Professional Documents
Culture Documents
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Abbreviations vii
Introduction
Karen Houle and Jim Vernon xi
Part 1. Disjunction/Contradiction
Part 2. Connection/Synthesis
Contributors 253
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the text for frequently cited works.
vii
viii
ABB R EV I AT I ONS
DI Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans.
Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004).
DR Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
ES Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature,
trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991); Empirisme et Subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953).
F Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988).
LS The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983).
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 “Con-
tinental philosophy.” What has proved equally hard, however, is to deter-
mine the impact the thought of each thinker has on that of the other
when considered in tandem. Helping to bring to light the various re-
lationships—sympathetic, antipathetic, and otherwise—that may hold
between them is the goal of this anthology.
xi
xii
I N T ROD UCT I O N
How does the terrain appear from the Hegelian side? The prevailing wis-
dom among Hegelians who work at arm’s length from Deleuze appears
to echo the presupposition that what we have in these two thinkers are
radically divergent idioms and systems. We say appears because, where De-
leuzians have, in the main, actively heaped disdain upon Hegel, scholars
of the latter have been more passively dismissive. Virtually no work has
been done to answer the challenges Deleuze brings to Hegel’s system
by those invested in defending—or even critically reworking or appro-
priating—it.16 This is a curious feature of recent scholarship given the
voluminous ink spilled over Hegel’s relation to Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and others.
This silence, however, is perhaps not unsurprising. Deleuze, after
all, proudly claims to bear his heaviest debt to Spinoza, “the Christ of
philosophers, [before whom] the greatest philosophers are hardly more
than apostles who distance themselves or draw near to this mystery.”17
Many Hegelians would simply assume that the same criticisms Hegel
lodged against Spinoza apply equally to his apostle, Deleuze. These crit-
icisms essentially invert the Deleuzian charges against Hegel. That is,
Hegel reproaches Spinozism with “merely assum[ing] individual deter-
minations, [rather than] deduc[ing] them from substance” and thus of
conceiving the negative or determination as “only as a vanishing mo-
ment,” returning to the one substance rather than essentially existing
in itself.18 For Hegel, Spinozism subsumes all individuality into the un-
dulations of the self-differentiating substance, making it both unclear
how and why individual subjects and determinations arise within it, and
what, if anything would give any such determinations positive value. If
Deleuzians charge Hegel with forsaking the universal variation of differ-
ence for representational stability within the internalist system of nega-
tions, Hegelians would charge this brand of Spinozism with collapsing
differences into the play of the univocal one, blotting out the values of
individuality, subjectivity, and determination. It would seem, then, that
Hegelians would be as correct to assume that Hegel is as anti-Deleuzian
as Deleuzians are anti-Hegelian.
But, as one would expect, this picture is not so simple either.
In scholarly literature, Hegel is often chastised, and not just by De-
leuzians, for his disdain for individuality and for subsuming all such de-
terminations into spirit, history, or the idea. Having paved the way, via
negation, for mediated determination out of immediacy, Hegel is gener-
ally presumed to have progressed to dissipate it again into one or more
quasi-mystical “absolutes.” In fact, one emerging line of criticism—repre-
xv
I N T R OD UCT I O N
Double Vision?
Disjunction/Contradiction
themes within their respective texts that do, in fact, draw the figures to-
gether if only to ultimately push them apart again.
Brent Adkins, in “At the Crossroads of Philosophy and Religion:
Deleuze’s 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 represen-
tational image. Religion is the lived experience of the community, medi-
ated 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 re-
ligion is preserved by being superseded into philosophical thought. De-
leuze, Adkins argues, likewise differentiates religion and philosophy but
according to their different forms of creation: religion creates (represen-
tational) 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. Reli-
gion, to the contrary, arises when lived immanence is subsumed under
another level, raised to something higher, or transcended, as in Hegel’s
dialectical system. Thus, Adkins argues, Hegel’s philosophy abstracts
from lived experience, but only by subsuming it under something tran-
scendent 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: Deleuze’s Critique of Hegel,” also defends—albeit 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 ex-
periencing 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 opposi-
tion and contradiction. The advent of such opposites produces a dialec-
tic 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
xvii
I N T R OD UCT I O N
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 construct-
ing (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 sub-
ject 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, unex-
pressed potential that precedes it. By contrast, Deleuze finds in actual-
ization 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 tar-
geted by Hegel’s critique of immediacy, the focus here. Theoretically,
Hegel argues, romanticism posits an immediate experience that is inde-
terminate, 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 ra-
tional, 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 deter-
mined, if virtual, structure, rather than a determinable, but indetermi-
nate 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 crea-
tions. 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 ac-
tualizations. It may be, then, that Hegel’s critique of the beautiful soul’s
inaction applies equally to Deleuze’s “Body Without Organs.”
xix
I N T R OD UCT I O N
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 com-
plete discreteness of all mental contents from one another to see what, if
any, relations apply universally to the thinkable. For Hegel, the discrete-
ness of any term essentially implies its relation with others in the form
of “identity-in-difference,” through which the determination of any dis-
crete term is only graspable through its difference from, and in relation
to, others. Such identifying relations take the form of predicating judg-
ments, 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
Notes
haps . . .?” Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Phi-
losophy?, 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. Al-
lison (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),
191–95.
11. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Les-
ter 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: Rout-
ledge, 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 Pla-
teaux,” SubStance 44–45 (1984): 62. Patton is quoting from Gilles Deleuze and
Félix 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 Univer-
sity 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: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1995), 289.
19. See, e.g., Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Sin-
gular 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 Iden-
tity,” in Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996), 21.
HEGEL AND DELEUZE
Part 1
Disjunction/Contradiction
1
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 phi-
losophy creates concepts. Crucially, since for Hegel the content of phi-
losophy 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, De-
leuze is not required to think of either as progressive. After articulating
both Hegel’s and Deleuze’s positions with regard to philosophy and reli-
gion, I will show that Deleuze’s account of philosophy exceeds Hegel’s in
its ability to think the contingent and affective nature of human existence.
Hegel
5
6
B R E NT ADK I NS
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 fun-
damental 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 re-
sponse 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 Žižek
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 eter-
nal 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 culmi-
nates in the reconciliation of God and world, infinite and finite, universal
and particular. This reconciliation is actualized in the community of be-
lievers known as the church, “the kingdom of Spirit” (LPR, 3:100 and
following). What we have, then, in Hegel’s 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, panthe-
ism 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
9
AT T H E C ROS S ROADS OF P HI LO S O P HY AND RELIGION
Deleuze
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 there-
fore 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 im-
manence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophi-
cal presupposition. (WP, 48).
Spinoza thus becomes the hero (and savior) in Deleuze’s history of phi-
losophy, 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
Spinoza’s role in it, Deleuze seems to come remarkably close to Jacobi.
For both, religion and philosophy are mutually exclusive. For both, Spi-
noza 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 cru-
cial difference, of course, is that Jacobi recoils in horror at this possibility,
while Deleuze embraces it as the path to freedom. If Deleuze’s account
is accurate, though, it would seem that philosophy has rarely been phi-
losophy. The history of philosophy has rather been dominated by the
continual attempt to subdue immanence, make it immanent to some-
thing. Within this context Hegel errs by confusing plane and concept. He
makes his plane of immanence immanent to the concept. On Deleuze’s
terms then, Hegel does not successfully differentiate philosophy and re-
ligion 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.
Hegel’s rejoinder to this criticism, of course, is that Deleuze misun-
derstands the task of philosophy. Without pursuing an underlying unity,
an absolute, philosophy simply abandons itself to feeling and contin-
gency. As a result, Deleuze’s 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 Hegel’s assessment of his thought would be. It is based on contin-
13
AT T H E C ROS S ROADS OF P HI LO S O P HY AND RELIGION
Philosophy as Productive
Hegel would agree with Deleuze that the subject is the result of a pro-
cess. This idea encapsulates Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza and Eleatic phi-
losophy in general. Substance must become subject, as Hegel says in the
Phenomenology.24 The crucial difference, though, lies in the way that Hegel
thinks the result. While result certainly indicates the culmination of a
process, this process is at the same time what Hegel calls in the Logic “a
retreat into the ground.” Hegel writes:
Conclusion
Notes
1. I will expand on this below, but at this point I’m simply repeating Hegel’s
claim from the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), §787. All shapes of absolute spirit, whether art, philosophy, or
religion, posit the unity of universal and particular. The difference among them
lies in the form by which each shape makes its appearance. Art does so sensu-
ously, religion representationally, and philosophy conceptually. Hegel’s point is
that philosophy only achieves this unity as a result (and not merely posited) in
Hegel’s own philosophy. The form of this unity is conceptual, but the content
is the content of revealed religion. That is, revealed religion thinks what philos-
ophy thinks (namely, immanent negativity) and revealed religion thinks this con-
tent as actualized. Philosophy thinks the same thing, except it does so conceptu-
ally rather than representationally.
2. See Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to
Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 44–91, for a fuller ac-
count of the Pantheismusstreit.
3. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 118–202, for an account of Hegel’s arrival at Jena.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and Henry S. Har-
ris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 190–91.
5. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §784 and following.
6. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Upper Saddle River,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 23–24.
7. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. Elizabeth Sander-
son Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1:284.
8. Ibid., 3:258.
9. Hegel, The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philos-
ophy, trans. Jere P. Surber (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1978).
10. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. B. Spiers and
J. Burdon Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 2:327.
11. Ibid., 2:344. This is unquestionably a stab at Hegel’s colleague in Ber-
lin, Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Hegel saw as the disseminator of a theology
based on subjective feeling rather than thought.
12. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dia-
lectic (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). I’d like to thank my colleague Paul
Hinlicky for pointing out Žižek’s modalism.
13. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Spiers and J. Burdon
Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 3:3; 10–11, referred to paren-
thetically in text as LPR, followed by volume and page number.
14. Others have, of course, argued that Hegel is anything but orthodox.
See, for example, Cyril O’Regan’s The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University
17
AT T H E C ROS S ROADS OF P HI LO S O P HY AND RELIGION
of New York Press, 1994). While I won’t deny that Hegel veers toward a kind of
Gnosticism under the influence of Böhme and the drama of sin and redemption
becomes Bildungsroman, his account of the Trinity strikes me as thoroughly Au-
gustinian and Lutheran.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 115–16.
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 Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tom-
linson 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 Deleuze’s lan-
guage of “belief” in Cinema 2 and What Is Philosophy? On the first issue, Deleuze’s
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 Nietzsche’s critique of the Beyond in Christian thought
(see Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta [Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 172). See also Katherine Thiele’s
“ ‘To Believe in This World, as It Is’: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activ-
ism,” Deleuze Studies 4 (2010): 28–45.
19. On this point see Dan Smith’s very helpful “The Conditions of the New,”
Deleuze Studies 1 (2007): 1–21.
20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1994).
21. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Fran-
cisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 128–29.
22. In the Phenomenology, for example, Hegel notes that the task of con-
sciousness 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, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” in Desert Islands and
Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 42.
24. Hegel, Phenomenology, §25.
25. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Paperback Library, 1989), 70–71.
26. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota 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.
2
18
19
NE G AT ION , DI S JUNCT I O N, AND A NE W THEORY OF FORCES
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 Absolute’s first appearance, which
occurs at the end of the Phenomenology’s third chapter when conscious-
ness, 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 ontol-
ogy and empirical man [resolved in the Absolute’s first appearance] is
perfectly determined, but not the relation between ontology and his-
torical 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 sug-
gests, for Deleuze, that a route from Hegel may be found in a difference
that differs from dialectical contradiction. If Hyppolite’s 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).
Deleuze’s early review presents his most direct and detailed critique
of Hegel, and its distinction between difference and contradiction re-
mains pertinent to all his later work. But it certainly does not tell the
whole story of Deleuze’s relation to Hegel, insofar as Nietzsche and Phi-
losophy takes aim at a rather different target. Moreover, the contention
that the relation between ontology and empirical man is perfectly deter-
mined 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 philos-
ophy. Indeed, a disconnect arises in the Absolute’s 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 Absolute’s first appearance,
it is worth noting, with Heidegger, the dual position the Phenomenology
holds in Hegel’s 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
21
NE G AT ION , DI S JUNCT I O N, AND A NE W THEORY OF FORCES
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 expres-
sion, 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 distinc-
tion between essence and appearance: since force is nothing but its ex-
pression, “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 sepa-
rated from its object, consciousness is also negatively related to it, so that
each is part of the other’s 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 phe-
nomena than the portrayal of an isolated consciousness examining an ex-
ternal and independent reality. The Dialectic of Self-Consciousness thus
works out the truth of self-consciousness—the conditions under which
its self-certainty has objective truth—but 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-consciousness’s
initial certainty negates itself. On the contrary, Hegel prefaces this new
stage with a review of the previous developments, declaring that with
consciousness’s return to itself from otherness, “we have . . . entered the
native realm of truth” (PS, §167). Self-consciousness is then said to con-
sist of two moments: first, it relates to itself alone and is negatively sepa-
rated from an otherness given to it in sense certainty and perception as
a substantial and enduring—but not self-conscious—existence; 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 mo-
ment, leads Hegel to define self-consciousness as “desire in general. Con-
sciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is
the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which how-
ever 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-
25
NE G AT ION , DI S JUNCT I O N, AND A NE W THEORY OF FORCES
sible as an abstract image of the real, one that reality already resembles
and to which existence is merely added, leaving the conditions of pos-
sible experience too loose and general for the reality they are meant to
grasp.19 On the face of it, Hegel’s dialectic seems to avoid this criticism,
since it is structured as an internal movement that progressively expli-
cates 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 rational—the Notion—is
real and the real is rational. The only requirement is to show that contra-
diction and opposition arise internally, so that the dialectic’s movement
remains immanent and never refers to a beyond that cannot be synthe-
sized. 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. Dia-
lectics 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 pre-
dialectical 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 iden-
tity 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 differ-
ences 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 differ-
ence, 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
29
NE G AT ION , DI S JUNCT I O N, AND A NE W THEORY OF FORCES
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 Hegel’s the contention that the thing-in-itself is ab-
stract 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, 6–7). At first sight, Deleuze’s Nietzschean account of force
appears far too metaphorical and vitalist to have any substantive con-
nection to Hegel’s. His statements that “all force is appropriation, domi-
nation, 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 dif-
ference” (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 Hegel’s language of opposition, con-
tradiction, and negation that lacks the necessary rigor. Forces remain ab-
stract when they are determined simply through reciprocal opposition.
Hegel’s account remains one-sided and incomplete because his seem-
ingly more analytical and philosophical language removes the forcefulness
that makes forces what they are:
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 achieved—there is
some truth to the Hegelian thesis about recognition—but this idea cap-
tures only a limited aspect of desire’s 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 dis-
solution of the bond of identity attained through opposition.
Deleuze’s analysis of Michel Tournier’s Friday, a retelling of the Rob-
inson Crusoe story, illustrates all of these aspects. In contrast to Daniel
Defoe’s version, which places Robinson in an original state of isolation
and follows him as he builds a new rigorous order—an exploration al-
ready falsified by Robinson’s having access to tools of civilization from
the shipwreck and having already repressed his desires so as to be able
to work—Tournier frames the story in terms of Robinson’s “dehumani-
zation” through a process that does not reproduce the world but rather
deviates from it (LS, 302–4). Robinson’s 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 organi-
zation 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 re-
spect, 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 sub-
ject 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
33
NE G AT ION , DI S JUNCT I O N, AND A NE W THEORY OF FORCES
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 desire’s perversion—or,
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 Hegel’s on the same terrain, and in affirming dif-
ference and disjunction against negation and contradiction, he follows
Hegel’s own refusal to leave thought in the realm of abstractions, di-
vorced from any relation to the concrete and sensible. Deleuze in this
way completes Hegel’s project even while breaking with dialectics and its
movement to secure the subject. In this way, their common philosophical
direction in no way prevents Hegel’s and Deleuze’s respective philoso-
phies 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 Hegel’s and De-
leuze’s thinking are intimately intertwined but never subject to media-
tion or resolution, separated even in their proximity to each other by
the deepest of chasms. In Derridean terms, each is the other’s différance,
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
ground, and is fatal to Hegel’s project: “what the text does is introduce some-
thing of a ‘linguistic moment’ into the relation of life and consciousness and,
in doing so, threatens to render impossible not only the emergence of self-
consciousness (as self-consciousness) out of life but also the project of the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit as such. Life’s 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 life—consciousness as consciousness,
knowing as knowing—appear, 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 spirit’s appear-
ing—the possibility of a phenomeno-logic of spirit’s appearing in the phenom-
ena of its own self-negations—would also be very much in question” (Warminski,
“Hegel/Marx: Consciousness,” 131–32).
16. Kojève, An Introduction, chaps. 1–2.
17. “Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the es-
tranged object—the estranged essential reality of man—is nothing but conscious-
ness, the thought of estrangement merely—estrangement’s abstract and there-
fore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is
therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty ab-
straction—the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity
of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativ-
ity—an abstraction which is again fixed as such and thought of as an indepen-
dent activity—as 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 content—the thought-
forms 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. Nor-
ton, 1978], 122).
18. “Nietzsche’s relation to Kant is like Marx’s 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 cri-
tique 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. . . . Every-
thing 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1994], 68). See also Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
37
NE G AT ION , DI S JUNCT I O N, AND A NE W THEORY OF FORCES
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 con-
cepts 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 Les-
ter with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 174.
22. Hegel, Hegel’s 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 quan-
tity” (DR, 232). Nietzsche himself proclaims: “Our ‘knowing’ limits itself to es-
tablishing 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.
3
38
39
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E : DI FFE RE NCE OR CONTRADICTION?
Simondon’s Dialectic
Deleuze is quite close to Bergson. The “élan vital” puts paid to Hege-
lian 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 transcen-
dental principle which hugs the vital movement of thought itself and is
totally distinct from the quantities which science manipulates and con-
ceptualizes—even 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. Transcenden-
tal 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, 56–57).
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 ob-
jects which it envelops, and thus “incarnates a natural or spiritual power
(an Idea)” (DR, 22–23); 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 con-
stitutive disparity. It is also what underwrites the label of empiricism for
thought which, as we have just seen, does not back away from pure specu-
lation, 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: 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade,
trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 87.
3. Compare to Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique:
53
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E : DI FFE RE NCE OR CONTRADICTION?
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 Deleuze’s critique of judgment occurs
throughout his work, I want to focus here in particular on the argu-
ments 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 rhi-
zome, we first need to understand the limitations of the classical model
54
55
T H E LO GI C O F T HE RHI Z OME I N T HE WO RK OF HEGEL
AND D E LEU Z E
What is meant will be clear from the following. In each category there
are the highest classes, the lowest classes, and some which are between
the highest and the lowest. There is a highest genus beyond which there
can be no other superior genus; there is a lowest species after which
there can be no subordinate species; and between the highest genus
and the lowest species there are some classes which are genera and spe-
cies at the same time, since they are comprehended in relation to the
highest genus and the lowest species. Let us make the meaning clear
with reference to one category. Substance is itself a genus; under this
is body; and under body animate body, under which is animal; under
animal is rational animal, under which is man; under man are Socrates,
Plato and particular men.3
The first difficulty with such an approach is that it creates a sharp distinc-
tion between nature and the image of nature. Porphyry’s hierarchy of
terms operates according to sharply opposed differences, but it appears
56
HEN RY S OME RS -HALL
and when not to, such as in the degenerate cases which Aristotle discov-
ers 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 mak-
ing 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 increas-
ing the sophistication of our hierarchy—by, for instance, as Deleuze and
Guattari suggest, moving from bivalent to polyvalent categorical distinc-
tions. 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, De-
leuze’s 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.
Deleuze’s 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 Guattari’s 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 follow-
ing a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity” (TP, 7).
In other words, the principal unity must always precede the determina-
tion of the object, ruling out an account of the emergence of this unity
itself. On Deleuze’s 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 ontol-
ogy that does not presuppose the division of the world into subjects and
58
HEN RY S OME RS -HALL
Formally, what has been said can be expressed thus: the general nature
of the judgement or proposition, which involves the distinction of
Subject and Predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition, and
62
HEN RY S OME RS -HALL
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 criti-
cized 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 Hegel’s
conception of the plant to be compared to Deleuze’s concept of the rhi-
zome? 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 sys-
tem 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). There-
fore 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 undevel-
oped species of animals” (PN, 314). As we saw above, the classical dif-
ferentiation 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 es-
capes 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 arbo-
rescent 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 Hegel’s sugges-
tion that difference in this case can only be understood as a superficial
metamorphosis of form rather than a genuine difference. As we saw, De-
65
T H E LO GI C O F T HE RHI Z OME I N T HE WO RK OF HEGEL
AND D E LEU Z E
leuze’s focus on the rhizome implies an underlying logic, and this is also
the case with Hegel’s discussion of plant life. The philosophy of nature
is an expression of reason in its externality, and so we can see it as cor-
related with the logical categories provided in the Science of Logic. The
question, therefore, is, which of the categories of the Science of Logic cor-
respond to plant life? In this case, the dialectic which embodies the tran-
sition 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 Hegel’s
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 Hegel’s 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 differ-
ence 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 something—an 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 en-
tities. 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 be-
comes 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
66
HEN RY S OME RS -HALL
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 condi-
tions 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 funda-
mental 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 infinitude—it 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 can-
not at this stage countenance the possibility of the finite containing the
infinite, the notion of limit does not simply signify an arbitrary point in
something’s relation to another something, but is also a limitation—that
which prevents finitude from becoming infinite. This brings in a new
moment into the concept of finitude. As finitude now contains this essen-
tial 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 re-
sists 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
67
T H E LO GI C O F T HE RHI Z OME I N T HE WO RK OF HEGEL
AND D E LEU Z E
of organization. In the earlier Jena Logic, Hegel explicitly relates the ques-
tion 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 Hegel’s
point, therefore, is that any mode of organization which simply relies
on a series of properties related without a central notion cannot but im-
manently 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 sub-
sist, 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, Deleuze’s 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 Guattari’s critique of arborescent thought.
The movement of the infinite is the key to understanding Hegel’s
account of life. The plant is explicitly characterized as an infinite, con-
junctive multiplicity, lacking any notion of a center: “Each plant is there-
fore 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 pro-
vided 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 anal-
ysis 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 conscious-
ness, it would worship light as its god” (PN, 306). The plant therefore
69
T H E LO GI C O F T HE RHI Z OME I N T HE WO RK OF HEGEL
AND D E LEU Z E
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 Burroughs’s
cut-up poetry, Joyce’s attempt to provide a decentered narrative, particu-
larly in his Finnegan’s Wake, and Nietzsche’s move to an aphoristic notion
of philosophy. Burroughs’s 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 pre-
sented 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 writ-
ten 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 “reflex-
ive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by de-
manding a more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive total-
ity” (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 right—“the 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 Nietz-
sche brings in the notion of the eternal return to unify the field of differ-
ences,23 while Joyce, in his most radical attempt to break with linear nar-
rative, Finnegan’s 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 sub-
stratum. Likewise, the world of differences for Nietzsche is unified by the
eternal return. Deleuze and Guattari’s 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 “an-
gelic doctors” evokes Aquinas’s 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
71
T H E LO GI C O F T HE RHI Z OME I N T HE WO RK OF HEGEL
AND D E LEU Z E
Conclusion
Notes
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,
398–99)
5
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 deter-
mination 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 Hegel’s
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, 400–403).
For Deleuze, by contrast, every actualization involves a loss of the
infinite richness of the virtual. The virtual contains a multiplicity or mani-
fold of divergent tendencies, any number of which can be actualized
depending on the circumstances, but each actualization is an impover-
ishment 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 (échec) in relation to the movement which invents it”; “life
as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualiz-
ing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses ‘contact with the rest of itself.’ ”3
76
77
AC TUAL IZAT I O N: E NRI CHME NT AN D LOSS
the purity of conscience and such like have been mentioned” (PS, 42).
But rather than being the apogee of humanity and humaneness, “stay-
ing within the sphere of feeling and being able to communicate only at
that level,” that is, through the poetic expression of feeling, is “the anti-
human, 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 nei-
ther “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 hazi-
ness,” “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, 3–6). It does so out of fear of losing its own, natural self, at-
tached 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 articulat-
ing itself in the form of a rational system, holding on to its “immediacy”
and “inwardness” at all costs (PS, 49–51).
The cult of “natural” sentimentality and feeling, the authority of
individual conscience over law and convention, and “intuitive” appre-
hension of the divine took its chief inspiration from Rousseau’s Émile,
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 Hegel’s time, this view had numerous Ger-
man exponents: Friedrich Schiller, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, the poet Novalis. Schiller, for example, in Naive and Sentimental
Poetry (1795–96), who refers to “our lost childhood, which eternally re-
mains most dear to us” but also fills us with melancholy because in be-
holding 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, dis-
position and determinability are represented; in us, the fulfillment that for-
ever 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 sim-
plicity “in the midst of the artificial circumstances of fashionable society”
(NSP, 92–93);9 it achieves its highest form in genius, which, “led only
79
AC TUAL IZAT I O N: E NRI CHME NT AN D LOSS
lis’s “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 Genial-
ität) gives rise to the moral doctrine that places individual moral “convic-
tion” above public law and morals and immediate intuition above articu-
lated conceptual knowledge, such that the individual’s “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, then—alas!—it is no longer the soul speaking.”14
All these elements are found together in the philosophy of F. H. Ja-
cobi, probably the main target of Hegel’s 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 Fichte’s “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 good-
ness 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 Fichte’s divinized au-
tonomous Ego. Against divine Reason and its laws, Jacobi declares him-
self 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 David18—yes, 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 se-
cret something in which our heart, understanding and sense combine”
(HL, 315).20
81
AC TUAL IZAT I O N: E NRI CHME NT AN D LOSS
Hegel characterizes the position of Jacobi and the romantics this way:
“What is here called faith or immediate knowledge must also be identi-
fied with inspiration, the heart’s revelations, truths implanted in man by
nature,” all of which are marked by “the immediate or self-evident way” that
these are presented in consciousness. It is this “subjective certainty” that
becomes the criterion of truth; “modern views . . . put great value on the
mere fact of conviction . . . there being no [objective] standard by which
we can measure its truth” (HL, 99, 105, 35). Belief or faith is a certainty
within consciousness precisely because the belief is an object of immedi-
ate intuition, like Descartes’s cogito, no matter whether what is believed
in is God or a thing present to the senses (HL, 97–98, 100, 105). But this
renders Jacobi’s faith both a purely “personal revelation” that wants to be
taken as valid for everyone and “a purely formal category applicable to
very different facts” and beliefs. Rather than being concrete, “pure and
simple intuition” is as formal and abstract as Fichte’s “I = I.” Worse, mere
conviction can justify any belief, “all superstition and idolatry,” and any
act, however wrong and immoral, simply on the grounds that the person
was convinced of being in the right and acted in accordance with her
convictions (HL, 98, 107–8).21
Jacobi’s sensory intuition is supposed to grasp sensuous existence in
its concrete richness and individuality as something that is “certain” inso-
far as it belongs to me and my experience, something that is “mine” and
shares in the certainty of my self-awareness. In sensory feeling, the thing
is given as simply “being,” just as the “I” grasped in self-feeling simply
“is” (PS, 58–59; HL, 31). But everything and anything is an individual,
sensible “this” given here and now, and so is “neither this nor that . . .
and with equal indifference this as well as that,” just as every “I” is itself
to the exclusion of all others and in that respect is just like every other
“I.” I may mean to designate something that is individual and uniquely
mine through the words “this,” “here,” “now,” “I,” in speaking of what is
sensibly present to me at this very moment of my experience, but what I
actually say is every “this” and every “I,” “being” in general and “I-hood”
or subjectivity in general, a wholly abstract universality. “It is just not pos-
sible for us to say or express in words a sensuous being that we mean”
or an “I” that would be uniquely my own, and in fact, language, which is
the medium of consciousness in its universality, reverses the meaning of
what I mean to say, “not letting the meaning get into words at all.” Conse-
quently, the inexpressible, whether “feeling or sensation” or the self in
its uniqueness, “far from being the highest truth is the most unimport-
82
B R UC E B AUGH
the cost of leading “a purely literary existence” (ILH, 151) in which what
is recognized is not the actuality of one’s deeds but the sincerity of one’s
expressed convictions (GS, 512). Only the echo of one’s 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, 397–99; PG, 480–83). Such “indeterminate subjectivity
does not attain existence or the objective determinacy of action, but re-
mains 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 powerless-
ness,” wanting its moral judgment to be taken for actual deeds, and ex-
pressing lofty sentiments (Gesinnungen) in literary productions instead of
acting (PS, 399–403; PG, 483–87; 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, 406–7; 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 par-
ticular circumstances, that is, a selfishness that contradicts the univer-
sality 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 beauti-
ful 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 actual-
izing 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 any-
one, and loves only itself. Not even its self-sacrifice in madness (Friedrich
Hölderlin) 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 realiz-
ing its ends, which would inevitably involve compromises, risks, and par-
tiality, actualizing some potentialities and sacrificing others, benefiting
some particular others at the expense of others. Not willing to do this,
the beautiful soul’s 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 unex-
pressed 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
84
B R UC E B AUGH
distributes itself into lines or parts that cannot be added up” (B, 42–43,
94, 97–98, 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 ontologi-
cal level which they incarnate” without being restricted by preestablished
ends (B, 101–3). On the other hand, “the Whole must create the diver-
gent 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 differen-
tiate 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, 209–10), it at the same time involves a separation of the ac-
tual species from the élan 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 élan
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 actualiza-
tion 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 structural-
virtual elements are not actual (DR, 183), but they are completely deter-
mined 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 differenti-
ated 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, 207–12, 220, 255–58). 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”
87
AC TUAL IZAT I O N: E NRI CHME NT AN D LOSS
(DR, 163). The actual, products of actualization, never exhaust the vir-
tual; 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, 22–27).
Difference in itself—difference as virtual multiplicity, the virtual whole
from which all divergent lines emerge, the “ultimate unity” that differen-
tiates itself and causes each difference to pass through all the others in a
system of complications and implications (DR, 56–57), 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.
Unlike Schiller and the romantics, Deleuze’s “dissolved self” is not a to-
tally undifferentiated potential; it is an already differentiated system of
intensities and capabilities. And yet Deleuze seems to share Schiller’s
melancholy that the actualization in adulthood of the child’s unlimited
determinability falls short of the child’s total potential for becoming
(NSP, 87). Both regret that the actualization of the child’s potential is
achieved “only through negation and exclusion”; the actualization of vir-
tual potentialities in one form being for Deleuze always at the expense of
91
AC TUAL IZAT I O N: E NRI CHME NT AN D LOSS
all the other possible actualizations which could have been realized. In
Schiller’s words, after actualization, after maturation and development,
“reality is then there, but infinity is lost” (AEM, 128–29). The power of
becoming and transformation of the egg or embryo is lost and alien-
ated in the stability and rigidity of the organized and unified body of the
adult, in which organs have their determinate functions within a hier-
archical system of needs and ends, and which would be destroyed if it
underwent the embryo’s “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 power”—the “full infinity”—of the in-
tensive individual be recovered? It would be necessary for the body to
lose its organic unity and the self to lose its identity (LS, 298–99). The
adult experience in which this occurs has already been alluded to: schizo-
phrenia. 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, 326–27; 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 inte-
grated, 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, 326–27). The body without organs
is not fragmented or dismembered, but complete in itself, an intensive
multiplicity (LS, 189–92; TP, 164–65), 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, 131–33; LS, 188–89) or a “connec-
tion 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 experi-
mentation (A-O, 370–71; 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
92
B R UC E B AUGH
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 determina-
tions 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 im-
mediacy, with its emphasis on subjectivity, it is not far from Schiller’s 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,
144–45), as well as Jacobi’s valorization of the heart’s pure feeling as a
way of breaking the “hollow nut” of the “empty, pure and bare ego.”27
Similarly, Deleuze’s valorization of schizophrenia as a pure process with-
out 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, 399–407).
For Hegel, Deleuze’s 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 mad-
ness over action.
True, Deleuze and Guattari write that “dismantling the organism
has never meant killing yourself” (TP, 160), and they are careful to distin-
guish schizophrenia as a “pure process” from the medical and medical-
ized 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 Deleuze’s setting the virtual over the actual re-
flects 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, 58–66; HL, 31, 125–27). Yet, although Deleuze’s vir-
tual 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 indi-
vidual who never recognizes himself in the limits of the Me and the I”
(DR, 259), amounts to the desire to be rid of one’s self, and is in that
sense a pursuit of nothingness. Indeed, Deleuze writes that death is im-
93
AC TUAL IZAT I O N: E NRI CHME NT AN D LOSS
plicit in the I and the Me as “an internal power which frees the individu-
ating 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 differ-
ences 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 inconsum-
able, 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 af-
fect registering an increase or decrease in the body’s 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 or-
ganic 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
Notes
11. Schiller’s “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 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Daniel
Shannon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 212–16.
13. Novalis, “Hymns to the Night,” trans. R. M. Browning, in German Poetry
from 1750–1900, ed. Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 1984), 112–
13, 128–29.
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. Di-
ana I. Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi and Schelling, ed. Ernst
Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 119–41.
16. Theban general and statesman (c. 410–362 B.C.E.) who liberated Thebes
and other Greek territories from Spartan subjugation.
17. Dutch statesman (1625–1672) of republican convictions, assassinated
by followers of William of Orange.
18. 1 Samuel 21:1–6.
19. A reference to Mark 2:23–28; “The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath”; compare Matthew 12:1–8 (I have altered Behler’s transla-
tion to capture the biblical allusion).
20. This note by Hegel’s translator William Wallace cites Jacobi’s 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), 178–79.
22. See also Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic High-
lands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), 82–108.
23. Hegel here seems to be parodying Jacobi’s “Open Letter to Fichte”:
“the law is made for man, not man for the law.” See Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and
Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heck-
man (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 504–5.
24. See also Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 2nd edition,
ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1985 [1947]), 149–51.
25. Bruce Baugh, “Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuze’s Response to
Hegel,” Man and World 25, no. 2 (1992): 133–48; Bruce Baugh, “Deleuze and
Empiricism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24 (1993): 15–31.
26. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Les-
ter and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Gilles De-
leuze and Félix 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 (Harmonds-
worth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1971), 117–18.
6
97
98
P H E NG CHE AH
tification of the state with reason, which has been interpreted as an ex-
ample 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. Hegel’s infamous dictum from the “Preface” of the Philosophy
of Right, “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational [Was
vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig]”—has
been read as an authoritarian justification of existing political institu-
tions as rational by the likes of Rosenzweig, Popper, and so on.5
For present purposes, two features of Hegel’s political philosophy
are important. First, the organismic metaphor in Hegel’s 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 con-
stitutes 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 whole—its vitality or health—is 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 conse-
quences 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, 302–3; 429)
The state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual,
since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the
whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except homony-
mously, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand
will be no better than that. But things are defined by their function and
power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no
longer have their proper quality, but only that they are homonymous.7
(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 activ-
ity against the activity of the whole, the fluidity and all-pervading process
of which is thus obstructed [dessen Flüssigkeit und durch alle Momente hin-
durchgehender Prozeß hiermit gehemmt ist]” (PN, §371, 428; 520). Disease is
that which undermines the organismic living process. Whereas the liv-
ing 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 com-
mensurate relationship of the organic to the nonorganic, so that for the
organism there is nothing nonorganic which it cannot overcome,” dis-
ease 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 (aufge-
hoben) 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):
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 develop-
ment of the subjective freedom of individual members. In Hegel’s words:
The essence of the modern state is that the universal should be linked
with the complete freedom of particularity [Besonderheit] and the well-
being of individuals . . . Thus, the universal must be activated, but subjec-
tivity 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 orga-
nized [gegliedert und wahrhaft organisierter werden]. (PR, §260Z, 283; 407)
We can see from the above that Hegel’s political philosophy is not po-
litically conservative insofar as it does not forestall critical resistance to
state domination. For just as not all existing shapes or objects have actu-
ality (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 contradistinc-
tion, 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 leb-
ender Mensch]; the affirmative aspect—life [das Leben]—survives [besteht]
in spite of such deficiencies. (PR, §258Z, 279; 404)
The ideality which makes its appearance in war in the shape of a con-
tingent external relationship is the same as the ideality whereby the
internal powers of the state are organic moments of the whole. This
is apparent in various occurrences in history, as when successful wars
have averted internal unrest and consolidated the internal power of the
state. Other phenomena of the same kind include the following: na-
tions which are reluctant or afraid to accept internal sovereignty may be
subjugated by others, and their failure to attain honour and success in
their struggles for independence has been proportionate to their initial
failure to organize the power of the state from within (that is, their free-
dom has died from the fear of dying); and states whose independence is
guaranteed not by armed strength but by other factors (as in those states
which are disproportionately small in relation to their neighbours) have
been able to survive with an internal constitution which would not on its
own have secured either internal or external peace. (PR, §324, 362; 493)
104
P H E NG CHE AH
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, 40–41, 269–70). 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 play-
ing 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 nega-
tion. 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 Foucault’s more concrete account of the relation between bio-
power and the power of life. Deleuze and Guattari characterize it as a re-
lation 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
107
P O L I TI C AL BO DI E S WI T HOUT ORGANS
“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 com-
bined 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, empha-
sis 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 im-
manent 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, becom-
ing the whole world]) . . . The issue is not at all anarchy versus organiza-
tion . . . but a calculation or conception of the problems of nondenumer-
able sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may
have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; neverthe-
less, 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, 470–72, 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 il-
lustrated 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 unem-
ployment even as inflation grew as a result of the devalued local curren-
cies. 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
112
P H E NG CHE AH
Beyond the crisis, the education system will shape the region’s future
workforce and the competitiveness of its economies. Sustaining high
quality and broad-based educational expansion is central to equipping
workers with the skills for high productivity manufacturing and ser-
vice industries and to train them over the course of a working life . . .
Institutional and policy reforms are required to foster the high quality
schooling which includes the skills that will propel East Asian countries
into the knowledge economy of the next century.19
Notes
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 Bänden, 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 transla-
tion followed by the German text. Translation modified as appropriate.
5. The dictum comes from PR, 20; 24. For an overview of the pathologiza-
tion of Hegel before and after the Second World War, see Hegel’s Political Philos-
ophy, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Atherton, 1970).
6. Aristotle, De Anima: Books II and III, trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1993), II.i, 412a22–28.
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; En-
zyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II: Zweiter Teil: Die Naturphilosophie, in
Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frank-
furt, 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. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1988), 124–32.
10. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1994), 133.
11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix 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 organiza-
tion, see TP, 266–70.
13. Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans.
Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), 28–29.
14. See TP, chap. 9, titled “1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity”; and
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “Many Politics,” in Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tom-
linson 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 Min-
nesota Press, 1983), 224.
16. Ibid., 239–40, 245–46. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject here Samir
Amin’s caution that Third World countries should delink from the global capi-
talist system.
114
P H E NG CHE AH
Deleuze
115
116
J I M VER NO N
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 im-
pressions 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, 96–97; 106–7). 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 de-
rived from such-and-such an idea, but rather from the smallest idea” pre-
cisely because “it is not under the category of quality that we must con-
sider the mind as mind, but rather from the viewpoint of quantity” (ES,
90; 96–97). One might object that the very distinction between ideas, let
alone between simple and complex ones, presupposes a qualitative dis-
tinction between them. After all, one must be able to distinguish between
“gold,” “mountain,” and “gold mountain” to grasp not only that the for-
mer two are not only distinct but also the simple ideas from which the lat-
ter’s complexity arises. Nothing essential changes, however, in Deleuze’s
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 spa-
tiotemporal.13 A distinct idea, in its singularity, is not successive to an-
other; however, the difference between terms ensures that they are not
experienced together (or else they would be given as related in them-
selves), but the mind experiencing them, just by experiencing and there-
fore collecting them, holds them all together within mind, counting
them all as part of the same experience, and thus orders them in suc-
cession. Similarly, no unrelated point occupies a space next to or dis-
tant 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 “col-
lected” 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,
118
J I M VER NO N
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 what-
soever” (ES, 91; 99). We should note the necessary appeal to the quali-
tative distinction between what are still meant to be strictly quantitative
units. It seems that Deleuze is forced to admit, even in the basic differ-
entiation of terms from each other, that ideas are different not only as
numerically distinct but also as qualitatively something, even if only mini-
mally. However, this does not undermine Deleuze’s 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 dis-
tribution of elements: atom and structure” (ES, 91; 99). What form does
this structure take?
Successively ordering discrete ideas requires that mind bring to-
gether 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 “syn-
thesis 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 experi-
ence of discrete ideas inevitably leads habit to enter the mind as a prin-
ciple, relating previously experienced ideas into present expectations
that anticipate future connections between similar ideas. Mind, thus, in-
evitably “takes on a spontaneity of relation” (ES, 96; 106), giving itself a
structure of habit-anticipation independent of given ideas, transform-
ing 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.
119
DE L E UZE AND HE GE L ON T HE LOGI C OF RELATIONS
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
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 Deleuze’s
concern for novelty and creation. Mind relates content by necessity, but
this inevitably makes it a slavish subject; to emancipate mind from sub-
jective slavery would be to actively undo imposed relations, regardless of
their specific nature. Of course, this cannot be achieved by simply evacu-
ating relation entirely; the merely given will always result in habitual, re-
active subjects whenever it is collected. Rather, one must “keep enough
of the organism’s [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 pre-
subjective 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 in-
terests. Given Deleuze’s 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 Deleuze’s politics is not
only devoid of subjective interest but also dedicated to the perpetual
dismantling of interested subjects/collectives.22 Assuredly this process re-
quires the dedicated work of individual subjects who direct their pursuits
away from both social institutions that facilitate inter-subjective recogni-
tion 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 need-
ing to be experimentally undone in turn, thus the prescription: “keep
moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjec-
tivization.”23 However, Deleuze’s 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 col-
lective interest. Equally cognizant of the fact that merely existent relations
both lack justification and thwart possibilities for action and thought,
126
J I M VER NO N
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 in-
cessant; unlike Deleuze, however, for Hegel it is also progressive, produc-
ing “freer” institutions over time. That is, as Hegel puts it, free spirit’s
“deed is to . . . comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself . . . The
spirit which comprehends this comprehension anew and which—and
this amounts to the same thing—returns 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, ab-
solute 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. Hegel’s politics thus defends the continual, progressive expan-
sion of actualized freedom through concrete social institutions.24
In sum: Hegel and Deleuze, given their respective logics of rela-
tions, both articulate political philosophies focused on “emancipating”
the subject from merely imposed relations. Deleuze begins from pre-
personal, 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, disin-
terested 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 ra-
tional essence. Hegel’s 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 like-
wise 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 pro-
ceeds 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 Hegel’s logic
is, in fact, more consistent, the question starkly posed by their debate
might be: which political philosophy is truly emancipatory?
128
J I M VER NO N
Notes
16. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Crea-
tion (London: Verso, 2006), 159.
17. This does not stop many of Deleuze’s 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 Félix 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 215–24.
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): 6–21. 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 (Man-
chester, 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 “Sid-
ing with Freedom: Towards a Prescriptive Hegelianism,” Critical Horizons 12, no.
1 (2011): 49–69, and “ ‘Free Love’: A Hegelian Defense of Same-Sex Marriage
Rights,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 47, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 69–89.
Part 2
Connection/Synthesis
8
133
134
S I MO N LUMS DE N
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 pas-
sage 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 ourselves—then 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. Mo-
dernity 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 objec-
tive 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 Enlight-
enment 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 objec-
tive 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 essen-
tial principle of modern society.
The fluidity and movement of, in particular modern self-
137
DE L E UZE AND HE GE L ON T HE LI MI T S O F SELF-DETERMINED
S U B J EC T IV I T Y
preserved truth as a given sensuous reality cut off from knowing. Kantian
intuition, just as with empiricism, assumes an immediate and given em-
pirical 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 ex-
perience, knowledge appeared unable to make any claims to objectiv-
ity. 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 Kant’s claim that intu-
itions 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 em-
pirical reality that concepts then mold into meaning. Hegel reconceives
intuition such that it is not purely conceptual but neither is it empiri-
cally 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 Kant’s tran-
scendental subject, Kant thought that concepts were bound to a subjec-
tive sphere that frames the way in which subjects make judgments and
with which they experience the world. Beyond this sphere, on Hegel’s
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 em-
pirical world constrains thought by making it answerable to experience,
was to conceive of Spirit and the Concept as in the broadest sense self-
determined. For Hegel experience must instead be understood as em-
bedded 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 judg-
ment and the concepts employed in judgment are taken to be inherently
self-determined this produces a host of problems, alluded to previously,
143
DE L E UZE AND HE GE L ON T HE LI MI T S O F SELF-DETERMINED
S U B J EC T IV I T Y
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 ac-
tivity, 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 other—the 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 determi-
nations of one’s own self-consciousness in some singular sense. And this
is precisely because the conceptuality that is constitutive of conscious-
ness, 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 one’s physical appear-
ance. 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” rec-
ognizes the delusion that one could know, as it were, transparently both
oneself and the conditions for one’s cognition and experience in an ahis-
torical 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 Car-
tesian reflective model of self-consciousness. In Hegel’s 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 self-
determined, we could never understand them all or make them pres-
ent 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 under-
stood. 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
145
DE L E UZE AND HE GE L ON T HE LI MI T S O F SELF-DETERMINED
S U B J EC T IV I T Y
This categorical structure is the unifying frame through which all mean-
ing 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 activi-
ties 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 ex-
pression 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-
146
S I MO N LUMS DE N
tic, all employ difference in the service of identity. Of the two paths that
Kant’s 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 practi-
cal 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 concept-
intuition distinction.
Deleuze returns to the scene of the Kantian crime. In Deleuze’s
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 Deleuze’s claim for a
transcendental status for the empirical is that Deleuze, like Hegel, is mak-
ing 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 tran-
scendental status. The sensible is the condition of experience and pro-
vides 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, never-
theless 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 Kant’s transcen-
dental 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 rela-
tion to appearance and thought that is subtler than this. “Individuating
147
DE L E UZE AND HE GE L ON T HE LI MI T S O F SELF-DETERMINED
S U B J EC T IV I T Y
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 ex-
actly freedom could mean for the subject that inhabits this world.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1994), 58; Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968), 81. French page numbers follow page num-
bers from the English translation. Referred to in text as DR, followed by page
numbers.
2. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 131–34/171–75; 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, “Philos-
ophy and the Logic of Modernity: Hegel’s Dissatisfied Spirit,” Review of Metaphys-
ics 65, no. 1 (2009): 55–89; and Angelica Nuzzo’s exceptional analysis of the dia-
lectic 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 Zusätze, 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 Hegel’s thought, which
frames it in terms of sociality of reason, usefully appeals to Sellars’s idea of the
space of reasons to assist them in this.
7. Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity 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 Hegel’s 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 Honneth’s Suffering from Indeterminacy:
An Attempt at a Reactualization of “Hegel’s 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.
151
DE L E UZE AND HE GE L ON T HE LI MI T S O F SELF-DETERMINED
S U B J EC T IV I T Y
Kant’s critical project in the Critique of Pure Reason serves two purposes.
On the one hand, Kant secures the possibility of objectivity within expe-
rience. On the other hand, Kant rules out the possibility of an uncon-
ditioned knowledge of things-in-themselves. These two results are both
rooted in the same aspect of experience, namely, the categories of subjec-
tive synthesis that provide unity to experience.
Kant’s epistemology is a kind of phenomenology. Kant argues back-
152
153
DE SI RIN G-P RODUCT I ON AND S P I R IT
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 them-
selves nonsignifying—of 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 tran-
scendent 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, 86–87; 71, 73, emphasis in original)
What has happened is that the subject that is the residuum of production
has been treated as production’s 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 origi-
nary, 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 subject—Kant’s 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 Guat-
tari 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 life—into the realm of transcendental synthesis;
160
J OHN RUS S ON
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
Kant’s project to the point of showing Kant himself to be guilty of the
very offense he attributes to rationalist metaphysics:
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 phe-
nomenology, 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 “sub-
ject”—it 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 in-
stallation 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 pri-
macy of the ideal of objectivity within meaningful experience and in-
stalls desire at the foundation of all sense. Deleuze and Guattari have
attempted to radicalize Kant’s project, articulating the implications of
staying true to the limits of immanence (the “transcendental,” in Kant’s
language), rejecting any attempt to explain experience—“sense”—on
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 de-
sire immanently gives rise to a certain telos of normalization and objec-
tivity. 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.
Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it de-
mands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far
as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless
because what is to happen can only be brought about by both. (PG, 182,
146–47)
ity—the absence “for itself”—of 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-feeding—both from the side of the child and from the side of
the mother—can itself be a way of engaging with the other’s subjectiv-
ity, 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 suck-
ling can be an enjoyment of community as much as it is sensually gratify-
ing: as Brian Massumi, describing the baby’s 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 ele-
ments 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 irreduc-
ible 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 actu-
alities, there would be no possibility of experiencing such an other if one
were only open to apprehending determinacy. Only a being—a 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 de-
sire 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,
176–84, 144–47). 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-
168
J OHN RUS S ON
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 else’s” that is forced upon me by the immanent logic of de-
siring 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 de-
sire 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 inter-
nal dynamism—in Hegel’s language, the “dialectic”—of 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 rec-
onciled 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 tra-
jectory 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 Kant’s 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
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1929), A97–110. See also A76–80/B102–5.
2. This is the argument of the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Critique of Pure
Reason, A22–49/B37–73. Compare A98–100.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A100–102. See B151: “Imagination is the fac-
ulty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present.”
4. Ibid., A103–10. See also A50–52/B74–76, and A67–69/B92–94.
5. Ibid., see A110–14 and A125–30. “Substance and Accident,” “Cause and
170
J OHN RUS S ON
Effect,” and “Reciprocity” are the categories of relation. They are centrally dis-
cussed under the heading “Analogies of Experience.” See A80/B106 and A176–
218/B218–65. The study of the categories is the general subject of the “Tran-
scendental Analytic” as a whole.
6. For a detailed and thorough analysis of Kant’s argument, see Beatrice
Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Tran-
scendental 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, A293–98/B349–55 and A321–32/B377–89. On transcendent vs. tran-
scendental/immanent, see A295–96/B352. On the cognitive value of the cate-
gories as limited to the realm of possible experience, see B146–50.
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 Self-
Consciousness: Originary Passivity in Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” Chiasmi
International 9 (2007): 219–32.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 13.
10. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et Schizo-
phrénie 1, nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972/73), 88; De-
leuze 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 under-
standing so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syn-
theses 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 psycho-
analysis has its metaphysics—its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution—this
time materialist—can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denounc-
ing 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 schizo-
analysis.” L’Anti-Œdipe is referred to in text as A-O, with the French pagination
first, followed by the English pagination; all quotations are from the English trans-
lation. 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 uncon-
scious: hence the determination of those syntheses proper to the unconscious;
the unfolding of history as the functioning of these syntheses; and the denuncia-
tion 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): 291–307, 293.
11. On the “connective synthesis,” see Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.:
171
DE SI RIN G-P RODUCT I ON AND S P I R IT
MIT Press, 1992), 47–48, 5–6. On the notion of the machine (and the signifi-
cance of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis in Anti-Oedipus in general), see Todd May,
Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
121–29.
12. On the recording synthesis, see Massumi, User’s Guide, 49–50; on the
“body without organs,” see 70–71. For the notion of the “virtual,” see May, Gilles
Deleuze, 46–55.
13. On the synthesis of consumption, see Massumi, User’s Guide, 50–51. On
the nature of the “subject,” see Massumi’s excellent summary discussion on 80–81,
and compare also 33–34.
14. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1984), 15–16. The “transcendental object = X” and the “transcenden-
tal unity of apperception” are both introduced in the discussion of the “synthesis
of recognition in a concept,” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A103–10.
15. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, vol. 21 of The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 66–68. The
logic of condensation and displacement is central to Freud’s 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), §15–16, especially pages 102–3.
18. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 10 of Werke in zwanzig Bän-
den, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970–),
137–39 and 143–45; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraphs 166–67 and 173–77. Referred to par-
enthetically 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 Hegel’s account of the dialectic of desire with which I am familiar
is David Ciavatta, “Hegel on Desire’s Knowledge,” Review of Metaphysics 61 (2008):
527–54. My own analysis of desire closely parallels Ciavatta’s.
19. See Ciavatta, “Hegel,” 529–30.
20. See ibid., 543–44.
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, 138–39, and 175, 143–44; for
the logic of negative self-relation in general, see Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vols.
5 and 6 of Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1986); Hegel, Hegel’s 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 Hegel’s Logic, see
Dieter Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion: Neue Fassung,” in Die Wissenschaft
172
J OHN RUS S ON
der Logik und die Logik der Reflexion, ed. Dieter Henrich, Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 18
(Bonn, Ger.: Bouvier, 1978), 203–324.
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, User’s Guide, 71–73. Massumi’s entire discussion of “personal” develop-
ment (68–80) should be compared with my discussion in this final section. Mas-
sumi 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
(73–74) of the “inconsistent availability” of the mother’s breast; I am arguing that
the terms offered by Deleuze and Guattari for explaining our experience of ex-
periencing another as another person always falls short of explaining that mean-
ing 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 re-
quires 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
Kant’s 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,” 293–94. 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): 18–27.
25. Massumi, User’s 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 Freud’s ‘Three Essays,’ ” in Rereading Freud:
Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, ed. Jon Mills (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2004), 33–50, I have made a parallel argument to show that Freud’s
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
173
174
J U L IET T E S I MONT
blends itself with thinking, such that difference knows no limits. Yet a
further consequence of Hegel’s 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 exis-
tents 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 Deleuz-
ian 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 words—and these are De-
leuze’s terms—one 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 essen-
tial 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 Leibniz-
ian 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” (Deleuze’s
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 indi-
viduality. 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 inoppor-
tune 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 differ-
ence 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 differ-
ence. “Vice-diction,” owing to the fact that it is asymmetrical and nonre-
176
J U L IET T E S I MONT
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 con-
cept 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 ex-
ternalization without any return to itself. In other words, it is philosophi-
cally worthless.
But, upon further reflection, we find that Hegel’s 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
unity—of a qualitative or organic synthesis found anew—than 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 har-
bors 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 de-
terminate 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 quan-
tity 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 appre-
hended in its univocity) there is also twenty degrees, just as there are one
hundred centimeters in a meter (extensive size); and inversely, in exten-
sive size, there is also the unity of one meter, and not just the summation
of the hundred centimeters. Quantity therefore tries to escape this insta-
bility 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
178
J U L IET T E S I MONT
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 lon-
ger 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 fash-
ion, or—in keeping with the term one encounters time and time again
in the Science of Logic and which Deleuze could not disown (given the im-
portance he gives it in his reading of Nietzsche)5—they 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 [l’informe].
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, position-
ing them with respect to themselves, as momentarily crystallized cate-
gories 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 uninter-
rupted 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
180
J U L IET T E S I MONT
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), 49–50.
2. Gérard Lebrun, La patience du concept: Essai sur le discours hégélien (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972), 321.
3. See Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 60. We must therefore understand
the world (that is, the set of series that can unfold in a convergent manner) as
preceding the individualities: God did not create Adam as a sinner, He created
the world where certain properties are going to condense as Adam the sinner.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Hu-
manity Books, 1969), 213.
5. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1962), 6–8.
6. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die objektive Logik, Erstes Buch:
Das Sein (1812) (Hamburg, Ger.: Felix Meiner, 1986), 81.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1994), 42.
8. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 120.
11
183
184
J AY LAMP E RT
Paragraph 62–63/42–43
Deleuze is pleased to call the ground a “womb” (matrice, muddying the
orgy metaphor) from which differences are “born.” The old critique of
Hegel is that he overdetermines and overdemonstrates differences; a
187
L I M I T, GR OUND, JUDGME NT . . . SYL LO GISM
Paragraphs 337–40/262–64
The “Conclusion” of DR includes an excursus to Hegel, distinguishing
four senses of “ground” (fondement). In general, ground cannot save dif-
ference, Deleuze argues, since it is ultimately either formless identity or
overdetermined (representational) reason. Hegel and Leibniz promised
orgiastic ground, but ultimately they both assume that differences con-
verge on an “insipid monocentricity of circles” (a geometric metaphor
Deleuze takes more seriously than Hegel). Still, Deleuze himself is ready
to use the notion of ground as a “sub-representative source.” We might
see Deleuze’s first three definitions of ground as criticism of Hegel,
and the fourth as Deleuze’s alternative. Or we might see the movement
through the four definitions as Hegel’s own dialectic.
Paragraph 349–50/272
(1) In the first definition, ground (Grund) means sufficient reason: “to
ground is to determine” why a thing is what it is, to name its essence. An
essence in turn “selects” different instances that “represent” it. Nonsimi-
lar cases are excluded as “rebellious,” or as “simulacra” that only feign
the essence in question. Now, if Hegel had affirmed a classical theory of
this sort, it would be fair to criticize him. But this theory has little to do
with Hegel’s use of the term “ground,” and little to do with what Deleuze
earlier meant when attributing a theory of ground to him. Hegel does
discuss a sufficient-reason theory of ground. But he rejects it as tautolo-
gous pseudo-explanation, as if the reason a thing is x is that it has the
sort of foundation that permits x. For Hegel, far from defining essence,
properties expand themselves until they conflict with essentialist interpre-
tation. For Hegel, ground contains no sufficient reasons, just phenom-
enal intersections across properties. If this is still a tautology, it is one of
contingent self-givenness, not transcendent doubling.
Paragraph 350/272–73
(2) By the second definition, ground refers to a foundational level be-
hind appearances. The difficulty with foundationalism, of course, is that
189
L I M I T, GR OUND, JUDGME NT . . . SYL LO GISM
ground must in turn be grounded. But this need not be viciously regres-
sive. In hermeneutical circles, for example, mutual grounding makes
meaningful history; and in phenomenological apodicticity, the transcen-
dental 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 re-
gressive. But to assign its cause to moving foreground and background
determinacies is, if less explanatory, more descriptive.
Paragraph 350–51/273–74
(3) “To ground is always to ground representation.” Ground, in the third
definition, “organizes” and “distributes” determinations that “coexist.”
But how can infinite representations be distributed? Each is positioned
not just in relation to the finite determinations around it, but is also dis-
tributed virtually among infinite others that are not actually present—
that are actually before and after it, yet virtually alongside it. Given in-
finitely complex relations, determinacies cannot have set positions in a
present, but they nevertheless “arrive and pass.” Determinations at dif-
ferent, incompossible times have to coexist on an omni-temporal plane.
This is Deleuze’s theme of “immemorial memory or pure past,” a tem-
poral “circle” (this time Deleuze uses Hegel’s circle metaphor in his own
voice), a shared ground of difference with no shared moment, just an
overlay of difference. But can we still call this a ground of infinite deter-
minations, or is it a way of saying relations are “ungrounded”?
In short, differences need a ground; but their distribution defines,
and de-structures, groundedness, “unraveling the circle.”
Paragraphs 352–54/275–76
(4) “To ground is to determine the indeterminate”: ground gives struc-
ture to ungroundedness.
This is Deleuze’s own account of difference, presented as a twist on
Hegel’s. “Something of the ground rises to the surface,” “between” forms.
Just because a determination arises from an infinite ground means that
the latter’s forms proliferate and thus “decompose”; any “model” for ex-
plaining it breaks down. Each thing is still determinate, but with more
available, its lines of contact with others are not determinable. As Deleuze
puts it, determination does not limit or oppose the indeterminate; it is not
as if the indeterminate is real and the determinate is its distorted represen-
tative. “Indeterminacy” simply names the mutable forces of determinacy.
Deleuze says this “forces thought”: sense emerges from stupid,
animal, genital, nonessential, non-sense material. To think is to focus
190
J AY LAMP E RT
Paragraphs 354–55/276–77
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 pos-
ited to explain representations leaves it too indeterminate, so it “cannot
sustain difference.” In fact, this is virtually Hegel’s conclusion as well.
Instead of the dual term “representation-ground,” we need each determi-
nation 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 ap-
pearances. Deleuze calls it a “simulacrum.” Jean Baudrillard treats simu-
lacra 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 de-
termination 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 Schelling’s undif-
191
L I M I T, GR OUND, JUDGME NT . . . SYL LO GISM
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 rem-
nants 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.
Part 2. Propositions
Paragraph 63–64/43–44
Deleuze and Hegel often use the same reason to choose opposite termi-
nology. They agree that to express an infinite situation, the terms of the
expression should do the work of producing infinite variants—Hegel
calls this “judgment,” Deleuze calls it “proposition.” If the expression
itself does not do that work, a subject with contingent psychological dis-
positions (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 Deleuze’s account of expression. A case in point concerns
disjunction in infinite judgment.
Infinite grounds are too extensive to be asserted, so they can only be ex-
pressed by hypotheticals, which are cashed out as disjunctions; disjunc-
tion for Hegel is the culmination of both judgment and syllogism.
The hypothetical “If A then B” means that A’s being is in B’s (SL,
652); the antecedent enters into its concept. But its relation to its con-
cept is only ever one of several disjunctive possibilities. “If A then B” does
not determine what the situation for B is if ~A. And since “If A then B” is
equivalent to “~A v B,” either B will be get to be true, or A will not have
been true. The hypothetical form presents A and B as two situations, one
following the other, whereas the equivalent disjunction pairs the two in
one multi-valued situation. This is why disjunction is the form that better
expresses inter-grounding determinations.
192
J AY LAMP E RT
other. The issue is not that there are extremes on a continuum (for ex-
ample, 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 im-
plicate 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 differ-
ence 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 posi-
tion 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.
Deleuze’s second excellent Hegelian point is that a determination
indifferent to context is an “object.” The stretching process of difference
reflects back into an object’s plastic identity. It hardly matters whether
we call a given object positive or negative, flowing or interrupted, indi-
vidual or field.
Deleuze’s 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. Deleuze’s 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 criti-
cizes Hegel for negativity anyway.
Deleuze’s 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 Hegel’s “ground” is to put de-
terminations 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 quali-
ties. Contradiction is thus a minimal step away from indifferent ground.
195
L I M I T, GR OUND, JUDGME NT . . . SYL LO GISM
Paragraphs 65–69/45–48
Deleuze mounts his criticism at the price of a less convincing reading of
Hegel. He begins by saying Hegel’s “real contradiction” “distinguishes a
thing from everything it is not” (as well as from what it is, we should add). It
is right, for Hegel, to focus on “real” contradiction (as opposed to potential
contradiction), and to say that a determination contradicts “everything.”
Deleuze rejects this total mutual distinguishing, since it “posits a
whole reality,” ens summum, “complete determination,” the infinitely large
of theology. It is true for Hegel that involvement beyond limit has no halt-
ing point, but that does not really posit a whole ex machina, so much as
a process whose lines draw incompossibles on a plane of consistency (to
use more Deleuzian terms). Deleuze suggests that Hegel prefers theology
to mathematics, but really what Hegel prefers to math is logic. Deleuze
shortly abandons his weak charge that Hegel relies on theology, but his
follow-up charge that Hegel relies on the logic of genus is no better.
Deleuze says that Hegel “begins” with genus, then posits division,
“suppressing” or subordinating specific differences. It is as if Deleuze’s
earlier interesting reading of Hegel has dropped out of the picture in
favor of a straw man. For Hegel, a genus is both itself and its species, a
whole and its parts, a synthesis that effectively destroys genus-species re-
lations. Deleuze earlier had correctly said that Hegel began with finite
determinations and drew the infinite out of it, rather than beginning
with an infinite genus and naming its portions. Hegel indeed says many
times that Being is not a highest genus. In the Phenomenology, under the
heading of “Observing Reason,” Hegel treats genus and species as naive
categories for classifying natural phenomena.7 Genus is an unlikely place
for an encounter between Deleuze and Hegel.
But there is a further criticism at stake. Deleuze confronts Hegel
with Leibniz’s notion of cases—imperceptibly tiny movements, infini-
tesimals too small to have essences, ontological units whose substance
is thereby more inessential than essential. Small in-essences are not just
small essences, but determinate in a way unrelated to essences. This is
interesting: essences can contradict one another, but in-essences have no
properties to contradict, so their difference is not annulled in contact
(they are “vice-dicted” rather than contra-dicted). But it is not clear what
Deleuze thinks does determine an infinitely small case, or what makes it
a difference.
And why is contradiction not repeated at each level of smallness, no
196
J AY LAMP E RT
Paragraphs 69–71/48–50
Deleuze finds two similarities between Leibniz and Hegel, four criticisms
of Hegel, and five senses of original difference; the last two senses ex-
press Deleuze’s own view.
Deleuze sees that Hegel’s essences are not abstract, but self-
expansions (like monadic selves), implications of elastic nonorganic auto-
affection. Nevertheless, Deleuze has two reservations about Hegel’s ap-
peal 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, prefer-
ring 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 fi-
nite (with Leibniz) or each other (with Hegel) “monocentrically.” In fact,
Hegel’s circle metaphor imagines inter-cutting orbits. But this aside, De-
leuze makes a good point that to describe difference, the infinite needs
to suppress the finite. Yet Hegel himself is often said to suppress the fi-
nite, and if this is true, he does what Deleuze wants him to.
(2) Deleuze’s second complaint is that while infinite ground con-
tradicts one kind of identity, it installs more “serious” kinds, by assum-
ing there are local identities needing explanation. It is unclear whether
Deleuze thinks that there should be any explanation at all for local de-
terminations. Orgiastic indifference suggests not; machinic assemblage
suggests the reverse. In any case, if Deleuze criticizes the notion of orgi-
astic 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 Hegel’s identity-destroying ground, and the logic of
contradiction it uses to overcome essences, are nevertheless in the service
of identity, Deleuze mounts four challenges.
199
L I M I T, GR OUND, JUDGME NT . . . SYL LO GISM
Paragraph 71–72/50–51
Complaints about negation and identity do not challenge the kind of
Hegelianism that thrives on becoming and distribution. But there is
a further argument against Hegel, based on second-order differential
200
J AY LAMP E RT
Paragraphs 72–74/51–52
Deleuze’s conclusion is that opposition (a) presupposes difference rather
than explaining it, (b) distorts difference by overcoming it, (c) pertains
only to one-dimensional parameters with “previously established iden-
tity,” and (d) makes difference sound like it negates something.9 Hegel’s
201
L I M I T, GR OUND, JUDGME NT . . . SYL LO GISM
Paragraphs 74–76/52–54
Deleuze considers an objection to his own view: if we say difference is pure
affirmation, are we what Hegel calls “beautiful souls”? Does the refusal to
acknowledge negation make one a naive optimist who either ignores, en-
joys, or seeks to justify destructive forces? Perhaps Deleuze should simply
embrace the beautiful soul, but he wants to avoid the charge.
202
J AY LAMP E RT
Notes
1. I will refer not to page numbers, but to paragraphs in the text in the
form “paragraph 62–63/42–43,” 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, Différence et répétition
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
2. To emphasize Deleuze’s encounter with Hegel, I deemphasize Deleuze’s
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, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic High-
lands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969), 124.
5. This puts a lot of pressure on Deleuze’s 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 176–79.
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 ele-
ments 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 Kojève’s1 and Andrzej Warminski’s2 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 “epistemology”3 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, Foucault’s reduction to Power-Being, as we shall see,
falls short of Deleuze’s 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 su-
persedes and is external to life (as in Kojève’s 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
204
205
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E O N LI FE , S E NS E , AND LIMIT
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 Warminski’s Hegel, I suggest that, on Deleuze’s theory
of exclusion, even what is definitive of singularity would in fact entail a
substantive notion of relation, limit, and indeed, death.8
There is no doubt that the eight or so pages on “life” (PG, 168–77), pre-
ceding the classic text of the section on “Lordship and Bondage,” are
central to the tradition of scholarship that focuses on desire as key to
Hegel and his theory of negation.9 Setting himself apart from the tradi-
tional view, however, Warminski claims that “life” is not determinately ne-
gated in consciousness; rather, he argues, there is a disjunction between
life as a phenomenon that consciousness cannot supersede and the unity
that consciousness grasps when it comprehends life as a genus (Gattung).
For Warminski, then, life entails a “disjunctive reading” in which the “we,”
or the Hegelian reader, witnesses or relates simultaneously to knowledge
of two extremities that are not to be reconciled. As finite, life multiplies
itself in the procreation of individuals, while, as infinite, life is living con-
sciousness grasping itself. Hegel thus notes the failure of finite life to
produce its own self-negation, or a sign for itself. Finite life just produces
more individuals of the species—it does not produce the species as such.
Following Warminski (“HM,” 183), the key text on this issue is the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit, 172:
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 Warminski’s view, the human significance of life that de-
sire represents cannot serve as a delimitation of the human from within
the human (contrary to Kojève, for whom desire is an anthropogenetic
206
E MI L IA ANGE LOVA
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 itself—it knows itself only through a self-
consciousness that is not yet sufficiently awakened to itself. Life seems,
however, to be “self-negating enough for self-consciousness” (ibid.). Un-
derscoring this point in Hegel, Warminski’s use of “enough” here is ironic:
life’s 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 life’s lack of appearance—the
nothing—and with the coming into being of the nothing knowledge
ceases to be related to an object external to itself; knowledge is thus self-
knowledge. 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 phi-
losophy of self-consciousness is announced in the introduction to the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Loosely put by Warminski, Hegel’s 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 “ac-
counted for,” on the arbitrary distinction between “man as a living crea-
ture (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, 80–82).
It is precisely attention to this arbitrary distinction between anthro-
pology and phenomenology, and the author’s 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 Kojève 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 life’s
own other, that is, death—the 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 self-
consciousness.10 On Kojève’s 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 infi-
nite self-concept of man. Hegel’s claim, for Kojève, is thus that the sign is
anthropogenetic discourse, or the vehicle of a spiritual transformation.
Kojève understands the sign, Barnett suggests, “in a decidedly modern
208
E MI L IA ANGE LOVA
light”:12 (a) that spirit’s precondition is the arbitrariness of the sign; (b)
that because of this arbitrariness the question with respect to the termi-
nus or limit must take on entirely new shape, a rational philosophy as
praxis; and finally (c) that consciousness is coterminus with history. For
Kojève, Hegel approaches the “end of man” as a move away from meta-
physics and to the material conditions of praxis. The “death of man” as
metaphysical entity and his birth as object of desire just means that self-
consciousness is desire for another self-consciousness within a historical
limit.13 As Kojève 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 Kojève, 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, 131–33). 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 privileg-
ing anthropogenesis as reproduction of the notion/life, namely, the sign.
In the next section, I will argue—contra Kojève, and with Warminski—
that the sign is neither structural nor senseless, but that, for Hegel, it is
sense that bestows meaning upon the sign.
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 standards—it 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 “ex-
perience,” 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 moment—the origination of a new object
occurring in the movement of consciousness—is “necessity itself [Notwen-
digkeit]” (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 “pre-
sents 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 uni-
versal, 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 “some-
thing contributed by us,” through a “reversal of consciousness,” or “scien-
tific progression of consciousness”—this, however, is not known to the
consciousness that we are observing, which remains within false appear-
ance (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 mo-
ment, 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, becom-
ing, and Spirit—what 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-
211
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E O N LI FE , S E NS E , AND LIMIT
cess of becoming; the “tarrying with the negative” that gives determinate-
ness 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 self-
enclosed” is “Death”—“if it is what we want to call this actuality”—yet 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 con-
sciousness, Hegel anticipates Heidegger and as well Deleuze: sign, life,
and time are expressions in the present. Completion of the series (Abso-
lute 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 suffers from neither a defect nor a void, yet rushes in “un-
halting” progress toward its “goal” (the concept itself), admitting noth-
ing except as it is “comprehended [begreifen]” in “speculative science [be-
greifende Wissenschaft]” in terms of the concept (PG, 80). This, then, is
an imperative that explains consciousness’s 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 on-
going 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 Hei-
degger, a major rethinking of negation and negativity, notably the factic-
ity of Dasein, its task of interpretation, and whether and how it derives
from the articulation of the question of Being, centers these debates (BT,
433–37). 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-
212
E MI L IA ANGE LOVA
tion of Thought, and finally Life, for Deleuze, carries more peculiarity
than for his interlocutors.
From his early works onward, and especially in his Foucault, Deleuze de-
fends “acategorial” thinking and the inability of Thought, constitution-
ally, to delimit conceptual determinations, whose series “has no begin-
ning or end” (F, 21). Thought itself, as subject, emerges in history only
later, and with this late origination in mind, historical epochs define a
“long period of time,” and thereby accommodate a postponement, de-
ferral, and recurrence of difference within a chronological sequence (F,
100). As such, the Concept/Thought in Hegel is tantamount, for De-
leuze, to revising the various concepts of series and life, as these appear
and are appropriated on the grand scale of history. However, it is not
in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but first in the Science of Logic, that Hegel
includes Thought as an independent subject of study. Hegel construes
the Phenomenology of Spirit as phenomenology (logic of appearance), the
science of the experience (Erfahrung) of consciousness, but the specula-
tive (begreifende Wissenschaft) philosophy (from the standpoint of which
this phenomenology is incomplete) is the study of “the form of being
in thought itself” and thus is “absolute knowing” (in the introduction
to PG, 37). Deleuze, by contrast, distinguishes the germinations of anti-
transcendental thought, as he identifies Thought to be the same as the
fold of difference. For Deleuze (F, 124–32), there exist three “images
of thought”—Greek (use of pleasure, use of bodies, Self without man);
classical (man does not yet exist since preoccupation is with fixing the
place of man on the measure of the infinite, death of God); and the new
image (man no longer exists since preoccupation is with the Idea and the
thought of another inside me enters and leaves the I, opens up spaces
and frees up both ends of the surface line, death of man).
Deleuze radicalizes the destructive potential of Thought’s object,
which he first uncovers out of Foucault’s four diagrams (folds) of “dis-
course.” Foucault decouples the ontic object from the ontic-ontological
one, as well as the conditions of possibility from those of explanation.
Foucault thus uncovers a new dimension in the object: Thought. Two
folds are internal to the new dimension of thought: the one end-form
is visibility (Magritte’s well-known drawing of the pipe); the other is dis-
course or the “statement” (F, 9). Two epistemic functions are brought
forth contra a phenomenological structure of consciousness investing a
213
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E O N LI FE , S E NS E , AND LIMIT
On the contrary, these positions stem from the statement itself and
consequently become the categories of “non-person,” “he,” “one,” “He
speaks,” or “One speaks,” which are defined by the family of statements.
Here Foucault echoes Blanchot in denouncing linguistic personology
and seeing the different positions for the speaking subject as located
within a deep anonymous murmur. It is within this murmur without
beginning or end that Foucault would like to be situated, in the place
assigned to him by statements. And perhaps these are Foucault’s most
moving statements. (F, 7)
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) estab-
lishes the “being-brought-before” of an ethics in which “being-with” is
217
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E O N LI FE , S E NS E , AND LIMIT
One question the above might pose is: does Deleuze’s ontology of the pres-
ent depend first on a methodological instruction concerned with accessibil-
ity? Deleuze isolates and brings to light the “style” of the one “who” is doing
the speaking (the writer, the philosopher). Moreover, the immanence of
difference incurs a breakage ascending to what Deleuze calls the image of
thought, which “retains only what thought [that is, the given philosopher]
can claim by right [quid juris].”20 The image of thought implies a strict
“division between fact and right,” for thought demands or selects “infinite
movement or the movement of the infinite.”21 The intensive reduction in-
cludes all levels, yet it at the same times excludes systematic limit and ne-
gation. Yet one could still ask: how does exclusion work—what does it do?
The plane of immanence is something that Deleuze abrogates, it
folds/unfolds and reveals/conceals. Every philosopher institutes a plane
which is neither a state of knowledge, nor a method, nor opinion; acting
like a sieve, he creates concepts. One needs to insert “the” plane—and
with it Deleuze confronts Hegel’s universals—yet without it, thought will
cease being a sense, or sign: “The plane of immanence is . . . rather the
image of thought, the image that thought gives itself of what it means to
think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”22 Con-
sider Nietzsche’s Ariadne.23 Brilliantly, Deleuze traces the above account
of the “act” by taking up Nietzsche’s example of the Greek archaic myth
of Ariadne’s thread as figure. We ask of the act: what does it do? Ariadne’s
act, her spinning thread-machine, or what Nietzsche has represented as
the “Spider’s Web,” is a single image of thought. Theseus (man), Dio-
nysos (man-God), her two knots, her two husbands do not hamper her
singularity—displaced upon a line of flight by her act, she is untouched
by them. Deleuze admits that even the single image of thought cannot
help becoming a reduction, whereby genital, dangerous thought, which
is in definition a weakling, an impotence, connects “to” itself in search
of its bearings. One surface on which the thread hangs is Ariadne, her
life, while the thread on which Ariadne’s hangs herself, her death, albeit
congruent, not identical, is another—almost the same but similar, how-
ever small the difference.
The clue for Deleuze is, it seems to me, that the very limit, or limi-
tation, or end, remains a substantive notion of death. On the one hand,
if singularity is a story—a fiction more real than reality—then becoming
singular is aimed at the complete determination of the question-problem
complex. The story of Ariadne told this way is myth par excellence. This
chapter problematizes Deleuze’s attack on Hegel for believing naively
219
HE G E L A ND DE LE UZ E O N LI FE , S E NS E , AND LIMIT
in raising the individual to the universal and the absolute (the story of
Desire). For Deleuze, We/I, the privileged member, consciousness, Ari-
adne, the agent of her desire—observe. What we cannot do is witness
thought’s own geneticism to testify, to engage in knowledge. Authenticat-
ing death proper, witnessing desire, speaking about it, entails completion
of the story, drawing the thread to a close—which 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 Hegel’s position
that the self grasps itself through the limits of the other as pointing to
the sense of life.
Notes
Conjunctive Synthesis
13
223
224
C ONS TANT I N V. BOUNDAS
tence: “OÙ L’ON APPREND que le philosophe porte secours aux crimi-
nels et que la philosophie s’entend en un sens extra-moral.” The second
scene—under the title “The Roads of Desire”—has the curtain go up
with this passage: “OÙ IL EST QUESTION de la rumination animale, du
désir . . . ” 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 ar-
ranged according to the deductive necessity of formal logic. It would not
be an intrigue. To present itself with intrigue, Hegel’s Phenomenology has
to attest to the contingency of becoming. “History,” writes Martin, “can-
not be conceived under the yoke of nature or the mechanical linking
of social facts . . . The Spirit has to tear itself off this double determina-
tion . . . in order to enter History successfully and to achieve the freedom
of its deployment” (103).
But in what sense is the Phenomenology’s 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 life—an inaugural crime that creates an opening . . .
Only in the death, the crime and the sacrifice of its perfection—only in
the contestation of the angelic perfection of the Idea—does 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 de-
tach itself from the world in transcendence. On the contrary, it separates
itself in a Fall, which is a movement of being submerged and divided ac-
cording to a trajectory of immanence. In the last analysis, it is evil that
stands for the root of creation” (236–37).
Now, instead of heaping quotations upon quotations, I invited Jean-
Clet 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 book’s fidel-
ity to Hegel. I was intrigued by the fact that you, one of the best read-
ers of Deleuze today, chose to write it without even setting aside your
Deleuze-colored spectacles. You have written on Borges, Van Gogh, Aris-
totle, and Nancy, but to us Anglo-Americans, you are best known as a
reader of Deleuze—and 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
225
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
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 book—he had already composed the Letter
that now prefaces it—and we know it, too, thanks to the translation that
Edinburgh University Press has made available. Your profound under-
standing of Deleuze’s 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 Deleuze’s confidence in you
and showcase your ability to think and write in accordance with Deleuze’s
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 variation—this time, with Hegel in mind—where
“the enemy will find a better place in the network of friendships intro-
duced 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 d’être of Deleuze’s “libidinal deconstruction” as the dismantling
of Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge.4 We may then begin our discussion of
your book at this point.
One recent essay speaks of Deleuze’s “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—
Hegel’s is a philosophy of identity; the Phenomenology is a humanism; the
centrality of the negative muffles the voices of affirmation; desire col-
lapses into need, and so on—that ground the conclusion of this author
and then bring your own assessments of Hegel’s intentions to bear on
your obvious disagreement. But, before we follow this road, could you
perhaps take us back to an earlier time—the 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?
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, Deleuze’s reading of Marx would have been very
different from Marx’s 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 De-
leuze, 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 im-
possible 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 ques-
tion 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 it—we are on very different ter-
rains, 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 Deleuze’s
enemy, the enemy’s position becomes interesting when we relate it to the
way that Deleuze—in 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, who—at the
center of an empire (where people switch positions constantly)—reveals
a friendship that is stronger than any family tie. Nevertheless, this friend-
ship 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 clichés 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 him—he 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.
227
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
So, Hegel and Deleuze are enemies. So be it! But how the enemy
sees the friend—this 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
work—“Hegel 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 move-
ment. No doubt about it! However, this movement is not the movement
of Deleuze—the rhythm and danse are not the same, the negative does
not proceed from affirmation in the same manner as Spinoza’s, 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 think-
ing. This makes me think of a remark Borges made about tango: it is a
duel, a danse of two enemy brothers, performed with knives—a manner-
ism of martial arts. In this context, my reading of Hegel makes possible
a radiography of Deleuze: a negative—in the photographic sense of this
word—that makes room for a new visibility. But under no circumstances
is it a question of Hegel making the same movement as Deleuze—in the
place of Deleuze—when we, the readers of Deleuze, know full well that
this place has its own signature.
of Deleuze’s book, could not help but express his reservations toward
Deleuze’s sustained effort to wipe out all vestiges of the dialectic from
Nietzsche’s 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 nega-
tive 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
Hegel’s 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] pos-
sess . . . 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 Hegel’s 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 masks—even 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 func-
tion, the creative potential of the dialectic movement? Unmasking and
creating are not the same thing—are 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
229
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
the value of these tools from a functional point of view? Is not moral-
ity dependent upon functions whose distant effects—but also the least
expected ones from the point of view of symptomatology—were discov-
ered by Nietzsche? It is true that the dialectic is the tool of the weak, ac-
cording 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 future—a 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 past—not 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 to-
tality of Deleuze’s work. Obviously it is a significant moment, absolutely
valid in the context of Deleuze’s 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 Deleuze’s 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 no-
tions 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 Bergson’s 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 con-
tradiction in the economy of Hegel’s 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
230
C ONS TANT I N V. BOUNDAS
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, Bergson’s cone is a
much more complicated machine than the twists and turns of the eter-
nal return. On the other hand, it seems to me that, on this plane, the
fabrication of machines demands other alliances, friends other than the
Nietzscheans—whose 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 isn’t 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” aspect—a 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 dia-
bolical force—the devil [diable] in his essence being diabolical—inside
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 authority—the pontifical language.
Deleuze is therefore elsewhere—beyond the simple opposition dia-
lectic/anti-dialectic—no 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 life—as he does in Faust. Only
the strange entities that Deleuze has us encounter through the imper-
sonality of becoming-animal could do this. I think this is the real nov-
elty of Deleuze: that he places us in front of the animal—face-to-face
with animal sensations and animal spirits that the West must understand
231
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
before they become extinct, and face-to-face with machines that we must
learn to handle before we leave this life. In Hegel’s 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 anthro-
pological 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 will—and 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 Hegel’s 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 conscience—stoicism, skepticism,
and so on—have done. It was, you recall, with these figures in mind that
you invoked Nietzsche’s diagnosis of pregnancy. And, despite your quali-
fications, 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 think-
ing His own thought of the Science of Logic will not match the archē and
the eschaton of the Hegelian saga.
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 im-
perative is the first fact—the only fact that we can respect, without deriv-
ing 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?
Hegel’s critique precisely consists of showing that morality itself is
a phenomenon—a 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 rea-
son that considers itself pure must move beyond, very much beyond, the
aspirations—themselves metaphysical and illusory—of theoretical rea-
son 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 “ge-
nealogy of morals.” However, Hegel’s genealogy differs over many points
from Nietzsche’s, because Nietzsche’s 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 Ger-
man idealism. I think that Hegel’s 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 impera-
tive as the origin of the world—the 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 University—the thing that endeared him to me, I should say . . .
233
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
complicated point that I leave hanging for the time being, as I am already
at some distance from your question.
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,
235
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
CVB: Permit me to quote you once more: “Hegel’s book displays two
planes, each one of which has a different speed of composition: the rag-
ing, 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 igno-
rant of the becoming that he helps hatch. This line of sense occurs ‘be-
hind his back’; it is the series of moments—the slower and ampler of the
two—the pacified thread of which the philosopher-historian is going to
follow retrospectively backwards” (130–31). This way of referring to the
237
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
two planes makes me think that, according to your reading, the Hege-
lian planes with their difference prefigure Deleuze’s distinction and sup-
plementarity between becoming and history. And you seem to confirm
this suspicion when, a few paragraphs earlier, you quote from Deleuze
and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?: “Hegel powerfully defined the con-
cept 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, accord-
ing 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 him—the real and the virtual—proves to be
very far away”? (234–35). Is your qualification of the two worlds—made
in terms of the real and the virtual—a mere lapsus calami? Did you mean
to write, instead, “the actual and the virtual”? If it were not your inten-
tion 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 terri-
fied 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 Hegel’s
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-
238
C ONS TANT I N V. BOUNDAS
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 Hegel’s commenta-
tors 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 ap-
proach is not the same and the criticisms have their place and their justi-
fication). There are, then, in Hegel two planes—the 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 De-
leuze’s 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 Phe-
nomenology of Spirit that places us squarely inside eternity, inaugurating a
machine that did not exist earlier—a machine that Hegel calls “Absolute
Knowledge,” and which is neither the eternal return nor Bergson’s 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, notwith-
standing 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.
239
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
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 mo-
ments or places where, like a demon, they were not expected—casual
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 is—how 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 pro-
ceeds from the statute of the image [tableau], from the circulation of
images having become for-themselves—as they pass from the in itself to
the for itself—to the point where they no longer need our brains to sur-
vive, having been entirely liberated in a form of pure, almost cinemato-
graphic, sensation. That’s it. It looks difficult, but this is the point respon-
sible for the monstrous beauty of the whole, a point of tipping over to
which we will probably return.
J-CM: I must confess that my reading of Hegel kept itself away from what
Lacan might have thought. For the little that I know, there are at least two
fundamental differences between Lacan and my own complex reading of
Antigone. On one hand, a reconsideration of Creon and his “becoming-
man” that sidelines the father whose authority I do not think he embod-
ies; and on the other, my impression that, at long last, the young girl—the
young woman, the woman in the direction of whom the becoming of the
statute mother is being propelled—is about to be liberated. Creon is not
adopting a father’s attitude any more than Antigone seems to endorse the
role of a mother! What Hegel seems to say without pause is that, in this
distanciation from the couple father/mother, the brother/sister relation-
ship loses its familial character, as I myself tried to show on the basis of my
reading of Derrida’s Glas. By the same token, it is true that I lift the trag-
edy of Sophocles out of the economy of the household and therefore out
of psychoanalysis to place it on the side of the anti-Oedipus that remains
hostile toward the familial romance. We have always known that the Oedi-
pal complex does not work well with the girl and that Freud always had a
hard time with this subject. It seems to me that Antigone is the exact coun-
terproof of Oedipus and that Freud omitted the reading of this sequence
as he concluded his universal complex with an appeal to castration.
I believe, by the way, that my reading moves away from our habit of
naturalizing Antigone as a representative of natural right (essentially ma-
ternal) and again away from this other tendency to hold Creon culpable
and to see him as a paternalist tyrant mobilizing an arbitrary or rather
241
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
CVB: “The affair of Christ implies that God becomes man only on the
condition that man becomes a superior being, an ‘overman,’ if I am per-
mitted to assume, in an untimely manner, the expression that will be-
come Nietzsche’s own” (193). “God steps outside the limits of His per-
petual reclusion as He negates himself as ‘One’ . . . In such a negation of
His retreat, man’s approach to God is being prolonged; it is pursued in
242
C ONS TANT I N V. BOUNDAS
the vision that God has of Himself—Himself 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” (217–18). 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 term—“overman”—for 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 Hegel’s system.
My reason for asking is this: Christianity’s 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 à la Nietz-
sche (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?
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, let’s consider Giacometti’s sketches.
We see in them a multiplicity of intersecting traits, a veritable ball, an
intersection of threads coming from all directions, which, when com-
pleted succeed in creating a portrait. Where then does the figure come
from? It did not preexist like a substance; rather it happens like an in-
corporeal 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 land-
scape that are being inflected upon it. The inversed aura does not be-
come 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 circu-
lates 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 [s’effraient], seized that they are by the sudden entry of becom-
ing [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 Deleuze’s reading) where I can find cinema, image, the art of pho-
tography, 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 him—instead of repeating with the orthodoxy of the
244
C ONS TANT I N V. BOUNDAS
friend who always muffles him. This is my way of being Hegel’s 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
Hegel’s times, especially as we learn that he was the reader of Goethe’s
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 obli-
gates 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 con-
cept, 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 in-
tellectual 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 (25–26). Since
Hegel, you claim, “the concept is not an idealization external to things.
Rather, it designates the force of creation and destruction—an 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 tantum—the (one) event—with 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 Deleuze’s con-
cept. With Deleuze, we are inside a radical immanence and this is already
the case with Hegel. This is indisputable—it 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. De-
leuze’s “transcendental empiricism” requires the virtual; that is, a form
245
A C R IMIN AL I NT RI GUE
J-CM: I do not think that Deleuze was mistaken in keeping his distance
from Hegel. Their difference is in fact a difference in nature. The mecha-
nisms are not the same and the histories skirt each other, being neverthe-
less suspended from a common transcendental plane from which they
draw their inspiration and are detached, much like lightning is from the
black sky (here I repeat the formula of Difference and Repetition). Begin-
ning with these traces that fuse together in all directions, I would say
that Hegel came to know a more important becoming in North America
than in France, especially through an entire series of nineteenth-century
thinkers that led to James’s pluralism. As for Deleuze—no matter what
critics have to say—he seems to me to be closer to Félix Ravaisson, to
Bergson and perhaps to Schelling, himself a reader of Spinoza. The
genealogies, therefore, are not the same at all. But there are bridges
and parallelisms that I made use of to pass from the system of “negative
difference” to Deleuze’s more affirmative plan. I would say that there
is a plethora of Anglo-American thinkers, from F. H. Bradley to Josiah
Royce, who are not in the analytic tradition and who could help us work
out a new image of thought. There are necessarily differences of nature
between the Hegelian landscapes and the wild landscapes of the Deleuz-
ians—similar to the differences between continents—but there are also
passages and discoveries to be made as we circulate between the two, in
a fault line that would contribute to the encounter between the Conti-
nental and North American philosophies, between literature and the
cinema. The real center of thought for the future is here—a pluriverse
with pathways that diverge, but also intersect one another in the elabora-
tion of a new machine intending to explore spaces and times of different
dimensions, like Royce’s map which is self-contained, but its coordinates
become deformed as we alter the scales. Royce was able to invent a fan-
tastic world on the basis of the disquieting mathematical speculations on
the subject of the infinite being reflected inside the finite and its parts.
This is what interests me, and this could open a new line of research and
writing after my forthcoming book on Derrida.
Notes
253
254
C ONT RI BUT ORS