From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectic
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 20:55:38 -0000


>
>>Nathan wrote:
>>There is no thing-in-itself, therefore all things are nothing but their
>>relations.  Hence Hegel says the logic of the atomistic thing gives way
>to
>>relational forces -- just as Deleuze outlines in the opening pages of
>>Nietzsche and Philosophy.  
>
>>	[]  
>>....Hegel is operating on a different level..
>> -- 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.
>
>Nathan,
>
>Your post of 1-6-99 (see first paragraph above), regarding Hegel's
>dialectic describes "the logic of the atomistic thing" and its
>relations.
>It seems to me that this can only be on the level of the concept and its
>relations (i.e., the atomistic elements relate interally or externally
>to
>the concept of the thing).  What you describe as Hegel's movement in the
>idea of the identity of identity and difference is still at the level of
>the concept and its relations.  It is what Deleuze regards as molar.  It
>is
>therefore, not similar to what Deleuze outlines in his reading of
>Nietzsche
>in the opening pages of N&P where he speaks of the intensive double
>repetition of forces and their differential relations at the level of
>the
>event.  Hegel is pre-structuralist.  Deleuze is post-strusturalist. 

You are reducing Hegel's Concept or Notion to a concept in the ordinary
sense of the term.  This is simply not accurate -- as Michael pointed out
long ago in that four way debate between Melissa, Michael, you and I.
Deleuze and Guattari also note this:  see p. 12 of WiP? (English
translation).  To put Hegel's point simply:  a thing has relations that are
internal and external, and this recognition is what ultimately subverts the
notion of the thing and introduces the notion of force.  On this level, what
Deleuze describes in N&P regarding force is very much the same as what Hegel
does in ch. 3 of the Phenomenology.

Also, Deleuze doesn't speak of a double movement of forces that marks the
event in the first pages of N&P (by which I mean the first 10 pages or so)
-- which is not to say that he doesn't talk about it elsewhere.  But I never
said that Deleuze/Nietzsche and Hegel were doing the same thing, only that
their first few steps are the same.

Finally, if anything, what Hegel describes as the movement of forces is not
molar in Deleuze but molecular or virtual.  Force is not actual but it is
fully real.  It is not a possibility that may or may not be realized but is
the condition of possibility for meaning.  Now the synthesis of forces, as
I've said a number of times, is conjunctive in Hegel rather than
disjunctive, and as I said I think in the 1/6 post, Hegel's synthesis
depends upon a conflation of all forms of difference with spacing.  But I
don't think that makes it molar, to the extent that you can push such terms
onto Hegel's thought.  It is rather a virtuality that Hegel tries to show is
identical to actuality -- that is to say, he tries to do what D&G say cannot
be done, to go from the actual back to the virtual and from the virtual back
to the actual.  In contrast, in WiP? they insist that we cannot go back the
other way, because it is not the same virtual in the two movements (pp.
155-156).

>If, on the other hand, as you claim in your post of 1-8-99 (second
>paragaraph above), "Hegel is operating on a different
>level....ontologically prior to the internal/external relations
>distinction...", that is, if you are reading Hegel as operating on the
>level of a pure negation of all conceptual relations, then you need to
>explain how anything is given to experience at all.  
>

I don't really get what it is that I need to explain here, but I'll try.
What Hegel tries to show is that what is given to experience always points
beyond itself -- that is the way it negates and sublates itself.  What is
given is immediate, but it cannot maintain this immediacy, once the question
of its truth/meaning is asked.  The example Hegel gives is that if it is now
night and I write this down (if I write "It is now night") then in 12 hours
this written statement will be false.  To make a long story short, Hegel
says that what remains constant in both the truth and falsity of this
statement -- and which is therefore true, since truth for Hegel must be
universal -- are concepts (small 'c' this time) such as subject, object,
Here, Now, etc.  Now, if we ask for the meaning of these concepts, we indeed
find that they are only established through their relations -- both internal
and external -- to one another, and from here he goes to show how such
atomistic concepts sublate themselves into a movement of forces.  Force, as
Hegel argues, is necessarily relational, and it is all-encompassing insofar
as the negative relations among forces accounts for independence,
interdependence and identity among them.  Hence, he says, we can think of a
totality of forces and, as I said, this is basically a virtual realm for
Hegel.  The next several chapters seek to move from this virtual back to the
actual, in such a way as to show the unity of rational and real.

>
>>Nathan wrote:
>>	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.

>As for "force relations [being] ontologically prior because they account
>for independence, inter-relatedness and identity"...that just says they
>are
>prior because it is the prior condition.  It does not explain how they
>condition the concept, let alone how they could possibly be given to
>experience.

They don't condition the concept because the ARE the Concept.  And I never
meant to say they condition particular concepts, nor that they are given in
experience.  You seem to be trying to force Hegel to say what Deleuze says,
and to construct a philosophy according to Deleuze's terms. All I have said
so far regarding forces is that they are presupposed as the condition of
possibility for experience to have meaning, for it to make sense.  The
process by which Hegel tries to show this Absolute of forces being
instantiated in actual relations -- and ultimately in the modern state -- is
done in a different manner.

>>	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.
>
>Of course, Hegel does not *posit* the priority of internality over
>externality.     However, Hegel's dialectic, working on the level of the
>concept, can only divide the concept in homogeneity with itself.  It can
>not escape return to itself.  Internality is the unintended consequence
>of
>Hegel's dialectic.   

No, immanence is the intended consequence.  Again, you are treating the
Concept as an ordinary concept.  Homogeneity in the crude form you seem to
be implying is not part of Hegel's thought, either intentionally or not.
That is not to say it is not there in some sense, just not in the way you
are making it out to be.  Hegel treats ordinary concepts and their
internal/external relations, and from this moves to a notion of force which
embodies both types of relation.  In that sense, he does not either take or
seek to demonstrate any priority of internal relations over the external.
That is why I said he is operating on a different level than these
distinctions.  The 'homogeneity' you ascribe to him would similarly have to
be understood on a different ontological level than you seem to place it.


>Beth    

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