January 25, 2007
I've started thumbing though Gilles Deleuze's Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1972). In it we find an early essay on Henri Bergson, entitled Bergson's 'Conception of Difference', in which he argues that Bergson's concept of difference is different from dialectical difference--both Plato's and Hegels' . With respect to the latter Deleuze says:
In Bergon, thanks to the notion of the virtual, the thing differs from itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs from itself because it differs first from everything it is not, and thus difference goes as far as contradiction. If Bergon could object that Platonism goes no further than a concept of difference as still external, the objection that he woudl adddress to a dialectic of contradiction is that it gets no further than a conception of difference as only abstract....the dialectic falls short of difference itself, which is the cause or reason for nuance.
Deleuze says that everything comes back to Bergson's critique of the negative: his whole effort is aimed at a conception of difference without negation; a conception of difference that does not contain the negative.
Why so? This is what I don't understand. What's the big problem with negation, that it has to be done away with?
Deleuze says that difference is an action and an actualization. Isn't that Hegel? A thing changes (becomes) through the process of actualization? Hegel also thinks in terms of tendencies in physical processes, self-organizing tendencies in dynamical processes, and also holds that 'what is actual ' as a fully formed entity.
The key term is 'viritual' as Deleuze says that it is only our ignorance of the virtual that makes us believe in contradicton and negation. Why so? isn't virtual referring to the way that tendencies in dynamical processes happen? So how does the virtual/actual couple work? (Why the use of couple instead of duality?) If so, then the virtuality is the "yet-to-come" --it refers to how we can we speak of the future in a world of becoming, when the yet -to-come in that it is not yet and it has not yet arrived.
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I think I can take a crack at this. "Difference" must imply relation: two aspects of something must be related to each other to be comparable, which is to say, different. Now the root of Hegelian difference is the difference between consciousness and its object, or, more generally, the world.
All further differences are derived as "contradictions" from this "originary" difference through consciousness' relation to itself in relating to its object, ultimately to be "sublated" in the absolute as infinite self-relation in otherness, by which the very connection to the world is lost in abstraction. Thus consciousness sets the limit to the world idealistically in terms of (the conditions of) its conceivability.
But consciousness (and memory) are something in the world, embodied and existing only in its ongoing interaction with the world to which it relates and through which it is "actualized" and transformed. It's through the "virtual" that consciousness becomes other, without that otherness being a negation of its (relation to) the world.
And that is the way that "things" would become conceivable otherwise, which is only apparently their "negation".