From: "Widder,NE" <N.E.Widder-AT-lse.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Dialectics (correction)
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 22:13:02 -0000


Paul

>Nathan--
>
>Thank you for taking the time to engage in this debate surrounding
>Hegel.  It's refreshing to see someone interested in working out the
>details of Deleuze's arguements (and he does have arguments) without
>taking his word as the gospel.  Contrary to popular opinion, I do not
>think it represents being a reactive force of the "academy", but
>instead is the sort of careful and concerted engagement representing
>active forces in knowing ones enemy.  In failing to do that, one
>insures that Hegel will return, though he hasn't left yet...  Which is
>to say, one's thinking becomes all too Hegelian, as Beth's simple
>oppositions between molecular/molar, active/reactive, virtual/actual
>aptly demonstrates.  (Why hasn't anyone raised the point that the
>molecular/molar distinction doesn't arise until Anti-Oedipus anyway? 
>Doesn't this set it outside the domain of _Nietzsche and Philosophy_
>in important ways?").
>
>At any rate, I'm writing because you quoted Foucault with respect to
>the project of overcoming Hegel.  I was wondering if you could remind
>me what that quote was, and where to find it.
>

It's in "The Order of Discourse", which was Foucault's inaugural lecture at
the College de France.  It can be found in a book entitled UNTYING THE TEXT:
A POST-STRUCTURALIST READER, edited by Robert Young, and LANGUAGE AND
POLITICS, edited by Michael Shapiro.  I imagine it's also in one of the
recent Foucault collections as well.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Paul (Kalapsyche)
>
>P.S.  In regard to Beth's reticents about admitting the ontological
>nature of Deleuze's project, do you think this might arise because of
>the distinction that Deleuze makes in the Nietzsche book between
>"philosophy of being" and "philosophy of will"?

Possibly, though Beth is your best bet to find an answer.  It just seems to
be the inverse of the Heideggerian line against Nietzsche, that he doesn't
think the closure of metaphysics from the vantage point of Being but only
beings.  Goodchild's book on Deleuze takes this up in order to say the
Heideggerian's have the whole point wrong, because evaluation cuts deeper
than the question of Being.  But Goodchild then draws on only one line of
Deleuzean rhetoric to argue that there D rejects ontology in favour of
vitalism.  I think this just ends up re-establishing a dichotomy at the
level of Deleuzean and Heideggerian discipleship, and its also somehow
related to the odd turn he takes at the end of his book, where he suggests
that Deleuze's thinking is lacking because it is just the most recent form
of a sterile materialism that recurs throughout the history of European
thought, and which is deterritorialized by a turn to Spirit (which doesn't
recur throughout the history of European thought?)

>Over an above the
>many references Deleuze makes to ontology in D&R and LOS, a simple
>reference to his book review of Hyppolite's _Logic and Existence_
>seems enough to dispel this misunderstanding:  "Philosophy must be
>ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of
>essence, only an ontology of sense."  Also, it seems to me that
>Deleuze has two major arguments against Hegel.  The first revolves
>around the master/slave dialectic and appears to be a response to the
>Kojevian reading of Hegel.  The second, found in D&R and the review of
>Hyppolite's book, revolves around non-conceptual difference.  I know
>that you've referred to this latter argument a number of times, but
>I'd enjoy hearing more of your thoughts regarding it.  It seems to me,
>that of the two arguments, the one revolving around non-conceptual
>difference is much stronger...  Though it might fail against the
>opening chapter of the Phenomenology, and again, in the transition
>from being to essence in Hegel's greater logic.
>
I'll have to think about the argument against the master/slave dialectic for
a bit.  I think the non-conceptual difference argument does work, even
though there are stronger attacks on Hegel than the one Deleuze mounts, but
they fit in well with Deleuze's direction.  Marx had already shown how
Hegel's Spirit remained an abstraction hovering over a reality that was
divided.  And the end result of that is that the historical dialectic
remains unreconciled with the rest of the system.  Adorno takes all this up
to show how history becomes this enormous and disturbing blind spot (there's
a wonderful passage on it on p. 124 of Hegel:  Three Studies).  The result
is that the dialectic only becomes concrete if it gives up the identity of
identity and difference and instead becomes the non-identity of identity and
difference.  Or, to put the matter in a more Deleuzean fashion:  the
conditions for real experience are not to be found in oppositions, which
remain abstract, but in difference as multiplicity (that is, the will to
power as a plastic principle).

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