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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Deleuze: on the pathway of difference « Previous | |Next »
October 28, 2004

I'm struggling with Deleuze as I realize more and more that dialectics represented the system that Deleuze most detested. In reading the dense Repetition and Difference I'm trying to avoid simply condemning Deleuze's reading of Hegel, and his treatment of Hegelian multiplicity and becoming.

In the Preface to Negative Dialectics Adorno writes:


"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept. Bergson as well as Husserl, the standard-bearers of philosophical modernity, innervated this, but shrank away from it back into traditional metaphysics. Bergson created, by fiat, a different type of cognition for the sake of the non-conceptual. The dialectical salt was washed away in the undifferentiated flow of life; that which was materially solidified was dismissed as subaltern, instead of being understood along with its subalternity. Hatred of the rigid general concept produced a cult of irrational immediacy, of sovereign freedom amidst unfreedom."

The non-conceptual, the individual and the particular. Is not another name for this difference? Can we not see this in terms of Nietzsche affirming difference in opposition to a natural science (and we can add neo-classical economic science) that denies difference in favour of logical identity, mathematical quality and thermodynamic equlibrium? Difference is what is left over as waste matter by the conceptual structure of either economic and natural science.

A pathway has been opened up or disclosed. On this pathway---on this line of thought--- we find the discrete, the alienated, the remaindered, the repressed, the fragment,' diversity', 'otherness', and multiplicities. Is this not the pathway travelled by Deleuze and his conception of a difference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than a contradiction and a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation?

What does that mean? Does it not mean an attempt to work out a non-contradictory, non-dialectical consideration of difference that is not envisioned as a simple contrary (negation) of identity? Is it not an attempt to work out a non-dialectical account of becoming? We can make some headway here with the help of this.

According to Deleuze in Hegel's dialectics the difference between one entity and another, what allows us to identify it, is established in contrast to what it is not. Why is this difference "external" to the entity in question or the properties that make it up? Because difference is unnecessarily translated into negation. In Hegel's terms, it is only via the universal that the particular becomes accessible to knowledge, the universal being the negation of the particular.

Subsuming difference under negation is a major mistake Deleuze imputes to the dialectical tradition. It is the detour through negation that keeps the dialectical conception of difference "external" to difference itself, or difference in kind. If we want to reach difference in kind, we cannot address the entities and their properties externally, by negatively comparing them to all others, but internally, that is, by asking what are the "things themselves" rather than what they are not.

This ignores Hegel's notion of internal relations and the internal dynamics, the tendencies within a entity, emerging properties and development, but never mind.

Deleuze's line of thought here is that a thing is the expression of a "tendency" and a tendency is a phase of becoming. A tendency can express itself only insofar as it is acted upon by another tendency and, therefore, tendencies never come isolated from one another but always in pairs. These tendences are expressions of relational but antagonistic forces

What is suprising is how biological Deleuze is. This is an organic metaphysics that reaches back to Aristotle, even as it destabilizes essentialism and turns its back on Hegel putting wheels on Aristotle.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:12 AM | | Comments (0)
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