From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectics: 'Can Philosophers read Deleuze?' 
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 11:28:07 -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.

In other words, one could set up a straw man again.

>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.

Go back and read the 1/6 post again.  Did I say that Hegel covers
everything?  No, I said what's wrong with it from the perspective of
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Marx.  I told you how the attack on continued
Hegelian abstraction and the positing of equality works, and how refusing
that is the key to getting to a disjunctive synthesis.  Why am I being
accused of reducing one to the other?  Or that I haven't outlined the site
at which Nietzschean resistance to Hegel is most effective?

>>
>> > 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.

Oh please, I've been on this list for years, and so have you.  Do you really
think I was responding in particular to unleesh's posts?  I have been making
this point for longer than he's been around.

This is not a call for 'let's get serious'.  This is a call to get to know
your enemy, to not think that you can say whatever the fuck you want about
Hegel just because this is the D&G list.

>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. )

Well, many thoughtful people have explored Hegel and thought through this
gap:  Andrew Benjamin, Gasche, Derrida, Heidegger.  The sad thing is that
almost none of Deleuzeans seem to have bothered (Hardt's few analyses are
not particularly great and have many problems in their reading of Hegel),
and have instead chosen to remain stubbornly ignorant.

>>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!

Perhaps, but reading Hegel seriously does not amount to commiting one to
such a project.

>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?
>

I identify with the need Foucault outlines to know your enemy (in Michael's
words).

>> > Phil.


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