From: "michelle phil lewis-king" <king.lewis-AT-easynet.co.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectics: 'Can Philosophers read Deleuze?' 
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 01:44:38 -0000




> 	I brought Nietzsche into it because, from the usual posts to the
> list, there seems to remain some weird conception of Hegel as the
> enemy, the
> one who msut be forgotten, the one who would contaminate our active
> becomings (heaven forbid!), etc.

One could  say that there is a tendency to bring Nietzsche and Deleuze into
a realm of a philosophical 'common sense' and that Hegel is the ground of
that sense.


Also, since I was explaining
> some of what
> Hegel does, and since this is a list where many are familiar with
> Nietzsche
> (and, one would hope, Deleuze), it is a convenient way to
> communicate ideas
> by bringing up comparisons between Hegel and those thinkers people are
> familiar with.

fair enough.. but then it is to expected that people will respond with the
information that Nietzsche represents a site of resistance to the perceived
homogeneity of Hegels thinking... his reduction of everything to knowledge.
You haven't shown how this is not the case.
>
> > You end on if not a project then an affirmation: To draw out  a
> Deleuzean
> > position regarding rhizomatic, virtual pluralism  WITH a
> rigorous reading
> > of Hegel.
> >
> 	An affirmation I made precisely because of the character of much
> which gets posted on this list.


So invoking Hegel is your response to (un)leash? A kind of 'lets get serious
call'..' let's stop mucking around' and read properly.. face up to the grim
necessity of knowledge. The impossiblity of going beyond what we 'should'
know .It's funny because  I reckon Unleash is the most Hegelian (in
Derrida's and Kristeva's terms ).. he appears to be trying to make of
himself an all inclusive context.. the sad thing is that he makes sense, not
that he doesn't.

Going back to 'Difference and Repetition' to the passage that Paul Bains
originally pinpointed is instructive.. in my reading of it Deleuze  blames
Hegel  for participating in the continual perversion of the dialectic. Of
'forgetting' the intimate relation the dialectic has with Platonic Ideas.
Hegel, for Deleuze, replaces the ideal objectivety of the problematic with
a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary or contradictory
propositions. This ideal objectivity both transcendent and immanent is what
for Deleuze provokes learning.. he first praises Hegel's learning as it
takes place in 'The Phenomenology' only to then damn him for then
subordinating it to absolute knowledge.

(So perhaps there is indeed a gap there to drive a Hegel without answers
through.. a learning Hegel as opposed to a knowing Hegel.. a Hegel that can
read Deleuze. )
So:
>Well, I love the learning part, if that's sufficient.
Yes, I'd say it is.


My own problems with Hegel are more related to what I've read of Derrida
objections, which are to do with Hegels perceived logocentrism and with his
exclusion of writing.In 'On Grammatology' he cites Leibniz as a type of
attempt to open a breach in logocentric security. Hegelianism is seen as
'the finest scar' in the battle against the pressure of writing. (sovereign
writing or what Bataille names a 'comic operation'). From my own experience
it is those who are commited to a kind of Hegelian dream of philosophy who
work to exclude and dismiss those '20th century French philosophers' who
engage me. It is a neat reversal to have to see them as exclusive of Hegel!

The Foucault you quote below speaks of the question of discourse. I don't
get the sensation that Deleuze's 'experimental' work itself is grounded in
'discourse' as such, at least it doesn't work that way for me.. rather it
seems to 'operate' beyond and below that territory... it doesn't (and  this
is its force not its weakness) have a basis in the closure of philosophical
(hegelian) discourse. It is detteriorialised philosophy.

(It is interesting that Foucault appears 'closer' to Bataille, more caught
up in the struggle with Hegel (with power?) than Deleuze allows us to see of
himself as he follows desire.)

> 	Maybe he (Gilles) was simply not being as carfeul
as Foucault on
> this point, who was no Hegelian himself but knew enough to say:

  "But to
> make a real escape from Hegel presupposes an exact appreciation of what it
> costs to detach ourselves from him.   It presupposes a knowledge of how
> close Hegel has come to us, perhaps insidiously.  It presupposes
> a knowledge
> of what is still Hegelian in that which allows us to think against Hegel;
> and an ability to gauge how much our resources against him are
> perhaps still
> a ruse which he is using against us, and at the end of which he is waiting
> for us, immobile and elsewhere" ("The Order of Discourse")

Do  you identify with this statue?

> > Phil.
>