From: "michelle phil lewis-king" <king.lewis-AT-easynet.co.uk>
Subject: RE: dialectics: 'Can Philosophers read Deleuze?' 
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 13:58:15 -0000


Nathan,

Thanks for your post. I've probably reached the limit of what I can offer
without a period of thinking about it some more.. look forward to your
thoughts on the dialectic issue however.


phil.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Widder,NE [mailto:N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk]
> Sent: 16 January 1999 23:21
> To: 'michelle phil lewis-king '
> Subject: RE: dialectics: 'Can Philosophers read Deleuze?'
>
>
> >
> >You seem to want to have it two ways:ie it's weird that Hegel is
> >conceived as an enemy because he is not.. he is but a straw man (straw
> >territory?) and then : know your enemy (in which case he is not a straw
> >man but a real enemy of thought). The implication ( beyond Nietzsches
> >perspective on this) is that once you get to know your enemy he is no
> >longer an enemy.
> >
> I don't hold to this friend/enemy binarism, so perhaps it may
> appear that I
> want to hold things both ways.  Given how much Nietzsche -- as well as
> Deleuze and Foucault (the latter having said some wonderful stuff,
> especially in interviews, regarding how ridiculous the politics of
> friend/enemy is) -- did to try to show how this really papered over much
> more complex relationships, it is strange that people drawing on Nietzsche
> would not be willing to see the complex relationship that Hegel
> has to this
> "post-philosophical" thinking.
>
> Hate your enemy but do not despise him is what Zarathustra says.  In the
> Genealogy Nietzsche says the noble must find enemies in whom there is much
> to honour.  Zarathustra also says that in the friend one must have one's
> best enemy.
>
> >It is knowledge which is the problem, it demands sharing the same, a
> >gregariousness, a question of recognition.
>
> Well, I wouldn't go that far.  Werner Hamacher gave a paper on
> contemporary
> Kantian philosophy at Essex a few years back where he chastised
> Habermas and
> Charles Taylor for misunderstanding the whole idea of recognition.  To
> briefly explain his point:  if recognition is of others as autonomous
> beings, and autonomy is a noumenal aspect, then respect and recognition of
> autonomy in others means precisely NOT reducing them to something
> comprehended and fully understood.
>
> Anyway, I'm not suggesting everyone needs to know Hegel because
> once they do
> they will see he is the same as Nietzsche.  But there are complexities in
> the relationship which go unnoticed unless people start picking up and
> reading their Hegel.
>
> >As you say Nietszche knew Christian morality inside out, he
> links what >he
> does know of Hegelianism with it and as Klossowski points out >understands
> it as heralding first of all the "mise en commun" of >victorian
> middle class
> society and then that of the socialising force of >industrialisation that
> then it could be argued leads on to consumerism.
>
> And in many ways Nietzsche was right to make this linkage.  But his
> judgments of Victorian middle class society, industrialization
> and modernity
> in general are hardly unambiguous.
>
> >I'm drawn repeatedly to this glitch, this an absence of knowledge that
> >seems like a break in philosophy to me..a fracture in  economy..
> >otherwise
> Nietzsche would just be a philosopher (I'm not knocking >philosophers).. I
> don't think it contradicts or competes with what >you're
> saying... does it?
>
> I don't know yet if it contradicts or competes with what I'm saying.  That
> may take a few more posts.  But most "philosophers" who are worth
> their salt
> are somewhat more subtle on knowledge than you seem to be making
> them out to
> be.
>
> >I would like to know what you think of Deleuze's criticism of Hegel's
> >(sorry Hegelianisms) perversion of the dialectic (in D+F.pp164  )
>
> Well, the perversion, Deleuze says on that very page, "begins with
> dialectics, and attains its extreme form in Hegelianism".  Dialectics has
> already perverted the way in which problems are dialectical and remain
> implicated in their solutions which both come from them and are dissolved
> into them.  But I'd like to think about this for a little bit before
> answering further.
>
>
> >> >
> >> >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?
> >
> >You're not. Hegel is.
> >
> Not even Hegel is:  nature remains fundamentally unmediated and
> unknowable.
> The problem Hegel then faces, as many have commented on (Stace, Descombes
> too I think, in his criticism of Kojeve bypassing the issue) is how to
> prevent the admitted opacity of nature from corrupting the self-certainty
> said to be attained in the realm of Spirit/society.
>
> > Or that I haven't outlined the site
> >> at which Nietzschean resistance to Hegel is most effective?
> >
> >Ok. I simply felt the need to draw attention to the force of Nietzsche's
> >ignorance as a site of resistance. Its power may be more elusive but it
> >attracts me (moth) and oddly mobilises me more as fractured painter
> >(often
> >caught up in an unknown 'thought without an image', in the work of
> >'bringing
> >into being that which doesn't yet exist' ect )  than 'fair discourse'
> >between knowledgeable philosophers.
> >
> >(and no I can't justify this ignorance, or my paintings for that matter,
> >only that it sometimes of works for me! They kind of collapse.They have
> >their moments of stupidity I have to move through)
>
> Ok, at some point I guess we just go our separate ways on this issue.  I'm
> not insisting everyone needs to read Hegel, since I'm aware of all the
> people I still need to read and probably will never get around to reading.
> I'm just suggesting people don't construct their Hegel's through
> Deleuze and
> don't make grand claims about things they admit to ignorance about.
>
> >>>
> >>
> >> I identify with the need Foucault outlines to know your enemy (in
> >> Michael's
> >> words).
> >>
> > Perhaps the enemy has been abolished by the revelation of
> >'schizophrenia's'
> >possibility for thought. Perhaps not.
> >
>
> Well, if the enemy being abolished means the abolition of the friend/enemy
> dichotomy by the work to stretch beyond good and evil, then there is hope.
>
> >phil.
>
> Nathan
> n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk
>