrangement that we can
call Spirit. This rearrangement, however, does not have to endure, as
is the case with Heidegger and occasionally with Derrida, a reflection on
discourse or on the procedures of language. Hegel refuses to go through
language (which nonetheless does not fail to be the most accomplished
form of the organism and the organization of his corpus). I find throughout Hegel the example and the transversal play of processes that overflow
the function of the enunciation and discursive relations as they carry us
in the direction of other logicsthe logic of a stomach that digests, of
an animal that devours, of a plant that poisons, of a spider that sucks the
blood of its victim, or of a guillotine that cuts off heads. And this travels
by roads that are not those of significationsomething that occasionally
makes Hegel unreadable. This is it: I think that there are functions and
functionings in Hegel that we have not been able to appreciate because
of the primacy we continue to give, since Nietzsche, to language and to
our obstinacy of limiting the Logic to the confines of grammar, as well as
the proposition that grammatology in particular was supposed to have
deconstructed. And it seems to me that it is this impoverishing reduction to
grammar that Hegel puts out of play when he reflects on the composition
of a Logic upon completion of the Phenomenology. As for the question
of art, he is not explicitly concerned with poetry and tragedy, but with
many other forms of visibility where the question will be about a Spirit
that is not filtered through the snares of language. The aesthetics that
follows shows the antihumanism that dismantles the relationship of art
to imitation and beauty. But this is another point that threatens to take
us away from our purpose.
CVB: Permit me to quote you once more: Hegels book displays two
planes, each one of which has a different speed of composition: the raging, conflictual series of acting figures that we apprehend with the help
of events; and another series, which, in every section, reaches a different
point of interpretation. This latter series is a repetition that he who acts
in History does not see, being unable to read what he does and ignorant of the becoming that he helps hatch. This line of sense occurs behind his back; it is the series of momentsthe slower and ampler of the
twothe pacified thread of which the philosopher-historian is going to
follow retrospectively backwards (13031). This way of referring to the
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two planes makes me think that, according to your reading, the Hegelian planes with their difference prefigure Deleuzes distinction and supplementarity between becoming and history. And you seem to confirm
this suspicion when, a few paragraphs earlier, you quote from Deleuze
and Guattaris What Is Philosophy?: Hegel powerfully defined the concept through the Figures he created and the Moments he posited. The
Figures become parts of the concept because they constitute the aspect
through which the concept is created by and in consciousness, through
successive minds; whereas the Moments form the other aspect, according to which the concept posits itself and unites minds in the absolute
of the Self.12 Now, the difference that Deleuze and Guattari postulate
between becoming and history is essentially the difference between the
virtual and the actual. But then what do you mean to say when you write
that at the time of the Phenomenology, the moorings of this amphibious
being have yet to be found: the reconciliation of the two worlds that
Hegel senses moving inside himthe real and the virtualproves to be
very far away? (23435). Is your qualification of the two worldsmade
in terms of the real and the virtuala mere lapsus calami? Did you mean
to write, instead, the actual and the virtual? If it were not your intention here to express a point in a Deleuzian garb (whereby both actual
and virtual would be real), then you may be saying that, at the time of
the Phenomenology, the possible and the real are still far apart from each
other. But if your real at this point stands indeed for the actual-real
and your virtual, for the virtual-real, your reader may be excused for
being confused, since she brings to her reading the knowledge that the
incommensurability between becoming and history, in Deleuze, is not
affected by the passage of time. You could perhaps help this reader by
further elaborating on the anticipation/promise that you seem to have
built around a phrase that begins with an unless: There would be no
logic capable of accounting [for a new, superhuman existence], unless a
different Logic were to be reinvented, with a sense that is no longer terrified of the absurd (235, emphasis mine).
J-CM: Yes, you are right about the two planes to which you refer: they
do not adopt the same rhythm. I wanted to show that History, in Hegels
sense, is not a mere succession of facts chained together according to the
ternary circulation of what we call dialectics, but that, rather, we are faced
with a serial history, which is very different from that of the historians
of his time. Serial and qualitative. I would also like to draw attention to
the following fact: the word dialectics rarely appears in the text of the
Phenomenology of Spirit, and when it does, it is in an extremely minimalist
and timid way, as if it were to describe an immanent movement, a proc-
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ess that returns to itself and coils in on itself. It has nothing to do with
the meaning that the word has in Plato, Aristotle, or Kant who always
use it for their own specific purposes. But what have Hegels commentators done? Well, they have discovered dialectics to be ubiquitous, to the
point of completely forgetting the incredible and extraordinary events
of which Hegel speaks in the Phenomenology and in the Logic. They have
maintained a ternary skeletal structure, believing themselves to be happy
and reassured at the illumination of the affair, allowing the rest to be
registered as merely decorative. You understand of course that I followed
the inverse procedure.
We could forget about the word dialectics, that occurs only three
times in the Phenomenology, and move on, or we could explain it a little
explain why at the level of the Phenomenology readers expose themselves
to be more Hegelian than Hegel, yet so very stingy with justifications. It
was not through me that the reading of Hegel was forced. I tried instead
to go back to this emblematic thinker in an amiable way (without ever
forgetting the concerns I expressed in my earlier books where the approach is not the same and the criticisms have their place and their justification). There are, then, in Hegel two planesthe pacified plane of
moments, and the raging plane of figures that intersect in keeping with
a method we could call dialectics, provided that we do not forget the
infernal virtues of the dialectic to which I alluded in my third response
the wealth of dialects that spring up with it, to the point of obscuring the
very exposition of the system. And, of course, I have been thinking of Deleuzes claim in his book on Spinoza that distinguishes the volcanic chain
of the scolia from the continuous line of propositions in the Ethics.
Let us simply say that I could not resist the desire to read Hegel in the
way that Deleuze taught me to read Spinoza. Nor could I resist noticing
a certain relationship with the acceleration of the last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit that places us squarely inside eternity, inaugurating a
machine that did not exist earliera machine that Hegel calls Absolute
Knowledge, and which is neither the eternal return nor Bergsons cone.
And believe me, this machine operates with an efficacy that we do not
find elsewhere. How can we tackle this machine? I must confess that it is
a complete mystery and that the Absolute Knowledge is so illogical that
until now nobody has been able to tell us what makes it revolve, notwithstanding the declarations that find in it Science, System, and so on. It is,
indeed, very curious that we forget to ask what Hegel means by science
and system, and fail to remember that the science of the spirit has
nothing to do with what we call science in the domain of matter and
nature. Not to mention the fact that objective and subjective logic would
not suffice to bring us to the intelligence of absolute logic.
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Well then, to answer your question I would put the real on the
side of time, of the chain of time that the moments offer us; whereas
the virtual is to be found entirely in leaps and anachronisms. The latter
reveals the racing rhythm of figures that intervene in many different moments or places where, like a demon, they were not expectedcasual
and surprising, sharing in an instance that I would call eternity. The
real and the virtual, the moments and the figures, interlace time and
eternity. The question ishow is this passage realized? Is it in a logical
manner? My response is yes, if you wish, but on the condition that we
understand logic other than in the usual way reserved for this word, in a
way that is not exempt from absurdities, as I tried to explain in my fourth
reply in showing that perfection does not lead to existence, that it is
merely possible and unable to aspire to any virtuality. You could then ask
me about the nature of this paradoxical and quantic logic. You yourself
suggest the word sensation. This is perfect! It is something that proceeds from the statute of the image [tableau], from the circulation of
images having become for-themselvesas they pass from the in itself to
the for itselfto the point where they no longer need our brains to survive, having been entirely liberated in a form of pure, almost cinematographic, sensation. Thats it. It looks difficult, but this is the point responsible for the monstrous beauty of the whole, a point of tipping over to
which we will probably return.
CVB: You wrote some beautiful pages about Antigoneechoing the
beautiful pages that Hegel dedicated to her. You spoke of the indispensability of the family in the acquisition of identity; you highlighted the familys ability to make death lose its contingency and accidentality; and you
followed Hegel in his discussion of families capacity to create a space for
the desexualized and sublimated love of the sister-brother relationship.
Also moving are the pages that you wrote, following Hegel, on the clash
between the laws of the city and the laws of the family and on Antigones
double bind. And you went on to designate the relationship between
brother and sister as a motiveless relationship and a veritable body without organs (137). In a footnote to this designation, you claimed that this
concept of Gilles Deleuze fits marvelously to the passages that Hegel
dedicates to the concept of an essentially non-Oedipal family (137, n.
19). In fact, you suggested that Freud and Lacan failed to read Sophocles
with the care that characterizes Hegels reading. Had they done so, they
could not fail to recognize the anti-Oedipal and anti-psychiatric anticipations of Antigone (123). I wonder, having read all these claims, whether
you would concede the boldness of your own reading and of your own
conclusions. You know well that Lacans interpretation of Antigone has
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the vision that God has of HimselfHimself being taken in the hems of
His own dissipation and having descended to the point where evil begins
to expand. To the point that the eye of man and the eye of God are both
open upon the same background . . . as if, without man, God would not
be able to reach the knowledge of Himself, and, without God, man could
not overcome his all-too-human humanity (21718). In other words,
Hegel suggests that the kenosis of God is central to the transformation
of man. But the death of the mediator reveals that God is not one to
come in and help us escape our dire straits. Instead, Hegel, conflating
Easter and Pentecost, argues that the death of the mediator becomes
the presence of the Spirit. The agony of realizing that we humans are
finite becomes the realization that the life lived on the other side of the
death of God is what is meant by the life of the Spirit. That may well be
a new kind of life that transcends our prior existence. But does it justify
the coining of a new termovermanfor this new humanity, along
with the antihumanist rhetoric that this term carries with it? Besides,
the bi-conditional that links the transformation of man with the death
of God makes me wonder about the place of grace in Hegels system.
My reason for asking is this: Christianitys central claim, I take it, is that
soteriologically speaking, man cannot lift himself to salvation by his own
bootstraps. When, therefore, I read in your book about the overcoming
of man, I need to know whether the overcoming is proclaimed la Nietzsche (and his bootstraps) or whether Christ is, for Hegel, the one whose
death combines the ef hapax (absolute singularity) of his death with the
universality of the becoming-Spirit. This is where I would want to see
grace coming in. What do you think?
J-CM: This question of grace is interesting. It seems to me that, yes, grace
comes from the outside. I mean, it is not human, it hardens in traits and
figures that are beyond man and, at the same time, beyond God. Notice
that Christianity needed to match it with a holy spirit, with light, with a
son, with a trinity that is barely paternal and borders on heresy. I would
like to set aside the Hegelianand theologicalplane to make myself
understood as I turn toward my earlier work on eroticism.15 Grace seems
to me to depend on the set of lines that come to drape over a figure. It is
an inversion of the Aura. It is not an expression but rather an impression,
a print, a nexus of curbs, which meet and produce an intersection that
we can call a Subjecta subject as an ensemble of coordinates. Think,
for an example, of a Roman orator. He learns gestures, he casts himself
in gestures, he acquires the manner of a danseur in figures that exist independently of him, as he embodies signs whose signification is received by
his body. This could well describe the ecstasis that prepares us to receive
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a place waiting for us, like a scar that we embody. I really think that this
is the way to understand Deleuze when, in The Logic of Sense, he says that
our wound has been waiting for us, and that the event is a surface effect.
To understand this point better, lets consider Giacomettis sketches.
We see in them a multiplicity of intersecting traits, a veritable ball, an
intersection of threads coming from all directions, which, when completed succeed in creating a portrait. Where then does the figure come
from? It did not preexist like a substance; rather it happens like an incorporeal event being incorporated inside a concretization, a singular
concrescence of volutes, like a hurricane that comes progressively to give
itself an eye. It is not a face that shines, but rather the lines of the landscape that are being inflected upon it. The inversed aura does not become fused, it does not emanate; rather, it immanates: it is a gravitational
collapse of lines that produce a figure as they intersect. Thus, we come
nearer to the forces of the outside that are really the Spirit and come
from a distance to be joined in the movement of grace.
We can then see that Spirit does not mean consciousness or
self-consciousness. On the contrary, the movements of consciousness
need the Spirit to be concatenated. And this is why man must be really
overcome in favor of the impersonal, which is the light that shines when
God himself is lost in his own diffraction, much like a universe under
expansion or like the pluriverse that James knew something about. I see
the relationship between all of these with photography or cinema, both
of which are arts that capture the intervening of grace. And I wonder
whether this is what Hegel means with the notion tableau that circulates in the kingdom of the Spirit. We should come back to this.
However, it seems that this way of helping man and God meet each
other amidst this piercing light that conserves and effaces them both is
very different from what Nietzsche called death of God, and Foucault,
death of man. I would say that God dies in the way that a light bulb
burns out to liberate the light under which men are frightened/find a
new way [seffraient], seized that they are by the sudden entry of becoming [effraction], as if they had waited for the event that precedes them. It
is interesting that Hegel says that the philosopher is a bird of the night.
I cannot stop thinking of the eyes of the barn owl [Effraie]which is the
name of a species of owls in French, but also of fright, which is a clearing
[frayage], a composition of relationships and also a very great fear. Yes, I
cannot stop reading Hegel in a Deleuzian way (a bit more grave perhaps
than Deleuzes reading) where I can find cinema, image, the art of photography, and so on. Does this mean that I force what Hegel really said?
It is possible, but I would say that this is a good sign. We should read an
author to renew himinstead of repeating with the orthodoxy of the
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friend who always muffles him. This is my way of being Hegels enemy,
by reinventing him as I refuse the readings that have blessed him and
tempered him to the point of becoming a caricature. But, at the same
time, this way of understanding the light is perfectly in agreement with
Hegels times, especially as we learn that he was the reader of Goethes
Theory of Colors16 and, together with Schelling, he discovered that bodies
are electric phenomena. It is, in a certain way, the electrification of the
death of God in the universal effusion of a Spirit that reveals. Revelation
itself becomes a photographic revelation. But to understand this obligates us to first understand what a concept is for Hegel.
CVB: Your chapter on the Hegelian concept, as it emerges from the pages
of the Phenomenology, could have been written with equal plausibility and
without any addition or subtraction, about the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept, as it emerges from the pages of What Is Philosophy? The Hegelian
concept is not a notion (23); it is not an abstraction that retains the
general characteristics of a sample of similar entities (24); it is not placed
in the service of classification (25); it is not the result of a subjective intellectual operation (24). It is processual (24); it is an operation of the
real itself (24); its function is not to differentiate one set of entities from
another, but rather to account for the internal constitution of things and
the ability of different processes to have the same rhythm (2526). Since
Hegel, you claim, the concept is not an idealization external to things.
Rather, it designates the force of creation and destructionan intimate
life (26). When we turn to Deleuze, we find repeated in his work the
bold equation, concepts-events, and the equally bold proclamation of
the eventum tantumthe (one) eventwith its internal differentiation.
Two questions, therefore: Do you find in Hegel the anticipation of the
Deleuzian distinction between the virtual event and the actual state of
affairs? Would such a distinction make the Hegelian Concept virtual?
And, second question: Where would Hegel and Deleuze differ from one
another with respect to the Concept?
J-CM: You are right on many points, but it is not correct to say that I
would have written the same things if I were writing on Deleuzes concept. With Deleuze, we are inside a radical immanence and this is already
the case with Hegel. This is indisputableit is a philosophical fact. We
then discover in both situations the necessity to generate the concept
on the basis of experience. There is a Hegelian insistence on the idea of
experience, which by itself merits an entire monograph. But we do not
deal with the same experience in the works of the two philosophers. Deleuzes transcendental empiricism requires the virtual; that is, a form
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Notes
1. Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010), 216.
2. Jean-Clet Martin, Une Intrigue criminelle de la philosophie (Paris: Dcouverte,
2010). Cited parenthetically in running text.
3. G. W. F.Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly? in Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts
and Commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (Peter Smith, 1988), 11318.
4. See Robert Sinnerbrink, Nomadology or Ideology? Parrhesia 2 (2006):
6287, who counts Judith Butler, Catherine Malabou, and Slavoj iek among
those who find Deleuzes and Hegels positions on dialectics to be compatible,
in the last instance, and Brian Massumi, Michael Hardt, and the majority of Deleuzes commentators, among those who hold the positions to be incommensurable.
5. Bruce Baugh, G. W. F.Hegel, in Deleuzes Philosophical Lineage, ed. Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 130.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
7. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 96.
8. Jean Wahl, Nietzsche et la philosophie, Revue de la Mtaphysique et de
Morale 3 ( JulySeptember 1963): 35279.
9. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. W. H.Johnston and L. G.Struthers, 2 vols.
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), 2:70.
10. Jean-Clet Martin, Plurivers: Essai sur la fin du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).
11. Hegel, Science of Logic, 1:44, 50.
12. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 1112.
13. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jacques A. Miller (London: Norton, 1997).
14. Judith Butler, Antigones Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
15. Jean-Clet Martin, Parures dEros (Paris: Kim, 2003), 6369.
16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors, trans. Charles L. Eastlake (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
17. Jean-Clet Martin, Le corps de lempreinte (Paris: Kim, 2004).
18. Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 21.
Contributors
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PHENG CHEAH is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality:
Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003)
and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006);
and the coeditor of Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (2003) and Derrida and the Time of the Political (2009).
KAREN HOULE is an associate professor of philosophy at the University
of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of numerous
articles on Deleuze and Flix Guattari, as well as on Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Spinoza. Her book Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion: Toward a New Image of Ethical Thought is forthcoming
in 2013. She also has written two books of poetry, Ballast (2000) and
During (2005).
JAY LAMPERT is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He has written many
articles not only on Hegel and Deleuze but also on Jacques Derrida,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Edmund Husserl, and other philosophers. He is
the author of two groundbreaking works on time and history, Deleuze and
Guattaris Philosophy of History (2006) and Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time (2012). He also wrote Synthesis and Backward
Reference in Husserls Logical Investigations (1995).
SIMON LUMSDEN is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University
of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His research is primarily concerned with German idealism and poststructuralism. He has written
articles for such journals as International Philosophical Quarterly, The Owl of
Minerva, The Philosophical Forum, Philosophy and Social Criticism, The Review
of Metaphysics, and Topoi.
JEAN-CLET MARTIN is a professor of philosophy at the Collge International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several books, the
most recent of which include Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie: Lire
la Phnomnologie de lesprit de Hegel (2010); Breviaire de lternit: Vermeer et
Spinoza (2011); and Deleuze (2012). His book Variations: La philosophie de
Gilles Deleuze was translated into English by Constantin V. Boundas and
Susan Dyrkton as Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (2011).
JOHN RUSSON is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. His research
extends from ancient philosophy through Hegel to contemporary Euro-
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