October 25, 2004

Deleuze & Klossowski

Just a quick point, Gary. I've got about five minutes before I have to leave to give a lecture on Proust, so my thought is elsewhere.

Klossowski dedicates his book on Nietzsche to Deleuze but Deleuze's book on Nietzsche is, from memory, nothing like Klossowski's. The latter's book is unique, Deleuze's less so. Once again, from memory, it is more a book against Hegel than on Nietzsche. In particular, it is a polemic against dialectics. Adorno comes to a similar point at the end of Negative Dialectics regarding the limits of dialectics as metaphysics - I mentioned this earlier during our heated discussion on Heidegger but I think you misunderstood it then. This is why I thought Deleuze and Adorno were rather similar. They both see the limit of dialectics. The difference is that Deleuze wants to bring this about through an act of will. Adorno, on the other hand, wants to complete the negative process, to bring about the end of dialectics objectively.

Posted by at October 25, 2004 09:31 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Trevor,
I probably did misunderstand you.

I'm not sure why you want to bring an end to dialectics as distinct from Hegel's dialectics? Deleuze seems to see Hegel's dialectics as the the 'sublation' [Aufhebung] of real differences in the world through the synthesizing faculty of the mind qua negation).

That does not account for the Hegel's Philosophy of Right where the state is aufhebung the contradiction bweteen the family and civil society. But we know the French misread Hegel;

eg., the claim that the dialectical tradition expelled the factor 'time' from thinking or - as Hegel did -thinking of time as homogenous and linear.

That is hardly a good interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or Marx's Capital. Most of this kind of stuff is just an excuse to bash dialectics from ignorance.

So a broader question.

Why would you want to stop thinking in terms of a thing, person or process constituted, and moved by its opposites?

Why would you want a non-dialectical philosophy of becoming as opposed to a dialectical one?

Adorno is different.He continues to think dialectically and to defend a revised dialectical tradition.

It is that difference that probably lead to me misunderstanding what you were getting at. I still don't get the similarity.

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on November 12, 2004 02:13 PM
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