From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectic
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 13:07:00 -0000




> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Paul Bains [SMTP:P.Bains-AT-murdoch.edu.au]
> Sent:	Wednesday, January 13, 1999 5:08 AM
> To:	deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject:	RE: dialectic
> 
> At 02:00 PM 1/8/99 -0000, Nathan wrote:
> >But Hegel is operating on a different level
> >than this -- and I think Nietzsche and "pomo" are as well.  If anything,
> >they are operating on a level that is ontologically prior to the
> >internal/external relations distinction, at least insofar as I understand
> >the terms as they are used in Anglo-American philosophy.
> 
> This is an interesting observation and you are surely on to something
> (sounds more like whitehead). Could you develop it a teensy bit? and if
> this
> is so why does Deleuze refer in partic to James and /Russell? What is this
> ontologically prior level and where can i buy some?
> 
	My knowledge of Whitehead/Russell/James is pretty lacking.  As for
why Deleuze turns to them, well, I suspect is has something to do with
Russell's critique of Hegel (really of British Hegelians) on the point of
internal/external relations -- attacking the idea that all relations are
subject-predicate ones, and doing so in the name of some mind-independent,
empirical reality.  But Hegel doesn't reduce relations to subject-predicate
in the first place.  In fact, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, he
criticizes the whole idea of a subject and its predicates -- one never
learns what a thing is, because the gap between subject and predicate
remains.  There is also the point that it is unclear whether Deleuze really
even knew his Hegel at all -- most of his comments on it are off-the-cuff
and, well, idiotic.  His Heidegger remarks leave much to be desired too (a
point Derrida makes in one of his most wonderfully understated criticisms of
both Foucault and Deleuze, in his Introduction to Lacou-Labarthe's
Typography book).

	But anyway, to get back to Hegel -- force relations are
ontologically prior because they account for independence, inter-relatedness
and identity.  That is precisely what "the power of the negative" means for
him.  And that is why the movement of forces is ontologically prior to the
idea of an atomistic thing and its relations -- be they internal or
external.

	To put it simply:  force relations are immanent, but immanence is
not the same thing as internal.  It is a mistake to think that Hegel is
positing the priority of internality over externality in the way that some
would like to think.

	Nathan
	n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk