Houle & Vernon (Eds) - Hegel and Deleuze. Together Agains Fort The First Time

Hegel and Deleuze
Vernon, Jim
Published by Northwestern University Press
For additional information about this book

http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780810166530
Access provided by New York University (8 Nov 2013 12:24 GMT)
Hegel and Deleuze

Vernon, Jim
Published by Northwestern University Press
For additional information about this book

http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780810166530
Access provided by New York University (8 Nov 2013 12:24 GMT)
HEGEL AND DELEUZE
Topics in Historical Philosophy

General Editors
David Kolb
John McCumber
Associate Editor
Anthony J. Steinbock
HEGEL AND
DELEUZE
Together Again for the First Time
Edited by Karen Houle and Jim Vernon
Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press

www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright 2013 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2013 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hegel and Deleuze : together again for the first time / edited by Karen Houle
and Jim Vernon.
p. cm. (Topics in historical philosophy)
ISBN 978-0-8101-2897-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17701831. 2. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925
1995. 3. Philosophy, Modern. I. Houle, Karen. II. Vernon, Jim. III. Martin,
Jean-Clet. IV. Series: Northwestern University topics in historical philosophy.
B2948.H31724 2013
193dc23
2012036431
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Abbreviations
vii
Introduction
Karen Houle and Jim Vernon
xi
Part 1. Disjunction/Contradiction
1
At the Crossroads of Philosophy and Religion: Deleuzes Critique of

Hegel
Brent Adkins
5
Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of Forces: Deleuzes

Critique of Hegel
Nathan Widder
18
Hegel and Deleuze: Difference or Contradiction?

Anne Sauvagnargues
38
The Logic of the Rhizome in the Work of Hegel and Deleuze

Henry Somers-Hall
54
Actualization: Enrichment and Loss

Bruce Baugh
76
Political Bodies Without Organs: On Hegels Ideal State and

Deleuzian Micropolitics
Pheng Cheah
97
3
4
5
6
Deleuze and Hegel on the Logic of Relations

Jim Vernon
115
Part 2. Connection/Synthesis
8
Deleuze and Hegel on the Limits of Self-Determined Subjectivity

Simon Lumsden
133
vi
C O NT ENT S
Desiring-Production and Spirit: On Anti-Oedipus and German Idealism

John Russon
152
10
Hegel and Deleuze: The Storm

Juliette Simont
173
11
Limit, Ground, Judgment . . . Syllogism: Hegel, Deleuze, Hegel, and

Deleuze
Jay Lampert
183
12
Hegel and Deleuze on Life, Sense, and Limit

Emilia Angelova
204
Part 3. Conjunctive Synthesis

13
A Criminal Intrigue: An Interview with Jean-Clet Martin

Constantin V. Boundas
223
Contributors
253
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the text for frequently cited works.
Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
EPR
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B.Nisbet

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
HL
Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
LPR
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. B. Spiers and

J. Burdon Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1968).
PG
Phnomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol. 3, ed. Eva

Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp,
1970); Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
PM
Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971);

Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden,
vol. 10.
PN
Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).
PR
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B.Nisbet

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Grundlinien der
Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol. 7.
PS
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1977).
SL
Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanities

Press, 1999); Wissenschaft der Logik II, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol. 6.
Works by Gilles Deleuze

B
Bergsonism, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (New York:

Zone Books, 1988).
vii
viii
AB B R EV I AT I ONS
DI
Desert Islands and Other Texts: 19531974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans.
Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004).
DR
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia

ES
Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature,

trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991); Empirisme et Subjectivit: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953).
Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1988).
LS
The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
NP
Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia

Works by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

A-O
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark

Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977).
TP
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
WP
What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Works by Other Authors

AEM
Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of

Letters, bilingual edition, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and
L. A.Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).
BT
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962). Originally
published as Sein und Zeit (Tbingen, Ger.: Max Niemeyer, 1927).
CJ
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), sec. 54; trans. Werner

Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
GS
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit,

trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
ix
AB B R EV I AT I O NS
HM Andrzej Warminski, Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life, in Hegel

After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998).
IGP
Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique: Lindividuation

la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation (Grenoble, Fr.: Millon,
1995).
ILH
Alexandre Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, 2nd edition, ed.

Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1985 [1947]).
IRH
Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the

Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
LE
Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
NSP
Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime,
trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966).
RLE Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, in Hyppolite, Logic and
Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997).
Introduction
Karen Houle and Jim Vernon
A century and a half separates Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles
Deleuze. It would be hard to overstate the impact of these two major
European intellectuals, individually, on what has come to be called Continental philosophy. What has proved equally hard, however, is to determine the impact the thought of each thinker has on that of the other
when considered in tandem. Helping to bring to light the various relationshipssympathetic, antipathetic, and otherwisethat may hold
between them is the goal of this anthology.
Deleuze and Deleuzians on Hegel

and Hegelianism
It is not as though Deleuze and Hegel, scholastically speaking, have never
been seen out in public together. Hegel and Hegelianism are mentioned often in Deleuzian circles. Unfortunately, these mentions are frequently snide caricatures, reflecting outright disdain or blanket rejection. For example, Brian Massumi reminds us that although Deleuzes
earliest books read like a whos who of philosophical giants . . . Hegel
is absent, being too despicable even to merit a mutant offspring.1 Michael Hardt, likewise, declares that even in [Deleuzes] very first published article, Du Christ la Bourgeoisie, published when he was only
twenty-one years old, we can already recognize anti-Hegelianism as a
driving force of his thought.2 However, beyond mere opposition, Hardt
goes on to say that Deleuze at times falls into rhetorical exaggerations
by giving in to his unbridled hatred for Hegel.3 These exaggerations are
often taken as gospel in the literature, preventing any real confrontation between the two thinkers. Indeed, as Catherine Malabou asks, in
much Deleuze scholarship, doesnt Hegel become the bow-wow of contemporary philosophers, the abhorred victim of the pack of the thinkers
of difference, their absolute enemy?4 A totalizing anti-Hegelianism appears to have become a kind of tic among some Deleuzians.5
xi
xii
I N T R O D UCT I O N
Of course, Deleuzians exhibiting this tic would counter by reminding us that, while their rhetoric is perhaps unpleasanteven at times
unfairit is certainly not unwarranted given Deleuzes own comments.
There are repeated moments, from his early writings all the way through
to his final works, where Deleuze makes precisely those sorts of unbridled
jabs. Hegel and Hegelianism are routinely name-called: the long perversion,6 the long history of the distortion, the dead end (DR, 268),
a philosophy that betrays and distorts the immediate, animating no
more than ghostly puppets (DR, 10). Hegelians are singled out as those
lacking the wit to laugh.7 The arc of Deleuzes anti-Hegelian rhetoric
perhaps reaches its apex in Difference and Repetition: It is only in relation
to the identical, as a function of the identical, that contradiction is the
greatest difference. The intoxications and giddinesses are feigned, the
obscure is already clarified from the outset. Nothing shows this more
clearly than the insipid monocentricity of the circles in the Hegelian dialectic (DR, 263). Less jab than bald confession, Deleuze eventually tells
us what I detested most was Hegelianism and the dialectic.8
This looks like disdain, and perhaps there was real hatred; however,
a closer and more careful look at his texts reveals that there isnt only disdain. Something between Deleuze and Hegel also expresses itself therein
which is far less easy to define, represent, or characterize.
True, among those figures credited with being Deleuzes intellectual forefathersDavid Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, William
James, Alfred North Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, and so onone never finds the brass nameplate of Hegel. Unlike the equally hated Kant, Deleuze does not even devote to Hegel a
book about an enemy.9 Yet, unlike so many other philosophers who also
dont make his bastard lineSaint Anselm, Niccol Machiavelli, or
Hannah Arendt, to name a random fewHegel makes regular appearances in Deleuzes writings: once or twice in A Thousand Plateaus, The
Logic of Sense and What Is Philosophy?, frequent mentions in the final chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, and then about a hundred times in Difference and Repetition. Such a pattern testifies to the fact that, even if he was
not a straightforward intellectual kin, Hegel was in no way a negligible
figure for Deleuzes thought. Deleuze, after all, was taught by Jean Hyppolite, and even wrote an early review of Logic and Existence.10 Given Deleuzes own education, and the intellectual climate in Paris at that time,
the need to engage with Hegel and Hegelianismparticularly if one
wished to escape itsurely impressed itself upon him early and often.
Indeed, a closer and sustained look at Deleuzes texts reveals that
Hegel was neither simply ignored, nor hated. A number of times Deleuze
offers qualified praise, for example: The Hegelian idea of alienation
xiii
supposes a profound restructuring of the true-false relation (DR, 150);

Deleuze even lauds Hegels genius.11 More commonly it is simply philosophical business-as-usual: he isolates a Hegelian concept or argument
to build upon it or critique it, frequently drawing upon neglected aspects of the work . . . to develop an alternative conception of the nature
of thought.12 Some exemplary remarks: With Aristotle, Philosophy was
able to provide itself with an organic representation of difference, with
Leibniz and Hegel an orgiastic representation: it has not, for all that,
reached difference in itself (DR, xv). In this sense, it is noticeable how
far Hegel, no less than Leibniz, attaches importance to the infinite movement of evanescence as suchthat is, to the moment at which difference
both vanishes and is produced (DR, 27). Hegel seems to recognise the
presence of genuine infinite in the differential calculus, the infinity of
relation (DR, 310 n. 9). Leibniz and Hegel marked this attempt with
their genius. But they too do not get beyond the element of representation, since the double exigency of the Same and the Similar is retained.13
Thus, to presume Deleuzes relationship to Hegels thought as
nothing but bow-wow hatred is too quick. However, the prevailing wisdom
amongst cooler-headed Deleuzians who work at arms length from Hegel
is not incorrect. For Deleuze, Hegels account of difference and his own
are divergent, if not wholly incommensurate, ontological idioms; in his
own jargon, they are distinct images of thought. With Hegel, Deleuze
claims, we remain only with a difference already mediated by representation (DR, 27), because Hegel . . . substitut[es] the labour of the negative for the play of difference and the differential (DR, 268). Deleuze essentially charges Hegel(ianism) with forsaking the universal variation of
differences for the stable individualities of representation. For Deleuze,
difference is self-differentiating, structurally subverting the negative attempts to fully determine individuals and relations. Todd May takes this
divergent schema as settled: Deleuze credits Nietzsche with the discovery of a type of thought that is antidialectical in that it no longer relies
on negativity as the path to positivity.14 Paul Patton argues that the Deleuzian alternative is not simply a matter of another image of thought . . .
it is a matter of the force which destroys . . . the True, the Right or the
Law (cartesian truth, kantian right, hegelian law, etc.). What is being
recommended is not the repetition of some Other Form of conceptual
assemblage, but a process: the operation of putting thought into an immediate relation with outside forces, in short, of making thought a warmachine.15
What remains an open question, however, is whether this divergence
marks the sole, or even primary, relationship between Hegelian and Deleuzian thought.
xiv
Hegelians on Deleuze and Deleuzians

How does the terrain appear from the Hegelian side? The prevailing wisdom among Hegelians who work at arms length from Deleuze appears
to echo the presupposition that what we have in these two thinkers are
radically divergent idioms and systems. We say appears because, where Deleuzians have, in the main, actively heaped disdain upon Hegel, scholars
of the latter have been more passively dismissive. Virtually no work has
been done to answer the challenges Deleuze brings to Hegels system
by those invested in defendingor even critically reworking or appropriatingit.16 This is a curious feature of recent scholarship given the
voluminous ink spilled over Hegels relation to Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj iek, and others.
This silence, however, is perhaps not unsurprising. Deleuze, after
all, proudly claims to bear his heaviest debt to Spinoza, the Christ of
philosophers, [before whom] the greatest philosophers are hardly more
than apostles who distance themselves or draw near to this mystery.17
Many Hegelians would simply assume that the same criticisms Hegel
lodged against Spinoza apply equally to his apostle, Deleuze. These criticisms essentially invert the Deleuzian charges against Hegel. That is,
Hegel reproaches Spinozism with merely assum[ing] individual determinations, [rather than] deduc[ing] them from substance and thus of
conceiving the negative or determination as only as a vanishing moment, returning to the one substance rather than essentially existing
in itself.18 For Hegel, Spinozism subsumes all individuality into the undulations of the self-differentiating substance, making it both unclear
how and why individual subjects and determinations arise within it, and
what, if anything would give any such determinations positive value. If
Deleuzians charge Hegel with forsaking the universal variation of difference for representational stability within the internalist system of negations, Hegelians would charge this brand of Spinozism with collapsing
differences into the play of the univocal one, blotting out the values of
individuality, subjectivity, and determination. It would seem, then, that
Hegelians would be as correct to assume that Hegel is as anti-Deleuzian
as Deleuzians are anti-Hegelian.
But, as one would expect, this picture is not so simple either.
In scholarly literature, Hegel is often chastised, and not just by Deleuzians, for his disdain for individuality and for subsuming all such determinations into spirit, history, or the idea. Having paved the way, via
negation, for mediated determination out of immediacy, Hegel is generally presumed to have progressed to dissipate it again into one or more
quasi-mystical absolutes. In fact, one emerging line of criticismrepre-
xv
sented most prominently by Peter Hallward19links Hegel (patron saint

of the absolute, defender of the necessary slaughter bench of history,
identifier of the real and the rational) and Deleuze (patron saint of the
univocal, defender of the Stoic maxim become worthy of what happens
to you, identifier of pluralism and monism) for their apparently mutual
indifference to the specifics of worldly events, determinations, and subjects. Rather than opponents, then, the two have recently been seen as
rivals, even interchangeable neighbors, for there is no real alternative
between Spinoza and Hegel, andby extensionbetween Hegel and
Deleuze.20
Thus, on the one hand, Deleuze and Hegel are often opposed to
each other through the nature, role, and value of determination, representation, and negation in their systems; on the other, they are just
as likely to be linked by their absolutism, indifference to specificity, and
apparent amorality. The picture is very murky, indeed. If nothing else, it
tells us that the relationship between Hegelian and Deleuzian thought
is going to be neither one of simple rupture and escape, nor smooth cooptation and digestion.
Double Vision?
This collection hopes to more adequately limn the various resonances
and dissonances between these two major philosophers. It represents the
best in contemporary scholarship on Hegel and Deleuze, neither presuming they occupy incompossible worlds nor collapsing them into
each other. The contributing authors inhabit the as-yet uncharted space
between Deleuze and Hegel, collectively addressing most of the major
tensions/resonances therein and laying a solid ground for futureand
necessaryscholarship. The chapters are organized thematically into
two groups: those that maintain a firm but nuanced disjunction or opposition between the thinkers, and those that chart possible connections
and/or syntheses.
Disjunction/Contradiction
The chapters in this section corroborate, with varying degrees of intensity and import, the thesis that the fundamental relation between Hegel
and Deleuze is divergence. This claim demands a close focus on those
xvi
themes within their respective texts that do, in fact, draw the figures together if only to ultimately push them apart again.
Brent Adkins, in At the Crossroads of Philosophy and Religion:
Deleuzes Critique of Hegel, focuses on the distinction between religion
and philosophy in the two thinkers. On his reading, Hegel develops this
conflict into an opposition between conceptual thought and representational image. Religion is the lived experience of the community, mediated by representations that crystallize unconscious feeling. Philosophy
is the necessary, ordering thought that abstracts from such content into
pure form. By raising the difference between philosophy and religion to
the level of contradiction, Hegel can resolve the two in synthesis, leading
to his famous account of religion as the content of philosophy, allowing
(properly ordered) unity between the two, through which the truth of religion is preserved by being superseded into philosophical thought. Deleuze, Adkins argues, likewise differentiates religion and philosophy but
according to their different forms of creation: religion creates (representational) figures, while philosophy creates concepts. Rather than seeking
any ultimate unity of these creations, however, Adkins seeks, through
Deleuze, to maintain and deepen the divide between them. Philosophy
must create concepts precisely by remaining at the level of feeling and
contingency; it operates immanently and is directly tied to affects. Religion, to the contrary, arises when lived immanence is subsumed under
another level, raised to something higher, or transcended, as in Hegels
dialectical system. Thus, Adkins argues, Hegels philosophy abstracts
from lived experience, but only by subsuming it under something transcendent from it. As such, Hegel can neither do justice to lived affect, nor
explain the genesis of the abstract; errors Adkins thinks are corrected by
the thoroughly immanent Spinozism of Deleuze.
Nathan Widder, in Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of
Forces: Deleuzes Critique of Hegel, also defendsalbeit less starkly
a disjunction between the two thinkers via abstraction and immanence,
using their respective accounts of force as the fulcrum. Hegel, having
like Deleuze found that both (actual) objects and the (actual) subject experiencing them necessarily presuppose the play of (virtual) forces that
cannot exist in isolation but always already differentiate from each other,
seeks to show that such differences necessarily rise to the level of opposition and contradiction. The advent of such opposites produces a dialectic that culminates in the realization of the Absolute. However, Widder
argues, Hegel can only move this dialectic of forces forward through a
cheat, that is, by presupposing the completion of the dialectic, or the
goal, as that toward which the play tends (represented by the observing,
phenomenological we). As such, Hegel subsumes the immanent play
xvii
of forces under the transcendent abstraction of achieved Absolute spirit.

Deleuze, to the contrary, surpasses Hegel by remaining at the level of
immanence, freeing difference and force from the capture of the Absolute, and the oppositional structure it presupposes. While the forces at
play mutually imply each other, for Deleuze, they manifest a relation of
disjunction that connects heterogeneities without subsuming them in
ultimate synthesis. Widder concludes by considering the consequences
of Deleuzes critique for our understanding of desire, recognition, and
the Other.
Anne Sauvagnargues, in Hegel and Deleuze: Difference or Contradiction? examines an as yet underappreciated influence on Deleuzes
critique of Hegel: Gilbert Simondons account of disparation. Against
the dialectic account of an instantiated concept pushing out to its logical opposite, resulting in their synthesis in some higher-order concept/
object, Simondon argues that it is real physiological tensionssuch as
the binocularity of human visionthat creates problems irresolvable by
their own terms, forcing the creation of a new singularity as a solution to
the problem. Such a disparation is neither deducible from the problematic heterogeneous moments, nor reducible back to them; it is genuinely
creative and new, and provides a concept of difference which escapes
the dialectic of contradiction. Given this stark contrast, and the admitted influence of Simondon on Deleuze, Sauvagnargues asks why Deleuze
felt the need to call Simondons account a dialectical one. The answer
is that, in articulating the movement from pre-individual singularities to
trans-individual individuations, Simondon hews dangerously close to the
dialectical progression to more complex articulations from tensions at
lower levels. More firmly distinguishing himself from Hegel, Deleuzes
account of virtuality affirms difference as preexisting any individuation,
and furthermore accounts for how difference itself gives itself over to the
illusion of contradiction, and thus the appearance of dialectic. As such,
he evades the potentially conservative consequences of Simondons view
by genuinely moving beyond Hegel.
Henry Somers-Hall, in The Logic of the Rhizome in the Work of
Hegel and Deleuze, similarly distances Deleuze from a similar, yet still
too dialectical, view; however, he does so by mounting a Hegelian rejoinder to the Deleuzian charge that his system is strictly a transcendental, arborescent one. Hegel, like Deleuze, after all acknowledges the existence
of rhizomatic multiplicities defined by external, inorganic relations.
However, drawing upon Hegels account of plant life in the Philosophy
of Nature (as well as the related dialectic of finitude and infinity in the
Science of Logic), Somers-Hall argues that Hegel both accounts for, and reveals the limitations of such rhizomatic assemblages. Plants, for Hegel,
xviii
are defined by the lack of central subject internal to them, and thus are
capable of an infinite series of relations and configurations. However,
Hegel also shows that plants can only enter into assemblages because of
the light that, while external to them, uniformly feeds them all. Thus, all
plants are inherently unified by their relation to light, which organizes
their movements and relations. Thus, Hegel shows that multiplicity alone
is not enough to eliminate or fend off the unified subject, for the latter
can arise from, or be presupposed by, externally related assemblages.
Somers-Hall concludes, however, by suggesting that Deleuze answers this
challenge through his discussion of the fascicle which, while constructing (like the rhizome) a multiple of open connections, remains open to
recapture by, or implicitly presupposes, an external unity. True Deleuzian
multiplicity, then, must be carefully constructed by subtracting the subject not just from trees, but from false multiple assemblages.
Bruce Baugh, in Actualization: Enrichment and Loss, charts the
differential accounts of the ethical value of actualization in the pair. For
Hegel, the process of becoming actual (determinate, concrete, explicit)
marks an enrichment of power and truth from the inchoate, unexpressed potential that precedes it. By contrast, Deleuze finds in actualization a loss or impoverishment, in that it limits what was previously an
inexhaustible virtuality of determinations, connections, and expressions.
As such, Deleuze partially echoes the sentiments of the romantics targeted by Hegels critique of immediacy, the focus here. Theoretically,
Hegel argues, romanticism posits an immediate experience that is indeterminate, ineffable, and ultimately indistinguishable from nothingness;
ethically, it valorizes a beautiful soul incapable of acting lest its smug
self-certainty be thrown into question. In both cases, it affirms the least rational, objective, and inter-subjective aspects of experience as the highest
and truest, destroying the very foundations of philosophy and morality.
Deleuze, Baugh recognizes, is concerned to distinguish his philosophy of
immanence from inactive romanticism and thus begins with a fully determined, if virtual, structure, rather than a determinable, but indeterminate state. For Deleuze, the virtual is a differentiated, problematic system
of intensities, which is then differenciated into actual individuals without
ever exhausting the virtual. Actualizations arise from, and cover over, an
inexhaustible virtual which is more powerful and profound than its creations. However, this leads Deleuze to defend an ethics aimed at retrieving
the powers of the virtual via the progressive dismantling of the actual. As
Baugh argues, such an ethics can by definition only retrieve undeveloped
potentials in their purity, rather than manifesting new, more ethical actualizations. It may be, then, that Hegels critique of the beautiful souls
inaction applies equally to Deleuzes Body Without Organs.
xix
Pheng Cheah, in Political Bodies Without Organs: On Hegels Ideal

State and Deleuzian Micropolitics, focuses on the political implications
of their divergent accounts of life. The living organism, of course, serves
as the analogue for Hegels theory of the state (as well as for other normative political theories), and thus the threat of Deleuzian nonorganic
life to destabilize the conceptual scaffolding of modern political philosophy is significant, forcing us to conceive of the political body in nonorganizational terms. Hegel raises the animal organism to the level of spirit,
facilitating his conception of the political interdependence between the
state (whole) and individuals (parts). While Cheah divorces Hegels organismic actualization of the healthy, free, self-realized political individual within a vital whole from the diseased or pathological relations
that mark its distortion into authoritarianism, he nevertheless reminds us
of the normative entailments of Hegels account, elucidating some of the
difficulties involved in maintaining the health of the whole by reconciling subjective recognition and state sovereignty. For Deleuze, however,
all organisms (from subjects to states) arise through the stratification,
or capture, of the immanent flows of life, and only tenuously; all organisms are subject to death, after all, while the flows that compose them
simply recombine into other forms. As such, Deleuzes account of life
subverts the organismic politics of healthy states by defending the incessant deterritorialization of all state forms (although not their ultimate
dissolution into pure life, for flows can and will always be recaptured
and segmented). While a significant challenge to Hegel, Cheah reminds
us that this vitalist ontology led Deleuze and Flix Guattari to affirm
(albeit with qualifications) the rigidly stratifying global capitalism as a
potentially revolutionary force due to the deterritorializing power of
its uncontrollable flows of money, population, and so on. He closes by
suggesting that the repressive features of capitalism that concern them
might only be genuinely countered through organized forms of state
resistance.
In Deleuze and Hegel on the Logic of Relations, Jim Vernon
more staunchly defends the necessary development of determinate unity
out of pure multiplicity. Deleuze seeks to undermine dialectics by demonstrating the externality of all relations, a thesis he defends primarily
in his reading of Hume. There he contends that all relations are contingently imposed upon discrete impressions by experiencing subjects,
and that it is only the demands of habit that grant them the appearance of necessity. Relations appear internal to terms, in short, only in so
far as we cover over their contingent genesis by presuming that experience conforms to the expectations produced in us from past experience.
Using the Mechanical Memory section of Hegels Encyclopedia, Vernon
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argues that, like Deleuze, Hegel is concerned with the restraining effect
of habit. Because many seemingly necessary relations are in fact merely
habitual, Hegel evacuates all relations from thought, positing the complete discreteness of all mental contents from one another to see what, if
any, relations apply universally to the thinkable. For Hegel, the discreteness of any term essentially implies its relation with others in the form
of identity-in-difference, through which the determination of any discrete term is only graspable through its difference from, and in relation
to, others. Such identifying relations take the form of predicating judgments, thus demanding more explicit, precise, and varied forms through
which all such terms may be related. Vernon closes by considering some
of the practical consequences of these divergent theories of relation.
Connection/Synthesis
The chapters in this section varyingly defend the compossibility of the
Hegelian and Deleuzian images of thought. Doing so, of course, requires
confronting the thinkers at the points wherein they seem most distant,
thus often opening up different textual avenues than those guiding the
preceding chapters.
Simon Lumsdens orienting concern in Deleuze and Hegel on
the Limits of Self-Determined Subjectivity is their respective responses
to the Kantian bifurcation of apperception and sense. While seeking to
complete modernitys drive toward a self-identical self-consciousness,
Kant actually problematizes it by leaving unclear how subject and object,
concept and intuition, can be determinately unified. Lumsden argues
that Hegel and Deleuze can both be read as productively responding to
the Kantian problematic by seeking to overcome its dualism, albeit in
divergent ways. On the one hand, Hegel confronts the Kantian problematic by essentially eliminating the purely given, demonstrating it to always
already have been mediated by historical and social forces. As such, for
Hegel all determination of the given is the historically progressive selfdetermination of the inherently social subject, and thus concept and
intuition are united on the side of the concept. On the other hand, Deleuze contends that thought is not the self-mediation of a willing, intending subject, but is forced upon the subject by the shock of the given. In
Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, concepts arise from the passive
exposure of subjectivity to the sensuous manifold. As such, thought is not
spontaneously applied to the given, nor has it already stamped sensation
as mediated, but is incessantly produced through the impact of some-
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thing heterogeneous on the subject, thus eliminating dualism on the side

of intuition. As such, both thinkers replace the modernist, pre-Kantian
concept of the subject with something more fluid, plastic, and open.
Thus, while divided on precisely how to overcome the Kantian problem,
Hegel and Deleuze are drawn together by their drive to productively
overcome the dualism that hides behind modernist self-consciousness by
evacuating stable self-identity.
John Russon, in Desiring-Production and Spirit: On Anti-Oedipus
and German Idealism, draws Deleuze closer to Hegel by examining
their mutual affirmation of desire as constitutive of subjectivity and experience. He begins by locating a Kantian tenor to Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus. While aligning the three Kantian syntheses (intuition,
imagination, understanding) with the three syntheses of desire (production, recording, consumption), Deleuze and Guattari argue that the apperceptive unity through which Kant originally grounds objective experience is in fact the result of the Oedipalization, or normalization, of
desiring-production. Subjectivity and experience being results, rather
than given, are by extension never complete, but always in process. Thus,
they furthermore call into question Kants division between (theoretical)
sense and (practical) desire. All experience is the experience of desire,
which is productive of all meaning. While agreeing with this radicalization of the Kantian project, Russon argues that the process of desire
they articulate immanently produces an objective telos insufficiently
acknowledged by the Deleuzian project. Turning to Hegels dialectic of
desire and recognition, he argues that, in so far as meaning is produced
through desire, or as desired, every meaningful object is experienced
through the presence of the absent desires of (possible) others who also
desire it. In short, to experience meaning at all is to be inherently open
to the desires of others. As such, inter-subjectivity is implicit in the very
nature of desiring experience, and constitutive of all possible experience. All desiring-production implicitly presupposes the revelation of
inter-subjective recognition as the necessary result of desire. Thus, while
both immanently radicalize the original project of German idealism by
defending an account of experience as desire, Russon argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to push their immanent critique far enough, ultimately siding with Hegel, albeit for slightly Deleuzian reasons.
Juliette Simont, in Hegel and Deleuze: The Storm, provides a
Hegelian response to Deleuzes critique that difference is domesticated
by identity within the Hegelian dialectic (and better accounted for by
Leibnizean monads). For Deleuze, there are two essential aspects of difference Hegels dialectic cannot account for: the serial multiplicity of
cases (purely quantitative multiplicity) and the unilateral condensation
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of difference (its tearing itself away from totalizing relations of resemblance). Simont responds to the first of these charges via Hegels account
of quantity. Rather than forsaking merely quantitative difference for a
higher quality, she argues that Hegel liberates quantity from the quality
that hems it in, that is, the fixed point from which ordered quanta proceed. His dialectic of quantity thus offers a restitution of quantity as quantity, rather than enveloping it in a unifying quality. She then treats the
second critique through Hegels account of form and content, arguing
that there must be a gap between the two in order for any synthesized
pair to proceed toward each other in the first place. Thus, synthesis does
not eradicate difference by reducing it to the same, but allows differences
to flourish as different even in relation. As such, Hegel relates unilateral difference and its convergence in unities in a manner resonant with
Deleuzes critical account. While demonstrating points of convergence
between their systems, however, Simont also uses them to reveal the irresolvable distinction between their systems. While offering remarkably
similar accounts of the relation between unilateral difference and the
reciprocity of form and content, and so on, each thinker tilts this relation
in different directionstoward thought and its unity for Hegel, toward
nature and its contingent matters for Deleuze. As her analysis of their
respective accounts of lightning storms reveals, the divergence between
the thinkers may largely be one of emphasis and valuation, rather than
essential content.
Through a close reading of Deleuzes most sustained reading of
Hegel, Jay Lamperts Limit, Ground, Judgment . . . Syllogism: Hegel,
Deleuze, Hegel, and Deleuze throws into question many of the stock
Deleuzian myths regarding Hegel, most notably those regarding the role
contradiction plays in the dialectic. While eventually critical of Hegel,
Deleuze, as Lampert notes, does credit Hegel with having overcome organic philosophy (grounded in genus-species relations, under which
differences are determined strictly as parts of a whole) for a more orgiastic model of thought (within which differences continually emerge
and vanish in a non-totalizable field). Both Deleuze and Hegel move
beyond categories such as substrate or essence to posit the necessity of
ground, which is orgiastic in so far as its productivity brings forth
determinations which mutate as they interact. By tracing his explication
of ground into various expressions (the infinite, judgment, syllogism,
mechanism, etc.), Lampert reveals the limited role merely oppositional
contradiction plays in Hegels logic of difference. Rather than proceeding via struggle to ideal synthesis, Hegelian contradiction reflects the
forcing effect differences have on each other across a field, or the difference differences make to other differences. Hegelian differences do not
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tend toward an end, or proceed from a cause, but reciprocally condition

and un-condition each other in ground, drawing close to Deleuzes flux
of simulacra in the empty form of time. Given the complexity of Hegels
account, and Deleuzes recognition of it, Lampert questions not only why
Deleuze repeatedly resists aligning his project with Hegels, but more
important the cost of doing so. At times, to avoid any appearance of dialectical teleology, Deleuze seems to imply that true difference is too different to make a difference, bringing him close to the romantic beautiful
soul. While the same charge is often brought against Hegel, Lampert
argues, reading Deleuze in light of his enemy reveals that partisans of both
thinkers of difference need to account for the effect differences have on
each other.
Emilia Angelova, in Hegel and Deleuze on Life, Sense, and Limit,
draws the thinkers into proximity through the relation between natural
life and the sign. Contrary to strictly representational understandings of
Hegel, Angelova argues that his dialectic of self-consciousness and life
reveals the inability for either to fully separate from, or subsume into,
each other. Life cannot be comprehended as a genus save through selfconsciousness, and as such presupposes it, while the comprehending selfconsciousness cannot arise to comprehend it save through the natural
base of life. Life thus demands the existence of conceptual signification,
which arises as the self-conscious desire to reproduce the negating activity of life. Self-conscious desire, then, is a kind of gap, or nothingness in
un-comprehending life, which is not something given or transcendental,
but arises as an event of sense from the immanence of life, drawing Hegel
toward Deleuze. Deleuze, of course, would object that Hegels life, split by
a negative gap of consciousness that seeks to comprehend, is narratively
limited, corralled by the demand for mastery, truth, and completion.
Rather than seeking to make sense of life, Deleuze seeks to determine
what it does; to traverse in thought and thus reconstitute the full power
of the virtual rather than to conceptually comprehend it within structured discourse. Such nomadic thought dismantles the self-conscious
subject, bringing thinking back to the total play of life that forms its
genesis. Angelova asks, however, whether such a reduction to life itself
amounts to a kind of comprehension or closure. Bearing witness to pure
immanence in thought entails a complete determination of the field, lest
any forms of transcendence remain. It may be that all ontological stories
impose a limit upon life, and thus imply a negating subject. If this is true,
then there may be less distance between Hegel and Deleuze than the
latter would like to think.
Finally, the collection closes with A Criminal Intrigue: An Interview
with Jean-Clet Martin conducted by Constantin V. Boundas. Martin
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director of the Collge Intrnationale de Philosophie in Paris between

1998 and 2004, author of dozens of critical monographs and articles, and
a major European node in the network of friendships about which Deleuze spokeseeks, in his latest work, Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie, to rekindle the discussion on Deleuzes relation to Hegel. Rather
than seeking to affirm Hegel as an antecedent to Deleuze, Martin both
affirms Hegels status as Deleuzes enemy, while intriguingly employing
this enmity to reinvent Hegel as a genealogist of morality and creator
of conceptsdistinct from Deleuze to be sure, but also perhaps unrecognizable to mainstream Hegelians. Neither accepting nor rejecting
this characterization, in this extraordinary conversation, Boundas pushes
Martin through a wide range of topics in Hegels philosophyfrom the
critique of Kantian morality to the account of Antigone, from the nature
of the dialectic to closure of the system, from the engine of negativity
to the logic of Absolute Knowingwhich draws Hegels system closer
to Deleuzes philosophy of difference, without eliminating the distance
between them.
As should be clear from this range of texts, the challenges involved
in grasping, appraising, appropriating, and developing the systems of
Deleuze and Hegel are varied and immense. The essays collected here
testify to the diversity of possible relationships currently conceivable
between them, and the consequences thereof for the future of philosophy. While neither Hegel nor Deleuze gets the last word, these chapters
ably demonstrate that partisans of either can no longer ignore the voice
of the other.
Notes
1. Brian Massumi, The Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press [Swerve Editions],
1992), 12.
2. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvii.
3. Ibid., 38. Emphasis added.
4. Catherine Malabou, Whos Afraid of Hegelian Wolves? in Deleuze: A
Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 117.
5. Eric Alliezs worry about the status of necessity in What Is Philosophy?
verges on this anxiety: Under the guise of a quest for real distinction, does this
double necessity not reintroduce a transcendent point of view . . . Such a predicament would be especially deplorable, since in this unequal chiasmus selfpositing would acquire a dialectical position of identity, determining its outside
as a moment of its own negativity. Hegels posthumous revenge on Spinoza, per-
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haps . . .? Eric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum,
2004), 33.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 164.
7. Jean Granier, Nomad Thought, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 147.
8. Deleuze, Letter to a Harsh Critic, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.
9. Deleuze, Negotiations, 6.
10. Available as an appendix in Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans.
Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),
19195.
11. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 259.
12. Paul Patton, Anti-Platonism and Art, in Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of
Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkwoski (New York: Routledge, 1994), 146.
13. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 259.
14. Todd G. May, The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze,
SubStance 66 (1991): 25.
15. Paul Patton, Conceptual Politics and the War-Machine in Mille Plateaux, SubStance 4445 (1984): 62. Patton is quoting from Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 467.
16. Notable exceptions include Malabou and Stephen Houlgate, Hegel,
Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
17. Deleuze and Guatarri, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60.
18. G. W. F.Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3: Medieval and
Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S.Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 289.
19. See, e.g., Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3;
and Out of This World: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso,
2006), 6.
20. Ernesto Laclau, Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity, in Emancipation(s) (New York: Verso, 1996), 21.
At the Crossroads of Philosophy

and Religion: Deleuzes Critique
of Hegel
Brent Adkins
For Hegel and Deleuze both religion and philosophy are undeniable
facts of human existence. Thus neither Hegel nor Deleuze can avoid
an account of how religion and philosophy relate to one another. For
Hegel religion and philosophy are related to one another as content
and form. For Deleuze religion and philosophy are two different types
of creation, which are often confused with each other but ultimately are
distinguishable by what they create. Religion creates figures, while philosophy creates concepts. Crucially, since for Hegel the content of philosophy cannot be any religion, but must rather be Trinitarian Protestant
Christianity, he is dependent on a progressive notion of religious history.1
In contrast to this, since philosophy and religion have different tasks, Deleuze is not required to think of either as progressive. After articulating
both Hegels and Deleuzes positions with regard to philosophy and religion, I will show that Deleuzes account of philosophy exceeds Hegels in
its ability to think the contingent and affective nature of human existence.
Hegel
In 1785 F. H.Jacobi upended the German intellectual community with
the revelation of G. E.Lessings Spinozism. Moses Mendelssohn took up
Lessings defense, while Jacobi widened his offensive to include all of philosophy. Jacobi argued that all philosophy, insofar as it is thought consistently, tends toward Spinozism, atheism, and nihilism (a term coined by
Jacobi).2 Jacobis scathing condemnation of philosophy had wide-ranging
consequences for years to come. J. G. Fichte lost his position at Jena
when he was charged with atheism. F. W. J.Schelling and G. W. F.Hegel,
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who remained at Jena after Fichtes departure, were scrupulous in their

writings about God to avoid the same censure, even as they were trying
to further their philosophical projects.3 Hegel goes out of his way in Faith
and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)to praise Jacobi even as he criticizes
him as a manifestation of the subjective tendency in current philosophy.
The subjective tendency in philosophy, Hegel argues, results in an untenable split between faith and knowledge. The solution to this difficulty
for Hegel is to reconcile the opposition in terms of content and form.
Faith, explicitly Trinitarian faith, provides the content that is given philosophical form in speculative philosophy. This is the call for a speculative
Good Friday with which Hegel ends Faith and Knowledge.4 And this is the
promise that Hegel fulfills in the Phenomenology of Spirit.5
That Hegel sees the Trinity as the essential content of philosophy
does not mean that Hegel is trying to Christianize philosophy or turn
philosophy into theology. Rather, Hegel is trying to account for the basic
historical fact that the rise and spread of Christianity has profoundly
changed the nature of thought in Europe and has become determinative for European identity. In short, Europe would not be what it is in any
sense (material, cultural, moral, etc.) without Christianity. The task of
philosophy for Hegel is to account for this change to show the contradictions that arise in a culture because of this change, as well as what is new
in thought because of this change. Hegel articulates this change in terms
of freedom in Reason in History (Die Vernunft in der Geschichte). Under oriental despotism only the despot is free. All others are in bondage to the
ruler. In Greece and Rome some, the citizens, are free. With the coming
of Christianity, Hegel says that all are in principle free, but that this freedom is not actualized until the Reformation. For philosophy to fulfill its
purpose it must account for this expansion of freedom and it cannot do
so without taking Christianity into account.6
In Hegels Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he repeatedly notes
that what separates philosophy proper from its origins in Eleatic philosophy is Christianity. Thus, in discussing the difference between Heraclitus and Parmenides, Hegel notes that Heraclitus is superior because he
makes negativity immanent within the very concept of philosophy itself.
Parmenides, since he fails to do this, is left with a dead infinite. The
crucial moment comes when Hegel compares the immanent negativity
of Heraclitus with the Trinity. All that is concrete, as that God created
the world, divided Himself, begot a Son, is contained in this determination.7 Here we see that Hegel identifies the essence of the Trinity with
negation, and it is precisely this that must be thought in order for philosophy to be philosophy. At the same time, there must also be a process
of historical actualization by which the thought of the negative becomes
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real in a particular community. So, while Heraclitus is to be revered for

first thinking immanent negativity, philosophy itself must wait until this
thought takes shape and makes its appearance in Europe.
Similarly, when Hegel notes the fundamental parallel between Spinoza and Parmenides, the issues of both negativity and Christianity arise
again. The difference between our standpoint and that of the Eleatic
philosophy is only this, that through the agency of Christianity concrete
individuality is in the modern world present throughout in spirit.8 What
makes modernity different from past ages is the change wrought by
Christianity that makes concrete individuality possible. The reason that
Eleatic philosophy (whether Parmenidean or Spinozist) fails to do this
is that it eschews the particular to think the One. In doing this Eleatic
philosophy necessarily fails to think the negative and make it immanent
to the concept.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel makes explicit exactly what he means
when he says that faith is the content of philosophy. At the conclusion
of the section on revealed religion, the community of Protestant Christianity comes on the scene. The limitation of this community lies in the
representational way it takes up the negativity of the incarnation and
resurrection. This incarnation is pictured as happening in the past and
creating the reconciliation in principle, though the reconciliation will
not be actualized until some point in the future. The task of philosophy
is to take up this universal process of immanent negativity pictured in
Trinitarian religion and give it philosophical form.
Philosophy thus thinks what is already actualized in a community. The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. Philosophy arises within
a specific community to reconcile the contradictions that arise in the
thought of that community. What arises with the advent of Christianity
is the thought of the concrete individual, which can be thought from
either the standpoint of the subject or the standpoint of object (which
could be nature or the community). Thus, for Hegel the fundamental
contradiction of his time (as the Differenzschrift makes clear) is between
the subjective and objective viewpoints.9 The problem with contemporary philosophys attempt at a solution is that for the most part it has
attempted to resolve this problem from the side of the subject (hence
Fichtes radicalization of the Kantian project in which the Ich produces
the non-Ich). Faith and Knowledge shows that despite all of their differences Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte remain trapped within the subjective viewpoint, which is why they are unable to come to terms with the relation
between faith and knowledge. A one-sided approach, however, can never
produce a reconciliation; it can only reaffirm the contradiction between
the viewpoints. What is needed is a standpoint that is neither subjective
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nor objective but out of which this opposition is produced. This is the
absolute, the philosophy that is able to take up faith as its content and
not something opposed to philosophy.
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel maintains the fundamental position that he outlines in Faith and Knowledge and explicates
in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The culmination of religion, defined as the
self-consciousness of God, lies in Protestant Christianity.10 Furthermore,
not only are religion and philosophy intimately related as content and
form, but also insofar as philosophy takes up this content in its logical
form, it is orthodox par excellence.11 What Hegel adds in these lectures
that go beyond his fundamental position might best be construed as a response to the heresy of modalism. The modalist heresy argues against the
eternality of the Trinity. It argues, rather, that the single God is manifested
historically in three different and mutually exclusive modes. Thus, Father,
Son, and Spirit can never appear together. The Phenomenology might easily
be read modalistically, since it pictures the three persons of the Trinity as
corresponding to different historical epochs. Indeed, it seems that iek
in his most recent work on Hegel and Christianity proposes just such a
reading.12 In the Lectures, though, Hegel is at great pains to show that the
relation of Father, Son, and Spirit lies beyond time in what Hegel calls
the kingdom of the Father.13 However, the very same act that is the eternal begetting of the Son is also the creation of the world. Thus, in the
eternal self-diremption that is the life of the spirit lie both the Trinity and
the creation of the world. It is only in ordinary thought that the two are
regarded as separate, as two absolutely distinct spheres and acts (LPR,
3:38). This is the kingdom of the Son (LPR, 3:33 and following). The
creation of the world, however, inaugurates the divine history that culminates in the reconciliation of God and world, infinite and finite, universal
and particular. This reconciliation is actualized in the community of believers known as the church, the kingdom of Spirit (LPR, 3:100 and
following). What we have, then, in Hegels fullest account of religion is
not a simplistic and heretical modalism, but a highly complex, orthodox
Trinitarianism.14
Hegel thus avoids the false dichotomies of faith or reason, pantheism or theism, subject or object, immanence or transcendence, infinite
or finite, human or divine, universal or particular. Each side of these
dichotomies reveals something essential about the world, but in their
one-sidedness they remain abstract. It is only by thinking both sides in
their difference from and relation to one another that one arrives at
the thought of the absolute. The absolute can only be thought through
negation, can only be actualized through negation. The Trinity is, then,
the very thought of the negative made actual in the world through the
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lived community of Protestant Christianity. There is no conflict between

faith and reason, as Jacobi famously argues. Neither is it the case that
faith is subordinated to reason, as Kant argues. Rather, what faith manifests concretely as the Trinitarian life of the community is the content
of philosophy, and this is precisely what philosophy must think to be philosophy. Philosophy does not add anything new to this content, which already is the lived actuality of the reconciliation of God and the world, but
simply replaces the representational form of this lived actuality with the
conceptual form of thought. The historical and contingent form of religion is superseded by the conceptual and necessary form of philosophy.
Deleuze
In contrast to Hegel who begins with the difference between philosophy
and religion and argues for their ultimate unity as form and content, Deleuze begins from the point at which philosophy differentiates itself from
religion and argues that in order for philosophy to be philosophy it must
maintain that difference. In his account of the origins of philosophy Deleuze is heavily reliant on Jean-Pierre Vernant, although undoubtedly
lying behind both is Nietzsches argument from the Genealogy that to conceal themselves the first philosophers took up the mask of religion.15
How is philosophy distinct from the wisdom traditions of the East? How
does the sage, the one possessing wisdom, differ from the philosopher,
the friend of wisdom?
In The Origins of Greek Thought, Vernant argues that what sets the
sage of ancient religious traditions apart from the philosophers of Greece
is a complex interrelation of social and political factors. The Greeks were
not merely being modest in saying that they were the friends of wisdom, while the sages were able to make the more grandiose claim that
they possessed wisdom. Rather, changes in political and social organization made possible the formation of a city in which all the citizens were
seen as being in competition with one another. For example, Xenophon
writes concerning the Spartans in The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians:
But Lycurgus thought the labour of slave women sufficient to supply
clothing. He believed motherhood to be the most important function
of freeborn woman. Therefore in the first place, he insisted on physical
training for the female no less than the male sex: moreover trials of
strength for women competitors as for men, believing that if both parents are strong they produce more vigorous offspring.16
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The Spartans pursued the competitive aspect of their city in largely

physical terms, but Vernant argues that this competitive aspect became
generalized such that Greek cities were characterized by the citizens agonism toward one another. Even when the topic turns away from physical
competition toward ideas, this agonism remains. No longer is it possible
for one person to possess wisdom. Each must prove in a contest of arguments and ideas that he or she is wisdoms true friend. All others are, of
course, rivals to the one who claims to be wisdoms friend.
In some ways Vernants argument echoes the long-standing claim
that the rise of philosophy in Greece is miraculous and unprecedented
(the so-called le miracle grec). Vernant, however, is careful to note that
while something new comes on the scene in Greece it is not miraculous, but the result of new political and social organizations that arise in
Greece during the sixth century B.C.E.
Deleuze takes Vernants argument about the origins of philosophy
as a way of understanding the nature of philosophy. In pursuit of this
task in his and Guattaris What Is Philosophy? Deleuze explicitly distinguishes philosophy from art and science. However, Deleuze also at crucial points is required to distinguish philosophy and religion. In brief,
Deleuze argues that all of these domains (philosophy, science, art, and
religion) are characterized by creation, but each domain creates something different. Philosophy creates concepts, science creates functions,
art creates sensations, and religion creates figures. Each of these creations is a different way of dealing with chaos, the riot of things and ideas
with which one is constantly confronted.
Initially, it looks as if Deleuze has come to the same conclusion as
Hegel regarding the difference between religion and philosophy, though
by very different means. Deleuzes distinction between figures and concepts sounds very much like Hegels distinction between representations
and concepts. This similarity is further reinforced when Deleuze writes,
the transcendent God would remain empty, or at least absconditus, if it
were not projected on a plane of immanence of creation where it traces
the stages of its theophany.17 For both Hegel and Deleuze religion requires a referential structure by which transcendence is represented.
Hegel, of course, argues that this referential structure culminates in the
three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. In contrast, for Deleuze, the figures do not culminate at any particular point. History for
Deleuze is not the progressive unfolding of the absolute in its necessary
self-development. As a result, even though the distinction between religion and philosophy for Deleuze and Hegel shows remarkable confluence, ultimately religion cannot be the content of philosophy for Deleuze. Deleuze begins with the point of separation between philosophy
and religion and seeks to maintain that separation.18
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Deleuze maintains the separation of philosophy and religion not

only by articulating the difference between figures and concepts but also
by showing that philosophy presupposes a plane of immanence and invents conceptual personae. Deleuze describes the plane of immanence
in numerous ways. It is the image of thought. It is fractal. It is a secant plane that cuts across chaos. Deleuze takes up the notion of fractal
to describe the plane of immanence because what he is trying to capture is infinite variability. If the plane of immanence is defined by infinite variability, then concepts are the singular points at which something
happens.19 Concepts are thus intensive ordinates within the plane. The
relation between plane of immanence and concept is identical to the
relation between the virtual and the actual that dominates works such
as Difference and Repetition.20 The conceptual persona is the correspondence between the plane and the concept. Conceptual personae carry
out the movements that describe the authors plane of immanence, and
they play a part in the very creation of the authors concepts (WP, 63).
For example, in Descartes the presuppositions that set the contours of
his plane of immanence, and form his image of thought are assumptions about the nature of thought itself. Everyone knows what thinking means. Everyone can think; everyone wants the truth (WP, 61). On
this plane Descartes forms the concept of the cogito, and he is helped
in creating this concept by the idiot, the lone thinker locked away in
a room to discover certainty. These three aspects of philosophy, plane
of immanence, concept, and conceptual persona, are only separable in
principle, not in practice. Furthermore, they do not follow from one
another either logically or chronologically. Each aspect is self-reflexively
related to the others.
For Hegel the plane of immanence is difference raised to the level
of contradiction. Or, the image of thought that Hegel presupposes is the
dialectic, in which every position necessarily generates its opposite. The
concept that Hegel creates is simply the concept or the idea or the absolute depending on the work. In each case the concept posits the identity
of the oppositions generated on the plane of immanence. The conceptual persona that is the correspondence between plane and concept is
spirit. In keeping with Hegels privileging of development, spirit appears
in many guises. This aspect of spirit is foregrounded in the Phenomenology
but subtends all of Hegels works.
The great danger that continually haunts philosophy is taking the
plane of immanence and making it immanent to something else, substance, being, or God, for example. Making immanence immanent to
something other than itself transforms immanence into transcendence.
At precisely this moment, philosophy ceases to be philosophy and becomes religion. Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, impe-
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rial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy
whenever there is immanence (WP, 43). The primary exception here is
Spinoza:
Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was
only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by
movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher
never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it
down everywhere . . . He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. (WP, 48).
Spinoza thus becomes the hero (and savior) in Deleuzes history of philosophy, the only one who understands the true nature of philosophy,
which he pursues relentlessly.
In his description of the nature of philosophy and his evaluation of
Spinozas role in it, Deleuze seems to come remarkably close to Jacobi.
For both, religion and philosophy are mutually exclusive. For both, Spinoza represents the culmination of philosophical endeavor; that is, to
the degree that philosophy consistently follows its own presuppositions
it tends toward Spinozism. All philosophers are Spinozists of some kind.
The only issue is whether they are consistent in their Spinozism. The crucial difference, of course, is that Jacobi recoils in horror at this possibility,
while Deleuze embraces it as the path to freedom. If Deleuzes account
is accurate, though, it would seem that philosophy has rarely been philosophy. The history of philosophy has rather been dominated by the
continual attempt to subdue immanence, make it immanent to something. Within this context Hegel errs by confusing plane and concept. He
makes his plane of immanence immanent to the concept. On Deleuzes
terms then, Hegel does not successfully differentiate philosophy and religion as form and content. Hegel remains a religious thinker, but not
because he takes the Trinity as the content of philosophy. He remains a
religious thinker because the dialectic, difference itself is subordinated
to the concept, which unifies the difference.
Hegels rejoinder to this criticism, of course, is that Deleuze misunderstands the task of philosophy. Without pursuing an underlying unity,
an absolute, philosophy simply abandons itself to feeling and contingency. As a result, Deleuzes philosophy ends up being another version
of the subjectivism that he sees as endemic to the philosophies of his
age, whether in Jacobi or Schleiermacher. Deleuze essentially agrees with
what Hegels assessment of his thought would be. It is based on contin-
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gency and feeling. What Deleuze is at pains to show, though, is that a

philosophy based on contingency and feeling need not fall under the
criticisms of subjectivism that Hegel levels against Jacobi and others. The
way that Deleuze avoids this criticism is first and foremost by reconceiving philosophy as a productive activity. The second way that he does this
is by turning to the fundamental role of the affects in shaping thought.
Thus, subjectivity is not the ground of philosophy; it is the result of an
affective process.
Philosophy as Productive
As we saw above, for Hegel, philosophy cannot be philosophy without
thinking the negative. Deleuzes thought in general, along with his work
with Guattari, can be seen as an attempt to remove the thought of the
negative from philosophy. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze argues that
negation is the last bastion of representation, the means by which Hegel
stretches difference to the point of contradiction (DR, 26263). The dialectic, however, only ensures that difference remains external and subjugated to a greater unity, the identity of identity and difference, as Hegel
says in the Logic. It is precisely here that we see why Deleuze accuses
Hegel of a false Spinozism.21 Hegel has taken the plane of immanence
and made it immanent to something else, namely the absolute in the
Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia or the Idea in the Logic.22
In contrast to the Hegelian dialectic, Deleuze proposes a different
model of thought and experience. Rather than introducing negation
as the means by which movement is introduced into thought, Deleuze
proposes that thought is self-moving, that it already differs from itself
without this difference being a negation or rising to the level of contradiction, which would externalize the difference. Deleuzes first attempts
to think internal difference come from an early essay titled Bergsons
Conception of Difference. Deleuze writes, In Bergson, thanks to the
notion of the virtual, the thing differs from itself first, immediately. According to Hegel the thing differs from itself because it differs first from
everything it is not, and thus difference goes as far as contradiction.23
There are numerous ways that Deleuze takes up the notion of internal
self-differentiation throughout his work. In many texts he retains the notion of the virtual as the abstract, machinic account of actual processes.
He also pursues this same notion in terms of possible connections among
partial objects and the way in which these connections are channeled by
their limit. At bottom, though, lies a conception of philosophy, even life
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itself, as productive. Life, experience, philosophy simply is that process

of making new and contingent connections. In philosophy these connections are conceptual and are articulated on a plane of immanence. There
is desire but it is not predicated on a lack.
Affectivity and Subjectivity

Hegel would agree with Deleuze that the subject is the result of a process. This idea encapsulates Hegels criticism of Spinoza and Eleatic philosophy in general. Substance must become subject, as Hegel says in the
Phenomenology.24 The crucial difference, though, lies in the way that Hegel
thinks the result. While result certainly indicates the culmination of a
process, this process is at the same time what Hegel calls in the Logic a
retreat into the ground. Hegel writes:
Progress in philosophy is rather a retrogression and a grounding or
establishing by means of which we first obtain the result that what we
began with is not something merely arbitrarily assumed but is in fact the
truth, and also the primary truth . . . The advance is a retreat into the
ground, to what is primary and true.25
Hegels point here is the Aristotelian point that epistemological grounds

are inversely related to ontological grounds, that what is primary in the
order of knowing is secondary in the order of being and vice versa. Thus,
all of Hegels works begin with what is immediate and through the process of determinate negation the immediate is shown to be grounded
on the mediated. The truth of immediacy lies in mediation, but this can
only be achieved as the result of a process. In the same way, the truth of
substance lies in subject (as the concrete, self-conscious whole of spirit),
but this moment can only be reached through the dialectic. Thus, the
subject is an achieved moment for Hegel but it is also the ground and
truth of all that preceded it.
The process that Deleuze has in mind for the production of the
subject is much different. Deleuze takes up Klossowskis Nietzsche and the
Vicious Circle as emblematic of the account of the subject as the result
of affective states. What is common to Deleuzes articulation of Spinoza
and Nietzsche and Klossowskis articulation of Nietzsche is a fundamental affectivity that underlies and results in subjectivity. At the same time,
however, subjectivity is not seen as more fundamental than affectivity.
Rather, for Deleuze, the subject is a residuum.26 Each individual, rather
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than being a self-positing whole, is in fact constructed as the intersection

of various affective forces. Thus Klossowski writes concerning Nietzsche,
The body is a product of chance; it is nothing but the locus where a
group of individuated impulses confront each other so as to produce
this interval that constitutes a human life, impulses whose sole ambition is to de-individuate themselves.27 Thus, in sharp contrast to Hegels
account in which the more one pursues consciousness the more one
uncovers its ground in the self-positing subject of reason, Deleuze, following Klossowski, argues that the subject is not the ground but the contingent nexus of affects that are only chosen in retrospect as constitutive.
This is why Deleuze discusses the subject as the reflective moment by
which one selects some affects, some intensities as representative and
declares, so, thats who I am.28 This declaration is the final moment in
the complexification of desiring-production in which the connective and
disjunctive syntheses of desire interact with their limit in the body without organs. This third synthesis of desire Deleuze calls celibate because
it neither produces nor grounds anything. It is merely the aorist moment
that freezes the continuous circuit of desire.
Conclusion
For Deleuze, then, philosophy is precisely the account of the contingent
and affective. This account, however, does not result, as Hegel would
argue, in a one-sided subjectivism. Rather, the subject is the impotent
result of contingent and affective processes and grounds nothing. The
question that remains, though, is what is gained by reconceiving philosophy in this way? What is gained is precisely the contingent and the affective. For Hegel the contingent and affective either remain inscrutable
or are subordinated to the greater unity of the concept, at which point,
of course, they are neither contingent nor affective. The problem with
Hegels account of thoughts movement from abstract to concrete is that
(to paraphrase Deleuze) it is neither abstract nor concrete enough. It is
not abstract enough because it cannot give an account of the affective
or contingent as such. In Deleuze this abstract account is in terms of
the virtual or the diagrammatic. Even more crucially, though, it is the
very interaction of the contingent and affective in their concreteness that
gives rise to the abstract. Neither the abstract nor the concrete is more
real than the other. Neither is superseded by the other. Each is required
in its distinctness to think the contingent and affective. Philosophy for
Deleuze is the creation of concepts. It is only insofar as these concepts
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are thought on a plane of immanence that is not immanent to anything

else that they can think the contingent and affective.
Notes
1. I will expand on this below, but at this point Im simply repeating Hegels
claim from the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 787. All shapes of absolute spirit, whether art, philosophy, or
religion, posit the unity of universal and particular. The difference among them
lies in the form by which each shape makes its appearance. Art does so sensuously, religion representationally, and philosophy conceptually. Hegels point is
that philosophy only achieves this unity as a result (and not merely posited) in
Hegels own philosophy. The form of this unity is conceptual, but the content
is the content of revealed religion. That is, revealed religion thinks what philosophy thinks (namely, immanent negativity) and revealed religion thinks this content as actualized. Philosophy thinks the same thing, except it does so conceptually rather than representationally.
2. See Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to
Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 4491, for a fuller account of the Pantheismusstreit.
3. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 118202, for an account of Hegels arrival at Jena.
4. G. W. F.Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and Henry S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 19091.
5. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 784 and following.
6. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Upper Saddle River,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 2324.
7. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1:284.
8. Ibid., 3:258.
9. Hegel, The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, trans. Jere P. Surber (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1978).
10. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. B.Spiers and
J. Burdon Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 2:327.
11. Ibid., 2:344. This is unquestionably a stab at Hegels colleague in Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Hegel saw as the disseminator of a theology
based on subjective feeling rather than thought.
12. Slavoj iek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). Id like to thank my colleague Paul
Hinlicky for pointing out ieks modalism.
13. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Spiers and J. Burdon
Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 3:3; 1011, referred to parenthetically in text as LPR, followed by volume and page number.
14. Others have, of course, argued that Hegel is anything but orthodox.
See, for example, Cyril ORegans The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University
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of New York Press, 1994). While I wont deny that Hegel veers toward a kind of
Gnosticism under the influence of Bhme and the drama of sin and redemption
becomes Bildungsroman, his account of the Trinity strikes me as thoroughly Augustinian and Lutheran.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 11516.
16. Xenophon, Scripta Minora: Loeb Classical Library, Xenophon VII, trans. E. C.
Marchant and G. W.Bowersock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1925), 4:5.
17. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 89.
18. At this point two related issues arise: (1) what is the relation between
philosophical and religious thinkers? (2) what do we make of Deleuzes language of belief in Cinema 2 and What Is Philosophy? On the first issue, Deleuzes
claim would be that anything, even religious thought, can provide impetus for
philosophical thought. Thus Kierkegaard and Pascal can reenergize philosophy
through their thoughts of transcendence (WP, 74). On the second issue, belief for
Deleuze need not entail transcendence. In this respect his call for belief in the
world as it is is parallel to Nietzsches critique of the Beyond in Christian thought
(see Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 172). See also Katherine Thieles
To Believe in This World, as It Is: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism, Deleuze Studies 4 (2010): 2845.
19. On this point see Dan Smiths very helpful The Conditions of the New,
Deleuze Studies 1 (2007): 121.
20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
21. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 12829.
22. In the Phenomenology, for example, Hegel notes that the task of consciousness is to arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being
burdened with something alien . . . so that its exposition will coincide . . . with
the authentic science of spirit (89).
23. Deleuze, Bergsons Conception of Difference, in Desert Islands and
Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 42.
24. Hegel, Phenomenology, 25.
25. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Paperback Library, 1989), 7071.
26. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 17.
27. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 27.
28. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 20.
Negation, Disjunction, and a

New Theory of Forces: Deleuzes
Critique of Hegel
Nathan Widder
I would like in this chapter to examine the relationship Deleuze establishes with Hegel with a view to avoiding the false alternative often bandied between Deleuzes critics and defenders: that either Deleuze is a
naive and ill-informed reader whose polemic against his rival misunderstands how dialectical his own thinking is, or that Hegel is unimportant
to Deleuzes thought and thus any misreading of Hegel is irrelevant. The
textual evidence to support both sides of this exchange is easy enough
to find. Deleuze, for example, states that what he most detested in his
education in the history of philosophy was Hegelianism and dialectics.1
And he famously declares in his seminal work on Nietzsche that there
is no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsches
philosophy . . . forms an absolute antidialectics and sets out to expose
all the mystifications that find a final refuge in the dialectic,2 which presumably means that Deleuze sees no possible compromise between his
own thought and Hegels. Without dismissing these harsh statements,
and while acknowledging that Deleuzes general approach to Hegel is
quite an exception to his creative (if not always faithful) readings of both
friendly and rival figures in the history of philosophy, I nevertheless
maintain that there is a real sophistication to Deleuzes critique of dialectics, and a subtle and complex relation that is established underneath
his language of blunt opposition.
To advance this view, I will examine the discussions of force, consciousness, self-consciousness, and desire in the early chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit,3 locating the moments where Hegels dialectic falters
in such a way that Deleuze can provide new formulations of these terms.
I will then examine these new formulations as they appear first in the
theory of forces presented in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and then in the account of desire found in the appendices of The Logic of Sense. In engag18
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ing the Phenomenology in this way, it is less important to me whether Deleuze actually had the same critical reading in mind when launching his
attacks on Hegel than whether such a reading and critique can make
sense of Deleuzes moves in a way that provides a more complex and
sophisticated portrayal of the Hegel-Deleuze relation. What I hope to
make clear is that Deleuzes position against Hegel, including his declaration of irreconcilability, can be redeemed through a rigorous and
critical reading of Hegel, even if Deleuze did not provide this himself. I
believe that what emerges from this enterprise is a Deleuze who neither
neglects Hegel nor reads him poorly, but who rather rivals and completes Hegels thought, much like Nietzsche, for Deleuze, rivals and
completes Kant.4
Readers familiar with Deleuzes wider corpus know of his indebtedness to a particular reading of Hegel and a line of critique that emerges
from it. In his 1954 review of Jean Hyppolites Logic and Existence,5 Deleuze aligns Hegels project with what will become the general thrust of
his own, holding the lesson of Hyppolites Hegel to be: Philosophy must
be ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is
only an ontology of sense.6 This notion of sense provides the general terrain on which Deleuzes relation to Hegel must first be approached.7
Hyppolites text challenges the humanist or anthropomorphic readings
of Hegel that, la Kojve,8 take human collective spirit to be the Absolute Subject.9 To dispute this view, Hyppolite concentrates on the second
of two appearances of the Absolute in the Phenomenology, where, in the
closing pages, phenomenology transitions into logic. The nature of this
transition demonstrates that human self-consciousness and history are
merely focal points where an Absolute beyond humanity is actualized
concretely, these focal points, in turn, negating themselves and returning
to this Absolute. In this way, the Absolute is immanent to the empirical
and human even while remaining different from them, allowing Hyppolite to argue that it provides the sense and direction for human being
and history without becoming an essence standing above or behind
them. Thus, the Phenomenology studies the anthropological conditions
of this reflection [the self-reflexivity that is the sense of the Absolute]; it
starts from human, properly subjective, reflection in order to sublate it,
in order to show that this Phenomenology, this human itinerary, leads to
absolute knowledge, to an ontological reflection which the Phenomenology
presupposes (LE, 34).
Moving away from the anthropological interpretation, however,
Hyppolite encounters a fundamental difficulty he is not the first to locatenamely, that there is no negation internal to history that returns it
to the Absolute: History is indeed the place of this passage, but this pas-
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sage is not itself a historical fact (LE, 189). A disconnect thereby emerges
between the successive time of human history and the eternal nature of
the Absolute, leaving the latter opaque to the former and reinstating the
very transcendence the dialectic is meant to raze. For Hyppolite at least,
this quandary does not arise in the Absolutes first appearance, which
occurs at the end of the Phenomenologys third chapter when consciousness, finding itself in its object, passes into self-consciousness. This is the
point at which consciousness is no longer burdened by some alien other,
the point that, as Hegel promises in the Introduction, will signify the
nature of absolute knowledge itself (PS, 89). Deleuze seems to accept
this difference, declaring in his review that the relation between ontology and empirical man [resolved in the Absolutes first appearance] is
perfectly determined, but not the relation between ontology and historical man (RLE, 194). The lack of a properly dialectical transition
from history back to the Absolute indicates that the moments of the
Phenomenology and the moments of the Logic are not moments in the
same sense (RLE, 195), and this equivocation in Hegelian sense suggests, for Deleuze, that a route from Hegel may be found in a difference
that differs from dialectical contradiction. If Hyppolites Hegel is correct
in his view that the Absolute as sense is becoming (RLE, 194), this
becoming, Deleuze contends, must be grounded in a notion of Being as
difference, wherein contradiction would be less than difference and not
more (RLE, 195).
Deleuzes early review presents his most direct and detailed critique
of Hegel, and its distinction between difference and contradiction remains pertinent to all his later work. But it certainly does not tell the
whole story of Deleuzes relation to Hegel, insofar as Nietzsche and Philosophy takes aim at a rather different target. Moreover, the contention
that the relation between ontology and empirical man is perfectly determined seems implausible, and it is doubtful that even the young Deleuze
held it himself, for it suggests an adequacy of ontological negation or
contradiction that is fundamentally incompatible with his entire philosophy. Indeed, a disconnect arises in the Absolutes first appearance that
is as problematic as what Hyppolite identifies in the second, and while it
is perhaps not as relevant to the task of rebutting the anthropomorphic
readings of Hegel, it is significant for the critical path Deleuze pursues.
To appreciate the role played by the Absolutes first appearance,
it is worth noting, with Heidegger, the dual position the Phenomenology
holds in Hegels thought.10 On the one hand, it provides the groundwork
for the never completed System of Science, and as such, it functions
as a foundation that articulates the entirety of a system that Hegel had
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intended to present also as logic and as a philosophy of nature and psychology. On the other hand, it is merely one component of the system,
allowing Hegel, as his structure evolves into that of the Encyclopedia, to
relegate it to a subsection of the philosophy of spirit, which comprises the
final part. As a foundation and complete account of the system, the Phenomenology displays a miniature version of the path Hegel pursues later,
wherein an ontological derivation of the Notionwhat Taylor calls the
strict dialecticis followed by an empirical or historical dialectic that
demonstrates how this Notion is actualized and how it returns to itself.11
In the Phenomenology, the first three chapters, which form the Dialectic
of Consciousness, comprise the strict ontological dialectic (PS, 220),
although they differ from the Logic in deriving the Absolute from an
empirical starting pointconsciousnesss immediate experience of a
thing. The transition from the strict to the historical dialectic should
occur seamlesslyand, indeed, it must do so for the relation between
empirical man and the Absolute to have any temporal dimension. Otherwise, the relation remains no more than that of an abstract and merely
formal Notion that is presupposed by the immediate and abstract experience of an isolated and abstract consciousness. In short, the Absolutes
appearance must immediately effect this transition or it will remain abstract itself. Thus, the culmination of the dialectical path consciousness
follows to find its truth in self-consciousness should yield two fundamental results: consciousness must find its foundation in the Absolute and
also attain a more concrete conception of itself as self-consciousness. This
would allow the Dialectic of Self-Consciousness to trace the same route
as the Dialectic of Consciousness, but at a more concrete level, reaching
the still more concrete Notion understood as Reason. Through similar
transitions from the abstract to the concrete the dialectic can then progress through Reason, Spirit, Religion, and finally Absolute Knowing. As
will be seen, however, it is precisely in the first dual move that quandaries
arise, impacting not only the Absolutes relation to self-consciousnesss
development through historical time but also its relation to empirical
consciousness encountering its world.
It is on this empirical level that the attacks in Nietzsche and Philosophy
are launched. Early in the text, Deleuze explicitly connects the philosophy of sense to force: We will never find the sense of something . . . if
we do not know the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits
it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it (NP, 3). He quickly
adds that this Nietzschean conception of force must be rigorously distinguished from Hegels, that Nietzsches anti-Hegelianism is already apparent in the theory of forces (NP, 8) and its idea that the essential relation
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of one force to another is never conceived of as a negative element in the

essence. In its relation with the other the force which makes itself obeyed
does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference (NP, 89). In the Phenomenology, force
is introduced in the third chapter, and it leads consciousness to its first
encounter with the Absolute. Hegel maintains that the relational movement of forces ultimately makes sense of consciousnesss experience,
first by providing the underlying truth of the object of perception and
then by supplying the internal mechanism through which consciousness
sublates itself into self-consciousness. This forms the backdrop to the
Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage, to which Deleuze himself refers after
highlighting the distinction between Hegelian and Nietzschean forces
(NP, 910). Deleuze positions his critique of Hegelian forces in terms of
abstract versus concrete forms of relation, declaring that for Nietzsche
opposition is the law of the relation between abstract products (NP,
157) and that the dialectic . . . misinterprets sense because it does not
know the nature of the forces which concretely appropriate phenomena
(NP, 158). In holding the Hegelian conception of force is an abstract
one, Deleuze is challenging the adequacy of the central component in
Hegels derivation of the Absolute at the point at which its relation to the
empirical is, supposedly, perfectly determined.
If one may apply Deleuzian concepts to Hegel, then the first three
chapters of the Phenomenology can be seen as a movement that takes
thought from the actual to the virtual, and the text as a whole can be
seen as a movement from actual to virtual and back. On these terms,
Hegels text moves from the actual (if abstract) experience of the immediate thing of sense certainty to its virtual preconditions in a network
of mediating force relations, and then demonstrates the actualization
of this virtual Absolute through a series of transitions that, starting with
self-consciousness, proceed toward more and more concrete accounts of
human spirit and its unfolding in history, until the Absolute is once again
attained. The fulcrum that turns the analysis from the virtual back to the
actual would then be the frequently overlooked pages that introduce the
Dialectic of Self-Consciousness prior to the Dialectic of Lordship and
Bondage. It is precisely in these pages that the disconnect that plagues
the Absolutes first appearance is revealed, as the Absolute, rather than
transitioning immediately to the next stage of analysis, instead undergoes a series of nondialectical machinations. The empirical, ontological,
and historical are here left unmediated, and the inadequacy of dialectical contradiction is exposed.12 From this sundering, as will be seen, Deleuzes ontology of sense can emerge around the difference that structures a new relation of forces.
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Consciousness and Self-Consciousness

The Dialectic of Consciousness seeks the truth of consciousnessthat
is, the conditions under which the subjective certainty of consciousnesss
experience has objective truth. It begins with a thing immediately presented to consciousness, which appears as the richest kind of knowledge
(PS, 91). The claim that truth resides in this immediate appearance,
however, immediately negates itself, since a truth cannot lose anything
by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our
preserving it (PS, 95), yet any truth claims about an immediate experiencefor example, that it is now 6:06 p.m. exactlybecome false even
as they are stated. What remains true, however, even in this immediate selfcontradiction, is that the things appearance is always framed by concepts
of time, space, subject and object: whether it is now 6:06 p.m., midnight,
or 8:30 a.m., consciousnesss experience always takes the form of an object
appearing here and now before a subject. Sense certainty thereby finds
its truth in perception.
The truth of perception is likewise not to be found within its conceptual object. The latter is a unified, independent entity, yet also a multiplicity of universal but relational propertiesan object is white as opposed to black, blue, or some other color; it is white for a subject, for me,
and so on. The object is thus internally contradictory, insofar as it must
negate otherness to define itself, but this negation also relates it to others:
The Thing is posited as being for itself, or as the absolute negation of all
otherness, therefore as purely self-related negation; but the negation that
is self-related is the suspension of itself; in other words, the Thing has its
essential being in another Thing (PS, 126). As the objects essence involves being both a unity and a multiplicity, the truth of perception, moving between individuality and universality, must be found in a perpetual
alternation of determining what is true, and then setting aside this determining . . . in each single moment it is conscious only of this one determinateness as the truth, and then in turn of the opposite one (PS, 131).
The concept of force encompasses this contradictory movement
within the perceived object. It subsumes the moments of being-in-itself
and being-for-another, performing the requisite synthesis for the understanding, whereby the object, referring outside itself, nevertheless refers
to itself alone. Force is essentially relational and negative, each force defining itself by negating what it is not in a reciprocal determination: The
interplay of the two Forces thus consists in their being determined as mutually opposed (PS, 139). Furthermore, while force initially presents an
opposition between itself and its expression, the latter seemingly located
in its relations to external others, through the necessity of this expression
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these others are also internal to it: In this, there is immediately present
both the repression within itself of Force, or its being-for-self, as well as
its expression . . . Force, as actual, exists simply and solely in its expression, which at the same time is nothing else than a supersession of itself
(PS, 141). In this way, the concept of force also sublates the distinction between essence and appearance: since force is nothing but its expression, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its filling (PS, 147). It
therefore becomes a movement from being-in-itself to being-for-another
and back to being-for-self through being-for-another, leaving no opaque
thing-in-itself conditioning this movement from outside. Consciousness
is thereby given the internal mechanisms needed to overcome the aporia
that characterizes the Understanding, where it remains detached from its
world, grasping reality through laws that never fully reconcile universal
and singular. The movement of force demonstrates that, in being separated from its object, consciousness is also negatively related to it, so that
each is part of the others identity. The subject finding itself in its object
in this way, consciousness realizes itself as self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness, presenting a being that separates itself from its
world to examine it as an object while also remaining fully immersed
within this world, is a more concrete conception of the science of phenomena than the portrayal of an isolated consciousness examining an external and independent reality. The Dialectic of Self-Consciousness thus
works out the truth of self-consciousnessthe conditions under which
its self-certainty has objective truthbut also traces the same path as the
Dialectic of Consciousness on a more concrete level. However, it does not
begin with an internal contradiction that shows how self-consciousnesss
initial certainty negates itself. On the contrary, Hegel prefaces this new
stage with a review of the previous developments, declaring that with
consciousnesss return to itself from otherness, we have . . . entered the
native realm of truth (PS, 167). Self-consciousness is then said to consist of two moments: first, it relates to itself alone and is negatively separated from an otherness given to it in sense certainty and perception as
a substantial and enduringbut not self-consciousexistence; second,
it unites with this other, whose difference consequently becomes mere
appearance.13 This negation and absorption of otherness, a negation of
negation that moves self-consciousness from the first to the second moment, leads Hegel to define self-consciousness as desire in general. Consciousness, as self-consciousness, henceforth has a double object: one is
the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception, which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second,
viz. itself, which is the true essence, and is present in the first instance only
as opposed to the first object (PS, 167). As a movement of desire, self-
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consciousness negatesfor example, by consuming or destroyingan

object it is not.
It is clear, however, that the facets of desiring self-consciousness derived from this movement of negation cannot provide the grounding
Hegel seeks. Desire must reach a higher negation of negation, one that
negates but also preserves its other, and this ultimately requires another
self-consciousness, one for whom the first self-consciousness negates itself
to become an object of desire for this other. But the entire phenomenological dialectic takes place from the perspective of a singular consciousness examining its world, and no experience given to this consciousness
as it progresses to self-consciousness indicates that it ever encounters an
other that is even conscious, let alone self-conscious. This, of course, is
the problem of recognition in a nutshell: I cannot be certain that another
who confronts me is actually self-conscious, that he or she has the sort of
relation-to-self I am conscious of having when, say, I carry out an inner
dialogue with myself or reflect on my existence in the world. It is therefore
a leap of faith to see myself in the other, to recognize a human sameness
between us that persists no matter how different or alien we seem to be to
each other, and thus also a leap of faith to see the others recognition of
me as something that genuinely affirms me. And self-consciousness lacks
any determinate negation that overcomes this blockage; it can only relate
to its other through a negation that destroys the other.14
Hegel can negotiate this aporia only through a cheat, which he
quickly executes. He writes: But for us, or in itself, the object which for
self-consciousness is the negative element has, on its side, returned into
itself, just as on the other side consciousness has done. Through this
reflection into itself the object has become Life (PS, 169). This for
us cannot refer to the consciousness that to this point has been the
Phenomenologys lone subject, nor can it be the object that consciousness
has encountered and that has, in itself, returned to itself. This statement
introduces an entirely new perspective: that of the phenomenologist who
transcends the situation of consciousness and its object, seeing a movement of self-related negativity in each. From here, Hegel asserts that Life,
the object of consciousnesss desire, has its own Notion, whereby a simple
universality, the genus, sunders itself into multiple independent members, which return to the universal through self-negating acts of procreation (PS, 16971). This negative movement of Life, which preserves its
moments within it, is a universal unity (PS, 172) identical to the Notion by which consciousness becomes self-consciousness. Hegel thereby
concludes that Life, like self-consciousness, relates beyond itself: in this
result, Life points to something other than itself, viz. to consciousness,
for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus (PS, 172).15 The req-
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uisite higher form of desire can now be established. Self-consciousness

initially desires to destroy an independent object to establish its own selfcertainty (PS, 174); but as it requires the objects independence to desire to supersede it, this negation is self-defeating. Something other than
self-consciousness itself must be the essence and aim of its desire, and
the objects necessary independence indicates that self-consciousness
can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation
within itself; and it must carry out this negation of itself in itself, for it is
in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is (PS, 175). The
object must therefore be present as absolute negation, which gives it
the universal independent nature of the genus as such, or the genus
as self-consciousness, all of which entails that self-consciousness achieves its
satisfaction only in another self-consciousness (PS, 175). The form of this
satisfaction, of course, is recognition.
Now Hegel does not simply introduce the phenomenologists external perspective to advance this dialectic; the phenomenologist must stand
in a very specific location. Hegel concludes that A self-consciousness
exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for
only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit
for it. . . . With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit (PS,
177). But this reference to Spirit is, in fact, a reference to the end point
of the entire Phenomenology, whose goal is Absolute Knowing, or Spirit
that knows itself as Spirit (PS, 808). The perspective from which the
objects self-relating negativity appears is thus that of the phenomenologist who stands at the end of history, at the point at which this absolute
knowing is purportedly achieved. Only at this final stage is my recognition of the others self-consciousness, and thus also my own, certain;
all previous stages contain internal contradictions that block reciprocal
acknowledgment. Moreover, the desire Hegel inserts into the dialectic
here is not simply the individuals desire for recognitionthe desire to
be valued by another articulated so famously by Kojve16but is rather
the desire for the Notion of Spirit to be actualized, for the Identity of
identity and difference to be achieved at the level of concrete collective
self-consciousness.
The beginning of the historical dialectic thus depends on whether
this perspective can be granted. Clearly it can only if history has in fact
reached its end, or it would be a purely speculative assertion. If history has
already worked itself out as Hegel proposes, the nondialectical prologue
to his historical account would not be mortgaged against anything uncertain. The dialectical progression of the text would then be merely formal,
since the claim it redeemed would be as uncontroversial as stating that
when an acorn is planted it grows into an oak tree, a declaration whose
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certainty is guaranteed by our having already seen that acorns become

oaks. At this point the disconnect Hyppolite identifies between Spirits
historical development and its return to the Absolute reacts back upon
the Absolutes first appearance. Put colloquially, Hegels cheat essentially
involves looking for the answer at the back of the book, much like a high
school math student who takes the answer from the textbooks appendix
and writes a proof that will reach that same answer. If the proof, when
properly constructed, actually leads to this answer, then alls well that
ends well. However, if it ends up somewhere else, or if it cannot progress
to an end at all, it follows that either the proof has been done incorrectly
(the students error) or the answer in the appendix is wrong (the textbook authors error). In Hegels case, everything hinges on the historical
dialectic leading to the end he invoked to derive self-consciousnesss
truth in the desire for recognition. The failure to reach this end invites
reconsideration of everything that was borrowed from itthe nature
of desire, its relation to self-consciousness, and the possibility of mutual
recognition. But it also invites reappraisal of the prior steps that moved
from the empirical reality of consciousness experiencing the world to the
Notion that joined it to its world. For these steps, culminating with the
concept of force, rested on forms of negation and contradiction that may
have determined a relation between empirical man and the Absolute,
but that in the absence of a worked-out historical dialectic are no more
than a mediation of abstractionsof an abstract Notion, the Identity of
identity and difference, that has yet to be fleshed out in any concrete
sense, and of a subject determined as a conscious being but not a human
being. Absent having really and concretely reached the end of history,
the end upon which every step from the Absolutes first to its second appearance depends, Hegels dialectic is left open to Marxs critique that it
never moves beyond abstractionsspirit being no more concrete than
self-consciousness, which is no more concrete than consciousnessand
instead only passes from one abstraction to another.17 Deleuze reaches a
similar conclusion, although he does not follow Marx in reestablishing
the dialectic on materialist terms. Instead, Deleuze maintains, against
Marx, that the entire logic of dialectical negation must be overturned,
that a new form of difference or relation must be sought.18
A New Theory of Forces

Deleuze reproaches Kant for outlining the conditions only of possible
rather than real experience. Here he follows Bergson in seeing the pos-
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sible as an abstract image of the real, one that reality already resembles
and to which existence is merely added, leaving the conditions of possible experience too loose and general for the reality they are meant to
grasp.19 On the face of it, Hegels dialectic seems to avoid this criticism,
since it is structured as an internal movement that progressively explicates the real in its full complexity. Beginning with the most abstract and
one-sided depiction of reality, the dialectic demonstrates how this thesis
contradicts itself and engenders its opposite; the subsequent synthesis
of these opposites thereby presents a more complex, two-sided image of
the real, so that as the dialectic advances it progressively encompasses the
richness of a concrete Absolute, whereby the rationalthe Notionis
real and the real is rational. The only requirement is to show that contradiction and opposition arise internally, so that the dialectics movement
remains immanent and never refers to a beyond that cannot be synthesized. Indeed, such a beyond is impossible, since anything beyond the
Absolute would have a negative relationship to it and hence would be
subject to mediation.
Nevertheless, Deleuze maintains that this progression fails, because
the real cannot be constructed through a synthesis of abstractions. Dialectics can no more lead to the concrete than if one tried to recompose a
real object by gluing together two-dimensional photographs taken from
all possible angles.20 This critique does not entail a return to a predialectical conception of reality. Instead, for Deleuze, the abstractness of
dialectical negation and sublation points to differences that, exceeding
opposition and contradiction, are excluded from dialectical synthesis.
The inclusion of these fugitive differences within a synthetic structure,
however, precisely because they are incompatible with an Identity of identity and opposition, necessarily breaks with dialectics. A truly concrete
synthesis of differences, Deleuze maintains, must therefore be a synthesis
of disjunction that connects heterogeneities. Dialectics does maintain a
disjunction among differences, but Deleuze holds that in treating differences as opposites, it allows them to communicate only to the degree they
mirror one another, thereby submitting them to the principles of identity.
In contrast, the challenge, Deleuze states, is to make divergence . . . no
longer a principle of exclusion, and disjunction no longer a means of
separation . . . the whole question, and rightly so, is to know under what
conditions the disjunction is a veritable synthesis.21 This requires that
everything happens through the resonance of disparates, point of view
on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiation of difference, and not through the identity of contraries (LS, 175). A disjunctive
synthesis involves a relation to an Other, but one from which no return
to establish an identity-for-itself is possible. Under these conditions, the
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rational and the real remain connected, but in no way resemble each
other.
In general terms, the conception of force Deleuze develops through
Nietzsche shares with Hegels the contention that the thing-in-itself is abstract because any thing in its concreteness refers outside itself, making its
identity as an isolated thing merely a moment in a more comprehensive
synthetic relation. Neither physical atomism nor psychological egoism
can account for the necessary plurality and difference of their objects,
and only become coherent if they are translated into the terminology
of force (NP, 67). At first sight, Deleuzes Nietzschean account of force
appears far too metaphorical and vitalist to have any substantive connection to Hegels. His statements that all force is appropriation, domination, exploitation of a quantity of reality (NP, 3), that a new force
can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the
mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object (NP, 5),
and that a superior force affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference (NP, 9) seem completely removed from the language in the
Phenomenology, or any other properly philosophical treatise. Nevertheless,
despite the apparent philosophical sloppiness in this personification of
forces, Deleuze maintains that it is Hegels language of opposition, contradiction, and negation that lacks the necessary rigor. Forces remain abstract when they are determined simply through reciprocal opposition.
Hegels account remains one-sided and incomplete because his seemingly more analytical and philosophical language removes the forcefulness
that makes forces what they are:
Hegel . . . proposes an abstract movement of concepts instead of a
movement of the Physis and the Psyche. Hegel substitutes the abstract
relation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation
of the singular and the universal in the Idea. He thus remains in the
reflected element of representation, within simple generality. He represents concepts instead of dramatizing Ideas. (DR, 10)
In contrast, Deleuze argues, Nietzsches approach reflects a rigorous

method of dramatisation (NP, 78) that goes beyond abstract representations of force. Terms such as active, reactive, dominating, and
submissive express the nature of force concretely. They denote an
asymmetry and agonism that for Deleuze underpins the sense of things,
concepts, and events, making them obstinately resistant to mediation.
This asymmetry, Deleuze further maintains, is inseparable from
a rethinking of quantity and quality. When quantity is treated as number and linked to counting units, it remains abstract, as there are no
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units-in-themselves. Considered on a more concrete levelthe level at

which there are no unities or things preexisting their relations, but only
incongruent relations of forcequantity cannot be a number but only a
relation: there is no quantity in itself, Deleuze holds, but rather difference in quantity, an internal difference that differs from contradiction
and that specifies the essence of force. Intensive difference being the essence of quantity, there can also be no equalization of quantities except
in abstraction: Difference in quantity is the essence of force and of the
relation of force to force. To dream of two equal forces, even if they are
said to be of opposite senses is a coarse and approximate dream, a statistical dream in which the living is submerged but which chemistry dispels
(NP, 43). Forces are thereby constituted by relations to other forces that
are not simply external, but that nevertheless remain heterogeneous.
Against the dialectical progression of Hegels logic, where quality negates
itself to become quantity and both are synthesized as measure, ensuring that all qualities can be quantified and thereby measured,22 Deleuze
introduces a difference in quantity that, in concrete relations, effects a
disjunctive synthesis.
Intensive quantity, Deleuze maintains, manifests itself in the form
of more or lessit is ordinal rather than cardinal (DR, 23233). In the
realm of force, it is therefore a relation of strength and weakness: in
unequal relations of force, one must dominate over another that submits, but the incongruity of the relation implies that this hierarchy is
never without resistance, so that these forceful relations are relations
of inequality in flux or disequilibrium. Difference in quantity, however,
necessarily engenders quality, which is that aspect of quantity that cannot be equalised, that cannot be equalised out in the difference between
quantities(NP, 4344).23 Corresponding to the quantitative difference
of strength and weakness is thus an irreducible qualitative difference
of active and reactive: dominant forces are active, meaning they command, create, transform, and overcome; dominated forces are reactive,
and work by adaptation, compromise, and considerations of utility (NP,
4044). The active or reactive quality of force thus indicates the tactics
or means by which it exercises its power in relations of continual tension
and transformation (NP, 54). Finally, the configuration of forces manifests a will to power, which, Deleuze maintains, serves as the principle of
the quality of force and the signification of the sense of related forces
(NP, 83; 85). The will to power is what the configuration of active and reactive forces expresses, and this expression is either affirmative or negative, a will to affirm strife or to deny it: What a will wants, depending on
its quality, is to affirm its difference or to deny what differs (NP, 78). Affirmative and negative wills to power are closely related but not the same
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as active and reactive forces. Affirmation expresses active forces becoming dominant, while negation expresses forces in their becoming-reactive
(NP, 54) This, of course, distinguishes the wills to power Nietzsche calls
noble and slavish. The former expresses and affirms strife, conflict,
and a will not to secure its identity but to transcend its limits and overcome itself; the latter condemns strife and conflict as evil and affirms its
identity as good through contrast. In this way, Deleuze ties dialectics itself
to a slavish conception of the world: the entire master/slave dialectic,
he states, is the slaves conception, it is the image that the man of ressentiment has of power. . . . Underneath the Hegelian image of the master
we always find the slave (NP, 10). As Nietzsche says of opposing values,
they are merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as
it were.24 In this way, dialectical abstractions are not mere errors: they
express the sense of a limited perspective, and, indeed, are engendered
by this perspective.
Desire, the Other, and the Otherwise-Other

It is thus in accordance with the failure of dialectics to determine fully the
relation between the empirical and the Absolute that Deleuze is justified
in inserting into the empirical, material, and sensible a quantitative difference that replaces negative opposition, a disjunction of heterogeneities that replaces the identity of contradictories, and a will to power that
goes beyond self-relating consciousness. The dialectical sense of identity
and opposition that purports to underpin and relate the empirical, logical, and historical remains one-sided and incomplete, yet, crucially, this
does not make it a mere appearance or subjective error. On the one
hand, Deleuze contends, identity and opposition are real illusions, as
undeniable and objectively true as the fact that, from the perspective
of the earths surface, the sun and the moon appear to be roughly the
same size. On the other hand, their reality is that of surface effects, products of a dynamic of differences that exceeds their terms and operates
within them. Identity, opposition, and difference thereby form a single
assemblage, which Deleuze calls an assemblage of desire. In contrast to
the Hegelian structure of desire that relates self to another through a
demand for recognition, Deleuzian desire is a structure of disjunction,
an agencement of heterogeneous elements that function.25 Like its Hegelian counterpart, it certainly involves a relation to some other, but, more
fundamentally, it involves a relation through an Other that complicates
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the link between a desiring subject and a desired object, including those
objects that are themselves desiring others. Deleuze acknowledges that
through desire self-consciousness and subjectivity are achievedthere is
some truth to the Hegelian thesis about recognitionbut this idea captures only a limited aspect of desires operations, and presents only one
form that Otherness may take. More profoundly, desire also institutes an
overcoming and a deterritorialization of subjectivity and identity, a dissolution of the bond of identity attained through opposition.
Deleuzes analysis of Michel Tourniers Friday, a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, illustrates all of these aspects. In contrast to Daniel
Defoes version, which places Robinson in an original state of isolation
and follows him as he builds a new rigorous orderan exploration already falsified by Robinsons having access to tools of civilization from
the shipwreck and having already repressed his desires so as to be able
to workTournier frames the story in terms of Robinsons dehumanization through a process that does not reproduce the world but rather
deviates from it (LS, 3024). Robinsons island presents a world without
Others, revealing the significance of Others through their absence in
several respects. First, Deleuze maintains, Others ensure that around
each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the organization of a marginal world, a mantle or background, where other objects
and other ideas may come forth in accordance with laws of transition
which regulate the passage from one to another (LS, 305). In this respect, the Other is a virtual excess and a conduit that connects ideas and
objects to one another: the Other assures the margins and transitions
in the world (LS, 305). But the Other also enables the subject to embed
objects and itself in the world: The part of the object that I do not see I
posit as visible to Others, so that when I will have walked around to reach
this hidden part, I will have joined the Others behind the object, and I
will have totalized it in the way that I had already anticipated. As for the
objects behind my back, I sense them coming together and forming a
world, precisely because they are visible to, and are seen by, Others (LS,
305). Finally, the Other relates the subject to its object, as my desire
passes through Others, and through Others it receives an object. I desire
nothing that cannot be seen, thought, or possessed by a possible Other.
That is the basis of my desire. It is always Others who relate my desire
to an object (LS, 306). This relation is one of temporal discontinuity,
as the Other causes my consciousness to tip necessarily into an I was,
into a past which no longer coincides with the object. . . . The mistake of
theories of knowledge is that they postulate the contemporaneity of subject and object, whereas one is constituted only through the annihilation
of the other (LS, 310). In all these ways, the Other exceeds the order of
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representationit is neither subject nor object, even if it may at times

be in one of these categoriesbut is required for this order to function.
While the Other might seem to be another subject whom I perceive as
an object and who, in turn, perceives me as one, this is simply a substantiation of the Other as the structure of the perceptual field as such (LS,
307): It is the structure which conditions the entire field and its functioning,
by rendering possible the constitution and application of the preceding categories (LS, 309). Indeed, this structure-Other allows others to
function as Others, to instantiate an excess that constitutes the order of
representation (LS, 30910).
Without the texture provided by Others, there is only unmediatable
opposition, the brutal opposition of the sun and earth, of an unbearable light and an obscure abyss: the summary law of all or nothing. . . .
Real dualism then appears with the absence of the Other (LS, 306, 309).
Without the temporal discontinuity effected by the Other, consciousness
and its object coincide . . . in an eternal present (LS, 311), and as a
result, the category of the possible has collapsed (LS, 306) because the
structure-Other is the structure of the possible . . . the Other, as structure, is the expression of a possible world (LS, 307, 308). The loss of Others
may seem like the loss of all order, and, indeed, Tourniers Robinson
initially experiences it this way (LS, 311). But the dualism introduced
by the Others absence, Deleuze holds, is actually another order that
splits each earthly thing and introduces its double in a transcendent,
celestial Form: The Other is the grand leveller, and consequently the
de-structuration of the Other is not a disorganization of the world, but an
upright organization as opposed to the recumbent organization; it is the
new uprightness, and the detachment of an image which is vertical at last
and without thickness (LS, 31213). Robinson moves from despair and
neurosis with the loss of a structure-Other to psychosis as he tries to recreate through work the organization that the Other had provided (LS,
31315). Eventually, however, he finds an alternative in something that
is perhaps what Others were hiding from us (LS, 315). For Deleuze,
Robinson discovers a pure surface of disjunction, from which both
brute oppositions and the structure-Other arise (LS, 315). Robinson is
led to it by the intervention of Friday, who alone is able to guide and
complete the metamorphosis that Robinson began and to reveal to him
its sense and its aim (LS, 31516). Crucially, Friday does not function
at all like a rediscovered Other (LS, 316). Nor is he a sexual other, an
object of desire for Robinson (LS, 317). Instead, he indicates another,
supposedly true world, an irreducible double which alone is genuine,
and in this other world, a double of the Other who no longer is and cannot be. Not an Other, but something wholly other (un tout-autre) than the
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Other, not a replica but a Double: one who reveals pure elements and
dissolves objects, bodies, and the earth (LS, 317). Whereas the Other is
a strange detour that brings my desires down to objects, and my love
to worlds (LS, 317), Friday, this otherwise-Other (LS, 319), is able to
separate desire from its object, from its detour through the body, in order
to relate it to a pure cause (LS, 317). This is desires perversionor,
rather, its manifestation as a perverse structure . . . which is opposed to
the structure-Other and takes its place (LS, 319). In being released from
its object, this perversion effects a desubjectivation (LS, 320). This is
the sense of the Robinson fiction (LS, 318).
In declaring that philosophy must be an ontology of sense, Deleuze
places his project and Hegels on the same terrain, and in affirming difference and disjunction against negation and contradiction, he follows
Hegels own refusal to leave thought in the realm of abstractions, divorced from any relation to the concrete and sensible. Deleuze in this
way completes Hegels project even while breaking with dialectics and its
movement to secure the subject. In this way, their common philosophical
direction in no way prevents Hegels and Deleuzes respective philosophies from remaining fundamentally incompatible and irreconcilable.
How, then, should the Deleuze-Hegel relation be understood? I would
suggest that it be seen in terms of disjunction, whereby Hegels and Deleuzes thinking are intimately intertwined but never subject to mediation or resolution, separated even in their proximity to each other by
the deepest of chasms. In Derridean terms, each is the others diffrance,
with any final specification of their relationship being always differed and
deferred. This is certainly reason enough to read and reread both Hegel
and Deleuze, and perhaps also to give Deleuze a certain credit: while he
may seem to establish a crude opposition to Hegel, this opposition is in
fact only a surface effect of the disjunctive relationship his philosophy
has always affirmed.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 6.
2. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 195.
3. G. W. F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
4. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1, 8797.
5. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
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6. Deleuze, Review of Jean Hyppolite, in Hyppolite, Logic and Existence,

trans. Lawlor and Sen, 191.
7. Sense in this context refers not only to physical being (such as the sense
of smell) and meaningfulness (the sense of a word or idea) but also direction
(the sense of history, for example, being the direction it is moving). Hyppolites
main concern is to show that sense cannot be reduced to some human form but
must refer to the expressiveness of Being as such. Deleuze too adopts this position, as evidenced by his readings of Spinoza and others. The issue for Deleuze is
whether this sense is secured through a dialectical notion of synthesis or through
some other form. For elaboration see Nathan Widder, Reflections on Time and Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 3439.
8. Alexandre Kojve, An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H.
Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
9. In the Phenomenology, Hegel does not say man, but self-consciousness.
The modern interpreters who have immediately translated this term by man have
somewhat falsified Hegels thought. Hegel is still too Spinozistic for us to be able
to speak of a pure humanism; a pure humanism culminates only in skeptical irony
and platitude (LE, 20).
10. Martin Heidegger, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and
Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 19.
11. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
chap. 8.
12. The reading pursued here of the pages that constitute chapter 4s introduction, The Truth of Self-Certainty, owes a great deal to a profound essay
by Andrzej Warminski, Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life, Yale French Studies
88 (1995): 11841.
13. As self-consciousness, it is movement; but since what it distinguishes
from itself is only itself as itself, the difference, as an otherness, is immediately superseded for it; the difference is not, and it [self-consciousness] is only the motionless tautology of: I am I; but since for it the difference does not have the
form of being, it is not self-consciousness. Hence otherness is for it in the form
of a being, or as a distinct moment; but there is also for consciousness the unity of
itself with this difference as a second distinct moment. With that first moment, selfconsciousness is in the form of consciousness, and the whole expanse of the sensuous world is preserved for it, but at the same time only as connected with the
second moment, the unity of self-consciousness with itself; and hence the sensuous world is for it an enduring existence which, however, is only appearance, or a
difference which, in itself, is no difference (PS, 167).
14. Self-consciousness thus lacks an other-being that, simply put, is other
enough for it to be able to verify itself (the unity of the I am I) in it, to make itself
true in an essence (an in-itself, a truth) that would have enough being, enough
existence, to verify self-consciousness, that is, an essence whose own being, truth,
in-itself, essence, did not consist in being a disappearing essence (Warminski,
Hegel/Marx: Consciousness, 126).
15. As Warminski argues, this nondialectical act of pointing presupposes
the very conscious subject that the Dialectic of Self-Consciousness is meant to
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ground, and is fatal to Hegels project: what the text does is introduce something of a linguistic moment into the relation of life and consciousness and,
in doing so, threatens to render impossible not only the emergence of selfconsciousness (as self-consciousness) out of life but also the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as such. Lifes pointing introduces this threat because it opens
the possibility of an unmediatable break or gap between life and consciousness:
that is, if the relation between life and consciousness is mediated, not by a
determinate negation but, rather, by an act of pointing that can, perhaps, point
to many living things ( just as it can point to their other, many dead things) but
that, by itself, can never make the other of lifeconsciousness as consciousness,
knowing as knowingappear, then this relation would in fact be a disjunction,
the falling apart of life and consciousness. And when life and consciousness are
un-mediated or de-mediated in this way, then the possibility of spirits appearingthe possibility of a phenomeno-logic of spirits appearing in the phenomena of its own self-negationswould also be very much in question (Warminski,
Hegel/Marx: Consciousness, 13132).
16. Kojve, An Introduction, chaps. 12.
17. Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged objectthe estranged essential reality of manis nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merelyestrangements abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The annulment of the alienation is
therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty annulment of that empty abstractionthe negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity
of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativityan abstraction which is again fixed as such and thought of as an independent activityas sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but
the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be
merely a formal content begotten by abstraction from all content. As a result there
are general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that
account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all contentthe thoughtforms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature (Karl Marx,
The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: W. W.Norton, 1978], 122).
18. Nietzsches relation to Kant is like Marxs to Hegel: Nietzsche stands
critique on its feet, just as Marx does with the dialectic. But this analogy, far from
reconciling Marx and Nietzsche, separates them still further. For the dialectic
comes from the original Kantian form of critique. There would have been no
need to put the dialectic back on its feet, nor to do any form of dialectics if critique itself had not been standing on its head from the start (NP, 89).
19. The elementary concepts of representation are the categories defined
as the conditions of possible experience. These, however, are too general or too
large for the real. The net is so loose that the largest fish pass through. . . . Everything changes once we determine the conditions of real experience, which are
not larger than the conditioned and which differ in kind from the categories
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 68). See also Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
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Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 23; and Henri Bergson, An
Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), chap. 3.
20. We are told that the Self is one (thesis) and it is multiple (antithesis),
then it is the unity of the multiple (synthesis). Or else we are told that the One is
already multiple, that Being passes into nonbeing and produces becoming. . . .
To Bergson, it seems that in this type of dialectical method, one begins with concepts that, like baggy clothes, are much too big. The One in general, the multiple
in general, nonbeing in general. . . . In such cases the real is recomposed with
abstracts; but of what use is a dialectic that believes itself to be reunited with the
real when it compensates for the inadequacy of a concept that is too broad or too
general by invoking the opposite concept, which is no less broad and general?
The concrete will never be attained by combining the inadequacy of one concept
with the inadequacy of its opposite (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 44).
21. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 174.
22. Hegel, Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, trans. William Wallace with foreword by J. N.Findlay (Oxford: Oxford
23. Also, difference in quantity . . . is . . . the quality which belongs to quantity (DR, 232). Nietzsche himself proclaims: Our knowing limits itself to establishing quantities; but we cannot help feeling these differences in quantity as
qualities . . . we sense bigness and smallness in relation to the conditions of our
existence . . . with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations
between magnitudes as qualities (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale [New York: Vintage Books, 1968], 563).
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 2.
25. Deleuze, Desire and Pleasure, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. A. I.
Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 189.
Hegel and Deleuze: Difference

or Contradiction?
Anne Sauvagnargues
In the foreword to Difference and Repetition,1 Deleuze locates his philosophical program in what he thinks is a broad current of anti-Hegelianism,
and indicates that difference and repetition must take the place of identity, negativity, and contradiction. This programmatic statement deliberately foregrounds his theoretical quarrel with Hegelian-type dialectics,
where difference is glossed in a negative manner as a point of contradiction in so far as it is made subordinate to that which is identical. Thus
interpreted, the Deleuzian critique of Hegel can be viewed as unfolding in three steps. First, there is the 1962 chapter criticizingwith the
help of Nietzschethe notion of negativity. Second, the critique of
Hegel manifests itself with the introduction of Gilbert Simondon in Difference and Repetition, who is important for establishing Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, and whose influence should not be underestimated. Finally, thanks to Foucault and Guattari and the new theory of
history that Deleuze sets up after 1968, the debate over Hegel stabilizes
itself around the question of history, henceforth construed as the empirical and political domain of complex modes of subjectivation; a heterogeneous necessity comprised of an admixture of fortuitousness and
continuity.
The intellectual milieu from which Deleuze emerged made staking out a position with regards to Hegel a veritable rite of passage. With
respect to Sartre, Deleuze claimed, he was my teacher, noting the
widespread influence of Sartre-inspired phenomenology in the postwar
period. Still, for Deleuze, philosophy begins by challenging phenomenology in the broadest sense, including philosophies of consciousness,
in a lineage that combines the Kantian transcendental subject and Husserlian phenomenology (via the efforts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and
other phenomenological accounts of mind) in a trajectory that meets up
with Hegel, historical dialectics, and the historicism of some of Marxs
successors.
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Deleuzes objections both to the subject and to teleological history

manifest a keen awareness of the German idealist tradition, and help explain not only his interest in empiricism but also his recourse to Marx
a characteristic feature which will be accentuated still further over the
course of his collaborative work with Guattari. Such a background permits a comparison of his intellectual development with that of Foucault.
Following Jean Wahl, Deleuze uses Anglo-American empiricism from
Hume to Whitehead to distance himself from the idea of a historical
realization while Foucault turns to an empirical study of historical documents. Deleuze proposes a sustained but heterodox reading of Marx
which adds to the aforementioned empiricism an attentive concern for
the socius and the humanities while Foucault moves away from politics
and the Marxist circles of the 1970s toward a study of modes of governance and subjectivation. A critical reading of Kant, the disavowal of
Hegel, the battle against teleological conceptions of history and philosophies of the subject were all crucial issues for French philosophy from
the 1960s forward. When we consider that Deleuze and Foucault were
eminent figureheads in these debates, we are better equipped to understand their difficulties with Hegels theses.
Disparation and the Dialectic

Deleuze turns to Nietzsche and the theory of individuation of Gilbert
Simondon to criticize the Hegelian dialectic. In their hands, ontology
is no longer a matter of the identity of identity and difference, but of a
constructive disparity that stems from a difference that is not reducible
to identity: what essentially defines a metastable system is the existence
of a disparation, the existence of at least two different dimensions, two
disparate levels of reality, between which there is not yet any interactive
communication.2 Deleuze is interested in this tenet because it lends support to his contention that any individuation requires fundamental difference as a condition. He calls this fundamental difference transcendental differencean expression frequently capitalized in Difference and
Repetition to signal its status as a constitutive, that is, as a condition of the
new and not a mere comparative difference between two already-existing
distinct states.
The term disparation (or disparateness, DR, 51), which Simondon borrows from the psycho-physiology of perception, refers to the
production of depth-perception in binocular vision, and to the incompatibility of retinal images, the irreducible disparity of which produces
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three-dimensional vision as its creative resolution. Each retina is covered

by a two-dimensional image, but the two images do not coincide due to
differences in parallax, which one can readily observe by closing one
eye at a time.3 Hence, no two-dimensional image is available to solve
what Simondon calls the axiomatic of two-dimensionality, that is, the
mutual incompatibility of the images. Such an axiomatic, in Simondons
terminology, means the objective structuring of a problematic field (in
this case vision), the presentation of a problematic or objectively metastable situation requiring a solution. Such a problematic incompatibility
is what Simondon intends to capture by his notion of disparation.
To attempt to resolve this objective metastability between the two
retinas, the human brain integrates it as a condition for the coherence
of a new axiomatic, namely three-dimensionality. Vision of volume and
the perception of depth thus emerge as the resolution of a problem by
creating a newand unpredictablethird dimension, which the two
retinal images did not previously contain. This, in essence, is the process
of disparation, which Simondon extends from the realm of perception
to a general logic of becoming. Disparation, allowing us to grasp the assemblage of a perceptual operation, serves as the model for all individuation, and supplies an account of the emergence of novelty. It is from
this broader perspective that Deleuze will take up the notion of difference. Disparation offers an account that allows one to escape not only
the Hegelian concept of synthesis but also the dialectic of contradiction.
Disparation generates a new, third dimension to resolve the disparity of retinal images, but importantly, this new dimension does not make
the fundamental conflict between the two retinas disappear. Rather, it
incorporates that conflict in a new system: depth. Sustaining the retinal
disparity prompts this jump to a new dimension, which neither brings
about a synthesis nor resolves a contradiction, but rather produces an
integration that carries the problem to an altogether new level where the
disparity between the two retinas takes on a new meaning. Perceptions
discovery is not a reductive abstraction but an integration, an amplifying operation, avers Simondon (IGP, 206).4 On this view, depth perception neither reduces the contradiction nor eliminates the parallax which
nourishes it. There is no dialectic synthesis of opposites that absorbs disparity in some higher unity. What is at stake is an entirely different operation, an inventive construction that adds a new dimension to isolated retinal images. This solution does not come from a resolution of the initial
contradiction, but from the generation of a dimension that is genuinely
novel, depth having in no way been contained in the presenting problem. Disparation thus becomes the defining category of individuation. It
captures the process at work in any true genesis, and answers the linger-
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ing problem of the actualization of virtuality by providing an account of

what Simondon calls the metastable character of being.
Simondon presents his doctrine as a postulate of ontological nature
which rests on a new method and a new idea: being is act, not one.
Thus relation, as the modality of being and becoming, takes the place of
substance which is henceforth relegated to the model of a being which
has become. Simondon labels this new methodology and notional apparatus transduction to stress that the structuring operation of differentiation takes place at all planes of reality, be they physical, biological,
mental, or social. Simondon intends this transduction to encompass
the de-phasing or structuring differentiation through which an individuation carries itself out, such that each structured region serves as a principle for the constitution of the next. Simondon expresses the end-result
in a statement which is wholly Deleuzian: The extremes reached by virtue of the transductive operation did not preexist this operation. A dynamism arises from the primordial tension in the heterogeneous system
of being which falls out of phase and produces dimensions by which it
structures itself. It does not come from a tension between the terms attained through this operation5 (IGP, 31). In other words, the (individuated) terms to which the constituting relation gives rise do not preexist
the disparation, and, once created, reinvigorate the system as a whole:
the retriggering of transductive individuation.
Transduction is thus prior for Simondon, and must be understood
as a manner of being, not as a relation between two terms. In so far as
substance loses its status as the exemplary model of being, it henceforth
becomes possible to conceive relation as the non-identify of Being to
itself6 (IGP, 3031). Moreover, this allows one to construe relation as
external and anterior to its relatathe very result Deleuze arrived at
through his own empiricist investigations.
The Problematic and the Problem-Idea

Disparations model of the problematic offers a promising way to escape
the elements Deleuze deems unacceptable in the Hegelian dialectic,
namely the sustaining role of the negative, the primacy of contradiction,
and the resolution of difference by a dialectic which neutralizes it by
assimilating it to the identity of the concept. Deleuze thus calls on the
resources afforded by Simondons work to counter Hegel, much in the
same way that he had earlier enlisted the help of Nietzsche. The idea
of disparation is more profound than the idea of opposition, declares
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Deleuze. He notes that, in Simondon, the problematic replaces the

negative.7
Disparation thus betokens a new physical and physiological model
that supplants the strictly logical model of conceptual opposition, while
the problematic in re replaces the negative. Simondon himself took care
to distinguish disparation from a dialectic process. As he repeatedly insisted, it cannot be assimilated to a relation of contradiction, and cannot
give rise to a ternary resolution: identity, difference, identity of difference,
and identity. Or: affirmation, negation, Aufhebung. This for at least two
reasons.
First, no synthesis can get rid of a contradiction by overcoming it.
The dialectical movement, which purports to overcome contradiction,
does not overcome it. It logically envelops the preceding terms by containing them both hierarchically and ontologically. As the product of
a resolved contradiction, synthesis is necessarily homogeneous with its
very terms and superior to them. This is the dynamic of the Aufhebung: it
maintains while overcoming, such that it produces the identity of identity
and difference. None of this is applicable to disparation, which maintains
a strict equivalence between resolution and conflict, andcrucially
never overcomes the conflict that obtains between the terms provisionally brought into relation. Strictly speaking, then, in a rigorous transduction there is no synthesis: synthesis does not occur. It is never finished
[la synthse ne seffectue pas; elle nest jamais acheve] because the relation
to the contrary, maintains the asymmetrical character of terms [maintient
au contraire lasymtrie caractristique des termes] (IGP, 109). No higher synthesis is produced because, unlike the dialectic, the starting asymmetry
is never absorbed. The initial difference does not reduce itself into any
kind of superior identity. The presenting incompatibility between the
two retinas therefore cannot even be characterized as a contradiction,
since it subsists and is even required to continue to produce the ensuing
solution. Disparation at all times maintains the difference. There is never
a question of resolving it. Hence, where Hegel countenanced an internal
contradiction and a difference in the concept, Simondon proposes a real
disparity. This is a heterogeneity between terms which the problematic
alone brings into tensionand can do so only by maintaining that very
heterogeneity.
The second reason why disparation cannot be assimilated to a relation of contradiction is that whereas Hegel posits an identity, Simondon
insists on the play of a difference. While the dialectic generates an identity of contraries by means of a unifying synthesis, transductive disparation makes heterogeneity the ongoing constitutive condition for the
invention of a truly novel solution. Disparation is made possible by a dif-
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ference that is never liable to be withdrawn. The asymmetrythe problematic differenceproduces the individuation, not as a synthesis, but
rather as a response to a metastable situation. The synthesis is not implemented by reducing the contradiction; on the contrary, it is precisely because the asymmetry is maintained that it provokes, as a creative solution,
the invention of a dimension which does not absorb that asymmetry but
gives it a renewed expression.
The Hegelian construal of contradiction remains internal to the
terms which it encompasses in the dialectical relation, while in Simondonian disparation the heterogeneity stays external to the terms which
it brings into relation. Simondon must therefore be understood, along
with Nietzsche, as one of the key thinkers whom Deleuze strategically calls
upon in his bid to distinguish himself from Hegel. In the brief preface
that opens Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explicitly locates his project
in a climate of general anti-Hegelianism, and stresses the central place
of Simondon alongside Nietzsche: the problematic [Simondon] and the
differential [Nietzsche] determine struggles or destructions in relation
to which those of the negative are only appearances (DR, xx). In those
passages of Difference and Repetition devoted to Simondon, Deleuze always
insists on the fact that the status of difference depends on the principium
individuationis. With contradiction, difference is brought to a level of
existence that is purely logical. To that extent, Hegel pursues a philosophy of representation despite his claim to be breaking from it. Indeed,
he subordinates difference to a process of unitary differentiation of the
Absolute such that the contradiction which underwrites the negative role
of difference is arguably nothing but the discovery of the Self by the
mind in a phenomenology of the identical.
The Hegelian dialectic, in spite of being framed by its founder as a
struggle against the traditional idea of representation, thus becomes the
foil of choice for Deleuze. According to Deleuze, transductive disparation and the eternal recurrence of difference combine to effectively overturn the dominance of negativity and representation, which until then
reigned supreme as a misguided construal of difference subordinated
to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude and
analogy (DR, 50).
Difference is subordinated to identity whenever it fails to sustain
the heterogeneity of the terms which it relates. As Deleuze argues in his
1962 book on Nietzsche, the contact of one force with another never
implies a negative element of essence, and so the anti-Hegelianism (an
expression of Difference and Repetition already present in that earlier work)
which permeates Nietzsches oeuvre is manifest in his theory of forces.
The negative is shown under closer scrutiny to be a false concept: For
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the speculative element of negation, opposition or contradiction Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of affirmation and enjoyment.8 Although the pluralism at work can appear akin to
the dialectic inasmuch as a force is always thought in its essential relation
with another force, it nevertheless remains the only profound enemy
of the Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, the pluralism of forces never wholly
succumbs to the dialectics appeal to contradiction, but rather affirms it
directly and unilaterally as a plural singularity that is both positive and
conflictual. Force is always given in the plural, as a complex network.
In sum, Deleuze subjects Hegelian difference and negativity to an argument which echoes the concept of multiplicity that is so important to
his oeuvre. With the help of Bergson and Riemann, Deleuze shows how
we must go from a multiplicity composed of parts, still held captive by a
schema of difference between the one and the many and a conception
of the multiple as a body of amorphously plural and discontinuous unitiestoward a truly substantive multiplicity.
The Hegelian notion of difference, which is abstract and merely
nominal, conserves the unity and homogeneity of its terms, and maintains the difference in the order of the identical without ever managing
to produce a difference that is truly substantive, precisely in the manner that an abstract multiplicity adds stable unities. Instead of the internal difference of the concept where the movement stays dialectical and
homogeneous, Deleuze proposes a difference that is plural and irreduciblea veritable asymmetry of the different. For difference implies the
negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent
that its subordination to the identical is maintained, says Deleuze at
the opening of Difference and Repetition (DR, xix). Hegelian logic thus remains a false movement, from the mediation posed as a movement of
the concept, to the contradiction imitating difference in the progression
toward the Minds self-apprehension, to the similarity of the contradictory terms which the synthesis yields by giving birth to the identical. Deleuze will never cease fighting this mediation of the concept as the movement of speculative thought, which he supplants with the Leibnizian
idea of vice-diction, inserting small differences tongue-in-cheek where
the grand Hegelian contra-diction countenanced a unitary difference
in the concepts. Resolutely turning his back on these ways of approaching the issue, Deleuze thus proposes a new picture of difference. Arising
from the general failure of representation, his proposal sees the modern
world as a world of simulacra in the sense of going beyond the old, tired
differences that could do little else but pit essence against existence,
model against copy.
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Simondons Dialectic
By all accounts, Simondonian disparation is a powerful ally in the polemic against a Hegelian conception of dialectics, where negation leads
to Aufhebung. Why then does Deleuze feel the need to apply the term
dialectic to Simondon himself? Because, says Deleuze, in Simondons
dialectic, the problematic replaces the negative (DI, 88). This caveat
not only helps pinpoint a divergence between the two thinkers, it also
demonstrates the massive influence of the Hegelian setup, an influence
Deleuze acknowledges perpetually as the most formidable theoretical
adversary of a philosophy of difference.
Simondon construes disparation as holding between two preexisting dimensions of individuation: a field of pre-individual singularitieswhich Deleuze pays homage to as a new definition of the transcendental fieldto which is annexed a field of trans-individual individuation
that basically encompasses the process of individuation in a domineering
dimension. In this way, individuation does not escape an undifferentiated virtual canvas but rather modulates between the two successive dimensions of the pre-individual and the trans-individual. Simondon treats
these twin dimensions as the boundaries of the de-phasing operative
in the process of individuation, such that it is sandwiched, so to speak,
between a Large and a Small. All the explicit references to Simondon
made by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition bear on this point, since it is
the issue where the two thinkers differ most markedly.
For Deleuze, construing difference as a disparation between a preindividual dimension and a trans-individual dimension is meaningful
only to the extent that it reestablishes an analogical resemblance between
those very dimensions which the theory of disparation as a whole sought
to avoid. The moment difference is taken to come first, any reification
of differences as steps in the ladder of being is barred, and if Simondon
continues to appeal to this, Deleuze believes it is because it safeguards a
dimension of unity understood as the most and leastthe very site where
Deleuze will locate the multiplicity of becoming. Deleuzes entire philosophical effort consists in trying to turn these modal dimensions into
variations without making any presuppositions as to their size or scale
with respect to some all-encompassing being.
This allows us to better appreciate the rationale that sees Deleuze
distancing himself from Simondon whilst helping himself to ample portions of his insights. The locus of Deleuze and Simondons disagreement
has to do with the regime of multiplicities and the progressive order
of dimensions across which individuation unfolds. By holding fast to a
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sort of successive movement going from the pre-individual to the transindividual, Deleuze thinks Simondon tacitly conserves a form of dialectical progress which incorporates the various differences in an unbroken
development. In ordering the pre-individual, the individual, and the
trans-individual along a curve that ostensibly manifests a logical and
temporal evolution, Simondon unwittingly reinstates a sort of graduated
scale of being. His superb analysis of individuation can nevertheless thus
be said to founder into conservatism. The reproach is particularly salient
in a political key, especially when we consider the sociological analyses
that Simondons thesis generates; but the criticism applies across the
board. By maintaining a psychic individuation between the dimensions
of the organically pre-individual and the trans-individual, Simondon harbors a unifying teleology and reintroduce[s] the form of the Self which
he had averted in his theory of disparity, that is, his theory of the individual conceived as dephased and multiphased being (DI, 89).
To avoid this Simondonian precept of an already-established scale
of sizes, Deleuze insists on difference as difference in itself. In the first
footnote devoted to a critical treatment of the Large and the Small, he
opts to refer back to Simondon: On the importance of disparate series
and their internal resonance in the constitution of systems, see Gilbert
Simondon (DR, 318, n. 25). But, he quickly adds: However, Simondon maintains as a condition the requirement of resemblance between
series (DR, 318, n. 25). Deleuze stresses the place of virtuality in the actual, and refuses to situate it between the preexisting poles of the Large
and Small, thereby giving difference the potential to explain the emergence of individuation. Instead of a dyad of Large and Small resulting in
a phased individuation, Deleuze posits a vibration of the virtual and the
actual. This stakes out the key theoretical divergence that separates Deleuze and Simondonalthough, as we have striven to underscore, there
are many powerful areas of agreement between the two.
Simondons influence on Deleuze is thus much more subtle and
convoluted than what can be gleaned from the comments made in Difference and Repetition. The Hegelian dialectic, defined as a contradiction
which is resolved thanks to the contribution of negativity, is Deleuzes
chief adversary, and by making disparation the prime theoretical alternative to opposition, he confirms the centrality of Simondons ideas.
Care must be taken to not let the point of disagreement between the
two thinkers described above downplay the pivotal importance Simondon had on the development of Deleuzes account of differentiation, an influence one can see clearly in case studies of individuation
Deleuze explores like the physicochemical crystal and the biological
membrane.
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Intensive Quality and the Limit and Illusion

of the Negative
In clarifying his own conception of intensive quality, Deleuze betrays how
close-knit his thought is with Hegels. Intensity presents itself paradoxically as a limit which accounts not only for creation in thought but also
for the illusion of objectivity which covers it up. This is why intensity is
apprehended only as a form of representation by philosophy. It is this
ground that allowed Hegel to distinguish the speculative tenor of philosophies of representation. Intensity produces thought under the influence of the sign, but in thinking it is grasped as individuated, which is
why philosophy could do no better than approach it from a speculative
angle, and could never reach it without the experience of art. This is not
because art is somehow more adept than philosophy in this regard, nor
is it because difference is somehow ineffable by itself. Rather, it is because
intensity depends on a certain type of experience which art gives to philosophy. In so doing, art unravels philosophys transcendental illusion,
that unavoidable mirage that stems from the movement that actualizes
intensity, nullifying it just as it seeks to develop it.
Illusion thus arises from intensive quantities. In Difference and Repetition these are taken to possess three characteristics. Intensity occurs
first and foremost as a quantity that comprises inequality itself, even if
that quantity is resolved as a quality (since the unequal, as a quantity that
cannot be equaled, appears as the quality of quantity). Secondly, quality is an affirmation and not a contradiction. Thirdly, this affirmation is
a differentiation, that is, an individuation or virtual multiplicity that is
actualizing itself.
The objective illusion pertains to the very movement of actualization, which nullifies the difference in intensity. Deleuze must therefore
both signal his departure from the construal of difference espoused
by Hegeland at the same time account for the divergence that exists
between his affirmative difference and the standard notion of contradiction. The objective illusion of intensity fulfills this purpose. It does
so by pitting the Kantian dialectic of the illusion of thought against the
Hegelian dialectic of contradiction. Intensity is thus first and foremost
a difference in degree, which is to say a quantity. But this quantity, in so
far as it is irreducible to the identity of the same, is incapable of being
equaled. In itself, it therefore morphs into a quality. As such, the notion
of number, which is always ordinal before being cardinal, is originally
intensive: quantity therefore presupposes a prior difference.
For Deleuze, there are two sides of the Difference: differenciation
with a c, meaning the actualization, the individuationan actualized
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form, annulling the virtual difference; and differentiation with a t,

meaning the virtual pattern of intensity, the pure forces of difference implied in each individuation. Therefore, any individuation always means
an actualization, annulling the virtual intensity in having realized a concrete form. But virtual differentiation and actual individualization (differenciation) shouldnt be taken as two separate ontological levels, as if
the virtual differentiation could be the cause, or the principle of the actual differenciation: every form (every actual differenciation) is about to
become, and so to become re-differentiated. Even this re-differentiation
means the transformation of this actual individual into a new form, a new
individuation, leading to a new individual as a result.
This whole analysis of intensity as sheer difference, which remains
inexplicable without being reduced because it tends to nullify itself in the
very system that explains it, has undeniable Hegelian overtones. Quality, for Hegel, is a product of difference, and is negated in quantitative
indifference so that being may determine itself as difference. Becoming
implies the disappearance of being in nothingness and the disappearance of nothingness in being, after which being and nothingness themselves jointly disappear to give way to a veritable determination of being
as becoming. The opposing terms of being and nothingness, quality and
quantity, and so onwhich articulate the Logicare not so much identities as they are positions of their own difference, provisional moments
that are nullified in the movement of their becoming-other. Deleuze thus
rejects the status of contradiction and the negative that are central to the
Hegelian movementbut not the aim of establishing a Logic of Being as
becoming. As such, he retains the ambitious affirmation of a speculative
thought which escapes representation and those limits set by the Kantian
system. The project for a philosophy of difference encompasses both
of these aspects. As Juliette Simont has pointed out,9 this unexpected
alliance between Hegel and Deleuze turns on the reading of Hegel proposed by Jean Hyppolite. According to Hyppolite, the key point of Hegelianism consists in twisting thought to think the unthinkable: the Logos
is that which thinks the nonthought.10 Deleuze is not far removed from
this idea. In fact, difference as something absolutely different presents
itself as the highest thought, but we cannot think it (DI, 159).
Deleuze reviewed the work of Hyppolite in 1954,11 and underscored
the point of bifurcationmaximal coincidence and divergencethat
exists between a logic of meaning and a logic of contradiction. For
Hegel, the difference, which is wholly external to reflection and Being,
is in another respect the internal difference of Being with itself. As Deleuze notes, this means Being is identical to difference. Hence, the
major proposition of Hegels Logic, underscores Deleuze, consists in
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transforming metaphysics into logic, and for the transformation of logic

into the logic of sense (RLE, 193). From this point onward, then, Deleuze has at his disposal a crucial piece of his own system: philosophy,
as metaphysics, cannot be otherwise than a logic of sense. The key challenge resides in construct[ing] an ontology of difference which would
not have to go up to contradiction, because contradiction would be less
than difference and not more (RLE, 195). This is the very argument
we find in Difference and Repetition. Does not Hyppolite ground a theory
of expression where difference is expression itself, and contradiction its
merely phenomenal aspect? Deleuze queried at the close of his review
(RLE, 195).
The contradiction stays phenomenal, which is to say doxastic and
subject to common sense, because it places the burden of expressing
difference on the identity of contradiction. This is the logical status of
contradiction, and marks the dialectical opposition which Deleuze rejects. Difference goes as far as contradiction only when it is taken to the
limit under the determination of identity (DR, 49). That is how Deleuze
paints Hegels innovation [as] the final and most powerful homage rendered to the old principle of identity (DR, 50).
All while maintaining this proximity of thought with the unthinkable that determines it, Deleuze must now explain what sets the thought
of Difference apart from the Hegelian framework he has set up as his foil.
The second feature of intensity is called in to accomplish this work. It is
meant to account for how difference, affirmative in itself, is nevertheless
susceptible to falling under the (Hegelian) representation of the negative and contradiction.
Difference is affirmative, but by individuating itself and discharging its constitutive difference, it appears before thought under the illusory form of a contradiction. The objective illusion that prevents thought
from grasping the difference as an affirmation can now be explained: it
stems from the process of the individuation of intensity, which actualizes
difference and thus deletes it. The idea of the negative, regarded by Deleuze as the greatest danger that lurks for a philosophy of difference, is
thus seen as belonging to the transcendental illusion. Accordingly, it is
underneath quality and within extensivity that Intensity appears upside down
under the negative, under limitation, and opposition (DR, 235). Negation, in sum, is produced by an objective illusion that covers up intensity
for the sake of thought.
In a typical move, Deleuze submits Hegel to an argument that is still
more Hegelian in nature: Hegel did not succeed in grasping the logic
of difference, Deleuze argues, nor did he successfully fulfill his desire to
escape the clutches of representation, because he tried to explain differ-
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ence by subjecting it to the representational logic of identity. The speculative Hegelian tenets are thus not speculative enough, and his ontology
is held captive by the subjective structure of representation. It attains
difference only underneath quality, within extensivity, and retains only
a qualified opposition, not the true movement of difference.
Hegelianism approaches difference only in its actualized mode, and
thus misses its becoming, which for Deleuze means the tension that determines the passage from virtuality to actualization. Again, this argument is distinctly Hegelian: thought does not rise above the speculative
proposition but rather stays trapped in the antinomies of representation. Deleuze here defines the negative as a difference inverted, seen
from below (DR, 235), walking on its head, to echo Marx. However, the
Marxian argument is used by Deleuze in a vitalist, not political sense, one
which moreover is not even explicitly materialist: it isnt that thought
fails to understand the sociopolitical conditions that subtend it or the
very material conditions of its existence, but rather that it approaches
the thrust for actualization the other way round. Instead of considering
thought as it springs forth toward that which is higher (a rise in altitude
that marks an elevation of potential), it instead looks at it from below,
where all that potential collapses back.
Finally, there is a third feature: intensity is an implied quantity that
is wrapped up and embryonic. The appeal to Hegelian risk is effected
in a threefold manner: by means of the theory of enveloped expressions which the Renaissance inherited from Neoplatonism, by means of
the embryonic quantities of Leibnizs differential infinitesimals, and by
means of the theory of intensive variation developed by Geoffroy SaintHilaire. All three theoretical sources allow for a more focused insistence
on the problem of the virtual under actualization. They let Deleuze define the impenetrability of meaning, the ideational portion of the event,
and the construal of Difference as Idea. Only the joint collaboration of
these three features, Deleuze argues, allows us to escape the Hegelian
contradiction. To the extent that difference is affirmative, it is because
it is disparative. Difference is therefore not an opposition which, by negating its asymmetry, produces a synthesis which nullifies it because its
real movement is that of a productive differenciation (actualization). It
isnt surprising that the example Deleuze systematically chooses to buttress this point is that of disparation in the typical sense used in stereoscopy, to which Deleuze applies the Simondonian extension. Oppositions are always flat: they lack the stereoscopic depth of reality. Instead
of the superficial synthesis of differences according to their opposition
and merely mental reconciliation, Deleuze prefers a real and intensive
affirmation of the difference, bereft of any reconciliation. We have seen
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how this movement in Simondons work allowed Deleuze to counter a

merely ideational negation: every opposition refers to a deeper disparateness, and oppositions are resolved in time and extensity only to the
extent that the disparates have first invented their order of communication in depth, writes Deleuze, reprising the analysis put forth by Simondon (DR, 236).
Simondonian disparation ensures that Deleuzian logic is impervious to the logic of the concept at the very point where those views are most
alike. Disparation can do this because it curbs the entropic energy-loss
movement of the negative as opposition by means of a vital negentropy,
a growth of complexity and the production of the novel. By this term
vitalism, we mean that Deleuze is both close to and yet distinct from
Bergson. While it is true for Deleuze that every individuation takes the
path of living (nonorganic) complexity, unlike Bergson, life is not the
ultimate stage of the operation of difference. Living forms are no better
or more ultimate than material forms. Deleuze never forgets the virtual
differentiation of any actualization: his is a vitalism of Difference.
If the negative can be taken as difference seen from below, it is because it theorizes difference as a developed difference, explained at length
and subordinated to an identity which comes from an equalization of
differences in individuationwhich is to say subordinated to the status
of actuality. Deleuze makes it clear that negation is difference seen from
below, and that it becomes affirmation the moment it rises up (DR, 5455).
Affirmation (the second feature of intensity) is by itself a differentiation (the third feature) which makes the first feature relative. The intensive quantity is not divisible by quantity, nor is it indivisible by quality,
but does not divide itself without changing its nature. Here Deleuze is
borrowing from the Bergsonian idea of duration that had earlier helped
him define substantive multiplicity. Anachronistically perhaps, we might
say that it is dividual, with reference to the expression proposed by Deleuze in Cinema 1 to characterize multiplicities that are neither indivisible
nor divisible into their constituent parts, and which are also divided only
by changing their nature.12
Here we go from electromagnetic intensity to biological differenciation, from the virtual as the actualization of an intensity, to differenciation as individuation: a vital arrow. Implicitly, all that was understood as a
degradation of potential in the previous analysesloss of charge as difference, for instancenow reveals itself as a difference, a climb toward
complexity, so that every differenciation (empirical individualization) implies a transcendental differentiation, a new set of virtual differences.13
The electromagnetic model thus gives way to the biological model, and
material intensity assumes the role of a vital differentiation.
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Deleuze is quite close to Bergson. The lan vital puts paid to Hegelian negation: negation stays entropic and secondary because it travels
the layered slope of the concept instead of the differentiating lines of
becoming. Intensity is thereby very much given in things. It is a transcendental principle which hugs the vital movement of thought itself and is
totally distinct from the quantities which science manipulates and conceptualizeseven if the transcendental logic of difference requires the
substitution of a physics of individuation, of an energetics of difference
of potential, of a mechanics of fluids, and of a biology of individuation
which replaces the old mechanics of solids of classical physics and the
biology of genera and species. Hence the aesthetic of difference implies
an altogether new logic, not to mention its own dialectic. Transcendental yet empirical, it rejects the Kantian dichotomy between the empirical
and the a priori. Still, it remains transcendental since it retains intensity
as the insensible limit of difference itself. That is what Deleuze, following
the Bergsonian expression revived by Wahl, calls a superior empiricism,
whose object is precisely this intense world of differences, where qualities
find their rationale and the sensible finds its being (see, e.g., DR, 5657).
This superior empiricism, which is transcendental, construes the
sign as a heterogeneity. The sign is shown to be triply heterogeneous:
with respect to the object it emits, since it emerges as a disparation
between two kinds of scales; with respect to itself, since it refers to the objects which it envelops, and thus incarnates a natural or spiritual power
(an Idea) (DR, 2223); and heterogeneous with respect to the response
it elicits, since it does not resemble it. It is this heterogeneity of the sign
which allows Deleuze to articulate literature and philosophy in their constitutive disparity. It is also what underwrites the label of empiricism for
thought which, as we have just seen, does not back away from pure speculation, and moves, for the time being, in the sole medium of thought.
This conception of heterogeneity, according to Deleuze, allows one not
to surpass but to render powerless the very concept of contradiction.
Translated from the French by Marc Champagne, with Niels Feuerhahn and
Jim Vernon
Notes
Columbia University Press, 1994).
2. Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts: 19531974, ed. David Lapoujade,
trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 87.
3. Compare to Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique:
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Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation (Grenoble, Fr.: Millon, 1995), 203, n. 15. See also DR, 51.
4. Translated from French: La dcouverte perceptive nest pas une abstraction rductrice, mais une intgration, une opration amplifiante.
5. Translated from French: Les termes extrmes atteints par lopration
transductive ne prexistent pas cette opration; son dynamisme provient de la
primitive tension du systme de ltre htrogne qui se dphase et dveloppe
des dimensions selon lesquelles il se structure; il ne vient pas dune tension entre
les termes qui seront atteints et dposs aux extrmes limites de la transduction.
6. Translated from French: non-identit de ltre par rapport lui-mme.
7. Deleuze, Lle dserte et autres textes: Textes et entretiens 19531974, ed. David
Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 122.
8. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 9.
9. Juliette Simont, Essai sur la quantit, la qualit, la relation chez Kant, Hegel,
Deleuze: Les fleurs noires de la logique philosophique (Paris: LHarmattan, 1997), 250.
10. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit
Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 97.
11. Deleuze, Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, in Hyppolite,
Logic and Existence, 19195.
12. Compare Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 14.
13. On the passage from entropic mechanism to negentropic life, see
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998);
Albert Dalcq, Luf et son dynamisme organisateur (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941); and
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La nouvelle alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
The Logic of the Rhizome in the

Work of Hegel and Deleuze
Henry Somers-Hall
The aim of this chapter is to provide an account of Deleuze and Guattaris model of the rhizome, and to look at a possible Hegelian line of
response to it. After outlining why Deleuze and Guattari feel the need to
move away from an arborescent model of thought, such as underlies the
structure of judgment, I look at Hegels description of plant life in the
Philosophy of Nature, and show how this can be related to the dialectic of
the finite and infinite in the Science of Logic. This leads to the question: as
a Hegelian riposte to Deleuze, can we see rhizomatic thought simply as
an example of the spurious infinite at play? I want to conclude by showing that Deleuze and Guattari are well aware of this interpretation, and
show how Deleuzes distinction between the decentered and the polycentered, and his characterization of multiplicity as an alternative to the
many, allow him to avoid these implications. I want to begin by looking
at why Deleuze and Guattari believe we need to move to a new model of
thinking.
Arborescent Thought
In this first section, I want to look at why Deleuze feels that we need
to move away from a classical conception of thinking, typically tied to
the structure of judgment. While Deleuzes critique of judgment occurs
throughout his work, I want to focus here in particular on the arguments offered in his collaboration with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
It is here that Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of rhizomatic
thought as an alternative to what they characterize as the image of the
world, which they call either a tree or root-book. To understand why
Deleuze and Guattari feel the need to introduce the concept of a rhizome, we first need to understand the limitations of the classical model
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of thought which they wish to oppose. Deleuze and Guattaris discussion

of the traditional model of thought in A Thousand Plateaus centers on two
limitations. First, the classical image of thought is imitative. Their point
is that insofar as the classical image forms a complete and unified image
of the world, it necessarily leads us to posit a radical dualism between
the image of thought and the world of which it is an image. That is, we
are led to posit two different ontological planes, a position which cuts
off the possibility of the kind of immanent and univocal ontology which
Deleuze and Guattari want to construct. The world and the image of
the world become two distinct entities which cannot be reconciled with
one another: How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it
is what presides over the very division between world and book, nature
and art?1 Deleuzes second criticism of classical logic, as well as the arborescent or root metaphors that characterize it, is that it presupposes
a moment of unity, as well as a binary division of this primary unity. It
operates by a process of division: the law of the One that becomes two,
then the two that become four (TP, 5). The classical example of this kind
of thought would be the Arbor Porphyriana, Porphyrys tree of species.2
Porphyrys account, given in his text, Isagoge, provides a formalization of
Aristotles account of species and genera in the Categories, and was one of
the standard works in medieval logic. The essential idea which underlay
his model was that by the division of a more general category by a difference, we are able to give a precise account of what something is. That is,
we gradually approach a more precise definition of something by further
adding properties to it which differentiate it from other entities:
What is meant will be clear from the following. In each category there
are the highest classes, the lowest classes, and some which are between
the highest and the lowest. There is a highest genus beyond which there
can be no other superior genus; there is a lowest species after which
there can be no subordinate species; and between the highest genus
and the lowest species there are some classes which are genera and species at the same time, since they are comprehended in relation to the
highest genus and the lowest species. Let us make the meaning clear
with reference to one category. Substance is itself a genus; under this
is body; and under body animate body, under which is animal; under
animal is rational animal, under which is man; under man are Socrates,
Plato and particular men.3
The first difficulty with such an approach is that it creates a sharp distinction between nature and the image of nature. Porphyrys hierarchy of
terms operates according to sharply opposed differences, but it appears
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that in nature we have more gradated distinctions between different objects: opposed differences do not mix, but opposed accidents may mix.4
It doesnt help to replace the binary opposition between categories with
a larger set of categories, however, as in this case, we still presuppose
the notion of a unity from which all of the other categories are divided:
On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural
method, to go directly from One to three, four, or five, but only if there
is a strong principal unity available, that of the pivotal taproot supporting
the secondary roots. That doesnt get us very far (TP, 5). This difficulty
in fact stems from a deeper problem: the need to explain both aberrant
cases, where the entity falls within a species without having the property
which is supposed to govern species membership, and the differences
which are not to be taken into account when we consider what a thing
is. Thus, on the one hand, we need to take account of the fact that some
men are not rational, but are still to be counted as men. On the other we
need to deal with the fact that men may have different skin color, without
this affecting their nature as men. To deal with these questions, we need
to make a distinction between what is essential to something, and what
properties that thing has merely accidentally. Such a distinction seems
to require a further ontological dichotomy, however, between the ideal
image of the thing, its essence, and its actual, worldly, and often imperfect state. The dichotomy between essence and appearance therefore
leads to the distinction between the image of the world (essence) and
the world itself (appearance).
Deleuze provides an extended discussion of judgment in Difference
and Repetition, and although we have to be careful moving between his
sole-authored and collaborative works, the distinction he makes there
between two kinds of sense will be useful in diagnosing exactly where
the problem with arborescent thought lies. In Difference and Repetition,
Deleuze argues for two conditions that must be fulfilled when making a
judgment. He argues that the subject must possess both good sense and
common sense. Deleuze defines good sense and common sense as follows: For while common sense is the norm of identity from the point of
view of the pure Self and the form of the unspecified object which corresponds to it, good sense is the norm of distribution from the point of
view of the empirical selves and the objects qualified as this or that kind
of thing (which is why it is considered to be universally distributed)
(DR, 13334). Of these two problems, the problem of accidental and
essential properties is one of good sense. It amounts to the ability to attribute predicates appropriately, and to correctly assign things their positions within the hierarchy. Thus, problems of good sense occur when we
have difficulties in knowing when to attribute a property to something
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and when not to, such as in the degenerate cases which Aristotle discovers in The Parts of Animals: The sea-anemones or sea-nettles, as they are
variously called, are not Testacea at all, but lie outside the recognised
groups. Their constitution approximates them on one side to plants, on
the other to animals.5 In these cases, the possibility of successfully making a judgment is thrown into doubt by the purely empirical question of
whether or not a particular entity belongs to the species in question or
not. We may be able to deal with these errors of good sense by increasing the sophistication of our hierarchyby, for instance, as Deleuze and
Guattari suggest, moving from bivalent to polyvalent categorical distinctions. Good sense is not the sole presupposition of judgment, however,
and it is the case that even the failure of good sense still leaves judgment
intact: It is as though error were a kind of failure of good sense within
the form of a common sense which remains integral and intact (DR,
149). Rather than simply address the grounds for good judgment, Deleuzes project is to examine the grounds for judgment in general. Even
when the subject exhibits poor judgment (when good sense fails), we are
still dealing with thought in terms of a hierarchy of terms. The subject
falls into error by subsuming the particular under the wrong universal,
or failing to recognize the essential difference.
Deleuzes criticism of common sense instead attacks the nature of
judgment itself. Judgment involves the attribution of a predicate to a
subject, and Deleuze follows Kant in claiming that such an attribution
relies on the notion of a pure subject and a transcendental object.6 This
requires, prior to the attribution of properties themselves, a theory about
what is to count as a substance or an individual. That is, prior to the
specification of the properties of a subject, judgment already requires
a subject to be individuated. In Deleuze and Guattaris terminology, it
already assumes a certain form of territorialization. If we look at the
dichotomous approach, we discover that although it can provide an
account of the qualification of the subject, it cannot provide an account
of its constitution. At the top of the hierarchy, we simply already have the
notion of a being (albeit an empty one): in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity (TP, 7).
In other words, the principal unity must always precede the determination of the object, ruling out an account of the emergence of this unity
itself. On Deleuzes reading, there are therefore two principal postulates
of judgment. First, judgment presupposes that what exists is a world of
objects. Second, judgment presupposes a certain distribution of objects
throughout the world. This closes off the possibility of anything like a
theory of the genesis of objectivity itself, or a formulation of an ontology that does not presuppose the division of the world into subjects and
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properties. Deleuze and Guattari express this by noting that multiplicities in arborescent structures presuppose a point of unity in addition to
the multiplicity of properties itself.
How are we to overcome these limitations? Deleuze and Guattari
propose that rather than conceiving of thought on the model of the tree
or root, we need to develop a new form of thinking, in this case based
on the model of the rhizome. Whereas both trees and roots exhibit a
branching structure from a central point, much as we found in the Arbor Porphyriana, rhizomatic plants do not exhibit this structure. Rather
than a vertical branching structure, rhizomes have stem systems which
are horizontal in nature, which are not organized around a central point.
Further, they are adventitious root systems, which means that root systems
do not simply develop from a specific part of the plantlet (the radical),
but are also capable of developing from other parts of the plant, such as
the stem or leaf.7 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the rhizome provides
a better model for thought, as it does not require a central point, is not
hierarchical, and allows heterogeneous connections between parts to be
formed. To see how the alternative model functions, it is worth looking
at a system which is archetypally rhizomatic for Deleuze and Guattari:
the wasp and the orchid. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the Ophyrs genus
of orchids which attract wasps with a modified petal resembling a female
wasp. As the male wasp attempts to copulate with the petal, pollinia become attached to its body.8 The line or block of becoming that unites
the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterritorialization: of the
wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchids reproductive
system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm
in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction (TP, 293). If we
take the case given above, it would seem that if we were to explain the
symbiotic relationship between the wasp and the orchid on the model of
judgment, we would have to presuppose some kind of unified center for
the interaction. This amounts to in effect seeing the one as a property
of the other (the wasp is a moment in the reproductive system of the orchid, or the orchid as a moment in the instinctual system of the wasp), or
seeing both as contained in a higher unity. Deleuze and Guattari argue,
however, that such an approach ultimately is incapable of explaining the
generation not merely of an additive unity of the two organisms, but of
an entirely new system: Whenever there is transcoding, we can be sure
that there is not a simple addition, but the constitution of a new plane, as
of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value of passage
or bridging (TP, 314). Instead, Deleuze and Guattari stress the importance of transversal relations between organisms, and also the openness
of biological systems.9 In this sense, they want to see the wasp-orchid as
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an assemblage:10 not as the addition or simple exchange between two

different organisms, but as the constitution of a wholly new system defined purely in terms of the manifold connections it exhibits. This constitution of a new and open system cannot be understood within an arborescent framework, since such frameworks can only account for the
determination of a preexisting subject, rather than the constitution of
a novel one. The rhizomatic approach resonates even more closely with
Marguliss seminal study of cellular biology, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution.11
Margulis argues that eukaryotic cells (cells containing complex structures of organelles) evolved through the formation of symbiotic relationships between more primitive prokaryotic cells. That is, basic elements
of the cell, such as mitochondria, migrated within the cell membranes
of other cells to form mutually beneficial relationships: mitochondria allow the cell to use oxidizing reactions to produce energy while the cell
provides the machinery for the reproduction of the mitochondria. Such
an approach breaks with the idea of the progressive differentiation of
lineages of organisms by recognizing the importance of transversal communication of genetic data between species. It therefore disrupts the
hierarchical model which judgment relies upon by showing that organisms are not to be understood purely as subsumed under species, but
also as forming parallel, connective relationships. This move away from
a subsumptive logic further opens the possibility that rather than seeing
properties as attaching to a preexisting logical subject, we can see organisms as essentially open. Marguliss account is not one of the development
of the organism (the determination of the subject of predication), but
rather of the constitution of the organism itself (the emergence of the
subject of predication).
It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari are not introducing an ontological dualism between rhizomatic and arborescent structures. In fact, all structures can be understood in both of these terms. We
should note that root systems themselves operate largely rhizomatically.
Thus the process of nitrogen fixing (the conversion of nitrogen in the air
to ammonia or other nitrogenous compounds), one of the key roles of
the root system, relies on a symbiotic relationship with Rhizobium bacteria. Rhizobium bacteria are stimulated by the emission of chemicals from
the root hairs, and in turn emit chemicals which cause the root hairs
to bend around them, creating nodules within which the bacteria form
colonies.12 Likewise, grafting allows the formation of what Deleuze would
call heterogeneous assemblages. In fact, it should not surprise us to discover that arborescent structures show themselves to be rhizomatic in
nature, and Deleuze presents several examples of nonvegetative rhizomatic structures (such as the packs of wolves and rats, and the rhizome-
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city of Amsterdam). The rhizome therefore should be seen as a model

of a logic of connections, rather than as just a state of affairs. In all of
these cases, it is quite possible to read the phenomena in question according to either arborescent or rhizomatic categories: It is true that
the same thing is generally susceptible to both modes of calculation or
both types of regulation, but not without undergoing a change in state
(TP, 17). There is a disanalogy between the two cases, however, to the
extent that rhizomatic structures can more or less approximate arborescent structures, whereas arborescent structures, with their requirement
of sharply defined subjects, represent the ideal limit of arborescence,
which cannot in practice be encountered, as it implies that the organism
is completely closed.
Deleuzes introduction of the rhizome is therefore intended to
overcome several limitations of arborescent thought. First, it is intended
to provide a logic capable of accounting for the genesis of a particular
system. It does so by not relying on the notion of a subject as preexisting
its determination. Second, it aims at providing a logic capable of explaining transversal connections between systems. A rhizomatic thought will
therefore dispense with two interrelated moments on the structure of
judgment. First, it will not be based on the notion of the attachment of
properties to a central identity. Second, it will not rely on the notion of subsumption. Subsumption is key to the structure of judgment (an individual
is subsumed under a general concept, or is allocated to a class intentionally according to a given property). Subsumption allows a subject
to be determined by the constant restriction of the logical space it is to
be found in, but symbiotic relationships, for instance, disrupt this procedure by creating bridges between different logical spaces: There is a
block of becoming which snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from
which no wasp-orchid can ever descend (TP, 238). Likewise, the eukaryotic cell belongs to two lineages, and hence two arborescent spaces, at
the same time. It occurs on two branches of the tree of life simultaneously. To provide a way of understanding the world which does not rely
on the linear determination of judgment, the rhizome must therefore
be conceived of as an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system
without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton (TP, 21). What is the central logical move that Deleuze makes in
putting forward this project? It is the substitution of a logic based on the
copula by a logic based on the conjunction. The tree imposes the verb
to be, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, and . . . and . . .
and (TP, 25). In fact, there are two senses in which the verb to be
is rejected by Deleuze: first, Deleuze rejects the predicative use of to
be, thus moving away from a subsumptive understanding of determi-
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nation. He also rejects a second sense of to be: the affirmation of an

identity (A is A). To escape from this use of to be, Deleuze and Guattari need to focus on the relations between terms, rather than the terms
themselves.
In this account so far, we have seen some of the key features of Deleuzes critique of judgment. If we return momentarily to Difference and
Repetition, however, we can see that Deleuze is quite careful in making a
distinction between classical logic, which he calls finite representation,
and Hegelian dialectic, which he calls infinite representation. It is clear
that Hegels approach does rely on a progressive determination of an
indeterminate concept (the Being, pure being of the Science of Logic),
but Hegel himself is quite hostile to the idea that judgment should be
the driving force in philosophy. He argues, however, against the idea
that the inadequacy of the finite categories to express truth entails the
impossibility of objective cognition.13 Hegel therefore puts forward what
he calls the speculative proposition. Whereas the two uses of the verb
to be are kept separate in finite thought (in the sense that this rose is
this rose is logically a different kind of judgment to this rose is red),
Hegels speculative proposition attempts to combine the identity and
predicative uses of to be in the same proposition. For Hegel as well as
Deleuze, classical judgments rely on a passive subject which constitutes
the basis to which content is attached and upon which the movement
runs back and forth.14 By contrast, in the speculative proposition, the
subject is related to another subject, as in the proposition, the actual is
universal(PS, 39). In this case, Hegel argues that although both terms
are subjects (and hence relate to themselves through the proposition),
we do not have a simple tautology, as the two terms are also not identical
with one another. As the speculative proposition cannot be understood
either to be asserting the identity of the two terms, or predicating one of
the terms of the other, finite thought fails to make sense of the proposition. For infinite (or dialectical) thought, however, the speculative proposition represents the heart of the dialectical method, as the reiteration
of the second subject (the universal) as both different and identical to
the first subject (the actual) forces thought to consider the subject itself
no longer as a fixed identity, but as something which is itself changed by
the movement of the proposition. As the second subject is not simply a
further determination, but rather the subject itself, the whole proposition is put into motion. As Hegel expresses it:
Formally, what has been said can be expressed thus: the general nature
of the judgement or proposition, which involves the distinction of
Subject and Predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition, and
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the proposition of identity which the former becomes contains the

counter-thrust against the subject-predicate relationship. (PS, 38)
While Deleuze is careful to distinguish Hegel from other thinkers of representation, he argues that every philosophy of categories takes judgment for its modelas we see in the case of Kant, and still even in the
case of Hegel (DR, 33). That is, in spite of Hegels attempt to move away
from the concept of judgment, the speculative proposition is still too
close to the form of judgment to provide the kind of account Deleuze
thinks we need.15 I do not want to explore here the extent to which Deleuzes criticism of Hegel can be upheld, but rather to reflect on Hegels
own discussion of conjunctive logic in the Philosophy of Nature and the
Science of Logic. The aim will be to see whether it is possible to formulate
a Hegelian riposte to the move to a rhizomatic model of thought.
The Spurious Innite

Whereas the Science of Logic attempts to provide the complete determination of the categories of thought and Being, the philosophy of nature
expresses these ideas as they are found in the world itself. Nature is the
Idea in the form of otherness.16 As Houlgate notes, Hegels conception of
nature is somewhat Spinozistic (An Introduction to Hegel, 109), with Being
autonomously determining itself as nature. Nevertheless, the Philosophy of
Nature is not simply a reiteration of the categories of the Science of Logic.
Rather, the Philosophy of Nature also argues that nature is separated from
reason. Whereas the Science of Logic discovers reason to be a coherent,
internally related whole, nature for Hegel embodies the unreason of
externality (An Introduction to Hegel, 111). The Philosophy of Nature therefore presents the categories of thought in a form which is alien to reason;
rather than being immanently and internally related to one another, in
nature the categories present themselves as separated from one another
in the various forms of entities which we encounter in the world. Nevertheless, nature is still the Idea, albeit in the form of this externality. While
externality constitutes the specific character in which Nature, as Nature,
exists,17 the Philosophy of Nature charts the movement of reason back into
the form of a unity with Spirit in the form of a path of return: for
it is that which overcomes the division between Nature and Spirit and
assures to Spirit its knowledge of its essence in Nature (PN, 14). The
philosophy of nature will therefore chart the movement from the pure
externality of parts to a form where the parts are once again understood
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according to internal relations. Much as we found in the case of Deleuze,

these categories will not merely allow for a descriptive analysis of nature.
Nature embodies the categories of thought, albeit in a different element,
and on this basis, there is a normative element to Hegels descriptions
of the natural world. Different forms of life will better embody the Idea,
and so his appraisals of the sophistication of different forms of life will
allow us to determine his appraisal of the form of logic that they embody.
As Hegels philosophy aims to provide a purely immanent description of
the world which does not rely on any external principles, the movement
from the pure externality of nature back to the idea of internal relationality given by the end of the Logic must itself proceed immanently, that is,
not rely on any principles outside of itself. Thus Hegels account attempts
to show how nature itself moves from a system governed by externality
to one governed by internal relations. Nature will thus appear as a hierarchy of stages, moving from the most external to the least external, as it
progressively transforms itself into more unified forms. Hegels dialectic
therefore attempts to show how Spirit gradually becomes embodied in
more and more adequate forms of nature, progressing through mechanism, physics, chemistry to life, and finally to the apex of life, man. In the
process, we move from an understanding of the world governed purely
by the self-externality of matter to one which is centered on a more Aristotelian view of the organism as a relation of parts to a whole, where
in so far as the animals members are simply moments of its form, and
are perpetually negating their independence, and withdrawing into a
unity which is the reality of the Notion, the animal is an existent Idea. If
a finger is cut off, a process of chemical decomposition sets in, and it is
no longer a finger (PN, 352). We therefore move from the literally atomized account of the world offered by physics to the organic worldview,
where the parts have no meaning outside of their relationships to one
another.
While animal life provides the model of the highest form of organization, plant life occupies a position similar to the rhizome in Deleuze
and Guattaris account. Talking of rhizomes in particular, Hegel writes
that strawberries and a number of other plants, as we know, put out
runners, that is, creeping stalks which grow out of the root. These filaments or leaf-stalks form nodes (why not from free portions?); if these
points touch the earth they, in turn, put out roots and produce new,
complete plants(PN, 313). Much like Deleuze, Hegels point here is that
the rhizome does not have a fixed and determinate structure such as we
find in the higher plants. Rather, differentiation is always provisional,
and not formed around the unity of the plant as a whole. We should
note here, however, that Hegel recognizes that even the higher plants ex-
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hibit the same structural features that we find in lower plants. For Hegel,
the distinction will not be between the rhizome and the root/tree, but
between the plant and the animal. It is plant life as a whole that exhibits
a structure which escapes from the hierarchical form of judgment criticized by Deleuze. Thus, immediately after providing the example of the
rhizome, Hegel introduces the example of the mangrove tree, where
a single tree will cover the moist banks of rivers or lakes for a mile or
more with a forest consisting of numerous trunks which meet at the top
like close-clipped foliage (PN, 313). In what sense, therefore, is Hegels
conception of the plant to be compared to Deleuzes concept of the rhizome? In both cases, we have systems without a central point of unity, and
which do not operate according to the binary logic of diremption which
governs the structure of judgment.
Whereas the animal forms a natural unity with each part internally
related to each other, the plant lacks what Hegel calls a soul, and forms
merely external relations between parts. Whereas the body of the animal
is an organized body, the plant has not at the same time acquired a system of viscera (PN, 305). The lack of a central unity means that each
part of the organism can be connected with each other, and for Hegel,
the difference of the organic parts is only a superficial metamorphosis and
one part can easily assume the function of the other (PN, 303). Therefore rather than having parts inhering in the unity of the whole, we have
for Hegel a system where there is no longer any distinction between parts
and wholes (or between subjects and properties): in short, any part of
the plant can exist as a complete individual; this can never be the case
with animals with the exception of the polyps and other quite undeveloped species of animals (PN, 314). As we saw above, the classical differentiation of species occurs through a movement of division, with an
object being determined through the attribution of a specific difference
to the subject. As the plant does not have a central subject, it likewise escapes from the logic of opposition.18 Differences are no longer presented
as oppositions governed by a common center of identity as we found in
the Arbor Porphyriana.
It therefore appears as if the plant escapes from the kind of arborescent logic which Deleuze criticizes. Rather than operating through
a logic of opposition and hierarchy, it operates linearly, and through a
process of conjunction. As we shall see, Hegel argues however that this
conception of life necessarily collapses back into a model with a definite
center, and an oppositional structure, in this case the organized body of
animal life. This should already be partially apparent in Hegels suggestion that difference in this case can only be understood as a superficial
metamorphosis of form rather than a genuine difference. As we saw, De-
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leuzes focus on the rhizome implies an underlying logic, and this is also
the case with Hegels discussion of plant life. The philosophy of nature
is an expression of reason in its externality, and so we can see it as correlated with the logical categories provided in the Science of Logic. The
question, therefore, is, which of the categories of the Science of Logic correspond to plant life? In this case, the dialectic which embodies the transition from plant life to animal life is the dialectic of the finite and the
infinite. I want to turn briefly to this dialectic before returning to Hegels
account in the Philosophy of Nature. By doing so, I want to show exactly why
Hegel thinks the account given there proves to be insupportable.
The dialectic of infinity occurs in the first part of the Science of Logic,
in the doctrine of Being. As Hegels dialectic proceeds immanently,
we will begin at the stage where the dialectic has reached the notion of
something. The notion of something which Hegel develops is perhaps
the most basic which we could conceive of, merely that of the unity of a
being and a quality. For Hegel, something also contains a moment of
self-relation, in that as a unified concept, it is the negation of the difference between being and quality. As self-relating negation, however, we
can see it as containing two moments. Whilst it is a determinate being, it
is also the negation of this determinate being. It is something other than
something: the second is equally a determinate being, but determined as
a negative of the somethingan other.19 Something therefore contains
two moments of being. It implies the existence of another. We should be
able to see, however, that each of these moments, the something and the
other, have the same structure. The labels, something and other, only
apply to the extent that we began our analysis from one of these two entities. Each is therefore both a something, and an other to its other. We
can reverse this understanding of each being a something, and recognize
that each is also, in its own self, an other: if of two things we call one A,
and the other B, then in the first instance B is determined as the other.
But A is just as much the other of B. Both are, in the same way, others (SL,
117). As such, we have a continual process of something becoming other
than itself. As its nature is to be other than itself, however, this negation
is a constant return into itself. That is, in the other negating itself, it becomes other to this other, a something.
While something at first appeared to be a self-contained moment,
we can see now that it is in fact better characterized by this moment of
openness to another. We should note that we now have an understanding
as something being constituted by this relation to the other. Becoming
other is a key feature of the structure of something, and to this extent, we
can now see something as having a particular constitution. This aspect of
constitution is double for something. It is constituted by relating to, and
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being distinct from, something other. In other words, it is this, rather than
that. These two moments are the foundation of the distinction between
being in itself and being for another, as it is both self-enclosed, but also
other related. We can now ask how this essential relation to another plays
out in the determination of something. If something is to be determined
by its relations to another, it should be the case that at least two conditions must be met: first, it must form some kind of relation to this other,
in order that determination can take place. Second, it must differ from
the other, as without this difference, there is no other to determine it.
These two conditions imply the need for a further concept, that of limit,
which will both separate the two somethings, and yet as they share this
limit, relate them. The limit circumscribes what a thing is by defining
the point at which it transitions into its other. But as such, the limit has
a paradoxical quality, as it is the ground for the existence of something
(as something requires this relation and separation from another), but
is also the point at which something is not. Something is what it is within
its limit. Here we transition to another category, however. What is fundamental to the structure of something is its relation to its limit, but its limit
is what it is not. This fundamental relationship toward its own negation
leads us to recognize that at the heart of something is finitude.
For finitude, therefore, limit is not merely something indifferent,
but is rather a fundamental moment in its structure. Without this limit,
finitude would become infinitudeit would go beyond itself. This is the
first sense of the infinite, as a pure beyond. The limit therefore acts to
prevent the finite from becoming something other than itself. As we cannot at this stage countenance the possibility of the finite containing the
infinite, the notion of limit does not simply signify an arbitrary point in
somethings relation to another something, but is also a limitationthat
which prevents finitude from becoming infinite. This brings in a new
moment into the concept of finitude. As finitude now contains this essential moment of limitation, we can say that it also brings in a notion that
it ought to overcome this limitation. This ought captures the complex
structure of finitude. It contains both its being and its limitation. In fact,
these two moments are in tension with one another. Finitude wants to
transcend its limitation, but as the limitation is integral to finitude, it resists the force of the ought. As the moment of transcendence provided by
the ought is integral to finitude, however, it does go beyond itself. These
two moments do not collapse into a unity, however. Instead, we have a
constant process of moving between the two moments. Finitude perishes
because it transcends its limitation, but this perishing simply leads to the
emergence of another moment of finitude, as the ought includes the
moment of limitation within it. We have, therefore, a perpetual series of
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finite moments, the perishing of one leading to the generation of the

next. This series of finite moments, however, is an infinite series.
When we look at the notion of the infinite, however, we can see that
it relies on its reference to the finite. It is specified as the beyond which
escapes from the limitation of finitude. A result of this, however, is that
the notion of limitation is inherent to the concept of the infinite. For this
reason, this notion of the infinite is characterized by Hegel as the bad
infinite. The finite and the infinite are therefore in fact rather similar to
each other. Both are defined by their common limitation, and each relies on the other to sustain itself. So each concept requires that the other
concept be determinately understood in order that it may itself become
determinate. While we want to be able to understand each category in its
own terms, we find that each concept leads us to consider the other. This
leads us, however, into another form of infinity, an infinite series which
oscillates between these two terms, as each refers itself to the other to
vouchsafe its own determinacy. What conclusion can we draw from this?
Well, the concept of the infinite is now itself defined by a process which
can never be completed. It is therefore itself defined in terms of an ought
to be which is never achieved. The infinite itself, therefore, once again
collapses back into the finite.
There is thus an inherent unity between these two categories, although also a moment of difference between them, depending on the
emphasis which we place on the terms themselves. The infinite is determined, in part, by its differentiation from the finite. As such, however, it
is tied to the notion of a limit, and thus finitude. It is a finitized infinite.
But the finite now has a definite structure. It is no longer defined in
terms of its ought. As such, it is an infinitized finite. Rather than these two
terms being considered as defined in their own terms, we now explicitly
recognize that finitude as part of its structure has a reference to infinity,
and the infinite likewise contains a reference to the finite. These references mean that regardless of which term we begin with, we are driven
to the other. Rather than seeing these terms as existing in a series, as was
the case with the bad infinite, however, now that we have explicitly recognized that they reciprocally determine one another, we can see them
as forming a circle. Thus, from the very structure of the infinite series
of finite somethings, we are led to the notion that finite and infinite are
concepts which are mediated by one another. Neither can be determined
independently of the other. Once we recognize this, we can note that the
true infinite is this structure of movement of the finite and infinite as a
whole.
So now we can return to the original question of how this notion of
infinity is related to the notion of an a-centered, nonhierarchical mode
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of organization. In the earlier Jena Logic, Hegel explicitly relates the question of the bad infinite to the question of the one and the many. He
writes that the subsistence of the many qualities as of the many quanta
has simply the beyond of a unity that has not yet been taken up into
them and would sublate the subsistence if it were so taken up.20 Hegels
point, therefore, is that any mode of organization which simply relies
on a series of properties related without a central notion cannot but immanently develop, under dialectical analysis, a central moment of unity
(whereby the series presented by finitude is recognized as containing
the infinite). Systems of organization such as that proposed by Deleuze
rely on an artificial suspension of this moment of unity: In order to subsist, the aggregate is not allowed to take up this beyond into itself, but
just as little can it free itself from it and cease to go beyond itself (The
Jena System, 33). On this reading, therefore, Deleuzes strategy would rely
on an artificial suspension of the movement of the dialectic. If Deleuze
were consistent, he would allow the nonhierarchical field to immanently
develop a central moment of unity. Of course, this does not mean that
Hegel fully supports a model of subsumptive logic such as that which
Deleuze criticizes. Rather, Hegel is arguing that the notion of a subject
is both necessary, and nonarbitrary for philosophical enquiry. That is, it
emerges dialectically from the matter itself. The multiple imposes unity
on itself, rather than simply presupposing a moment of unity. We do not,
therefore, have the fixed moment of a subject which is central to Deleuze
and Guattaris critique of arborescent thought.
The movement of the infinite is the key to understanding Hegels
account of life. The plant is explicitly characterized as an infinite, conjunctive multiplicity, lacking any notion of a center: Each plant is therefore only an infinite number of subjects; and the togetherness whereby
it appears as one subject is only superficial (PN, 276). The structure of
the plant, therefore, is the expression of the bad infinite. We can now
ask, what is the inherent limitation of the structure of plant life? As we
saw with the structure of finitude, the infinite series of the bad infinite
eventually showed itself to require a moment of unity, which was provided by the recognition that in the good infinite, the determinations of
the finite and the infinite were unified, while each moment preserved
its determinacy. Deleuze brings forth the rhizome as the archetype of a
system without a central unifying principle. Hegel, however, has an analysis of such a form of life that shows that it does have a central point of
unity: The plant has an essential, infinite relationship with light . . . This
simple principle of selfhood which is outside of the plant is the supreme
power over it; Schelling therefore says that, if the plant had consciousness, it would worship light as its god (PN, 306). The plant therefore
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manages to exist without an internal point of unity only because it is

alienated from its true moment of unity, light, which is external to it.
Were the plant capable of thought, its attitude would be that of the unhappy consciousness of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is only if we ignore
this infinite relationship to light that the plant can be seen as a-centered.
What appears to be a nonhierarchical structure is in fact coordinated according to a point external to the plane of the rhizomes growth: potatoplants sprouting in a cellar creep from distances of several yards across
the floor to the side where light enters through a hole in the wall . . . in
order to reach the opening where they can enjoy the light (PN, 306). As
Hegel writes of the finite and infinite in the Science of Logic, if they are
taken as devoid of connection with each other, they are only joined by and,
then each confronts the other as self-subsistent, as in its own self only
affirmatively present.21 Without the infinite providing a point of unity,
therefore, no connection is possible at all between elements, and we are
left with a hollow philosophy of the and . . . and . . . and.
Deleuzes Tripartite Distinction

Hegel therefore puts forward a view of the rhizome which is fundamentally opposed to that of Deleuze, and with this comes a critique of an
attempt to found an a-centered logical system. If Deleuzes account of
the rhizome can be mapped onto Hegels account of the infinite, then
it could also be shown that Deleuzes philosophical approach itself is
simply an example of the bad infinite, and that a more faithful attentiveness to the movement of thought would lead us from the rhizome (and
the bad infinite) to the properly centered notion of the animal form
(and the good infinite). I now want to show that Deleuze and Guattari
are aware of this possibility, and that in fact A Thousand Plateaus features
a tripartite distinction between images of thought which allows them to
recognize the importance of the Hegelian argument while preserving a
place for their own rhizomatic vision.
There are three kinds of conceptual schemata that Deleuze and
Guattari put forward in A Thousand Plateaus. The first, the root-book, is
the structure exemplified by the arborescent image, whereby determination is provided by a series of subsumptive operations. Deleuze and Guattari suggest two different ways of overcoming this structure, however.
These are the model of the fascicular root and the rhizome itself. Fascicular root systems, such as we find in grasses, do not have a central taproot
from which secondary roots emerge, but rather develop a bundle of thin,
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fibrous roots, with no obvious center. Deleuze and Guattari identify the
fascicular root with a certain reaction of modernism against arborescent
or linear thought. The three examples they provide are of Burroughss
cut-up poetry, Joyces attempt to provide a decentered narrative, particularly in his Finnegans Wake, and Nietzsches move to an aphoristic notion
of philosophy. Burroughss cut-up poetry operates by combining texts in
a random manner, breaking down the inherent unity of the texts which
provide the material for his compositions. In Naked Lunch, we are presented with the fractured account of William Lee, a junkie. Burroughs
interjects into the narrative to tell us:
You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point. . . . I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the
little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro
race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe
bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her
Afghan Hound.22
In all of these cases, however, Deleuze and Guattari ask whether reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by demanding a more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality (TP, 6). They give three examples of how this unity functions. In
the case of Burroughs, it is through the fact that the work itself created
exists as a unity in its own rightthe most resolutely fragmented work
can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus (TP, 6). For
Nietzsche and Joyce, it is in the form of a cyclical ordering. Thus Nietzsche brings in the notion of the eternal return to unify the field of differences,23 while Joyce, in his most radical attempt to break with linear narrative, Finnegans Wake, relies on the form of circularity by developing a
structure where the final sentence trails off only to be taken up again at
the beginning of the work. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the lack of
an overarching unity in nature is only preserved on the basis of positing
a subjective unification in the form of a past, or yet to come (TP, 5).
Ultimately, therefore, the field of difference relies on an underlying substratum. Likewise, the world of differences for Nietzsche is unified by the
eternal return. Deleuze and Guattaris relationship with these figures is
thus ambivalent. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for
being fragmented (TP, 6). Their reference to these thinkers as the angelic doctors evokes Aquinass attempt to provide a consistent equivocal
concept of being through the concept of analogy.24 Deleuze and Guattari
are therefore going to attempt to show that despite the recognition of
the fragmented nature of the world within modernism, this recognition
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still in some sense relies on an implicit moment of unity. While arborescent thought leads us to an equivocal ontology, with representation
standing opposed to the world, the fascicular thought of modernism tries
to break with this ontology by problematizing it, but in fact sets up a
problem which demands an equivocal solution. Thus, while the roots
do not have a center, they are unified by their relation to the plant as a
whole. In this case, therefore, we can apply Hegels criticism of the bad
infinite. While these thinkers generate a field of differences, ultimately,
this is only on the basis of an external concept of unity. In these cases,
therefore, the subject provides a point of unity for the system, much as
the sun was the external point of unity in Hegels account of plant life.
Just as Hegels spurious infinite immanently transforms itself into the
good infinite, in the case of the logic of modernism, its ostensibly
nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only admits of a totally
hierarchical solution (TP, 17). Deleuze and Guattaris analysis of modernism thus characterizes it in a way that resonates strongly with Hegels
criticism of finite thinking.
Conclusion
The question thus remains, how do Deleuze and Guattari develop a
theory of the multiplicity which is not susceptible to the Hegelian critique? They argue that the multiple must be made, not by always adding
a dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with
the number of dimensions one already has availablealways n - 1 (TP, 6).
The question therefore is, how do we form a multiplicity without a point
of unification? Here we come to the key difference between Deleuze and
Guattaris rhizomatic structures and those of the root-book. Rather than
the unification of elements within a substratum (a species of entities in
the classical model of thought), or by way of a super-stratum (the sun as
an external reference which unifies the various moments of the plant),
Deleuze and Guattari propose that we reconceive the notion of elements
themselves. So long as they are viewed as a discrete collection of entities,
we will be drawn to introduce a further element, which is the unity of the
elements themselves. As long as the plant is conceived of along Hegelian
lines as an infinite set of discrete plants, the immanent movement of our
image of thought itself will force us to recognize a necessary point of unity
and identity above and beyond these elements. Thus we will be returned
to the situation of the subsumptive logic of judgment and the associated
structures of good sense and common sense. This is not the place to
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provide a detailed overview of Deleuze and Guattaris own alternative,25

but we can start to see the direction this approach will take in their claim
that it was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted
the multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, multiplicity. It
marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and topology of multiplicities (TP, 48283). Deleuze and Guattari are thus suggesting here that the move to rhizomatic thought occurs with a shift in the
meaning of the term multiplicity. Rather than seeing it adjectivally, as
something which we use to describe various elements, it becomes an entity in its own rightwe move from a predicative to a substantive understanding. But this means that we no longer talk in terms of the multiple
x, but of a multiplicity itself. To think this way, Deleuze and Guattari do
not mean we should take up the many elements into the one (We can say
the one is multiple, the multiple one forever: we speak like Platos young
men who did not even spare the farmyard [DR, 182]). Hegels solution
to the problem of the one and the many (the infinite and the finite) is
to show how both moments dialectically imply one another. Deleuze and
Guattaris response is to recognize that these two concepts are necessarily intertwined (as is shown by the fascicular root model), and therefore
to reject both simultaneously. They therefore give up the notion of the
units of the multiplicity being discrete and closed (There are no points
or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree or root
[TP, 8]). They also reject the notion of an inherent moment of unity over
and above the elements themselves (The notion of unity appears only
when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a
corresponding subjectification proceeding [TP, 8]). By giving up both
moments, they fall outside of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite
of Hegel: there is no determinate being to trigger the dialectical process,
but rather an anexact yet rigorous (TP, 483), continuous multiplicity.
Deleuze and Guattari therefore put forward three different models
of thought in A Thousand Plateaus: the root-book, or arborescent model,
the fascicular root, or modernist model, and the rhizome, or vegetal
model (DR, xvii). The key result of this tripartite structure is that it allows us to recognize that it is not simply enough to renounce the classical
hierarchical form of arborescent thinking to overcome judgment. Deleuze and Guattari argue that we must be careful not merely to reintroduce the moment of identity at a higher level, as they claim occurs in
the thought of Burroughs, Nietzsche, and Joyce. In this sense, we must
be wary of taking too loosely Deleuzes proclamation of a new logic of
and . . . and . . . and, as this is also the slogan of the conjunctive logic
of Hegels spurious infinite. Rather, the rhizome is open and connectable in all of its dimensions (TP, 12) and is a-centered, rather than poly-
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centered. While opposing hierarchy, it does not do so by recourse to linear series. This chapter has provided a via negativa of rhizomatic thought:
it is not the thought of judgment, nor the attempt to incorporate judgment into the movement of infinite thought which we find in the dialectic. A positive account of rhizomatics would require us to see exactly
how Riemann allows the move from dialectics to topology, and why we
naturally believe judgment to provide an adequate understanding of the
world. Only with such an account could we truly evaluate Deleuze and
Guattaris concept of the rhizome.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 5.
2. Deleuze refers to Porphyrys Isagoge in his discussion of Aristotle in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 3035.
3. Porphyry, Isagoge, trans. Edward W. Warren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), 37.
4. Ibid., 60.
5. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. W. Ogle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995),
681a37681b5. See Ermanno Bencivenga, Hegels Dialectical Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1, for a full discussion of these border cases
in Aristotle.
6. This is one of the main results of Kants transcendental deduction. See
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1929), A84/B116A130/B170.
7. Kingsley Stern, Introductory Plant Biology (Burr Ridge, Ill.: McGraw-Hill
Higher Education, 2000), 63.
8. Ibid., 42829.
9. A good example of a transversal connection is Raoul Benveniste and
George Todaros Evolution of C-Type Viral Genes: Inheritance of Exogenously
Acquired Viral Genes, Nature 252 (December 1974): 45659, which is referred
to by Deleuze and Guattari (TP, 29). Benveniste and Todaro show that as well as
DNA passing between organisms through descent, it can also be incorporated
into the genome as a result of virus infection. Through infection, virus DNA
becomes part of the genome of the host organism, which is then transferred by
lineal descent to the hosts progeny. In this case, we have a horizontal (or transversal), rather than vertical, transmission of DNA.
10. Deleuze and Guattari define an assemblage as follows: A multiplicity
has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions
that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the
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laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows) . . .

An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that
necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections (TP, 29).
11. Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W. H.Freeman, 1981).
12. Stern, Introductory Plant Biology, 75.
13. G. W. F.Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zustze, trans. Theodore F. Geraets, Wallis Arthur Suchting, and Henry Silton Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 6.
14. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon,
1977), 37.
15. Deleuze and Guattari make a similar point in A Thousand Plateaus, writing one becomes two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most dialectical way possible, what we have
before us is the most classical, and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of
thought (TP, 5).
16. Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 109.
17. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon,
1970), 14.
18. This reproduction is not mediated by opposition (PN, 312).
19. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989), 116.
20. Hegel, The Jena System, 18045: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. H. S.Harris, John W. Burbidge, and George Di Giovanni (Kingston, Can.: McGill-Queens
University Press, 1986), 33.
21. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, 14344.
22. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (London: HarperPerennial, 2005), 187.
23. Deleuze and Guattaris analysis on this point is in sharp contrast to Deleuzes earlier incorporation of the eternal return into his philosophy. As well as
Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), see Difference and Repetition, particularly Deleuzes discussion of the
third synthesis in chap. 2.
24. The abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers, doctores angelici,
because they affirm a properly angelic and superior unity (TP, 6).
25. We have already seen several cases where the rhizomatic model of
thinking is helpful in understanding systems. In the examples of the wasp and
the orchid and of Marguliss work on cell evolution, for instance, we have the
development of assemblages that are not defined by interior relations such as we
find in the Hegelian model of the organism, or of the infinite, but rather by the
capacity of each part of the system to interact with other parts. Such a model is
particularly apt for discussions of evolutionary theory, as the parts of an organism
are no longer defined in terms of the function they perform in relation to the
purpose of the organism as a whole, but in terms of the relations that they are
able to enter into. As such, the function of a part can change by entering into
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new relations, as the function of the mitochondria change by entering into new
relations with other organelles (whereas on the organismic model, the part is
defined by its purpose, and therefore cannot enter into new relations without
ceasing to be what it is). The ability for the same element to play different roles
in different assemblages is a cornerstone of an evolutionary understanding of
life. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari expand this rhizomatic model
of conjunctive logic to other domains, such as the social and the technological.
Their discussion of the stirrup, for instance, shows how the introduction of new
elements into an assemblage allows for new forms of interaction, and hence new
functions for preexisting parts:
The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage over
the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons. Weapons
and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has often been
remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat organization it is
bound up with . . . The lance and the sword came into being in the Bronze
Age only by virtue of the man-horse assemblage, which caused a lengthening
of the dagger and pike, and made the first infantry weapons, the morning star
and the battle-ax, obsolete. The stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of
the man-horse assemblage, entailing a new type of lance and new weapons;
and this man-horse-stirrup constellation is itself variable, and has different
effects depending on whether it is bound up with the general conditions of
nomadism, or later readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism. (TP,
39899)
Actualization: Enrichment
and Loss
Bruce Baugh
One aspect of the difference between Deleuze and Hegel which has not
received sufficient attention is their opposing views on actualization,
the becoming actual of a potential or of what Deleuze calls the virtual.
For Hegel, actualization is the outward manifestation and expression of a
truth or reality that had only been implicit. This process of manifestation
is at the same time an articulation of what had been inchoate, a determination of the indeterminate, a becoming concrete of what had been
abstract. In short, for Hegel, actualization is a process of enrichment:
the actualized, whether it be truth, a shape of spirit, or an idea, is
infinitely richer than the unactualized potential. We see this in Hegels
critique of inarticulate sense-certainty and of the beautiful soul which
refuses to express itself in action.1 Truth, or the Absolute, must manifest
itself as a differentiated totality, as a system: The power of Spirit is only
as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread
itself out and lose itself in its exposition (PS, 6). Unexpressed potential,
such as an unexpressed feeling or an intention not expressed in action,
is merely the untrue, the irrational (PS, 66), pure abstraction (PS,
407), pure being or empty nothingness,2 self-willed impotence that
flees the world for the inwardness of pure intentions and fine sentiments
(PS, 400403).
For Deleuze, by contrast, every actualization involves a loss of the
infinite richness of the virtual. The virtual contains a multiplicity or manifold of divergent tendencies, any number of which can be actualized
depending on the circumstances, but each actualization is an impoverishment relative to the richness of the virtual. Thus we read that every
solution in the form of an organ is a relative success in relation to the
conditions of the problem or the environment but is nevertheless a
relative failure (chec) in relation to the movement which invents it; life
as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualizing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses contact with the rest of itself. 3
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Similarly, insensible intensities are always covered by a quality which

alienates or contradicts them by leveling out and homogenizing their
constitutive differences.4 Consciously recollected memories are images
extracted from an ontological and unconscious past which cannot be
represented (B, 71). There is a single, vital time of the virtual prior to
its differentiation into differing fluxes of duration, a single virtual multiplicity underlying the plurality of lived durations (B, 8183). In general,
Deleuze seems to hold that the actual can only betray the virtual it actualizes by constituting the extensive and qualitative elements which are subject to negation through limitation and the dialectic of contraries (DR,
188). The virtual knows nothing of negation (DR, 2023, 207); these
arise only at the level of the actual. Consequently, for Deleuze, there is
thus a sense of loss with respect to actualization, almost a melancholy,
one that is quite at odds with the affirmation of life and of expression in
his books on Spinoza5 and even the Dionysian affirmation of suffering in
his Nietzsche books.6 This sense of loss brings him rather closer to the
philosophy of tragedy (Shestov) and its romantic antecedents ( Jacobi,
Schiller).
I will thus begin with the romantics who form the target of much
of Hegels critique of immediacy or unmediated experience in its
givenness, and then look at Hegels critique of immediacy, especially in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, and finally at Deleuzes theory of the virtual
and its actualization. Paradoxically, Deleuze is just as distrustful of experience in its apparent immediacy and givenness as Hegel; like Hegel, he
takes conscious experience to be an appearance and an effect of forces
and processes that not only do not appear to the experiencing consciousness but also can never become conscious. Deleuze is not a champion of
romantic subjectivity; he is, on the contrary, profoundly skeptical of the
whole notion of the subject. Rather, what he shares with the romantics
is the conviction that, as Kierkegaard puts it, in existence, possibility or
potentiality stands higher than actuality. For Hegel, it is just the reverse:
actuality always stands higher than possibility.
Romanticism and the Cult of Immediacy

In the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel takes aim at intuitive and
poetic philosophizing by the light of nature, which offers up trivial
truths as ultimate on the assurance that their meaning and fulfillment
reside in the heart, and must surely be present in the hearts of others too,
since it reckons on having the last word once the innocence of the heart,
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the purity of conscience and such like have been mentioned (PS, 42).
But rather than being the apogee of humanity and humaneness, staying within the sphere of feeling and being able to communicate only at
that level, that is, through the poetic expression of feeling, is the antihuman, the merely animal; human nature exists only in a community
of minds that brings the recesses of what is inner into the broad light
of day through the communication of rational thoughts, which are neither common sense nor sky-rockets of inspiration, not ruined by the
conceit of genius, but fully developed, perfected knowledge (PS, 42
43);7 the scientific system of truth that dares to spread itself out and
lose itself in its exposition (PS, 3, 6). Consequently, the mind that clings
to immediate intuition, whether in the form of sensuous intuition or
the moral intuition of conscience, contents itself with rapturous haziness, an intensity without content, the bare feeling of the divine,
and not only deprives itself of the human and rationally communicable
content of its experience but also is conscious of this loss of its human
essence (PS, 36). It does so out of fear of losing its own, natural self, attached to the animalistic life of feeling and sensation. For the natural
and intuitive philosopher, the loss of its beliefs and convictions counts
for it as the loss of its own self, and in anxiety, it shrinks from articulating itself in the form of a rational system, holding on to its immediacy
and inwardness at all costs (PS, 4951).
The cult of natural sentimentality and feeling, the authority of
individual conscience over law and convention, and intuitive apprehension of the divine took its chief inspiration from Rousseaus mile,
or on Education (1762), which presents childhood as a realm of infinite
potential that is limited, cramped, and restricted by adult mores, duties,
artifice, and hypocrisy. By Hegels time, this view had numerous German exponents: Friedrich Schiller, the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, the poet Novalis. Schiller, for example, in Naive and Sentimental
Poetry (179596), who refers to our lost childhood, which eternally remains most dear to us but also fills us with melancholy because in beholding childhood, we are touched . . . because we look upward from
the limitation of our condition, which is inseparable from the determination
[Bestimmung] to which we have attained, to the unlimited determinability
[Bestimmtbarkeit] of the child and its pure innocence. . . . In the child, disposition and determinability are represented; in us, the fulfillment that forever remains far short of these; our childhood is the only undisfigured
nature that we still encounter in civilized humanity.8 In adults, only the
naive temperament (Gesinnung) retains a childlike innocence and simplicity in the midst of the artificial circumstances of fashionable society
(NSP, 9293);9 it achieves its highest form in genius, which, led only
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by nature or instinct . . . with unpretentious simplicity and facility . . .

proceeds not by accepted principles, but by flashes of insight and feeling to its most sublime and profound thought: the utterances of a god
in the mouth of a child (NSP, 98). Similarly, in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794), Schiller, although noting that
the unlimited determinability of the human mind prior to being determined by experience is an empty infinity, a mere absence of determination (Bestimmunglosigkeit) or empty potential (Vermgen), laments that
this potential becomes an effective force only through limits . . . only
through negation and exclusion; reality is then there, but infinity is
lost (Nineteenth letter).10 But just as genius, the naive temperament, is
the restoration of childhood naturalness in adulthood, aesthetic feeling
restores mans infinite potential, not as empty indeterminacy, but as a
full infinity, as aesthetic freedom of determination from either the
senses or reason. Although man possesses humanity prior to every determinate condition into which he can enter, but he loses it in entering into
every determinate condition by acting, he regains it in aesthetic feeling,
the feeling of total potentiality in which our humanity expresses itself
with a purity and integrity as if it had not yet experienced impairment
(Abbruch) through the influence of external forces (Twenty-first letter;
AEM, 14445). Actualization and development, from child to adult and
from unrealized potential to determinacy, involves a loss not only of innocence but also of infinite possibilities sacrificed for the sake of the few
possibilities among infinitely many that became determinate and made
actual. Only through aesthetic feeling can infinite potential be restored
and insight and great sentiments (Gesinnungen) achieved (Twenty-third
letter; AEM, 16263).
The poet, the sensitive person of feeling and natural insight, is,
as Schiller put it in On Grace and Dignity (1793), the beautiful soul who
retains the natural and spontaneous morality of the child even after developing adult reasoning and moral judgment.11 His fine feeling makes
him an artistic and moral genius, unhampered by accepted principles;
in him, morality is second nature in which sense and reason, duty
and inclination harmonize (HL, 314). His feelings are laws for all races
and all men (NSP, 97), just as Kants artistic genius is that through
which nature gives the rule to art (CJ, section 46; 174). The beautiful
souls vocation is the attainment of mystical union with God through the
love of others,12 a love that transcends the self and reaches for the infinite, beyond the limitations and impediments of finite human circumstance and conventional morality, beyond the contention and strife of
the everyday worlda vision that in its renunciation of worldly striving
is all too clearly half in love with easeful death, as expressed in Nova-
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liss Hymns to the Night, where melancholy and infinite longing for his
dead beloved allows the poet to behold her transfigured features in the
night sky and makes him long for eternal night, . . . eternal slumber.13
The cult of feeling, intuition, and moral genius (moralische Genialitt) gives rise to the moral doctrine that places individual moral conviction above public law and morals and immediate intuition above articulated conceptual knowledge, such that the individuals inner life is held
to contain greater riches than can ever be expressed in words or deeds,
and the acts and thoughts that give outward reality and determinacy to
inwardness rob it of its truth: Why cannot living Spirit appear to Spirit?
Once the soul speaks, thenalas!it is no longer the soul speaking.14
All these elements are found together in the philosophy of F. H.Jacobi, probably the main target of Hegels critique of immediacy. Jacobi
ranges himself firmly on the side of the individual subject, individual
conscience, and inexpressible intuitions, both sensory intuitions and
direct personal apprehensions of God; he is opposed to universal laws of
thought, nature, and morality, all of which he regards as a negation of
the true self and of concrete, sensible nature and a concrete, personal
God. In his Open Letter to Fichte (1799), Jacobi denounces the living
death of the absolutely universal law of reason, the unconditional
universal laws, rules without exception, and rigid obedience that the
ego imposes on itself and which negate all otherness. The hollow nut
of autonomy leaves man trapped within Fichtes empty, pure and bare
ego, the I = I that lacks real selfhood.15 Only the heart, he says, can
raise man above himself and give him a distant presentiment of goodness in itself, just as an instinctive reason based on love forces me to
believe the conceptually impossible and informs me of a highest being
above and outside me, the God of faith, and not Fichtes divinized autonomous Ego. Against divine Reason and its laws, Jacobi declares himself an atheist and ungodly one who . . . wants to lie as Desdemona lied
while dying, . . . wants to break the law and oath like Epaminondas,16
like Johan de Wit;17 . . . to attempt temple robbery like David18yes, to
pull out ears of corn on the Sabbath if only because I am hungry and
law is made for man, not man for the law.19 Duty for duty, freedom
in the absolute indefinite, is nihilism, the will that wills nothing.
Only feeling, of the heart and the senses, brings man into contact with
an external and absolute reality: goodness, God, nature. Feeling is an
intuition of an external reality, faith or belief (Glaube) in an existence
that transcends the Ego and gives content to the Self; both immediate
self-knowledge (Wissen) and conscience (Gewissen) are the work of a secret something in which our heart, understanding and sense combine
(HL, 315).20
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Hegels Critique of Romantic Immediacy

and the Beautiful Soul
Hegel characterizes the position of Jacobi and the romantics this way:
What is here called faith or immediate knowledge must also be identified with inspiration, the hearts revelations, truths implanted in man by
nature, all of which are marked by the immediate or self-evident way that
these are presented in consciousness. It is this subjective certainty that
becomes the criterion of truth; modern views . . . put great value on the
mere fact of conviction . . . there being no [objective] standard by which
we can measure its truth (HL, 99, 105, 35). Belief or faith is a certainty
within consciousness precisely because the belief is an object of immediate intuition, like Descartess cogito, no matter whether what is believed
in is God or a thing present to the senses (HL, 9798, 100, 105). But this
renders Jacobis faith both a purely personal revelation that wants to be
taken as valid for everyone and a purely formal category applicable to
very different facts and beliefs. Rather than being concrete, pure and
simple intuition is as formal and abstract as Fichtes I = I. Worse, mere
conviction can justify any belief, all superstition and idolatry, and any
act, however wrong and immoral, simply on the grounds that the person
was convinced of being in the right and acted in accordance with her
convictions (HL, 98, 1078).21
Jacobis sensory intuition is supposed to grasp sensuous existence in
its concrete richness and individuality as something that is certain insofar as it belongs to me and my experience, something that is mine and
shares in the certainty of my self-awareness. In sensory feeling, the thing
is given as simply being, just as the I grasped in self-feeling simply
is (PS, 5859; HL, 31). But everything and anything is an individual,
sensible this given here and now, and so is neither this nor that . . .
and with equal indifference this as well as that, just as every I is itself
to the exclusion of all others and in that respect is just like every other
I. I may mean to designate something that is individual and uniquely
mine through the words this, here, now, I, in speaking of what is
sensibly present to me at this very moment of my experience, but what I
actually say is every this and every I, being in general and I-hood
or subjectivity in general, a wholly abstract universality. It is just not possible for us to say or express in words a sensuous being that we mean
or an I that would be uniquely my own, and in fact, language, which is
the medium of consciousness in its universality, reverses the meaning of
what I mean to say, not letting the meaning get into words at all. Consequently, the inexpressible, whether feeling or sensation or the self in
its uniqueness, far from being the highest truth is the most unimport-
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ant and untrue, the irrational and indeterminate, indistinguishable in

its content from Nothing (PS, 5866; HL, 31, 12527).22 The supposed
certainty (Gewissheit) of sensuous intuition vanishes into the thing with
manifold sensible properties expressed though universal terms and mediated through the categories of the understanding (Verstand). In order
for sensuous intuition to attain truth and become something determinate, it must be expressed in language and grasped through universal
concepts; it must become both rational and objective.
Conscience (Gewissen) is subjective certainty on the moral plane.
For conscience, its moral conviction is both the determination of its
concrete obligations in the particular circumstances in which it is called
upon to act and its way of knowing itself as a concrete personality in its
individuality: now is the law made for the self, not the self for the law
(PS, 38687; PG, 46769; HL, 9798).23 All that matters is that one be
true to oneself in acting in accordance with ones convictions in their
uncorrupted natural form, and that one accord to others the same
right, including the right to hold different convictions, this toleration
of differing convictions being the essence of political liberalism (GS, 285,
501).24 But when feeling and the law of the heart are set above the law
of the land, this is nothing other than arbitrary subjective opinion being
placed higher than the authority of thousands of years of human experience, and emotional enthusiasm being placed higher than reason, with
the added difficulty that if my conviction justifies me in breaking the law,
then other peoples convictions and feelings equally justify their condemnation of me (EPR, 153, 176, 17980; GS, 287). The moral genius of the
beautiful soul, the moral inspiration akin to that which allows the artist
to surpass the rules and create new forms and genres (PS, 39798; PG,
48081), might be required at a time when laws have not attained full historical development, but once laws have been given a rational basis, the
right of individuals to their subjective determination to freedom is fulfilled
in obeying laws and institutions that constitute the enduring power by
which the lives of individuals are governed and which, as an objective
system of rights and duties binding on everyone, constitutes the common
and universal spiritual essence of individuals, the actual vitality [Lebendigkeit] in which each has its own self-feeling [Selbstgefhl] and lives as in
its element (EPR, 19092, 196). Only indeterminate subjectivity that
is not satisfied with the universal, and longs to attain distinctiveness and
individuality through being an exception, regards binding duties as a
limitation on freedom (EPR, 19294).
If one wants to be an exception without also being a criminal,
then one can only express ones individuality in poetryin words rather
than actions. Ones genius can then be admired by ones circle, but at
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the cost of leading a purely literary existence (ILH, 151) in which what
is recognized is not the actuality of ones deeds but the sincerity of ones
expressed convictions (GS, 512). Only the echo of ones speech returns
from the community (Gemeinde) or circle of friends, who rejoice in the
mutual assurance of their conscientiousness and good intentions, but
this unmediated unity of self and others is just the emptiness of the I = I
writ large (PS, 39799; PG, 48083). Such indeterminate subjectivity
does not attain existence or the objective determinacy of action, but remains within itself and has no actuality (EPR, 192). It lacks the power of
externalization because it lives in fear of besmirching the splendor of
its inner being by action, and in order to preserve the purity of its heart,
it flees from contact with actuality and persists in its self-willed powerlessness, wanting its moral judgment to be taken for actual deeds, and expressing lofty sentiments (Gesinnungen) in literary productions instead of
acting (PS, 399403; PG, 48387; ILH, 150; GS, 521). Entangled in the
contradiction between its pure self and the necessity to externalize itself
in actuality, the beautiful soul is unable to realize its vision of oneness
with others, and goes mad or wastes away in yearning and consumption
(PS, 4067; PG, 491).
To attain actuality, it is necessary to act, and all action carries with
it the one-sidedness of partiality of a particular individual acting in particular circumstances, that is, a selfishness that contradicts the universality of duty (PS, 404; PG, 489); only a stone is innocent (GS, 502).
In wanting to love all, in choosing for all and against none, the beautiful soul hopes to preserve the unlimited, infinite determinability of
its full humanity in its purity and integrity (Schiller), but in refusing to
pass from determinability to a determination that will limit it by actualizing one potentiality at the expense of others and helping some at the
expense of others, it in fact chooses no one and does nothing for anyone, and loves only itself. Not even its self-sacrifice in madness (Friedrich
Hlderlin) or consumption (Novalis) benefits anyone; its feeling and
moral vision accomplish no real change in the world. Real action would
involve adapting itself to the world and finding effective means of realizing its ends, which would inevitably involve compromises, risks, and partiality, actualizing some potentialities and sacrificing others, benefiting
some particular others at the expense of others. Not willing to do this,
the beautiful souls supposed richness of moral sentiments is exposed
as bankrupt, its supposed selflessness revealed as self-worship (PS, 397).
Whether at the level of sensory experience or moral action, the unexpressed and the unactualized is the most impoverished and least real, not
the richest and most infinite. Actualization requires determination, and
so limitation, but without such limitation, infinite potential remains as
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vague, empty, and amorphous as unformed clay, much as children represent infinite potential, but have no definite character.
4. Deleuze: The Virtual Is Superior

to the Actual
With Deleuze, by contrast, we encounter a sensibility that is in many respects more closely aligned with the romantic ideal of infinite potentiality.
I have dealt with Deleuzes response to Hegels critique of sense-certainty
elsewhere;25 here my focus is rather Deleuzes privileging of the virtual
over the actual. Hence the privilege of the fractured I of schizophrenia, which opens Being directly onto difference without the mediation
of concepts, over the identity of the I of the I think (DR, 58); hence
the valorization of Dionysian dismemberment in the eternal return, in
which the thing is reduced to the difference which fragments it and to
all the differences implicated in it and through which it passes (DR, 64);
hence the privileging of the body without organs over the body differentiated into organs and functions which limit and alienate the intensive vital flows;26 hence the possibility of a counter-actualization which
could return to the virtual tendencies at a virtual point where divergent
tendencies converge again (B, 2829) and seek to actualize them in a
different way from how they have in fact been actualized (LS, 14851). It
is as if actual life were a degradation of virtual life; as if virtual life were a
value higher than actual life and through which actual life is denounced.
Deleuze is not unaware of the danger of a philosophy of difference
falling into the stance of the beautiful soul who grants everyone the right
to his convictions, a stance he mocks rather mercilessly. The beautiful
soul sees nothing but reconcilable and peacefully coexisting differences
and says: We are different but not opposed, seeing in differences mere
disagreements and even misunderstandings, acting like a justice of
the peace thrown onto the battlefield, whereas the affirmation of difference is a power of aggression and selection which destroys the beautiful
soul and its pious mystifications, and aligns itself with the bloody and
inexpiable struggles of history (DR, xx, 52, 207). The problem lies elsewhere.
We can begin with the notion of the problem itself, a notion that
is polyvalent in Deleuze, being at once mathematical, biological, social,
and metaphysical (DR, 220). In mathematics, it is the determination of
the problem which is crucial and which delineates the range of possible
solutions by assigning relations and points, places and functions, posi-
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tions and differential thresholds (DR, 207), differential elements and

corresponding singular points that define the field of the problem (DR,
209). This is why it is true both that a problem always has the solution it
deserves as a function of how it is posed, the conditions under which it
is determined as a problem, and the means and the terms available for
posing it (B, 16) and that a solution always has the truth it deserves according to the problem to which it is a response (DR, 159). A problem,
if properly posed, tends to solve itself by itself (B, 29). Deleuze, following Bergson, finds the root of the problem in life itself, in the lan vital,
which determines itself in posing and solving problems: The construction of the organism is both the posing of a problem and a solution (B,
16), as for example the construction of the eye is above all the solution
to a problem posed with respect to light (B, 103; DR, 211). A problem and its conditions are differentiated, virtually, as reciprocal relations
among terms, and the solution is the actualization of this virtual field into
distinct species and parts which incarnate these relations and functions
(DR, 207): An organism is a set of real terms and relations (dimension,
position, number) which actualizes . . . to this or that degree relations
between differential elements of the virtual field (DR, 185). A solution
does not resemble the conditions by which the problem is determined,
although it can resemble something that was a solution to a different
problem and produced by entirely dissimilar lines of evolutionary development (B, 106; DR, 212), but its success is determinable not through
comparison with other solutions or other beings, but solely in relation
to the problem to which it is a response. With respect to how the problem was posed and the means available for solving it, each solution is as
perfect as it can be in varying degrees (B, 103). Nevertheless, it is still a
failure in relation to the movement that invents it: life as movement alienates itself in the material form it gives rise to; in actualizing itself, in differentiating itself, it loses contact with the rest of itself (B, 104). Every
species is an arrested movement, and necessarily so, since the lan vital
is a virtual whole that actualizes itself along divergent lines, divergent tendencies that, when actualized, exclude and are external to one another
as actual existences (B, 1048; DR, 21112). Beyond the point where they
diverge in the process of actualization and so become actual, vital tendencies coexist in a pure virtuality that is the lan vital itself, a virtuality
in the course of actualizing itself, a simple unity in the course of differentiating itself, a totality in the course of dividing itself, shared out and
divided among the actual differentiations it produces (B, 9294, 113).
Actualization of the virtual creates divergent lines of differentiation corresponding to differences in nature and actualized in different species,
such that what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and
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distributes itself into lines or parts that cannot be added up (B, 4243,
94, 9798, 101, 104)
On the one hand, actualization is genuinely creative (B, 98; DR,
212): lines of differentiation actualize by invention, they create in these
conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level which they incarnate without being restricted by preestablished
ends (B, 1013). On the other hand, the Whole must create the divergent lines by which it actualizes itself, it is forced to create its lines of
differentiation in order to actualize itself (B, 106, 97). It must because
even though the virtual is already in itself completely determinate as a
problematic field, it lacks the set of determinations belonging to actual
existence and which are incarnated in the object-solution that results
from actualization, as a system of differential relations is incarnated
both in a species and in the organic parts that compose it and differentiate it from other species (DR, 209). So although this actualization of
the virtual is necessary to produce an integral and complete solution to the
problem (DR, 20910), it at the same time involves a separation of the actual species from the lan vital, as if each living being were a slice shaved
off the original virtual whole. Each slice, by virtue of its integrality or
integrity, bears witness to its origin in a virtual whole (B, 95), and yet as
divided up into divergent and exclusive series (matter-life, plant-animal,
instinct-intelligence) (B, 94, 108), it loses contact with the rest of the lan
vital. Between actual terms and real relations, negative relations appear;
the virtual, like the unconscious, however, knows nothing of the negative
(DR, 108, 207, 235).
What has happened here? As with the romantics, it is as if actualization were in a sense a betrayal of the infinite potential of the virtual. Yet
Deleuze does not start off from a determinable but indeterminate state, as
Schiller does, but from the virtual, which is already fully differentiated and
fully real: it is a structure (DR, 209), a fully determined and differentiated
problem with its ideal positions, functions, and coordinates (DR, 207), a
system of differences or intensities, a virtual multiplicity. The structuralvirtual elements are not actual (DR, 183), but they are completely determined along with the determination of the problem which establishes
the field of its solutions. The movement from virtual to actual is thus
not from indeterminate to determinate, but from a virtually differentiated problem or Idea, differential relations among members of a set, to
divergent actualizations or differenciation into solutions to the problem:
species and parts, actual divergent tendencies, individuated individuals
(DR, 183, 20712, 220, 25558). Yet these solutions never exhaust the
problem: A problem does not exist outside of its solutions. But far from
disappearing, it insists and persists in the solutions that cover it over
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(DR, 163). The actual, products of actualization, never exhaust the virtual; the virtual always retains something of its potential and points to
the possibility of other actualizations, other solutions. In that respect, the
virtual stands higher than the actualizations deriving from it, its power is
more profound and subterranean. Conversely, the actual never rises to
the heights or descends to the depths of the virtual. In fact, the actual
is a flattening out and taming of the wild differences contained in the
virtual, both a separation and ordering of divergent tendencies in the
process of actualization itself, and then a blending and homogenizing
of differences in the mixed objects of empirical experience (B, 2227).
Difference in itselfdifference as virtual multiplicity, the virtual whole
from which all divergent lines emerge, the ultimate unity that differentiates itself and causes each difference to pass through all the others in a
system of complications and implications (DR, 5657), difference which
affirms disparity, dissemblance, and the many (DR, 300), can indeed be
thought independently of all forms of negation (limitation, opposition,
degradation) (B, 46), but actualized difference appears as a degradation
of virtual difference.
Empirical Perception and the Empirical Ego

as Degraded Difference
Two examples may elucidate this flattening and homogenizing of difference in the passage from the virtual to the actual: sense perception and
the empirical self. In both cases, an intensive difference is flattened out
and diminished in its actualization in the realm of extension.
What in fact is a sensation? It is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface. Quality comes from this: it
is nothing other than contracted quantity (B, 74), a contraction of elementary excitations (DR, 72) on a privileged surface of the body (DR,
96). This contracted quantity is intensity, a difference in quantity that
includes the unequal in itself and is defined as internal difference with
itself (DR, 23234). Difference of potential, difference of intensity, is
the being of the sensible and the reason for qualitative diversity (DR,
57, 22223, 266). Intensive difference is never given in experience (B,
92); rather, in experience, intensity appears subordinated to qualities
which fill up extension, and so we are acquainted with intensity only as
already developed in extension and covered over by [sensible] qualities
(DR, 223).
Not only is intensive difference covered over, but it is also can-
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celled out in the extended region in which it is distributed through a

process of equalization that annuls the inequality or disparateness which
constitutes an intensity; extension develops, externalizes and homogenizes the distances and disparities involved in intensity (DR, 230). Intensity, then, the being of the sensible, cannot be empirically sensed or
perceived because in experience it is always covered by a quality which
alienates it or contradicts it (DR, 23637). Only as explicated in extension and qualities does intensity become negative: an opposition of contrary qualities, the limitation of one extension or quality by another, the
increase of one power at the price of the decrease of another, in a conservative, zero-sum game: the conservation of energy of matter, and so
on (DR, 235). Intensity is not explicated without being cancelled in this
differenciated [that is, actualized] system that it creates in extension
(DR, 255) because the law of extension is equality (extended space is
homogeneous) and the law of quality is resemblance (DR, 235). But in
itself, intensity is no more quantitative than extensive and knows nothing of negation (DR, 238). Even as explicated in extension, the intensity
remains in itself, implicated in itself (DR, 228): At the moment when
they are explicated in a system (once and for all), the differential, intensive or individuating factors bear witness to their persistence in implication and the eternal return as the truth of their implication (DR, 256).
Which is to say: outside of the empirical time of successive moments,
there is the time that doubles back on itself and repeats itself in the eternal return, the virtual returning to itself and determining itself as differing from itself not once and for all but for all times, at each instant.
Virtual difference, difference in itself, constantly differentiates itself
through a world of differences implicated in one another (DR, 57, 67).
In that sense, every intensity wills itself, intends itself, retraces its tracks,
repeats itself and imitates itself across all the others, for being already
distance in itself, it opens onto disjoint or divergent series (LS, 299). But
such pure difference, one in which each difference passes through and
is implicated in all the others, is that of the virtual. As actualized, every
intensity is flattened out and homogenized in extended sensible qualities (DR, 230).
With respect to the self, we witness something similar. Deleuze argues
that Kant introduces a sort of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack, an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle, in the pure Self [Moi]
of the I think (DR, 58) through his thesis that the form of the determinability of the being of the self (the I am) by the determination
of the I think is the pure and empty form of time (DR, 8690). My
undetermined existence [the I am] can be determined only in time as
the existence of . . . a phenomenal subject, passive and receptive . . . The
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spontaneity of which I am conscious in the I think cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only
as the affection of a passive self which feels that its own thought, its own
intelligence, that by which it says I, is exercised in it and on it but not
by it (DR, 86). Between the I think and the I am is interposed the
passive self, the receptivity of intuition, and between the determination
and the undetermined, time must be interposed as the form of determinability. The result is that the passive subject lives its thinking activity as an
Other within itself: already, JE est un autre (DR, 58, 86; LS, 29899);
another always thinks in me (DR, 199200). The I is fractured from
end to end by the pure and empty form of time (DR, 8687, 276, 284),
and because time is out of joint, unevenly distributed on two sides of
the caesura between past and present, present and future, time is internally and unequally divided, and divides the self into a thousand pieces,
each unequal to the others (DR, 8990). The I then is fractured by
time, and the Self or Me is dissolved, the moments of the self no longer
being glued together by relations of similarity and homogeneity. The
I is the form of identity (I = I), the Self or Me is the matter of identity constituted by the resemblance of thought with thought (DR, 257).
Both are, as Hegel also argued, abstract universals (DR, 258), but for
Deleuze, they find their truth not in an actualization through action,
but in the fractured I and the dissolved Me (DR, 259). At this point,
says Deleuze, for a brief moment, we have entered that schizophrenia
in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought and opens
directly onto difference (DR, 58). The empirical, lived self holds schizophrenia at bay by the cogito, the JE ME pense by which thinking unifies
I and Me (DR, 257) and welds together the different facultiesfeeling, thinkingthrough a supposed common sense by which we are
supposed to think what we feel and feel what we think (DR, 133). The
empirical self of the cogito repels and retreats from the differences that
constitute it; the actual represses its virtual differences.
Rather than being a simple unity (I = Me), selves are larval subjects (DR, 78), or rather, a system of local selves endowed with forms
of receptivity (DR, 98), the system of the dissolved self (DR, 254, 259).
This larval, dissolved self more directly displays the power of metamorphosis of virtual difference than does the empirical ego (DR, 57; 219).
Its model is the egg or embryo (DR, 215). An egg is an intensive field
distinguished by orientations, axes of development, differential speeds
and rhythms, as primary factors of the actualization of a [virtual] structure (DR, 214), crisscrossed with axes and thresholds . . . traversed by
gradients marking transitions and becomings (A-O, 19, 84), both the
milieu of pure intensity and an already differentiated intensive system
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(TP, 164). The embryo is capable of undergoing tremendous movements

and displacements, Dionysian transports: The prowess and fate of the
embryo is to live the unlivable as such and the amplitude of forced movements that would break any skeleton or tear the ligaments (DR, 21415)
at the cost of twistings [torsions] and displacements which mobilize and
compromise the whole body, but free from the identity of the I and
the resemblance of the Me: it is too late afterwards (DR, 219; my emphasis). Heaven lies about us in our infancy, or rather: in utero. The embryo
is the individual as such taken directly in its field of individuation, a
field of individuation constituted of differences of intensity or bands
of intensity, potentials, thresholds and gradients that express differential relations as a virtual material to be actualized, capable of living what
would be unlivable for the adult it sketches out (DR, 25051; A-O, 19).
As composed of intensive qualities that ceaselessly interpenetrate each
other, or of little intensive souls that envelop and develop each other
through intensive interactions, the larval or embryonic subject does not
have the form of an I or a Me but rather forms the system of the dissolved Self or Me (le Moi dissou) (DR, 254, 257). Below the Self or I lies
the chaotic realm of individuation, intensities and pre-individual singularities, intensive systems (DR, 25859, 299). Moreover, the individuating
system of intensities, whatever its indeterminacy in relation to its actualization in an empirical self, is not something unfinished in individuality
or interrupted in individuation, but expresses the full, positive power
of the individual as such, distinguished from the I and the Me just as
the intensive order of implications is distinguished from the extensive
and qualitative order of explication with respect to sensation (DR, 258).
The system of the I-Me covers over and alienates the intensive individuating system that individuates it just as sensible qualities cover over and
alienate the differential intensities that constitute their being.
Deleuze and Romanticism

Unlike Schiller and the romantics, Deleuzes dissolved self is not a totally undifferentiated potential; it is an already differentiated system of
intensities and capabilities. And yet Deleuze seems to share Schillers
melancholy that the actualization in adulthood of the childs unlimited
determinability falls short of the childs total potential for becoming
(NSP, 87). Both regret that the actualization of the childs potential is
achieved only through negation and exclusion; the actualization of virtual potentialities in one form being for Deleuze always at the expense of
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all the other possible actualizations which could have been realized. In
Schillers words, after actualization, after maturation and development,
reality is then there, but infinity is lost (AEM, 12829). The power of
becoming and transformation of the egg or embryo is lost and alienated in the stability and rigidity of the organized and unified body of the
adult, in which organs have their determinate functions within a hierarchical system of needs and ends, and which would be destroyed if it
underwent the embryos Dionysian transports.
Just as Schiller sought to recapture the potential of childhood in its
full infinity through aesthetic freedom from the determinations of
the senses or reason, the practical question for Deleuze is: how can the
self open itself up and liberate the acosmic, impersonal, preindividual
singularities which it had imprisoned within the bounds of identity and
resemblance? (LS, 213). How can the self be dismantled to liberate the
flows these singularities are capable of receiving or transmitting? (A-O,
362). How can the full, positive powerthe full infinityof the intensive individual be recovered? It would be necessary for the body to
lose its organic unity and the self to lose its identity (LS, 29899). The
adult experience in which this occurs has already been alluded to: schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not just the fractured I and dissolved Self;
it is also an experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a
point that is almost unbearable . . . an intense feeling of transition, states
of pure, naked intensity, stripped of all shape and form (A-O, 18). To
this experience corresponds the body without organs, that is, a body
that resists the organization of organs into a unified, hierarchical, and
functional system of separated, extended parts (A-O, 8, 32627; TP, 158).
Here, there is no longer a self that feels, acts and recalls but a system
of affects and movements without a subject (TP, 162); no longer an integrated, organized body, but non-stratified, unformed, intense matter
through which intensities pass and circulate, a pure determination of
intensity, intensive difference (TP, 153, 164), matter that always fills space
to given degrees of intensity (A-O, 32627). The body without organs
is not fragmented or dismembered, but complete in itself, an intensive
multiplicity (LS, 18992; TP, 16465), just as schizophrenia is the process
involving the dissolution of the self, a process and not a goal, a desire
lacking nothing, a flux or flow (A-O, 13133; LS, 18889) or a connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities (TP, 161)
where these flows know nothing of meaning and aims but are part of a
pure process that fulfills and enjoys itself as desire, creation, and experimentation (A-O, 37071; TP, 156). It is a matter of de-actualizing the self,
of a counter-actualization that brings the individual closer to the side of
the virtual, the potential (A-O, 376)the protest of the individual who
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never recognizes himself in the limits of the Me and the I (DR, 259). It
is the recovery of the pre-individual singularities and intensities of the
virtual from their alienation in the I = Me in a pure process of becoming
which is manifested in intensities of feeling free from the determinations of reason and from the actualization of the powers of sensing in
the organized sense organs. If this is not exactly the romantic cult of immediacy, with its emphasis on subjectivity, it is not far from Schillers idea
that aesthetic feeling, free from the determinations of reason and the
senses, is a feeling of total potentiality as yet unimpaired by external
forces which limit and determine potentiality in a particular way (AEM,
14445), as well as Jacobis valorization of the hearts pure feeling as a
way of breaking the hollow nut of the empty, pure and bare ego.27
Similarly, Deleuzes valorization of schizophrenia as a pure process without a goal which opens us up to a field of pure intensities in their pure
state through an intense feeling of transition at the very least recalls
the romantic infatuation with madness as a way of retaining the purity of
the self, uncontaminated by actualization through deeds (PS, 399407).
For Hegel, Deleuzes valorization of potentiality and intense feeling over
the actualization of the self through the actions it performs in the world
amounts to self-willed impotence, the choice of potentiality for itself,
as the pure matter of experience, rather than for what can be done with
it. It is the attitude of the Beautiful Soul, which chooses death and madness over action.
True, Deleuze and Guattari write that dismantling the organism
has never meant killing yourself (TP, 160), and they are careful to distinguish schizophrenia as a pure process from the medical and medicalized form that renders its sufferers mentally ill. Nevertheless, death and
madness haunt schizophrenia and the body without organs. Just as the
romantic infatuation with the intensities of the inner life of feeling can
too easily lead to a longing for death (Novalis, Keats), so too one must
wonder to what degree Deleuzes setting the virtual over the actual reflects an attitude of being half in love with easeful death. We have seen
that for Hegel, feeling and sensation and potentialities for becoming,
taken in themselves and apart from their actualization in determinate
thought, word, and deed, are mere irrationality and indeterminacy, a
mere Nothing (PS, 5866; HL, 31, 12527). Yet, although Deleuzes virtual is not the merely indeterminate, but an already determinate system
of intensities, the suspicion remains that counter-actualization and the
dismantling of the empirical ego, founded on the protest of the individual who never recognizes himself in the limits of the Me and the I
(DR, 259), amounts to the desire to be rid of ones self, and is in that
sense a pursuit of nothingness. Indeed, Deleuze writes that death is im-
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plicit in the I and the Me as an internal power which frees the individuating elements [of intensity] from the form of the I and the matter of
the Me in which they are imprisoned . . . a liberation of the little differences that it involves in intensity (DR, 259; LS, 222). Of course, this is
death in its transcendental sense, as a process which never ends for as
long as one is alive, as opposed to the empirical death that always comes
from outside in the form of external forces that cause the dissolution
of the body or of its vital organization. Still, the body without organs is
the model of the death instinct: it is the nonproductive and inconsumable, outside production-consumption, outside work (A-O, 8), a refusal
of working organs and a zero intensity (A-O, 329). It may be that this
zero point of intensity is implicit in every feeling, every feeling and affect registering an increase or decrease in the bodys vital powers (A-O,
330), but to make oneself a body without organs is to pursue this zero
intensity, to seek to jam the functioning of the organs, to intensify the
organs by liberating them from the work they perform to support the organic life of the body, that is, by disorganizing them. At that point, little
larval selves may indeed emerge from beneath the skin (A-O, 9) in much
the way Lucretius describes that boneless and bloodless horde exuded
from the body when its vital functions have ceased and its soul has been
fragmented.28
Conclusion
In sum, in Deleuzes philosophy, the actualization of the virtual represents both the creative actualization of divergent tendencies and a degradation and loss of potential. In the virtual, intensities, fluxes, powers, and
potentialities coexist, interpenetrate, and mingle; as actualized in species, organic bodies, qualities, and selves, these virtual intensities are flattened out, homogenized and covered over, subjected to the rule of the
same which governs extension. We see this degradation when the lan
vital differentiates itself into species which are external to each other and
cut off from life as a whole; when intensity as the imperceptible being of
sensation is covered over by extended perceived sensible qualities; when
the individual as a field of intensities or egg is actualized in the empirical
self and a body of extended organized parts. Rather than being fulfilled
in its actualizations, the already-full virtual suffers a loss relative to the
whole of its potentials. The model for this is the egg or embryo: it is a
field of intensity, capable of great forced movements which no developed adult could withstand, the site of bands of intensity in flux, and
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the schizophrenic marks a partial return to this state of pure, tremendous potential. For both the egg and the schizophrenic, its potential
and power remain inward and within itself, even in its interactions with
its milieu through the exchanges of flows and fluxes with its outside,
which it lives as intense affect. But this intensity of affect is not translated
into actions by which the individual would express and actualize itself in
the world; it is rather a pathos, the tremendous capacity for undergoing
metamorphoses and intense feeling of a passive subject (DR, 21415).
The tremendous potential and capacity of the egg and the schizophrenic
remains in itself, undeveloped, capable of living and undergoing unimaginable transitions and intensities, but incapable of actually acting.
It is in this sense that it shares much in common with the beautiful soul
and its life of intense feeling. Just as the beautiful soul does not act because any outward action would compromise the purity of its feelings
when the soul speaks, it is no longer the soul which speaksso too for
Deleuze, any actualization compromises the purity of the virtual: pure
tendencies (B, 2223), pure intensities, pure impersonal individuating
intensive systems, virtual multiplicities in which differences coexist and
differentiate each other and which constitute the true substance, substance itself (DR, 18283), rather than the actual in which parts are external to each other and moments of time succeed each other in a linear
fashion (DR, 84).
So, for Deleuze, it seems that what counts are two extremes and not
the middle term. On the one hand, there is the pure potentiality of the
virtual whole; on the other hand, there is the liberation of potentials and
intensities in the dissolved self of the schizophrenic and the body without organs. Between, there is actualization and the actual: the world of
extended space, linear time, the thinking and acting self with its bodily
and mental faculties. Between the larval and embryonic subject and the
shattered and dissolved self, there is the adult self, the mark of which
is the courage to risk the purity of its intense feelings by deciding and
acting in the world. It is not by intensive systems that one becomes an
individual, Hegel argues, but by risking compromising the purity of intensity in action in the outer world. Speech, action, physical movement:
it is through these that the individual develops capacities in an active way,
capacities for acting, not just for undergoing experiences. It is through
these that the individual is recognized by others and so achieves selfknowledge: one is what one does. It is in this way, says Hegel, one passes
from the empty universality of the I and Me to concrete individuality.
For Hegel, that is a process of determining the indeterminate.
For Deleuze, as we have seen, the virtual is already fully differentiated, and individuation is a function of a system of intensities that differentiates one individual from others. Nevertheless, Deleuzes individua-
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tion is one of intensities and potentials, puissances, and to that extent, it is

a merely potential individuation, an individuation en puissance. However
much one embryo or egg, one schizophrenic or body without organs,
is differentiated from others by the intensities that constitute it, its individuality is passive and undergone. If the romantics idealization of
childhood seems a bit childish, the idealization of embryonic states and
schizophrenia, on the grounds that these are more immediate expressions of the virtual, seems like even more of a flight from the adult world
of action in which people acquire a definite character. Actualization is a
loss only of undeveloped potentials, but to save a potential in its undeveloped state to preserve its purity only serves to ensure that nothing comes
of these potentials. In that case, one has preserved the purity of ones
potentials, but one has lost everything one might have done.
Notes
1. G. W. F.Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
2. Hegel, Hegels Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 82105.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 104.
4. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 236.
5. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Light Books, 1988); Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
6. Deleuze, Nietzsche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), referred to parenthetically in text as NP, followed by page
number
7. See also Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol.
3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp
Taschenbuch, 1970), 65.
8. Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime,
trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 85, 87, 103.
9. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), sec. 54; trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 206 (referred to in the text as CJ ): navet is the eruption of the sincerity that originally was natural to humanity and
which is opposed to the art of dissimulation that has become our second nature.
10. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, bilingual
edition, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A.Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967), 12829. Referred to parenthetically in text as AEM, followed by page
number.
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11. Schillers On Grace and Dignity in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New
Translation, ed. Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden
House, 2005).
12. Hegel, Spirit: Chapter Six of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Daniel
Shannon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 21216.
13. Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans. R. M.Browning, in German Poetry
from 17501900, ed. Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 1984), 112
13, 12829.
14. Schiller, Die Sprache, in Schiller, Werke in Zwei Banden, ed. Erwin
Ackerknecht (Munich: Droemersche Verlaganstalt, 1964), 1:200.
15. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Open Letter to Fichte (1799), trans. Diana I. Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi and Schelling, ed. Ernst
Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 11941.
16. Theban general and statesman (c. 410362 B.C.E.) who liberated Thebes
and other Greek territories from Spartan subjugation.
17. Dutch statesman (16251672) of republican convictions, assassinated
by followers of William of Orange.
18. 1 Samuel 21:16.
19. A reference to Mark 2:2328; The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath; compare Matthew 12:18 (I have altered Behlers translation to capture the biblical allusion).
20. This note by Hegels translator William Wallace cites Jacobis novel
Woldemar (1781 edition), Jacobi, Werke (Leipzig, Ger.: G. Fleischer), 5:122.
21. See also Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17879.
22. See also Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), 82108.
23. Hegel here seems to be parodying Jacobis Open Letter to Fichte:
the law is made for man, not man for the law. See Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and
Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 5045.
24. See also Alexandre Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, 2nd edition,
ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1985 [1947]), 14951.
25. Bruce Baugh, Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuzes Response to
Hegel, Man and World 25, no. 2 (1992): 13348; Bruce Baugh, Deleuze and
Empiricism, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24 (1993): 1531.
26. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press).
27. Jacobi, Open Letter to Fichte.
28. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E.Latham (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1971), 11718.
Political Bodies Without Organs:

On Hegels Ideal State and
Deleuzian Micropolitics
Pheng Cheah
Deleuzes antipathy to Hegelian dialectics is well known.1 According to

Deleuze, Hegel is Nietzsches archenemy and Nietzsches pluralist theory
of forces is resolutely antidialectical: The concept of the Overman is
directed against the dialectical conception of man, and transvaluation
is directed against the dialectic of appropriation or the suppression of
alienation. Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsches work as its cutting edge. We can already feel it in the theory of forces. We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsches work if we do not see against whom
its principal concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this
work as the enemy against whom it fights.2 Intellectual historians will
undoubtedly someday elaborate on Deleuzes antipathy as part of a more
general rebellion of post-1968 French philosophy against the tyranny of
Hegelianism. In Vincent Descombess succinct words, in 1968, all that
was modernthat is, Marx, Freud and so on, as beforewas hostile to
Hegel.3 The aims of this chapter are more circumscribed. It focuses on
one particular strand of Deleuzes anti-Hegelianism: the way in which
his account of life breaks with Hegels organismic account of life and the
political implications of this break insofar as the living organism supplies
the metaphorical template not only for Hegels theory of the ideal state
(the state as Idea) but also, more generally, for almost all normative theories of the political in modernity. If Deleuzes nonorganismic vitalism offers an understanding of life that is no longer centered on the organism
or on organization as the source of life, then how can we conceive of the
political body in nonorganizational terms? Or, which is the same question, what is a nonorganizational politics?
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The Hegelian State and the

Animal Organism
The clearest statement of modern political organicismthe fundamental connection between the vitality of organic life and the rational legitimacy that constitutes the strength of the modern territorial stateis
found in the following passage from Hegels Philosophy of Right:
The idealism which constitutes sovereignty is the same determination
as that according to which the so-called parts of an animal organism
are not parts, but members or organic moments whose isolation and
separate existence [Fr-sich-Bestehen] constitute disease . . . It is the
same principle which we encountered . . . as self-relating negativity,
and hence as universality determining itself to individuality [Einzelheit], in
which all particularity and determinacy are superseded.4
The principle of self-relation is the key to Hegels theory of the organic

state. It axiomatically joins the condition of freedom achieved in the
state to the animal organism. For Hegel, freedom is the concepts selfdetermination, its teleological development to actuality in which it
gives itself objective being whilst preserving itself. This principle of selfrelationthe concepts return to self from particularity and objective
externalityis the basis of the ideal state as the actualization of freedom. But since this principle first becomes objectively present to us in
the animal as organism with a nervous system, irritation, and sensibility,
the modern state in which freedom is actualized is literally a spiritual
organism, in which the principle at work in the animal organism is raised
to the higher level of spiritual life. The animal is thus a template for understanding the ideal state. It supplies the general framework for Hegels
elaboration of the states concrete institutions and their relations to each
other, to civil society, as well as to individual citizens in such a manner
that the vitality of the state is repeatedly distinguished from anything artificial or mechanical (techne or Kunst).
Unfortunately, the misinterpretation of the organismic metaphor
as a way of thinking in which the part is always subordinated to the whole
has led to a corresponding misinterpretation of Hegels political organicism as a simple form of right-wing political conservatism in which the
individual and his subjectivity are always sacrificed to the cohesion of the
state, thereby paving the way for political authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Accordingly, Hegels state as Idea has been linked to the Prussian
state of his time, thereby allowing it to be connected to Bismarck and
later, to National Socialism. There is also the problem of Hegels iden-
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tification of the state with reason, which has been interpreted as an example of state absolutism in which the state and the status quo it governs
and administers cannot be questioned because it is the sole embodiment
of reason. Hegels infamous dictum from the Preface of the Philosophy
of Right, What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational [Was
vernnftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernnftig]has
been read as an authoritarian justification of existing political institutions as rational by the likes of Rosenzweig, Popper, and so on.5
For present purposes, two features of Hegels political philosophy
are important. First, the organismic metaphor in Hegels account of the
state is so thoroughly pervasive that he even says at moments that the
state is a living organism. Second, far from subordinating the members
of the organism to the whole, the self-relation of an organism that constitutes its life is such that the individuality of each member can only
develop to its fullest by returning or being related back to the whole
even as the strength of the wholeits vitality or healthis essentially this
capacity of self-return and self-relation. As we will see, it is precisely this
account of life that Deleuze seeks to question.
But what exactly does Hegel mean by life and what are the consequences of understanding the state in organismic terms?
A bad state is one which merely exists; a sick body also exists, but it has
no true reality. A hand which has been cut off still looks like a hand
and exists, but it has no actuality . . . The state is indeed essentially
secular and finite, and has particular ends and particular powers; but
its secularity is only one of its aspects, and only a spiritless perception
can regard it as merely finite. For the state has a soul which animates it
[eine belebende Seele], and this animating soul is subjectivity, which creates
distinctions on the one hand but preserves their unity on the other . . .
[To contend] that the secular spirit, that is, the state, is purely finite is
a one-sided view, for actuality is not irrational. A bad state, of course, is
purely secular and finite, but the rational state is infinite within itself.
(PR, 270Z, 3023; 429)
Hegels unmistakable twofold reference to the Aristotelian conception of

form indicates a revival of a teleological understanding of life. Aristotle
had defined the living body as a body with organs, an ensouled body
where the soul as intelligent form is the source of life because through
the ascription of ends, it directs the parts of the body as organs or members of a whole, thereby organizing these parts and giving actuality to a
merely material body that would otherwise only have life potentially.6 At
the same time, he had also characterized the relation between the state
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and the individual in terms of the organic relation of interdependence

between whole and members:
The state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual,
since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the
whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except homonymously, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand
will be no better than that. But things are defined by their function and
power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no
longer have their proper quality, but only that they are homonymous.7
In Hegels organismic metaphor, the animating soul, the source of

life itself, is reason. However, what is distinctive about Hegels conception
of life is that reason is only fully active when it has externalized itself in
member-organs that have full individuality even as these fully developed
individuals are brought back to the universal whole, which is for that reason a concrete individual, a universal that has attained particularity. Now,
for Hegel, organismic vitality is only truly manifest in the animal, whose
nervous system gives it the capacity for sensation and the ability to distinguish between itself and the external world. The animal is truly alive because it has a subjectivity that does not lose itself in its contact with externality because it can limit or check its relation to alterity. Alterity is both
the external world, which the animal organism has to assimilate, and the
animals own members, which are distinct individuals. As Hegel puts it,
the organic individuality exists as subjectivity in so far as the externality [uerlichkeit] proper to shape [Gestalt] is idealized into members
[Gliedern], and the organism in its process outwards preserves inwardly
the unity of the self. This is the animal nature which, in the actuality
[Wirklichkeit] and externality of immediate singularity [Einzelheit], is
equally, on the other hand, the inwardly reflected self of singularity,
inwardly present subjective universality.8
We see from this that the organism is a process in which a subjectivity

takes an external shape that it idealizes into members or organs of the
whole, each with their proper ends or functions, thereby enabling the
organism to retain or maintain the unity of the self in the process of externalization. The organismic process is therefore a dynamic of limiting
the subjectivitys relation to alterity so that it can return back/relate to
itself. Animal subjectivity, Hegel writes, consists in preserving itself in
its corporeality [Leiblichkeit] and in its contact with an outer world and,
as the universal, remaining at home with itself [bei sich selbst zu bleiben]
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(PN, 350Z, 352; 430). The organism thereby achieves a complete unity
of ideal form and particular material content, inward subjectivity and
external objectivity.
When an organism becomes diseased, it comes into conflict with an
external power that is not organic. Here, an individual member of the
organism establishes itself in isolation and persists in its particular activity against the activity of the whole, the fluidity and all-pervading process
of which is thus obstructed [dessen Flssigkeit und durch alle Momente hindurchgehender Proze hiermit gehemmt ist] (PN, 371, 428; 520). Disease is
that which undermines the organismic living process. Whereas the living process involves a limitation of the relation to alterity that reduces
otherness to a form of self-mediation, in disease, otherness arrests and
obstructs the process of self-mediation. Thus, whereas health designates
the right proportion of the organic self to its existence (Dasein), a commensurate relationship of the organic to the nonorganic, so that for the
organism there is nothing nonorganic which it cannot overcome, disease arises from a disproportion between the self and its external being,
an alienation or non-properness in which the negative (the external
shape the organism takes in immediate existence) is not sublated (aufgehoben) and does not return to the organism itself but fights with it such
that a dehiscence is introduced in the organism between its inner self
and its external shape (Gestalt) (PN, 371Z, 428; 521):
Disease arises when the organism, as simply immediate, is separated
from its inner sideswhich are not factors, but whole, real sides. The
cause of disease lies partly in the organism itself, like ageing, dying, and
congenital defects: partly also in the susceptibility of the organism, in its
simply immediate being, to external influences, so that one side is increased beyond the power of the inner resources of the organism. The
organism is then in the opposed forms of being and self; and the self is
precisely that for which the negative of itself is. A stone cannot become
diseased, because it is destroyed in the negative of itself, is chemically
decomposed and its form does not endure: because it is not the negative of itself which overlaps its opposite, as in illness and self-feeling.
(PN, 371Z, 429; 521)
For example, one manifestation of disease involves the overcharging of

one member, which begins to compensate such that it functions not as
part of a whole, but in an isolated way, to the point where the member
dominates the whole. In this scenario, one of the organisms organs becomes entangled with a nonorganic power, thereby undermining the
unity that gives to the organism its vitality. While medicine can restore
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the formal activity of the whole over the particular irritation, when an
organism succumbs to this dividedness, it will die.
If we return now to the deployment of the organismic metaphor in
the political sphere, we see that the living process requires the full development of the subjective freedom of individual members. In Hegels words:
In an organic relationship, the units in question are not parts [Teile]
but members [Glieder], and each maintains the others while fulfilling
its own function; the substantial end [Zweck] and product of each is to
maintain the other members while simultaneously maintaining itself.
(PR, 286A, 328; 457)
The essence of the modern state is that the universal should be linked
with the complete freedom of particularity [Besonderheit] and the wellbeing of individuals . . . Thus, the universal must be activated, but subjectivity on the other hand must be developed as a living whole [ganz und
lebendig entwickelt werden]. Only when both moments are present [bestehen]
in full measure can the state be regarded as articulated and truly organized [gegliedert und wahrhaft organisierter werden]. (PR, 260Z, 283; 407)
We can see from the above that Hegels political philosophy is not politically conservative insofar as it does not forestall critical resistance to
state domination. For just as not all existing shapes or objects have actuality (Wirklichkeit), not all existing states are actual or inherently rational.
Hegel notes that there are inadequate, deficient states that merely exist
because they are sunk in contingency and arbitrariness. In contradistinction, the ideal state has genuine actuality and is the vehicle of the infinite,
but only insofar as it embodies the vital organismic process in which the
full subjectivity of individual members is developed:
The state is not a work of art [Kunstwerk]; it exists in the world, and
hence in the sphere of arbitrariness, contingency, and error, and bad
behaviour may disfigure it in many respects. But the ugliest man, the
criminal, the invalid, or the cripple is still a living human being [ein lebender Mensch]; the affirmative aspectlife [das Leben]survives [besteht]
in spite of such deficiencies. (PR, 258Z, 279; 404)
The problem rather lies with Hegels understanding of the affirmation that is life as the self-affirmation of reason in which the members
are brought back under the rule of universality, that is, affirmation as the
negation of the negation, as the self-mediation of reason, the return to
self of reason and the self-identity of the concept. In the political sphere,
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this understanding of affirmation takes the shape of the much-discussed

phenomenon of recognition, which is the basis for the health of the
territorial state. For Hegel, the state is the only valid form of political
life because spirit can only appear in the external shape of a concrete
individuality, that is, as a sovereignty in external relations with other sovereign states. For reasons of economy, I simply cite two passages, one on
recognition, and the other on the necessity of the territorial sovereign
state. The reader should bear in mind the correspondence between the
health of states and the health of animal organisms in relation to externality and how internal factors such as weaknesses and strengths, external
threats and common interests, can feed into each other to bring down
a state or to prop it up:
Concrete freedom requires that personal individuality [Einzelheit] and its
particular interests should reach their full development and gain recognition of their right for itself [Anerkennung ihres Rechts fr sich] (within the
system of the family and of civil society), and also that they should, on
the one hand, pass over [bergehen] of their own accord into the interest
of the universal, and on the other, knowingly and willingly recognize
[anerkennen] this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit,
and actively pursue it as their ultimate end [Endzweck] . . . The principle of
modern states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the
principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of
personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity
itself. (PR, 260, 282; 4067)
The ideality which makes its appearance in war in the shape of a contingent external relationship is the same as the ideality whereby the
internal powers of the state are organic moments of the whole. This
is apparent in various occurrences in history, as when successful wars
have averted internal unrest and consolidated the internal power of the
state. Other phenomena of the same kind include the following: nations which are reluctant or afraid to accept internal sovereignty may be
subjugated by others, and their failure to attain honour and success in
their struggles for independence has been proportionate to their initial
failure to organize the power of the state from within (that is, their freedom has died from the fear of dying); and states whose independence is
guaranteed not by armed strength but by other factors (as in those states
which are disproportionately small in relation to their neighbours) have
been able to survive with an internal constitution which would not on its
own have secured either internal or external peace. (PR, 324, 362; 493)
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Deleuzes Nonorganismic Vitalism

The intervention Deleuze makes in relation to Hegels political organicism is threefold. First, the freedom of individual subjects obtained
through the mutual recognition between state and citizen that is the basis
of the strength of the modern territorial state is reinterpreted as a freedom that is produced by modern biopower, understood, following Foucault, in terms of the power over life, the political control of life, and even
the power to make life through various technologies of discipline and government. Second, this power over life, which is properly organismic, however, discloses an internal limit to itself, a power of life, a life that is more
powerful than the life of the organism and that is the basis of organic life.
This power of life is manifested in the disorganizing of organic life and
the disarticulation of the members/organs of the organism, sometimes by
forms of disease. Third, insofar as the modern territorial state is the exemplary case of the organism at the level of political life, the life of which
Deleuze speaks is figured in terms of flows of deterritorialization. In what
follows, I will argue that Deleuzes critique of organization indicates the
problematic character of the power of life as a basis of politics.
Deleuze elaborates on the power of life that is more powerful than
the life of the organism through an ontology of force that explores the
implications of the play of the aleatory from the level of the constitution of individual organisms to the level of political forms. In his book
on Foucault, Deleuze argues that what is at stake in the formers work is
how forms are composed of relations between forces. Forces only take
on a specific form as a result of contingent relations with other forces
in a given historical situation. Hence, any given form can always decompose into forces that can be recomposed again into new forms in unpredictable ways when they come into relation with different forces.9 The
dominant tradition in the history of European philosophy has obscured
the play of the aleatory because it has always explained the constitution
of forms in terms of the subjects power of determination. The world is
regarded as indeterminate matter that is given form and constituted as
objects of appearance by the subjects sensible and rational cognitive
faculties. This image of the relation between human life and the world,
however, involves an anthropomorphic projection of the unity of rational
consciousness onto the world. Because it makes the identity of the self or
the cogito the basis of all appearance, it reduces the world to objects determined by and for the subject, that is to say, to things that are recognizable by and that resemble the subject because they conform to its ideal
or sensible forms. Hence, in Deleuzes view, even prior to the structure
of recognition that underwrites Hegels philosophy of objective spirit,
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thought as such has generally been understood through the ontological

motifs, or more precisely, topoi of recognition and resemblance. Our
thinking faculties are considered to be essentially recognitive because
their functioning together is premised on one faculty locating an object
that is given to it as identical to that given to another faculty. Recognition takes place when all the faculties together relate their given and
relate themselves to a form of identity in the object.10 The ability to do
so involves a structure of recognition because it implies that my faculties
are the same as those of another subject. Hence, my recognition of an
object presupposes the recognition of myself as being the same as another subject and, indeed, all other subjects. As Deleuze puts it, recognition . . . relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties
for everybody . . . This is the meaning of the Cogito as a beginning: it
expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it thereby expresses
the possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of object which
reflects the subjective identity; it provides a philosophical concept for the
presupposition of a common sense (DR, 133).
In Deleuzes view, this image of thought is false. Thought understood in this way can never give rise to anything new or surprising. It can
only lead to the repeated rediscovery of the same. The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognizable and the recognized; form will never inspire anything but conformities (DR, 134). This
is because recognition obscures a prior generative differential interplay
of forces that must have already been at work so that something can become determined. This interplay of forces, which is best seen in the existence of affects, is a reciprocal determination that constitutes both the
world and the self (DR, chaps. 3 and 4).
What is important for present purposes is that the interplay of
forces creates individuals that are permeable, fluid, and multiple because they are generated by productive differentiation and intensity (the
form of difference). Such individuals are prior to and do not have the
identical form of a thing, object, or a substance, a subject or a person,
whether this is an I or a self. They are more precisely modes of individuation, what Deleuze calls hacceities, mere permanences or durations that
are not localizable or locatable in or as things or persons because they
consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or
particles, capacities to affect and be affected.11 They point to a nonorganic life that precedes and is more powerful than the life of an organism
because it refers to a plane of immanence or consistency, a realm of
potentiality in which there are only unformed elements and the speeds
between them and nonsubjectified powers and the affects between them.
In contradistinction, the organism is generated in the plane of organiza-
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tion where the development of forms and the formation of subjects take
place.12 But the organism, Deleuze argues, does not genuinely embody
life. It merely traps and imprisons the play of singularity and multiplicity
that characterizes nonorganic life within an organized form, after the
latter has been actualized in subjects and objects.
Using a geological analogy, Deleuze suggests that the organism or
the process of organization is a movement of stratification. It coagulates
or condenses the plane of immanence by compressing the flow of forces
between two layers or strata (TP, 4041, 26970). But whereas organisms
will die, the plane of immanence is where life itself is liberated from
these limited forms. If everything is alive, it is not because everything
is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a
diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and
intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive
for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms (TP, 499).
Nonorganic life, the life of a body without organs (BwO), exceeds the life
and death of any subject or form. It is the movement at the membrane of
an organism, where it begins to quiver with virtuality and can break down
into potentiality and recombine again. Deleuze describes this movement
as the releasing of a life: there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and
yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of
internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of
what happens . . . A singular essence, a life.13 The indefinite article of a
life indexes virtual singularities prior to their actualization as forms, and
the in-between of already actualized forms that are always pulsing with
singularity and virtual force. The body without organs is . . . a living body
all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and
its organization (TP, 30).
The dissolution of the organism into and by the BwO is not a negation. It is the releasing of intensity and, therefore, of positive forces that
are adjacent to the organism, before stratification, before they are
articulated into an organism. Hence, it is not destructive. It frees up the
flow of forces that enable further generation and creation, which will
require the re-stratification of the released flows. The relation between
the two planes, between the organism and the BwO, is the ontological
version of Foucaults more concrete account of the relation between biopower and the power of life. Deleuze and Guattari characterize it as a relation between two poles of a continuum rather than a relation of mutual
exclusion. The two poles struggle with each other with regard to any
being, but this struggle is unceasing and cannot be resolved because both
planes are necessary to the existence of any being. Without the release of
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flows, without the movement of deterritorialization, nothing new would

be created and nothing would arise. At the same time, without the stratification that is necessary for the constitution of forms and subjects, the
plane of immanence can easily become a plane of abolition or death, a
regression into the undifferentiated (TP, 270). Hence, any being continually passes from one pole to the other: the plane of immanence causes
particles to break off from the strata even as the plane of organization
attempts to stop or weigh down the lines of flight by embedding the flows
in forms and subjects through re-stratification.
Deleuzes nonorganismic vitalism poses a radical challenge to the
central tenets of political philosophy, which has always taken the human
subject or self as the starting point and the basic unit of collective life.
The human subject and the political body are generally conceptualized
through an extended analogy in which the rational subject, political
community, and organic life are mutually defining terms. The relations
between members to each other and to the political body are modeled
on the relations between an organisms different organs and the organized whole. Accordingly, the development of political forms of increasing complexity is viewed as an ongoing process of rationalization that
resembles the rational organization of the human being as an individual
organism. This extended analogy is elaborately thematized in modern
political organicism, in which the resemblance between the living rational subject and the organized political whole is dramatized in the dynamic of recognition. As we saw, in the Hegelian version, the relation
of openness between subject and state in their mutual constitution is
such that the subject rationally accepts and internalizes the norms of the
political community as legitimate or universally rational because he recognizes his subjectivity in the political substance, that is, realizes that the
state is the substrate in which he can develop and live to the fullest as an
individual. This is the modern states source of vitality.
The motif of resemblance or recognition, however, is precisely
what Deleuzes ontology undermines. In his view, the rational subject,
the organism, and the state are similar to each other because they are
forms of stratification that obscure and cover over a more fundamental
power of life. From an ontological perspective, the rational recognition
that constitutes the subject is already a constraint that suppresses the flow
of intensities. At the sociopolitical level, the fact that the play of intensities precedes and travels across subjects and forms of collective life alike,
has three implications. First, the subject does not preexist the collective.
The subject and the collective are mutually constitutive since they are
generated by modes of organization and stratification that can intersect.
This means that the form and identity of any self, even a natural self,
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is always open to the shaping influences of its surroundings, including

social and political processes. Second, stratification always has oppressive
consequences. To take the most obvious example, the rational recognition that constitutes both individual subjects and state is simultaneously
a process of subjectification and a process of sociopolitical coercion and
control. It channels and shapes desires by blocking movement, fixing affects, and organizing forms and subjects. Recognition is therefore also
a process of segmentation, that is, stratification at the level of collective
life.14 Segmentation assigns identities or socially functional roles to the
masses (hacceities at the level of collective life), thereby making them
socially meaningful subjects. Third and most important, all the subjects
and forms within the plane of organization can be destabilized by the deterritorializing flows that occur in the plane of immanence. The fact that
deterritorialization is always real and can take place at any time means
that power over life, which seeks to organize life, can always be undermined by the power of life.
From an analytical perspective, the struggle that takes place between
the planes of immanence and organization at the level of politics can be
studied through a cartography of power that maps the different lines that
constitute individuals and groups. Simply put, the ordering and organization of collective life respectively create supple and rigid binary segments
that hierarchically divide existence into two. The codes (which correspond to stable structures or forms) and territories (which correspond
to actualized substances) of these segments need to be fixed. Deleuze
subscribes to a vaguely historical argument in which supple segmentation
is more dominant in non-Western premodern societies whereas rigid segmentation characterizes modern Western societies with their centralized
states, although he also stresses that both forms of segmentation coexist
and interact in modernity. The centralized state is the concrete actualization of the abstract machine of overcoding (Many Politics, 129).
It is coextensive with the decline of localized codes and territories in
modernity. Its univocal overcoding creates uniformity across the whole
of social space and it reterritorializes the flows released by the destruction of localized codes and territories. It leads to macrological forms of
politics such as that of class. In contradistinction, supple segmentation
involves molecular fluxes and leads to micropolitics. In modernity, segmentation also takes place via technologies of power-knowledge in the
Foucauldian sense. These technologies organize social space through the
pervasive distribution of norms. Deleuze distinguishes these two types
of lines, which are respectively, the sedentary line and the migrant line,
from a third type of line, the line of flight or the nomadic line, which is
primary and gives rise to the first two types of lines (Many Politics, 136).
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Lines of flight, which undermine segmentation, are marked by quanta

and defined by decoding and deterritorialization.
What is crucial for present purposes is that the destabilization of
the power over life by the power of life always involves the movement of
deterritorialization. Two features of a deterritorializing politics are noteworthy. First, deterritorialization is an ontological figure. It does not necessarily refer to the aimless wandering of peoples without any fixed destination or to flows of goods and money since the flux in question is that
of forces and intensities. Second, the politics of nonorganic life, a politics
that does not take organization as its central aim, is also not a simple repudiation of all forms of organization. For the BwO, which is opposed to
the organism, is not completely independent of the organism even if the
organism uproots the BwO from the plane of immanence by stratifying it
and organizing the organs (TP, 15859). Instead, the BwO is the swinging
between the organism and the plane of immanence, the movement of
dis-organizing the organism. Hence, for Deleuze, the question of a revolution has never been utopian spontaneity versus State organization . . .
The question has always been organizational . . . : is an organization possible which is not modeled on the apparatus of the State, even to prefigure the State to come? (Many Politics, 145). It is a question of a deterritorialized or nonorganizational mode of organization.
The privileging of deterritorialization over organization as an ontological figure, however, leads Deleuze and Guattari to view globalization
as a positive case of deterritorialization and to celebrate its potential as a
radical revolutionary force because its uncontrollable flows undermine
centralized forms of power. This argument was already presented in AntiOedipus where the release of the universal equivalent by the globalization
of capital was characterized as a decoding and deterritorialization that is
conducive to molecular quantum flows that escape the overcoding and
reterritorialization of the modern centralized state apparatus. In their
words, capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows,
but by the generalized decoding of flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows. It is the singular nature
of this conjunction that ensured the universality of capitalism.15 Consequently, most of Deleuzes later examples of deterritorialization in the
concrete sociopolitical field involve different forms of global movements
and flows such as population and money flows. Global capitalism is the
organization of the entire world. However, the global flows that enable
this global organization also escape this organization in two ways. First, as
molar organization becomes stronger, it induces a molecularization of its
own elements and relations. The diffusion of central power through a microphysical fabric causes more insecurities, gives rise to more forces that
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threaten to escape organization. The diffusion thus creates a zone of

instability or indiscernibility. The deterritorialization of the worker by
global capitalism creates the molecular or mass individual, who can
form movements that thwart and break with the worldwide organization
(TP, 21516). Deleuze and Guattari explain the rise of new social movements along the North-South axis in terms of lines of flight from the
Cold War division of the world into East and West. Second, insofar as
political power emerges in response to quantum flows, these flows are
the true origin of power. Because the central power can only convert
but not define or control these flows and quanta, they constitute a zone
of impotence that also defines the central power. In global capitalism,
financial flows are the paradigmatic example of this zone of impotence
because they exceed the mastery of state sovereignty. As Deleuze and
Guattari put it, there is no Power regulating the flows themselves. No
one dominates the growth of the monetary mass, or money supply . . .
An image of the master or an idea of a State [that dominates over flows
and segments] . . . is a fictitious and ridiculous representation. The stock
exchange gives a better image of flows and their quanta than does the
State (TP, 226).
This celebration of financial flows risks becoming a naive endorsement of global financialization as radical and revolutionary, simply because flows of money are uncontrollable and undermine state power and
centralized banking (TP, 22627). One should note that in Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze and Guattari emphatically distinguish capitalist flows from
schizophrenic flows because capitalism binds the energy of flows within
the body of capital as a deterritorialized socius, thereby inhibiting the
revolutionary potential of decoded flows.16 In subsequent work, Deleuze
has characterized postindustrial capitalist societies as control societies
in which businesses are the new masters and marketing has become the
instrument of social control.17 Nevertheless, despite the repeated insistence that none of the three lines that constitute existence are intrinsically good or bad, that lines of flight can be destructive and can lead to
fascism, Deleuze suggests that the truly revolutionary path is to follow
the movement of the market to maximize deterritorialization and decoding because this will enable new kinds of micropolitics both from within
the territorial state and also beyond its borders. On the one hand, the
national state is no longer able to fend off the social repercussions of
globalization and this intensifies molecularization at the sub-state level.
On the other hand, the planetary organization of the global capitalist
machine is also unable to control the quantum flows. Hence, new revolutionary forms that express a right to desire have developed that are
entirely immanent to the global economy and the national State system.
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Why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible,
and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane
of organization of the World and the States? For once again, the world
and its States are no more masters of their plane than revolutionaries are
condemned to the deformation of theirs (Many Politics, 147, emphasis added). Indeed, insofar as the global capitalist economy has become
axiomatic because it has no outside and, thus, functions according to
laws that are entirely immanent to it and can repeatedly set and repel
its own limits, movements of becoming-minority are by definition immanent to it. What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the
nondenumerable, even if that minority is composed of a single member.
That is the formula for multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or
becoming-everybody/everything (devenir tout le monde [literally, becoming the whole world]) . . . The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization . . . but a calculation or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may
have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure
becoming of minorities . . . At the same time as capitalism is effectuated in the
denumerable sets serving as its models, it necessarily constitutes nondenumerable
sets that cut across and disrupt those models (TP, 47072, emphasis added).
The tacit model here is most likely the collapse of the totalitarian
socialist regimes of the Eastern bloc as a result of economic globalization.
However, as I have argued elsewhere, complete openness to flows is not
as salutary for countries outside the economically hegemonic North, as illustrated by the Asian financial crises of 1997.18 This is an ironic historical
performance of the dangers of deterritorialization. Falling currencies
triggered investor panic, leading to a crashing stock market and falling
property prices. As the result of a contagion or domino effect, the
pattern was repeated with some variations in countries throughout the
region, some of which were generally perceived to have much stronger
economic fundamentals than Thailand, for instance, Malaysia and South
Korea. The reversal of short-term capital inflows led to a severe liquidity
crunch that caused the collapse of local corporations and massive unemployment even as inflation grew as a result of the devalued local currencies. The combined effect was a drastic deterioration of living standards,
especially for the millions of poor people, and this suffering escalated
into social and political upheaval, riots, destruction, and death. Certainly,
the crises hastened the demise of corrupt political regimes such as the
Suharto regime of Indonesia. The social movements that intensified and
led to the collapse of these authoritarian regimes can be interpreted as
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examples of the becoming-minoritarian that is coextensive with global

capitalisms deterritorializing flows. However, the economic devastation
could only be contained through a recoding and reterritorialization,
namely, the imposition of currency controls by the affected nation-states.
Indeed, the viable long-term solution to the dangers of speculative financial flows is sustainable development to be achieved by the cultivation of
human capital through state education policies. Based on focus-group
data from Indonesia and the Philippines, the World Bank recommends:
Beyond the crisis, the education system will shape the regions future
workforce and the competitiveness of its economies. Sustaining high
quality and broad-based educational expansion is central to equipping
workers with the skills for high productivity manufacturing and service industries and to train them over the course of a working life . . .
Institutional and policy reforms are required to foster the high quality
schooling which includes the skills that will propel East Asian countries
into the knowledge economy of the next century.19
The sensible solution here is precisely the opposite of becoming-minority

since what is prescribed is more intense subjectification through governmental and disciplinary technologies.
A politics of nonorganization risks abandoning too much, because
it is based on a power of life that is not limited by the organization of
organismic form. The quandary of the modern politicization of life is
therefore the following: the pervasive control over life by power means
that it can only be resisted by a power of life that undermines organization. But how viable is such a power of life? Must not the power of
life necessarily have ends and, therefore, take on an organized political
form to be effective? Reenvisioning state institutions and, indeed, all
political-institutional processes as these have been studied in the social
sciences in terms of the capture of deterritorializing virtual flows of living
desire by the organic forms of their realization may be palpably satisfying
at a philosophical level, but it may not be conducive to the theory and
practice of empirically recognizable forms of political and social transformation in contemporary global capitalism.
Notes
1. For an interesting discussion of whether Deleuze has constructed a reductive portrait of Hegels philosophy, see Catherine Malabou, Whos Afraid of
Hegelian Wolves? in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 11438.
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2. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 162. The previous quote comes from page 8.
3. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M.
Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 12.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B.Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 278A, 315;
Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:443.
Referred to parenthetically in the text as PR, with page references to the translation followed by the German text. Translation modified as appropriate.
5. The dictum comes from PR, 20; 24. For an overview of the pathologization of Hegel before and after the Second World War, see Hegels Political Philosophy, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Atherton, 1970).
6. Aristotle, De Anima: Books II and III, trans. D. W.Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), II.i, 412a2228.
7. Aristotle, The Politics, I.ii, 1253a, in The Politics and the Constitution of
Athens, ed. Stephen Everson, trans. B. Jowett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
8. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1830), trans. A. V.Miller (London: Clarendon, 1970), 350, p. 351; Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II: Zweiter Teil: Die Naturphilosophie, in
Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 350, vol. 9, 430. Referred to parenthetically in the
text as PN, with page references to the translation followed by the German text.
Translation modified as appropriate.
9. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 12432.
11. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 261.
12. On the distinction between the planes of immanence and organization, see TP, 26670.
13. Deleuze, Immanence: A Life, in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans.
Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), 2829.
14. See TP, chap. 9, titled 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity; and
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Many Politics, in Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Referred to parenthetically in the text as Many Politics.
15. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224.
16. Ibid., 23940, 24546. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject here Samir
Amins caution that Third World countries should delink from the global capitalist system.
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17. Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, in Negotiations: 19721990,

trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
18. Pheng Cheah, Crises of Money, Positions: East Asia Culture Critique
16, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 189219. What follows rephrases my arguments in this
article.
19. World Bank, What Can Be Done? in And Our Rice Pots Are Empty:
The Social Cost of the Economic Crisis (Penang, Malaysia: Consumers International,
1998), 290.
Deleuze and Hegel on the Logic

of Relations
Jim Vernon
As is well known, one essential weapon Deleuze employs to oppose

Hegel is the thesis of the externality of relations.1 Hegel, after all, is the
archetypal thinker of organic relations between systematically structured
terms, and thus to escape him one must demonstrate that such putatively
necessary relations are in fact only contingently applied, and thus can
intrinsically be undone. By extension, one of Deleuzes primary practical
concerns, flowing from his logic of relations, is the dissolution of internal relations, for only it allows for the creation of new modes of action
and thought. The logic of relations, then, is fundamentally political in
consequence.
In this chapter I seek to articulate the rival logics of relation developed by Deleuze and Hegel. Both thinkers are concerned that contingent habits may ossify certain terms together, producing the false appearances of internal relations that hinder the development of action and
thought; however, for Hegel, unlike Deleuze, positing the externality of
given relations generates the determinate, truly universal forms through
which all terms must be related. I conclude by considering the political
consequences of their accounts.
Deleuze
While the thesis of external relations pervades Deleuzes philosophy,2 and
thus can be approached through a variety of angles and figures, it is most
explicitly and substantially developed in Deleuzes first major work, Empiricism and Subjectivity,3 a commentary on Humes empiricism, which will
accordingly be my focus.4 Deleuze, there, credits Hume with creat[ing]
the first great logic of relations [by] showing that all relations . . . were
external to their terms (ES, x).5 It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Deleuze
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should from the start embrace a central tenet of empiricism, grounded

in its chief exponent, for he famously claims that the hatred of interiority [and the positing of] the exteriority of forces and relations was
the secret link between those thinkers who challenged the rationalist
tradition that he felt defined the history of philosophy, and from whose
patently repressive role he sought to escape.6 Rationalism is the philosophy of coherent deduction from clearly intuited first principlesin
short, of necessary, internal relations between terms. To reject this history, then, is to posit relations as the always revisable results of contingent
practice, or as external to their terms. It is just such a logic of relation
that Deleuze locates as one of the new concepts created by Hume in
one of his most essential and creative contribution[s] (ES, ix). Thus,
relational exteriority is presupposed throughout Deleuzes philosophy,
precisely because it is the rejectioncommon to all empiricistsof
organic rationalism (ES, 99; 109).7
To make the claim plausible, however, Deleuze cannot seek to ground
it in some more primordial principle(s), as rationalists do; rather, he
must show how purportedly necessary relations can be accounted for
by it, thereby retroactively justifying his methodological starting point.
Rationalism works to reveal the necessary presence of relations in a knowing subject. A consistent empiricism, then, must account for the origin
of such seemingly necessary relations and knowing subjects through an
irrational, a-subjective plurality that precedes them. In short, Deleuze
must explain how rational relations and subjectivity can arise from contingently given terms.8 Thus, the absolute essence of empiricism (ES,
87; 92) is the answer to the question how can a subject transcending the
given be constituted in the given? (ES, 86; 9192).9
What, then, is the given? If we begin by presupposing that no
relations hold either between things, or between things and a subject,
then we are simply left with a collection . . . of distinct perceptions or
ideas (ES, 87; 92). According to this principle of difference (ES, 87; 93),
what is primordially given is a multiplicity of distinct and differentiated
terms. If subjectivity presupposes any relations or principles for creating
relations, then clearly there is no subject in the given. However, Deleuze
nevertheless argues that the subject can only arise from the given if the
distinction between that which will become the subject, and that which
will be related by it, is itself also given.10 That is (anticipating arguments he will more famously make through Bergson),11 the given must
contain both the ideas to be related, and that which will eventually do
the relating, or the difference between the given as distinct ideas and
that to which they are given. Thus, what Deleuze calls the mind must
be presupposed, not (yet) as a subject or a faculty or principle of orga-
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nization, but rather [as] a particular set of the given (ES, 87; 93). This
set is particular just because it is experienced in a mind (of whose nature
we presuppose nothing) rather than being unexperienced, or being in
another such mind. Mind, then, is simply some given collection of impressions and separate ideas, or a kind of empty container that comes
through experience to hold any ideas at all, which are in turn unrelated
beyond their being contained in mind (ES, 132; 150).12 Thus, mind is
the mechanism only of distinct perceptions contained only as different
(ES, 9697; 1067). Mind mechanistically retains, rather than organically
relating.
Of course, in positing the complete lack of relation between terms,
Deleuze presupposes that such a mind contains no composite ideas, for
the composite is the related. Thus, the mind and the given are not derived from such-and-such an idea, but rather from the smallest idea precisely because it is not under the category of quality that we must consider the mind as mind, but rather from the viewpoint of quantity (ES,
90; 9697). One might object that the very distinction between ideas, let
alone between simple and complex ones, presupposes a qualitative distinction between them. After all, one must be able to distinguish between
gold, mountain, and gold mountain to grasp not only that the former two are not only distinct but also the simple ideas from which the latters complexity arises. Nothing essential changes, however, in Deleuzes
account if mind cannot distinguish simple from complex ideas, for it is
simply the mechanistic collection of any ideas whatsoever, considered
only as different from each other. What does this imply?
Discrete ideas are, in themselves, neither spatial nor temporal;
however, the collecting together of such ideas in mind makes them spatiotemporal.13 A distinct idea, in its singularity, is not successive to another; however, the difference between terms ensures that they are not
experienced together (or else they would be given as related in themselves), but the mind experiencing them, just by experiencing and therefore collecting them, holds them all together within mind, counting
them all as part of the same experience, and thus orders them in succession. Similarly, no unrelated point occupies a space next to or distant from another, but any two such points perceived by the same mind
are grasped in their distance and proximity in the same space. That is,
space and time are merely the idea[s] . . . distributed in a certain order
(ES, 91; 99).
Space and time are, of course, not identical. All ideas are collected within one mind, and thus are related within the temporal flow
of its experience; only some of these ideas, however, lead us to think/
perceive them as being in the same space as well. Extension, therefore,
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is only the quality of certain perceptions. This is not the case with time,
which is effectively presented as the quality of any set of perceptions whatsoever (ES, 91; 99). We should note the necessary appeal to the qualitative distinction between what are still meant to be strictly quantitative
units. It seems that Deleuze is forced to admit, even in the basic differentiation of terms from each other, that ideas are different not only as
numerically distinct but also as qualitatively something, even if only minimally. However, this does not undermine Deleuzes claim that space and
time are in the mind rather than in the ideas themselves (ES, 91; 99),
for quality does not necessarily imply relation without a mind ordering
its ideas. Thus, we can say that the discrete elements in mind already
possess two objective characteristics: indivisibility of an element and distribution of elements: atom and structure (ES, 91; 99). What form does
this structure take?
Successively ordering discrete ideas requires that mind bring together previously experienced ideas with those that came after, and this
can only be done in a time that is not any of the past ideas, that is, the
present. That is, linking discrete, past atoms into structured succession
is a synthesis of them into one contracted present. The temporalization
of ideas is thus a synthesis of time, or, what is the same thing, a synthesis of the mind (ES, 92; 100). It is in this collecting of different ideas
successively within mind that empiricism discovers a principle (ES, 91;
98). Mind structures certain ideas as preceded or followed by certain
other ideas and, thus, its experience is actually not of atomic ideas, but
of related ones. As such, the experience of any idea is the experience of
expecting its successively associated ideas to follow. Thus, the synthesis
posits the past as a rule for the future (ES, 94; 103), thereby creating
habits in mind, inciting us to move from one [idea] to a second (ES, 96;
105). Mind, in other words, is the habit of contracting certain ideas into
syntheses, and thereby becomes the anticipation of similar syntheses in
the future.14
Whenever an experiencing mind is given in the given, its experience of discrete ideas inevitably leads habit to enter the mind as a principle, relating previously experienced ideas into present expectations
that anticipate future connections between similar ideas. Mind, thus, inevitably takes on a spontaneity of relation (ES, 96; 106), giving itself a
structure of habit-anticipation independent of given ideas, transforming itself into what Deleuze calls a subject, which transcends the given
by imposing upon it relations not derived therein. The subject, then, is
essentially the spontaneity of the relations that, under the influence of
principles, it establishes between ideas (ES, 97; 107), and the principle
of habit explains how a subject is constituted in the given.
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It is just because the subject is habitual relation, moreover, that it

takes on particular dispositions (ES, 97; 107). Having developed habits
concerning its contingent, specific ideas, the subject expects these relations to hold in the future, and thus presupposes the conservation of its
acquired content (that is, its habits and syntheses). Subjects therefore
have a practical interest in conserving what habitual expectations they
have/are in the future. As such, the principle of habit creates in subjects
the dispositional interestin Humean terms the passionto see their
expectations fulfilled.
Relations, then, are external to their terms, because they arise as
the creation of a subject, but appear as internal to their terms precisely
because subjects habitually expect the given to conform to them. The
relational principles of habit and disposition thus constitute, within the
given, a subject that invents [relations] and believes [in their necessity]
(ES, 133; 151). Each constituted subject therefore reacts, whether by
instinct or invention, to every part of the given in accordance with its
habits, thus altering the very nature of its experience (ES, 133; 152).
Under the influence of principles, the mind becomes a subject and the
collection becomes a system, which the subject inevitably takes to be
organically related (ES, 98; 109). This is why the principles of association
and disposition are laws of human nature (ES, 114; 129) which correlatively turn the given into a nature (ES, 133; 152).
All of this, however, is the product of a chance encounter between
a mind and the given, the contingent contraction of specific ideas into
habitual syntheses and the passionate belief to conserve these habits. The
thesis of the externality of relations, then, leads directly to the affirmation of the complete contingency of human nature and its supposedly
essentialparticular or universalinterests. This explains why Deleuze
is even less interested than Hume in specifying the laws of human nature,
claiming that we do not have to justify their exact number or their particular nature (ES, 114; 129). Because its atoms are in themselves unrelated, the given will never justify relations between its separate parts,
and thus the laws of nature are not laws (ES, 133; 151). Deleuzes logic
of relations does not justify subjective or natural laws; it simply offers a
theory of what we are doing and what we are doing is always already unjustifiable (ES, 133; 152). This bears repeating: for Deleuzian empiricism
all principles from which practical interests are or can be developed are
in principle unjustified. No interest or passion is intrinsically more valid
than any other, for all arise contingently as habits transcending and imposed upon the given, thereby making each subject a slave to its origin
(ES, 129; 146). In short, no matter how its associations or passions arise,
develop, or change, the practical, interested subject, for Deleuze, is a slave
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to habit, reactive rather than active, and thus constrains the possibility for
novelty, of both thought and action.
In sum: Deleuze affirms the empiricist logic of external relations
specifically to escape from rationalist idealisms. Building from external
terms collected mechanically within mind, he accounts for necessary
relations as arising from contingent, subjective habits which enslave us to
unjustifiable expectations and interests.
Hegel
In the Psychology section of the Philosophy of Mind,15 Hegel likewise explores the development of a consciousness that immediately experiences
things, or intuits (anschauen) a given world (PM, 446). Intuition consists
of some outside content experienced by a mind constituted such that
it can receive it. While Hegel previously (PM, 387412) argues for the
arising of a conscious mind within the given, we will here presuppose
nothing more than Deleuze, and begin with a mind that simply finds
itself determined by given content (PM, 445).
Unlike Deleuze, Hegel clarifies the distinction that must exist between perceiver and perceived. Minimally, this difference manifests itself
in the fact that mind is necessarily a particular view on the given, for it is
only in so far as the given falls within minds view that it is experienced.
In other words, while the specific content perceived leads mind to have
the ideas that it does, it also has to be attended to to be perceived, for
apart from . . . attention there is nothing for the mind (PM, 448).
Thus, within experience itself, what is particular and contingent are the
given contents, whilebecause it can equally experience any particular
content and must be present for any particular content to be experiencedmind is both universal and necessary. As such, whenever mind
arises in the given, it arises as the necessary and universal condition for
the possibility of each contingent experience.
The consequences Hegel draws from this, initially, are not that far
from those developed by Deleuze. Mind experiences given individual
contents, but does so only in so far as it collects each into its unified attention, specifically as its time and also its place, its when and where (PM,
453). Thus all objects are experienced as related in a time and space
brought to them by the subject, and mind inevitably takes the relations it
brings to bear on the given to be, like itself, necessary and universal. Unlike Deleuze, however, Hegel draws attention to the fact that this lawful
subjectivity is in fact presupposed in immediate experience. Because im-
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mediate experience is impossible without a mind to attend to the given,

and because its subjective form is taken to be universal and necessary,
there is no immediate experience; mind was always already a subject.
However, Hegel locates a tension internal to this subject. Experience is made possible through the necessary structuring of the given by a
subject that transcends it. However, in intuition, the subjective ground of
experience is only grasped through objects that are contingently given.
Thus, the subjective forms of experience are taken to be necessary and
universal laws (since they structure all of the given), but in actual experience retain the appearance of contingency and habit (since they are
always attached to givenness). For Hegel, this is an explicit contradiction that drives the subject to resolve the tension.
The specifics of the dialectic which arises from this drive need not
detain us here. Essentially, Hegel argues that, through recollection, imagination, and ultimately language acquisition (see PM, 45262), mind
progressively seeks an empirical content that is not merely given, but
which is as subjective and universal as the forms of relation. By acquiring
a more universal or subjective content, mind seeks to break with its
arbitrary habits and reveal the necessary forms of relation. The reason
the details need not concern us is that each new contentas experienceablereveals itself to be still tainted with contingency. Mind holds its
forms of relation to be lawful, and yet can only relate content that can
be intuited and thus somehow given. Thus, it appears to be left with an
irresolvable conflict.
Hegel, however, offers a solution: to determine the necessary forms
of relation, we must relate experienced content; however, that content
cannot be related as experienced, for such relations simply reflect arbitrary habit. Thus, we explicitly abstract the content we habitually relate
from all actual and possible relations, evacuating merely contingent relations. In this abstraction, mind reaches the stage of development that
Hegel calls mechanical memory (PM, 463), which affirms the complete externality of all given contents from each other. In short, Hegel affirms the necessity of positing the externality of terms from all relations,
or Deleuzes principle of difference.
Unlike Deleuze, however, Hegel does not simply presuppose the
contingent existence of such a mind, as the precondition for the emergence of the experiencing subject. To the contrary, Hegel shows that
such a mind cannot be presupposed, for mind is always already transcending the given simply by virtue of experiencing it. Deleuze, then,
only holds relations to have been external to their terms prior to habitual
structuring, which is all that we ever experience; it is not clear, therefore, whether they actually are ever external within experience. Hegels
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mechanical mind, however, arises through the conscious dismantling of

all relations, actual or possible, radically transforming mind from experiencing subject to retaining collection.
Mechanical memory, then, arises when mind posits its content as a
mere collection of discrete atoms, and reciprocally posits itself as the totally abstract . . . power over any given content retained in some stable
order without determinately being related (PM, 463, trans. modified).
Deprived of all relational habits, mind also loses all subjective particularity and becomes the mere container for an arbitrary collection of discrete
contents. This mind, then, could be any mind at all holding any content
at all, because it has completely purged itself of the contingency of both
external determination and subjective particularity. Hegel stresses that it
is because of the complete externality in which the members of its series
stand in relation to each other [that this memory] is called mechanical
(PM, 463, trans. modified). Each retained idea is a discrete atomdifferent from the others, both otherwise indeterminatewithin a mechanistic mind that is no more than the collection of such atoms.
Because there is nothing specific to the retained that presupposes
principles of relation, and because mechanical mind is devoid of any
habits that impose relations on what it retains, any formal relations that
may arise between the content will necessarily hold between any possible
ideas possessed by any possible subject. That is, any forms of relation that
arise from merely different, unrelated terms will be universal to all given,
experience-able content. Of course, whatever relations Hegel develops
from mechanical memory must presuppose nothing beyond mechanical retention. Moreover, as per Deleuzes demands, they can presuppose
nothing but the difference of the retained atoms from each other; specifically, since Deleuze argues that we must begin with the smallest unit, relations can only be justified if they arise from the consideration of a single
retained atom, considered only in its difference from the others. What,
then, can be determined of any idea mechanically retained within mind?
Any retained idea mustqua distinctbe differentiated from the
retained others, that is, grasped as a qualitative one or a this (SL, 621;
300). The qualitative distinctness of any particular idea, in short, presupposes its qualitative difference from the others. Even the smallest idea is
only this one in so far as it is not another, that is, only in so far as it is
distinguished from the others from which it is different within the mind
retaining them all (however minimally, for example, Deleuzes own admission that an impression is qualitatively spatial rather than merely temporal, and so on). This means that each idea is only distinct in so far as
it exists in a relation of mutual differentiation and distinguishing with
others. Thus, mechanical memory, while lacking habitual structures, is
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not completely without relations, for the very differentiation of ideas

from each other posits them as related in difference within one relating/differentiating mind. As Hegel puts it, retained ideas do not subsist
in merely external difference but [are only determined as different] in
the difference of the concept (SL, 622; 301, trans. modified). In short,
the form/content relation of mind/ideas is that of identity-in-difference,
that is, that of ideas determined as distinct by being differentiated from
each other within mind, and mind determined as self-relating identity
only by differentiating retained ideas from each other. This relationship
of identity-in-difference is thus revealed as immanent to any content retained within mind, and is what Hegel calls the judgment, precisely because minds distinguishing-through-relation brings each idea into existence as a determinate being (SL, 623; 302).
The determinate idea is judged as qualitatively distinct, that is,
as that which immediately is (SL, 624; 303). However, an idea is only
determined as distinct through its differentiating relation to at least one
other. Thus, an idea only receives its qualitative distinctness through its
formal relation with another, that is, it is what it is only in and through
the other, or what it is not. Thus, the first ideas determination as distinct
is, in fact, the second, as it is the relation that produces its difference.
The judgment, then, posits the relationship between the two as one of
identity. Thus, ideas are not only essentially related; their relation presupposes some manner of identity as holding between the terms. This also
makes clearer why Hegel calls the relation a judgment. The first is what
it is through its determining relation to something else. This essentially
describes the subject-copula-predicate judgment form, which asserts the
qualitative distinctness of one idea by asserting its identity with another.
The predicate idea, then, posits the determining relation, while the
subject arises through it in its determinate individuality.
While we lack the space to detail the dialectic that follows this most
basic relation, we can say that the various permutations of the judgment
and relation that follow (especially the syllogism) seek to further eliminate the contingencies of human nature or subjective interest from the
forms of relation, to progressively uncover the various identifying relations appropriate to individual terms. Hegels account seeks, then, not
to justify habitual or existent relations, but to build from completely external terms to all of the forms of predicating relation appropriate to
their qualitative nature (merely different, contingent identity, reflection
of essential nature, and so on). Hegels core argument, then, is that, by
evacuating the relations that have been contingently brought to bear on
terms by particular subjects, we can grasp the relations that essentially
determine them.
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In sum: to overcome the contingencies of experiential habit, Hegel

posits the complete externality of any terms retained within any mind as
such. The distinction of any term within this mechanical mind presupposes
its determinate relation to others in the form of identity-in-difference.
Thus, it is in the very nature of externally held terms that they be internally related to each other.
Conclusion: Pragmatic Consequences

As Peter Hallward rightly notes, Deleuze is the first to recognize [that]
it is futile to argue about whether a philosophy or a concept is literally right or wrong.16 Deleuze as often as not justified the concepts he
creatednot by the various and subtle arguments that backed them
but through their pragmatic consequences, or what they allow us to do.
Thus, we shall conclude by considering the practicaland, in particular,
politicalconsequences of the above accounts.
A clear result of the empiricist account is that there are no better
or worse relations, passions, interests, or actions that Deleuze can recommend in favor of others.17 While it assuredly flows from the thesis of
external relations that terms can be related in a multitude of ways other
than those of our habitual nature (many of which Deleuze brilliantly explores), it does not justify any of them over the ones we currently employ.
As Deleuze and Guattari famously write concerning the lines which
structure social and political relations, we cannot say that one of these
three lines [that is, the molar, molecular, and line of flight] is bad and
another good, by nature and necessarily.18 All relations are contingent,
all lead to habits, and all set up limiting expectations for the future, enslaving us to subjectivity. Relations cannot of themselves remain open to
the new, just because relation produces expectation, therefore habit, and
thus reaction. Relating better, more accurately, more immanently to the
given are thus all ruled out in principle. In revealing the practical subject, Deleuze simultaneously reveals it as reductive and rigid. What, then,
can Deleuzian empiricism be besides an account of what we are doing?
While practical pursuits arise from passionate subjects interested
in seeing particular relations manifested in experience as slavish reaction, the externality of such relations nevertheless implies that disinterested actions are possible which are directed toward recovering the
pre-subjective given. That is (and here Deleuze clearly moves beyond
Hume), if relations are externally imposed by subjects enslaved to habits,
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such relations can be undone, liberating both them and the given from
the strictures and interests they unjustifiably impose. As such, the key
practical prescription that can arise from this theory of relations is that
which seeks to undermine relations as they currently exist; thus Deleuzes
concern for novelty and creation. Mind relates content by necessity, but
this inevitably makes it a slavish subject; to emancipate mind from subjective slavery would be to actively undo imposed relations, regardless of
their specific nature. Of course, this cannot be achieved by simply evacuating relation entirely; the merely given will always result in habitual, reactive subjects whenever it is collected. Rather, one must keep enough
of the organisms [habits and relations required] to turn them against
their own systems.19 One should not eliminate the relational subject;
one should rather experiment with it, in a continual effort to gently
tip the assemblage over to the plane of consistency,20 rereleasing presubjective forces, inevitably to be related anew, but always to be released
again, staying as close to the principle of difference as possible.
The political consequences are both obvious and well-known, so
we will rehearse them rather quickly. Our habitual interests, for Deleuze,
force us to seek to conserve what we have, leading us politically to erect
public institutions and laws that provide for the satisfaction of our interests. Given Deleuzes antipathy toward such interests, it should thus
come as no surprise that in his political works he evacuates the ties of
communal solidarity, institutional determinacy, and committed action in
favor of missing people, the indiscernibility of the public and private
spheres and fragmented, impersonal action.21 Deleuzes politics is not
only devoid of subjective interest but also dedicated to the perpetual
dismantling of interested subjects/collectives.22 Assuredly this process requires the dedicated work of individual subjects who direct their pursuits
away from both social institutions that facilitate inter-subjective recognition and defend individual right, as well perhaps as concerted actions
against those institutions. And assuredly it is dedicated to constructing
experimental relations, each possessing its own dangers, and thus needing to be experimentally undone in turn, thus the prescription: keep
moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectivization.23 However, Deleuzes politics necessarily prizes impersonal
creation above personal interest, missing people over collective struggle,
and novelty over progress.
For Hegel, on the other hand, while the evacuation of habitual
interest is essential, it does not entail the evacuation of subjective or collective interest. Equally cognizant of the fact that merely existent relations
both lack justification and thwart possibilities for action and thought,
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Hegel develops a methodmechanical memorywhereby subjects can

liberate themselves from their constraining habits and external determinations. However, this not only demonstrates the possibility of the
emancipation from existent relations; it also reveals truly universal forms
of relation through which all content can be qualitatively determined.
Thus, Hegels account offers a practical method through which subjects
can come to emancipate themselves from the merely existent to discover
what is essential to themselves and their experience.
As such, Hegels politics begins by extolling us not to confuse the
prevailing circumstances and existing . . . institutions of right with that
which is right in itself (PR, 3R). Political philosophy does not seek definitions of right in the situation in which it finds itself, that is, through the
abstraction from particular cases; rather it seeks the nature of the concept in all of its constituents qualities and relations, and only then as
a second step . . . looks around for what corresponds to it in our ideas
(PR, 2R). Far from apologizing for the State as it exists, Hegel abstracts
from all existing relations, seeks to determine the essential ideas and relations of right, and thereby to liberate them from that which is contingently given or habitual in social life. This is possible because, as Hegel
has demonstrated through mechanical memory, anyone can discover in
himself an ability to abstract from anything whatsoever, and likewise to
[freely] determine himself in accordance with universal and essential
relations of human subjectivity and experience (PR, 4R).
Unsurprisingly, what is essential to Hegelian right is human freedom or spirit, that is, freedom from constraint by the merely contingently given and self-determination according to human essence. His
politics, correspondingly, proposes the emancipation of free subjects
from the given natural, psychological, social, and political forces antithetical to free subjectivity. For Hegel, one only truly liberates freedom
from restraints external to it by relating free subjects to and through institutions that can be determinately identified with its qualitative nature.
Emancipation is not simply freedom from constraint, but the determinate actualization of essential freedom in concrete relations, and thus
the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit
developed from within itself (PR, 4). This is why the Philosophy of Right
proposes a series of personal and social institutional relations (contract, conscience, family, ethical life, and the state) that proceed from
freedom.
Of course, any new institutions that arise, just by existing as actual institutions, will be given for subjects, and thus will soon pose a
renewed threat to free subjectivity. Freedom made actual produces institutional determinations which will inevitably impose themselves on
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subjects either as external forces or given habits. This does not, however,
mean that there are no emancipatory relations. It simply demonstrates
that for Hegel, as for Deleuze, the process of emancipation must be incessant; unlike Deleuze, however, for Hegel it is also progressive, producing freer institutions over time. That is, as Hegel puts it, free spirits
deed is to . . . comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself . . . The
spirit which comprehends this comprehension anew and whichand
this amounts to the same thingreturns to itself from its alienation, is
spirit at a higher stage than that at which it stood in its earlier [phase of]
comprehension (PR, 343).
Thus, for Hegel the absolute determination or, if one prefers, absolute drive, of the free spirit . . . is to make its freedom into its object
(PR, 27). Freedom is driven to make itself exist as free, thereby creating
new givens which constrain it, driving us further to expand actualized
freedom. Hegels politics thus defends the continual, progressive expansion of actualized freedom through concrete social institutions.24
In sum: Hegel and Deleuze, given their respective logics of relations, both articulate political philosophies focused on emancipating
the subject from merely imposed relations. Deleuze begins from prepersonal, fragmented material and essentially proposes a practical means
for retrieving it (in so far as it is possible) from the inevitable constraints
that subjective interest and action place upon it. He thus proposes our
incessant emancipation from all relations, releasing pre-subjective, disinterested forces from the bodily and mental habits that constrain thought,
experience, and action. Such a process is directed toward the creation
of the new, that is, nonhabitual, and is perpetual, but it is also creative
and experimental, rather than teleological or progressive. Hegel, to the
contrary, begins with given relations, but proposes a practical method
for abstracting from them to reveal the relations truly internal to our rational essence. Hegels politics also advocates achieving freedom-from
contingently given relations, but demands the correlative production of
our freedom-to actualize our rational, free essence. This process is likewise perpetual, but progressive, directed toward the teleological (rather
than eschatological) actualization of free spirit through emancipatory
changes to increasingly free concrete social institutions.
Deleuze is arguably our most compelling philosopher of external
relations and the experimental politics of creative becoming that proceeds from them, while Hegel should rightly be recognized as our finest
exponent of internal relations and the progressive politics of institutional
change that they ground. While I have sought to show that Hegels logic
is, in fact, more consistent, the question starkly posed by their debate
might be: which political philosophy is truly emancipatory?
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Notes
1. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society (London: Continuum, 2006),
for example, opposes Hegelian, organic relations of interiority to Deleuzian,
pragmatic relations of exteriority (especially 825); and Bruce Baugh, Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuzes Response to Hegel, Man and World 25 (1992):
13348, sees Deleuzes logic of external relations as a way of resisting Hegel
(140). Nick Nesbitt, Deleuze, Adorno, and the Composition of Musical Multiplicity, in Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 5475, while raising a critique of Deleuze with
which I am somewhat sympathetic, incorrectly opposes Deleuzian relation[s] of
strict interiority to exterior, dialectical relations (67).
2. Daniel W. Smith, IntroductionA Life of Pure Immanence: Deleuzes
Critique et Clinique Project, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), xiliii (xxiii).
3. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human
Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivit: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1953). Cited as ES, the French pagination following the English, in the form ES, 21; 1. Roman numerals signify the Preface
to the English Edition, and thus no French follows.
4. Here I follow, for example, DeLanda, Baugh, and Patrick Hayden, From
Relation to Practice in the Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, Man and World 28
(1995): 283302.
5. This no doubt explains why Deleuze usually cites the thesis in discussions of empiricism. See, for example, On the Superiority of Anglo-American
Literature, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press), 3676
(55); or Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 206.
6. Deleuze, Letter to a Harsh Critic, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 312 (56). It is of course at precisely this point in this essay that Deleuze makes his infamous claim, What I
detested most was Hegelianism and dialectics (6).
7. As Deleuze claims, I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a
pluralist, Dialogues II (vii). It is important to recall, however, that for Deleuze,
Spinoza and Leibniz would qualify as empiricists against rationalism, due to
their pluralist accounts of relations. As Hayden notes, the thesis of external relations was also brought to bear against British idealism by G. E.Moore and Bertrand Russell (301, n. 11). It may be, then, that Kant (his other avowed enemy),
and especially Hegel, are the primary targets of this critique, not what we normally term rationalism.
8. In Cinema 1 (2025), while discussing the particular presentation of relations offered in several films by Hitchcock, Deleuze seems to suggest that terms
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are perhaps secondary to relations. However, in praising Humes logic of relations, he makes the opposite move, specifically to trace the origin of the knowing
subject: We start from atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages, tendencies, which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give
rise to habits. Isnt this the answer to the question what are we? We are habits,
nothing but habitsthe habit of saying I (ES, x).
9. It may, in fact, be that Deleuzes philosophy only poses this single question, in variant wordings, from Must difference have been mediated to render it
thinkable and livable? to How can desire desire its own repression?
10. The fact is that the given never joins its separate elements into a whole
(ES, 133; 152), thus there must be given a qualified something which will subsequently account for the presence of relations.
11. See, for example, in Cinema 1, by positing a world of universal variation within which the infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane of
immanence wherein each image exists in itself on this plane (5859). These
images are not for anyone and are not addressed to anyone but are images for
themselves. If they do not appear to anyone . . . that is because [the image] is not
yet reflected or stopped . . . If, subsequently, a de facto consciousness is constituted . . . at a particular place on the plane of immanence, it is because very special images will have stopped or reflected the images (6061). In fact, already
in ES, Deleuze claims it is not necessary to force the texts in order to find in the
[account of the subject as] habit-anticipation most of the characteristics of the
Bergsonian dure or memory (ES, 92; 101).
12. Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History (London: Continuum, 2006) rightly notes that for [Deleuzes] Hume, experience need not
be founded on subjectivity; it is first of all a conjunction that allows data to count
as one (13).
13. Here, Deleuze anticipates arguments he will develop more famously,
again through Hume, in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
14. Anticipation is the synthesis of the past and present brought about by
habit (ES, 93; 102).
15. The following section draws on the accounts of Hegels account of
memory and judgment defended in my Hegels Philosophy of Language (London:
Continuum, 2007), especially chaps. 2 and 3, and Universal Grammar: The Necessity of the Linguistic Judgment, Owl of Minerva 39, nos. 12 (Spring 2009):
124. G. W. F.Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Enzyklopdie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol. 10, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp,
1970). Cited as PM by paragraph number (for example, PM, 455). Our discussion will also extend to Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Amherst,
N.Y.: Humanities Press, 1999); Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, Werke, vol. 6, cited
as SL, the German pagination following the English; and Hegel, Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B.Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge,
1991), cited as PR by paragraph number.
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16. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), 159.
17. This does not stop many of Deleuzes sympathetic commentators from
seeking to ground better relations in practices that allow us to do more or
inhibit experimentation less, as in, for example, both Hayden and Baugh.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 227.
19. Ibid., 160.
20. Ibid., 161.
21. I draw this list from one of his most explicit texts on political subjects,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London:
Athlone Press, 1989), especially 21524.
22. Speaking this way, of course, I echo the criticisms of Peter Hallward,
first presented in Deleuze and Redemption from Interest, Radical Philosophy 81
( January 1997): 621. While broadly sympathetic with his charges against Deleuze,
it is unclear to me on what grounds he applies the same critique to Hegel. See,
for example, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3; and Out of This World, 6.
23. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159.
24. For more complete accounts of this Hegelian politics, see my Siding with Freedom: Towards a Prescriptive Hegelianism, Critical Horizons 12, no.
1 (2011): 4969, and Free Love: A Hegelian Defense of Same-Sex Marriage
Rights, Southern Journal of Philosophy 47, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 6989.
Deleuze and Hegel on the Limits

of Self-Determined Subjectivity
Simon Lumsden
At the heart of Deleuzes critique of Hegel is a contestation as to how to

conceive the disenchanted world that the Enlightenment bequeathed us.
The scientific rigor of modern philosophy reconfigured the self-world
relation in a manner that for the most part made the knowing subject
the arbiter of everything earthly. In the idealized narrative of modernity this inverted Copernicanism is presented as a revolution, indeed the
greatest revolution in human history, since it liberated humanity from
all forms of dogmatism. If the center of the universe and all meaning
determination has shifted from God to a finite synthetic self, who now
assumes all these attributes, then Deleuze argues this disenchantment
did not involve any radical change in understanding.1 From this perspective modern philosophy is continuous with premodern philosophy.
The fulfillment therefore of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which had
promised to reconceive our relation to existence by dethroning God and
traditional authority, requires a similar dethroning of the modern subject. For Deleuze that dethroning requires shifting the focus of philosophy from subjectivity to a reimagined empirical.
If we are to find a philosophical program adequate to existence
then we need to be cognizant of the limits of modern philosophy for
achieving this task. In making those limits apparent Deleuze is in effect
continuing the critical tradition of examining presuppositions. It is the
presuppositions of modern philosophy, its unacknowledged dogmatism,
that have constrained thought and philosophy. But Deleuzes philosophical project is not just critical; his positive project endeavors to give
expression to a philosophical thought that is adequate to being, being
understood primarily as difference. This rethinking of difference and his
criticism of the philosophical tradition will also have implications for the
core philosophical problems.
Deleuzes characterization of the philosophical tradition as the
dogmatic image of thought captures a set of methodological presup133
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positions. These presuppositions (representation, good sense, common

sense, the good will, dialectic, idealist conceptual schemas) are all employed as controlling forces by which the philosophical tradition imposes
its own conceptions of order on the world and thought.2 These and other
images of thought all distort thought. The focal point of all these distorting postulates is the cogito: These postulates culminate in the position
of an identical thinking subject, which functions as a principle of identity
for concepts in general (DR, 265/341). The transcendental subject that
coordinates the faculties, subsumes being with its conceptual schemas,
grounds and constrains all thought through its representations and its
recognitive determination of being makes difference in thought disappear (DR, 266/342). Against this view Deleuze argues that thought is
not under the control of the subject. These postulates are simply illusions
and presuppositions that have taken rhetorical hold of thought. While
the dogmatic image of thought and its attendant self-identical subject
range the entire history of philosophy, and Deleuze is especially critical
of its formulations in Descartes and Kant, it is Hegels thought above all
that takes this illusion to its extreme point.
Deleuzes analysis of Hegel, especially in Difference and Repetition and
Nietzsche and Philosophy, is critical of three closely related concepts: selfconsciousness, which he sees as a stagnant self-producing subject; the
dialectic, a methodology for a philosophical program that cannot think
difference other than as contradiction; and recognition, the conservative way in which Hegelian thought makes judgment. My concern in this
chapter is with only the first of these, though exploring this criticism will
also involve some discussion of the other two issues. What I want to argue
here is that while Hegel has a self-determining subject at the center of
his project, that subject cannot be understood as straightforwardly stagnant, self-identical, or under the control of a good will. Understanding
the distinctly Hegelian features of self-determination requires us to look
at two key issues: first the subject in modernity, and second the reception
of Kants critical thought, especially the concept-intuition distinction, an
issue central to both Deleuzes and Hegels thought.
Poststructuralists, and Deleuze in particular, are highly critical of
any closed system of meaning determination, whether that be tied to
God, transcendental subjectivity, or subjectless systems of meaning determination (structuralism). All such philosophical endeavors are fixed
and stagnant. Recognition, representation, the good will, and the conceptually mediating character of subjectivity are the pejorative terms Deleuze uses to define the Hegelian system. Deleuze, as we will see shortly,
undermines the stable subject that is central to this system by conceiving the transcendental empirical as something that forces itself upon
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thought, giving genuine thought an important aspect that is involuntary.

Thought, rather than being the product of the collective effort of selfdetermining subjects, is better conceived as produced by effects that are
external to the subject, effects that are not under the control of an authorizing agent.
While self-determining subjectivity is at the center of Hegels philosophical system, self-determination has to be understood in a very different way to Kants autonomous subject. Hegelian reason because it
is not constrained by something other to it, such as the thing-in-itself,
the given, or Platonic forms, is taken by Deleuze to impose its own selfdetermined concepts on the world. Self-determined Spirit on this view
recirculates its own image of itself, and is in no sense responding to the
world. Hegelian self-consciousness operates on a model of judgment
that presupposes the most banal form of thoughtrecognitive relations,
which are just the subject writ large recirculating its own self-image. Consequently this subject, like the thought aligned with it, is fixed and motionless since it cannot be open to the new. The new is anathema to the
model of thought Hegel employs. Hegels system does not attempt to
express difference and dynamism but rather he constrains it in the movement of contradiction. While it is clear that contradiction is important as
part of Hegels philosophical project of making sense of how values are
transformed and concepts created, Hegel sees modern life and human
subjectivity as dynamic and this is what he attempts to grasp in his notion
of the dialectic. Dialectic is for Hegel the philosophical form appropriate to modernity.3
What comes through all Hegels writings is that thought, history,
and Spirit are in a constant state of transition and revision. Thought in
particular is said to be restless, constantly dissatisfied with claims to know.
It strives for thought to be adequate to the shape of life it inhabits, but
because human Spirit is dynamic philosophical reflection is in constant
movement, always striving to make itself at home in a determinate shape
of life. This for Hegel is part and parcel of human history and of human
subjectivity, both of which are constantly transforming themselves. What
occurs for Hegel in the Enlightenment is the clear recognition that this is
the case. The cogito ergo sum are the first words in Descartess system; and
it is precisely these words which express modern philosophys difference
from all its predecessors.4 Descartess thought puts the self-grounding
thinking subject at the center of philosophy. This is consolidated in modernity, which strives to make us self-conscious of our status as thinking
and self-determining beings.
In modernity norms can no longer be authorized by God, a Platonic universal, fixed tradition, or natural law. Modernitys break with
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the past is based on its ongoing contestation of norms and the basis of
normative categories. The ideal of modernity is that it subjects its norms
to constant criticism and contention, and this persistent self-criticism is
what gives it its dynamism. Modernity in this sense makes implicit the
freedom and reflective capacity of the human subject. This beautiful passage from the Encyclopaedia Logic encapsulates the self-determining ethos
of the Enlightenment as well as the freedom of philosophical reflection:
When we think freely, voyaging on the open sea, with nothing under
us and nothing over us, in solitude, alone by ourselvesthen we are
purely at home with ourselves.5 What Hegel takes to be missing from
early modern philosophy and early modern life itself are the social and
political conditions in which this kind of freedom could be realized. Modernity had set the world in motion, freeing it from all dogmatism with
a self-determining subject as the center of the legitimation of norms.
But that subject could not realize itself or actualize its freedom without
the objective conditions that could facilitate that freedom. This modern
subject who now knows it is set in motion had to recognize and identify
these conditions as the objective expression of its subjective freedom.
For Hegel the modern state and the civil society that emerges at
the end of the eighteenth century have the potential to be the objective conditions for the subjective freedom that the Enlightenment had
finally brought to self-consciousness. We can recognize the development
and satisfaction of the objective criteria for freedom in the pages of the
Philosophy of Right in an idealized form. In that work freedom realizes
itself, and Spirit is satisfied or at home with itself in modern social and
political life, because the various problems that emerged in the Enlightenment formulation of individual and collective self-authorization, as
well as the limitations of individual autonomy as the model for freedom,
have been corrected by expanding the model of autonomy to the social
and political level. Modern life provides for Hegel the best conditions
for achieving a collective self-understanding because its institutions both
mirror and enable subjective freedom. The development of these objective conditions of freedom is a collective achievement. The critical issue
for Hegel is that notions of self-production and self-transformation are
explicit in the idea of modern life. Because we comprehend ourselves
as self-determining this in turn provides the optimal conditions for the
ongoing transformations of our self-understanding, that is, it allows for
the continual revision of habituated reasons and norms. This constant
transformation does not as with premodern societies cause the collapse
of the social order, since the very idea of self-transformation is the essential principle of modern society.
The fluidity and movement of, in particular modern self-
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understanding, subjectivity, and values required a modern response

to the objectivity of norms. There is enormous contestation as to how
to conceive the self-determining capacity of humans such that its selfproduced norms are binding on us. The historical, social, political, and
rational features involved in determining what can count as a legitimate
reason or justification is a fundamental concern of Hegels project,
but the problem is how such norms could be authoritative if they are
self-legitimated. This is a much more complex issue than I can hope to
examine here, but it is useful briefly to show one way of thinking how
this might be resolved. Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, and Robert Pippin have argued that Hegelian reason ought to be considered as fundamentally social. The modern social order, if it was truly to combine the
implied freedom of the autonomous subject and the dynamic institutions of modern public life, had also to reconceive rationality. Were its
categories and rules taken to have their authority in a transcendental or
otherworldly domain then the autonomous subject, the basis of whose
freedom was her rationality, could not be at home in the modern world.
Consequently reason and conceptuality itself had to be reconstrued to be
fundamentally social.6 This sociality of reason begins to translate into objective social and political structures at the end of the eighteenth century.
Hegels concern with structures of recognition is indicative of his
response to modernity. Reasons capacity for self-correction cannot be
grounded in an essential nature or immediacy. Something nondiscursive
or transcendent cannot be the legitimate basis for judgment. On this
view, reasons self-grounding has come to mean that norms are binding
and authoritative because they are based in structures of inter-subjective
recognition. This inter-subjective grounding of norms is rational and objective largely because of the way Hegel reconfigures Kantian autonomy:
rather than an individual, who has the gift of objective disembodied rational thought, who subjects herself to a law as if she were its author, in
Hegels case the types of reasons we give for our actions have to be understood to be socially, politically, and historically evolved. We can only act as
if we are rationally law-governed because of the communal, historical, and
inter-recognitive ties binding individuals together. Hegels often asserted
claim that Spirit is self-producing is not the story of a given rational structure unfolding itself over time, as the traditional metaphysical view of
Hegel had claimed, but is far better conceived as Robert Pippin describes
it as the evolution of a common like-mindedness.7 Self-producing Spirit
is the term Hegel uses to capture collective human self-determination
that is capable of producing a set of evolving inter-subjectively derived
conditions that form the basis of judgment and which come to be authoritative for us and binding on us through the complex recognitive in-
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terplay of social, political, and economic relations. Hegel thinks modern

social and political life (modern objective Spirit), unlike any other period
in history, has at least the formal capacity to revise existing norms and
claims to know without undermining the extant social and political edifice, precisely because it provides the social and institutional conditions
by which the revision of norms can be rationally self-legitimated.
Unlike other epochs, which could see their order based on God,
nature, or established tradition, modernity had to conceive a way for
itself to be self-grounding. Hegel thinks the seed of that self-grounding
is visible in the institutions of modern life. The deficiencies in selfunderstanding and in its way of life, and the norms that result from those
deficiencies, are authorized though the socially and institutionally mediated agreement and acknowledgement between subjects.8 We individually have to see ourselves in those institutions and social relations
that so define us, that is, we have to be able to reflectively see the reasons
we give as our own, and recognize that these achievements are the result
of rational developments that have occurred in history. Moreover, the
rationality of modern institutions, especially civil society, provided an environment for fierce disagreement, but because modern subjects understood the self-determined character of modern life and are at home in
its institutions, as has already been said, this meant the disagreement did
not result in the kind of normative incompatibility that Hegel saw, for
example, in Sophocless Athens.
Hegels concern with the self-determined subject and self-producing
Spirit is in part because he accepts, with some serious reservations, the
Kantian ideal of freedom as self-legislation. But the more important issue
in the context of Deleuzes reading of Hegel is, as we will see, that a
self-producing Spirit was the only way to resolve the concept-intuition
dualism. In Hegels case the only way to avoid the problems of Kants
philosophy, about which we will have something more to say shortly, is to
see the conditions of experience and judgment as necessarily the products of self-determined Spirit. Deleuze takes the self-regulating premise
of this whole approach, no matter how it is expressed, to be simply delusional and destructive. However, what I want to argue is that Deleuze
fails to take into consideration that recognition and the whole logical,
social, and political edifice that Hegel describes is designed to express a
dynamic subject and a world set in motion.
There are precedents to Deleuzes attempt to show the distorting
character of the modern focus on subjectivity. Heidegger has given the
most cogent and sustained critique of the egocentricism of the philosophical tradition, arguing in a parallel manner to Deleuze that the focus
on subjectivity distorts the relation of human subjectivity to being. Nietz-
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sche too had self-consciously questioned the hegemony of this secularized God and had tried to displace it with an ontology of forces. Both
these critiques of the philosophical tradition are a powerful influence
on Deleuze, but even in Kants thought Deleuze sees an unacknowledged fracture line that had already challenged the unified subject. The
brief moment in which the hegemony of the Cartesian subject is challenged has its origin in Kants distinction, in the transcendental deduction, between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego. Deleuze
describes it in this way: the self of the I think includes in its essence a
receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other . . . for a
brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterizes the highest power of thought, and opens being directly onto
difference (DR, 58/82). The empirical ego is that aspect of self that is
open to the manifold. This openness allows the subject to be affected by
the sheer diversity of the empirical. By contrast, the transcendental ego
is what allows judgments to be held together over time and provides the
requisite unity for self-consciousness. The passivity of the empirical ego
opens it to difference, because it is the site of its exposure to the manifold. The thinking activity of the subject, its spontaneity, can represent
to itself only its own thinking, nevertheless it is affected by the receptivity
of the manifold, though it has no resources to express it other than the
discursive. In this sense it is a divided subject. The receptivity of intuition
makes the I already another, since it opens subjectivity to something other
than thought.
This division maps at the level of subjectivity the central division
in the Critique of Pure Reason between concept and intuition, that is,
between the active and passive components of experience. Overcoming
the dualism of concept and intuition is one of the defining problems
of post-Kantian philosophy. Deleuze, however, thinks that the attempt
to synthesize this division is the profound mistake of German idealism.
Deleuze embraces this division; the tension between these two ways of
seeing the world is emblematic of the highest power of thought (DR,
58/82), since it raised a problem that required a genuinely new response.
Kant, however, shies away from embracing the irresolvable ambiguity of
this problem, instead sacrificing the empirical at the altar of the selfdetermining subject. It is worth dwelling a little while on this tension
between the transcendental and the empirical ego in Kant, since for both
Hegel and Deleuze it is an important distinction. The different way they
respond to this problem is instructive for their respective conceptions of
subjectivity.
In the reflection on the self, the self makes itself an object; in so
doing, it must make use of the I to judge the I. This is Kants famous in-
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convenience: Now it is, indeed, very illuminating that I cannot cognize

as an object itself that which I must presuppose to cognize an object at
all, and that the determining self (the thought) is different from the determinable self (the thinking subject) as cognition is different from its
object.9 Charles Taylor formulates the problem like this: we are objects
to ourselves only as empirical selves, not as the original subject; this Kant
takes as a bar to knowledge of self-consciousness.10 In this self-reflection
I treat myself as an object. The self I make an object is the empirical self,
because this is the self I experience as myself (my inner sense of self).11
But this empirical self is not the in itself or the truth of this self, which
would require it be prior to, or the condition of, any possible experience.
However, this feature of self (the transcendental self) is the self I am
using to investigate the empirical self that is the subject.
In this reading, to get to the real self and thereby gain selfconsciousness I would have to investigate the transcendental self, but this
I am not able to do because to make this an object is impossible. Hegel
puts the problem in this way: [Kant] holds fast to the I as it appears
in self-consciousness, from which, however, since it is its essencethe
thing-in-itselfthat we are to cognize, everything empirical must be omitted; nothing then is left but this phenomenon of the I think that accompanies every representationof which I think we have not the slightest
conception [Begriff ].12 This abstracted transcendental self is devoid of all
content, and cannot as such be made an object of investigation. To make
it an object would require it to be experienced as an object. Once I did
this it would no longer be this apperceptive I think but the empirical
self, because it would have to be made the inner self that I experience.
This transcendental I, since it is always prior to experience, can never
itself be an object of investigation, because we can have no experience
of it.
Kants problematic here has a distinguished lineage. Descartes,
when he took his I as an object, simply assumed an immediate selfperception, that is, a straightforward identity of existence with thought.
The conditions that allowed Descartes to take himself as an object were
ignored. In Humes account, self-consciousness is problematic since he is
unable to find among the objects of experience a self. Without an object
of which he could have an impression self-consciousness remains for him
a mystery. Kant, however, unlike Hume does not think we need to experience the self to establish the self; indeed, he argues that precisely because
we cannot experience the self, and yet there is a self unifying our experiences, therefore the self must be an a priori unifying principle. Kant does
not, however, abandon empirical consciousness; he preserves it as one of
the two moments of consciousness, the empirical and the transcendental.
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Hegel and Deleuze are in effect in agreement regarding the dualistic nature of Kants subject, but they have very different approaches as to
how to confront the division between these two components of Kantian
selfhood. Hegel thinks there is a structural mistake in this way of conceiving self-consciousness that is indicative of the general way Kant frames
his entire project; we will see this again shortly in the concept-intuition
dualism. For Hegel, it is a mistake to assume that, first of all, there are
objects which form the content of our representations, and then our
subjective activity comes in afterward to form concepts of them.13 Hegel
undermines this division between intuited object and concept by showing that the categories of thought are the only way in which there is a
world for us. The way Kant conceived of the transcendental subject generally suffered from a vestigial Cartesianism because it grounded experience in an abstract formal ego. Such a beginning point was unstable
and arbitrary for Hegel since once we begin with such a subject, we have
the problem of how to connect the world to it. The separation of the
empirical and the discursive into two distinct aspects of experience raised
the problem of how they could be reconnected. Deleuze disputes this
analysis, arguing that there is an irrevocable connection between these
spheres that should not be resolved by transforming the empirical into
a subset of the discursive, and moreover the empirical ought not to play
second fiddle to the conceptual.
By in effect beginning with the whole, that is with a historicized
Spirit, Hegel strives to avoid the whole set of problems that come with
Cartesian consciousness (self-reflection, inner and outer sense, isolation,
distanced spectator). The language of Spirit and the Concept is designed
to correct the deficiencies in this approach. There are two closely intertwined issues, which we can only touch on here, to show why Hegel
focuses on the spontaneous side of self-consciousness to overcome the
tensions in Kants view of subjectivity: the concept-intuition distinction
and the transcendental unity of apperception.
Kant had tried to unify the traditional opposition between empiricism and rationalism by arguing that these two represented legitimate
but opposed forms of knowing. In his critical philosophy he brings these
two ways of knowing together by asserting there was a single unified cognition that had two faculties: receptivity and spontaneity. Post-Kantian
idealism is united in arguing that the division between rationalism and
empiricism that Kant had sought to reconcile is reproduced in his own
thought, precisely because Kants two-faculty approach to cognition divided consciousness from world. Kant had claimed that concept and intuition were inseparable. Hegel, however, argued that intuitions role in
cognition retains too much of its empiricist origins, and consequently still
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preserved truth as a given sensuous reality cut off from knowing. Kantian
intuition, just as with empiricism, assumes an immediate and given empirical domain that is not mediated through concepts (SL, 45/28).14 Kant
preserved the importance of the empirical because thought needed to
be constrained by representations of what is received through intuition.
Without a nonconceptual intuitive faculty providing the content to experience, knowledge appeared unable to make any claims to objectivity. The idea that there was something that was a constitutive element
of knowledge and experience and yet was immediate and given was for
Hegel an unsustainable claim. Moreover, despite Kants claim that intuitions and concepts were distinct aspects or a unified knowledge, the way
in which concepts connected with the raw intuitive experiential content
was unclear and unpersuasive.
Hegel overcomes this dualism of concept and intuition by stripping
the intuitive of any appeal to the given. Experience is not of a given empirical reality that concepts then mold into meaning. Hegel reconceives
intuition such that it is not purely conceptual but neither is it empirically given. Just how successful Hegel is in preserving this balancing act
is beyond the scope of this chapter; nevertheless we can see why Hegel
takes this path. As we have already seen in the discussion of Kants transcendental subject, Kant thought that concepts were bound to a subjective sphere that frames the way in which subjects make judgments and
with which they experience the world. Beyond this sphere, on Hegels
reading of Kant, is an unreachable supersensible or noumenal sphere
that is not accessible to this subjective sphere. It is a realm completely
other to human mindedness. The end result for Hegel was that the only
way to avoid appealing to the given, and hence the view that the empirical world constrains thought by making it answerable to experience,
was to conceive of Spirit and the Concept as in the broadest sense selfdetermined. For Hegel experience must instead be understood as embedded in forms of life or shapes of Spirit that have to be conceived in a
historically and socially mediated way, that is, they must be understood in
some minimal sense to be discursive. Experience has to be in some sense
understood to be thoroughly conceptual; only then could world not be
positioned over and against us as a given.
The problem then, however, is that once you relinquish the role of
nonconceptual content in experience then the constraint of the world
on concepts is lost. Without appeal to either Platonism or an empirical
given as arbiters of an independent truth one has to be able to see all
meaning determination as self-determined. Once the standards of judgment and the concepts employed in judgment are taken to be inherently
self-determined this produces a host of problems, alluded to previously,
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such as how norms can be transformed and validated. Understanding the

importance of his response to these problems can help explain many of
Hegels most controversial formulations: substance as subject, truth as
the whole, thought overcoming otherness, and so on. All these phrases
are his way of signaling the need to deny any explanatory role for the
supersensible and nonconceptual content. Traditionally Hegels selfproducing Spirit was thought to show the self-determined character of
the whole only by reverting to a strongly metaphysical spirit-monism, that
is, by effectively reclaiming a pre-critical position. However, a far more
productive way to understand Hegels response to the set of unresolved
problems that emerge from Kants critical philosophy is, as we have seen,
to think of Spirit as an enhancement of self-determining subjectivity.15
Nevertheless, to avoid skeptical problems and to make his claims more
than spinning frictionlessly in the void Hegel needed to be able to connect subject and object and it is to Kantian apperception that he looked
to ensure this.
The transcendental unity of apperception in Kants thought is the
unified I that accompanies all ones representations; it is the aspect of
mindedness that allows us to know and to make claims to be in a specific mental state. Hegel repeatedly argues that apperception as Kant
conceives it is formal, something that Kant himself had emphasized.
Transcendental apperception is the most exiguous of conditions for selfconsciousness: merely to be able to claim ones thoughts as ones own.
The I think serves only to introduce all thinking as belonging to consciousness.16 But Hegel argues that such a limited role for apperception is not warranted. Apperception properly conceived is capable of
moving beyond the merely external relation of concepts to objects. In
apperception categories are not used externally, they are not applied by
consciousness to an intuited entity. In Hegels account the object is not
separable from the way it is conceptualized and judged. In apperception, judgments can be made precisely because the unity of the thing is
inscribed by the thought of it.17 Because an objects determinations are
conceptual it can express itself as objective. Interestingly, Hegel attributes
its objectivity to none other than the nature of self-consciousness (SL,
585/1516). This is not of course some sort of crude subjective idealism,
but rather a direct appeal to Kantian apperception, precisely because the
comprehension and experience of the object requires that it be thought.
There is a supra-oppositional quality to apperception that enables
it to be conceived as bridging the dualism of subject and object. Apperception can be considered as a process that does not have to be discussed
specifically as the pure domain of a singular consciousness, and yet it is
the condition for, and the domain of, consciousness. The I is required to
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actively think the object, but the truth of the object is not simply in the
comprehension by a singular subject; rather, it is only as it is in thought
that the object is truly in and for itself (SL, 585/14). In our judging activity, which is for Hegel the essential feature of experience and thought,
there is no representational or correspondence authentication that takes
place by which our judgments are compared to an otherthe object
in itself or the given. All we have for Hegel is the judging activity. The
possible ways in which we can experience and consider the object are
produced through a complex unfolding of historical and social forces.
These are the conditions by which we think and judge as well as being
the basis of our self-consciousness. This is the only way in which objects
can be experienced. Objects have no status outside of the whole, that is,
outside of our collective sense-making practices.
One could not simply reflect on oneself, as consciousness tries to in
the early chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and disclose the determinations of ones own self-consciousness in some singular sense. And this
is precisely because the conceptuality that is constitutive of consciousness, and the object world of which it is conscious, is not visible in this
sense; its meaningfulness overarches this subject-object relation. In this
way self-knowledge is not available to reflection. Self-reflection cannot be
to the mind what the reflection of the mirror is to ones physical appearance. This kind of reflection is incapable of grasping the conditions that
are constitutive of self-consciousness. Hegel is thoroughly anti-Cartesian.
The revised self-consciousness that emerges in Absolute Knowing recognizes the delusion that one could know, as it were, transparently both
oneself and the conditions for ones cognition and experience in an ahistorical or transcendental manner. The version of self-consciousness that
Deleuze is so critical of does not take into full consideration the idealist
view of self-consciousness but is instead focused very much on the Cartesian reflective model of self-consciousness. In Hegels case, while the
conditions and categories that constitute the various ways in which we
understand ourselves and the world have to be understood to be selfdetermined, we could never understand them all or make them present to us, indeed they are always being transformed. Our knowledge
is dependent on conditions as with Kantian self-consciousness, but we
can never know these in any definitive way. If this is the case then our
autonomy appears challenged and limited since the Kantian idea of
autonomy presupposes that these cognitive conditions could be understood. While Hegel accepts the latter view, he cannot give up on the idea
of a self-determined whole. The necessity for resolving the dualism of
concept and intuition and for connecting mind and world means that
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Hegels only option is a self-determining Spirit. That is, where Deleuze

wants to preserve the dissonance in the Kantian division between transcendental and empirical subjectivity Hegel has to resolve them, otherwise the idea of self-determined Spirit has also to be abandoned and with
it the problem of the given would reemerge.
As we have seen, Hegel overcomes the dualism of mind and world
by expanding the notion of self-determination, as well as the apperceptive self, and abandoning any conception of the given. Experience must
be conceived as a judging and the categories that frame the basis of those
judgments are the products of collective human history. The character of
our experience of the world is something that we are collectively responsible for. Hegel conceives experience in this way to resolve tensions in the
sensible-conceptual relation in exactly the opposite way to Deleuze. For
Deleuze, Hegels account of experience, because it shifts the emphasis
to the discursive, is limited and restrictive. But such a move is broadly
indicative of Hegels methodology that subordinates difference to identity and representation through the relentless labor of the dialectic.18
Through this methodology
thought is covered over by an image made up of postulates which
distort both its operation and its genesis. These postulates culminate in
the position of an identical thinking subject, which functions as a principle of identity for concepts in general; the thinking subject brings to
the concept its subjective concomitants: memory, recognition and selfconsciousness. (DR, 265/341)
This categorical structure is the unifying frame through which all meaning is interpreted. For both Kant and Hegel, this is the condition for any
possible experience, and in this sense at least it is transcendental (DR,
139/182). The implication of this strategy for Deleuze is that the sensible
and difference are reduced to the categories of judgment and the activities of the subject. Judgment is the faculty by which the world is parceled
up through analogy and recognition. Kant and Hegel employ mediating
categories to make sense of being. These categories are the defining expression of idealist thought; they are the tools of mind by which it tries
to know and manage the world.
We have already seen that Deleuze thinks that Kant abandons a
great insight by privileging the spontaneous and the apperceptive over
the sensible. For Deleuze self-determining subjectivity and spontaneity,
which is the focus of the Fichtean-Hegelian branch of post-Kantian
idealism, as well as the whole edifice of Spirit, the Concept, and dialec-
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tic, all employ difference in the service of identity. Of the two paths that
Kants subject opens, determined, spontaneous, and active on the one
hand and undetermined, passive, and receptive on the other, it is the
former that holds the most sway with Kant. The active side is the one
taken up by Kant and explicitly developed in the transcendental unity of
apperception and is associated with the great achievements of his practical philosophy. It is also the line preserved and pursued by Fichte and
Hegel. The reason that Hegel in particular focuses on the subjective side
is partly because he is convinced of self-determination as the highest
realization of human freedom but it is also, as we have seen, the only way
to resolve intractable problems in the way Kant conceives the conceptintuition distinction.
Deleuze returns to the scene of the Kantian crime. In Deleuzes
case the transcendental empirical that he lays claim to is of an entirely
different order; it is not an interpretative schema through which reality
is interpreted. Existence cannot be reduced to the categorical frame of
the transcendental subject. What is instructive in Deleuzes claim for a
transcendental status for the empirical is that Deleuze, like Hegel, is making a much more robust claim for thought than Kant is. Both Hegel and
Deleuze reject the idea of the thing-in-itself cut off from thought. The
sensible is not for Deleuze something intuited by a distinct faculty cut off
from the discursive aspect of experience; rather, the sensible has a transcendental status. The sensible is the condition of experience and provides its constitutive content nonconceptually (or at least not concepts as
the idealists conceive them) and it is not molded into a digestible form
by a subjectively derived set of categories. The sensible is existence and
the origin of diversity and difference. While Deleuze thinks the focus on
subjectivity is tyrannical and the transcendental subject distorting, nevertheless the sensible as he conceives it is not isolated from discursivity. To
escape from the Kantian dualism, which would leave the sensible cut off
from the discursive, he needs the empirical to be affective on thought.
That is, both Deleuze and Hegel respond to the subject-object division
that results from the concept-intuition distinction and Kants transcendental subject by trying to reconnect subject and object, though they take
different approaches to this. We have already seen how Hegel strives to
achieve this in his account of self-consciousness, by focusing on a revised
apperceptive and spontaneous subject.
Deleuze by contrast begins with a transcendental empirical, a real
difference as opposed to a conceptual difference. This difference is not
a metaphysical truth that lies behind appearance, of which the latter is
an inadequate expression. Difference, as Deleuze conceives it, has a relation to appearance and thought that is subtler than this. Individuating
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difference must be understood as preceding matter and form, species

and part and every other element of the constituted individual (DR,
139/182). Behind this difference there is nothing. This being of the sensible that is multiple and individuated is not cut off from thought, but
rather forces us to think (DR, 139/182). Being forced to think through
a fundamental encounter is positioned against the reactive, recognitive, and subject-centered thinking of idealism. Genuine thinking is initiated not by judgment, that is, by the subjects application of concepts in
experience, but is rather produced through something being sensed in a
range of affective tones that impact on the subject and thought in a way
that is heterogeneous and heteronymous. Rather than being recognized
and comprehended, thought perplexes us precisely because its affective
dimension is not assignable into the hierarchy of preassigned concepts.
Once we start with this assumption we can see why Deleuze tries to reconceive thought and selfhood as involving a passive synthesis.19
The relation of mind and world is not organized by intentional
acts of the conscious subject who employs concepts in acts of mediation
that matches up concepts and world through a recognitive process. In
Deleuzes case this division between subject and world is unable to be policed in this way. The generative process that produces knowledge, meaning, and experience does not operate in accordance with the coordinating activities of the transcendental subject. Formal linguistic structures
are also not the basis of knowledge and meaning. The relation between
subject, world, language, and ideas as Deleuze sees them is very different
from this model. His alternative to the subjective model of meaning determination is found in the way he conceives sense and passive synthesis
(DR, 38/56). This inversion is not simply an opposition to Hegel and the
canons of modern philosophy; his thought is not motivated by reaction
but by an alternative account of the ways in which concepts and ideas
are generated as well as how they take hold of thought. He is concerned
to provide a model for how thought regenerates itself, as well as providing a philosophical frame with which to conceive how the genuinely
new emerges, that is not grounded on self-determining subjects or a selfproducing Spirit. It is in this context that passive synthesis takes on an
important role in his thought, since it allows the sensible to be connected
with consciousness and thought in a way that impacts on thought more
on the model of a fluid biological system than self-determined thought.20
Whatever the skepticism Deleuze may have about subjectivity and
the epistemological and discursive prejudice of idealism, he still has to
connect thought and subjectivity to the transcendental empirical. Were
this not the case his transcendental empirical would be transcendent and
thereby totally other to thought and human life. His empiricism does
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not, as with classical empiricism or the empiricism of analytic philosophy, appeal to direct immediate knowledge or a given to justify knowledge claims. Deleuzes sensible does not have a verifying function in this
sense, but it does share with classical empiricists and Kant the idea that
consciousness intuits the sensible, that sensory consciousness has some
kind of receptive function that impacts on experience. But the transcendental characterization of the empirical positions it absolutely against
the Hegelian position for whom the empirical could have no explanatory
potential, precisely because as we have seen it is nonconceptual. But the
empirical is not passively received in the subject in the way it is in empiricism and in Kantian intuition. Deleuzes passive synthesis is not receptive; the passivity is a system of habituated contractions that constitutes
the organism before it constitutes the sensations (DR, 78/107). Deleuze
takes this form of habituated biological organization to be the basis of
difference and of self-formation. We do not develop ourselves through
acts of individual or collective self-determination or through some kind
of self-contemplation but through habits of contemplation, contraction,
or satisfaction. This biopsychic system is what allows the system to modify
itself, not reflective acts of self-determining subjects. The inherent diversity and fluidity of this basic domain of the subject is what makes it
multiple.
While Deleuze thinks the self-determining subject is an illusion of
good will, the empirical is not cut off from thought, and this has implications for how he conceives subjectivity. Because the empirical is passively
synthesized by the subject, its transformation of thought is unregulated
by the standard unifying categories of the philosophical tradition. The
uniformity of the transcendental subject and its thought because they
are affected by the sensible cannot maintain its self-sufficient stability.
Difference and singularity are embedded in the character of the subject in a manner that ensures it cannot maintain its claims to coherence
and unity. We cannot explore here the immensely complex way in which
sense operates for Deleuze; it is, however, worth stressing that sense and
habit reconfigure thought in a way that educates thought such that
it engenders the new. There is no straightforward and mappable way
in which singularity and sense affects the subject and thought; they are
described variously as provocations and generating problems as well as
migrating and swarming. Deleuzes subject could not thereby in any way
represent itself to itself in any coherent manner, since differences so conceived are not able to be present to the self as definable conditions or
concepts (DR, 57/80). They evade such mediations but they are, by virtue of the unique way he conceives sense and passive synthesis, nevertheless constitutive determinations of the subject. The biopsychic model he
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employs to explain the subject opens the subject to diversity in a manner

that makes it perpetually self-modifying. This ensures the subject at issue
in Deleuze is multiple rather than stable and unified.
Deleuze uses a great deal of colorful and occasionally scornful language to describe post-Kantian idealism; nevertheless, the focus of his
dispute is that conceptual mediation, recognition, representation, and
self-determination do not allow the genuine opening of being on to difference. Deleuze sets his program up by a neat division between tyrannical systems with self-determining subjects at their core and a diffused transcendental empirical that is not self-regulating. Hegel would recognize
in Deleuzes approach an aspiration to preserve the empirical without it
being either an unknowable given or a thing-in-itself, but Hegel would
think the problem far better framed not by reconceiving it as a transcendental empirical that is other to thought, but rather by keeping it as
something minimally discursive. To conceive such a field in any other
way threatens the idea of self-determination. Deleuze wants his empirical
field to not be cut off from thought, but its pathway into thought is necessarily diffuse and diverse for all the reasons we have seen above. But for
Hegel the transcendental empirical cannot but be outside our collective
sense-making practices and as such is literally inconceivable as a determinate domain beyond thought, since only something within the public
space of reasons could have any explanatory or determinate potential;
all else is crude metaphysics or the given. At this level there is simply an
impasse in their approaches and this is because of the respective takes
they have on self-determination.
As we have seen, Hegel wants to bring dynamism and motion to
his subject. But this motion is framed for him through the language of
determinate negation. The negative serves Spirits and the subjects selfcorrecting transformation; the subject finds itself and moves forward
through dismemberment. Despite this self-correcting trajectory, Hegel
does not produce a stable self-identical subject but a subject that knows
itself to be in transition and that knows the conditions of its own selfreference are in transition. In Deleuzes case the modern ideal of selfdetermination is no longer sustainable; it requires a differently conceived
subject, one that is not the stable focus of this world set in motion, since
for him the motion comes from the empirical and the modes of organization of the habituated self, not a self-determined modern Spirit. Even
though Hegels subject is not self-identical it still harbors an identity,
despite the world being in motion, that in principle has the capacity to
make sense of the conditions that are constitutive of its self-identity. In
Deleuzes case the movement of global capital and trade, the shifting allegiances of modern society and politics, and the wholesale transforma-
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tion of cultural life in the modern world mean the animating German
idealist concern, that a subject could be at home with itself in modern
life, is a form of philosophical self-comprehension that is inadequate to
late capitalism. We are perpetually displaced by these events and we need
a conception of subjectivity that is adequate to this world that is fractured
and fluid. For Hegel the question would remain for him as to what exactly freedom could mean for the subject that inhabits this world.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 58; Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968), 81. French page numbers follow page numbers from the English translation. Referred to in text as DR, followed by page
numbers.
2. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 13134/17175; and Deleuze,
Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 103.
3. For an extended discussion of this issue, see Simon Lumsden, Philosophy and the Logic of Modernity: Hegels Dissatisfied Spirit, Review of Metaphysics 65, no. 1 (2009): 5589; and Angelica Nuzzos exceptional analysis of the dialectic in Dialectic as Logic of Transformative Processes, in Hegel: New Directions,
ed. Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham, U.K.: Acumen, 2006).
4. G. W. F.Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans.
T. M.Knox and A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 183.
5. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical
Sciences with the Zustze, trans. Theodore F. Geraets, Wallis Arthur Suchting, and
Henry Silton Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 31z.
6. This is why much of the recent discussion of Hegels thought, which
frames it in terms of sociality of reason, usefully appeals to Sellarss idea of the
space of reasons to assist them in this.
7. Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12.
8. This does not mean that we can of course understand everything and
everyone within modern life as at home as in Hegels well-known discussion of
poverty. Moreover, there are a number of pathologies that play themselves out
through the experience of either being left behind by changes in norms or the
failure of these changes to actually correct what was indeterminate in a given
society. For a discussion of this, see Axel Honneths Suffering from Indeterminacy:
An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegels Philosophy of Right (Assen, Neth.: Van
Gorcum, 2000).
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A402.
10. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 335.
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11. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A107.

12. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1969), 777. German edition in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 21, ed. Hans-Jrgen
Gawoll (Hamburg, Ger.: Felix Meiner, 1989), 230. Referred to as SL in text. German page numbers follow page numbers from the English translation.
13. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, 163 z2.
14. Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard in numerous works have been the
clearest and most persuasive in arguing for this reading of Hegel.
15. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A341/B399.
16. Thought sublates the immediacy with which the object at first confronts us and thus converts the object into a positedness; but this its positedness
is its being-in-and-for-self, or its objectivity (Hegel, Science of Logic, 585; 14).
17. It should be reiterated here that despite Deleuzes claim, Hegel is not a
representational thinker. In this he is entirely consistent with Fichte.
18. Though Hegel is not a transcendental philosopher.
19. See chap. 2 of Difference and Repetition. For a good overview of these
issues in The Logic of Sense and in Difference and Repetition, see Sean Bowdens The
Priority of Events: Deleuzes Logic of Sense (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011).
20. There are clear connections to romanticism that I cannot explore here.
See the discussion of Schelling and Deleuze in James Dodds Expression in
Schellings Early Philosophy, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27, no. 2 (2006):
10939.
Desiring-Production and Spirit:

On Anti-Oedipus and German
Idealism
John Russon
In many respects, Anti-Oedipus, the collaborative work of Gilles Deleuze

and Flix Guattari, is a typical book of German idealist philosophy. Like
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Deleuze and Guattari model their work
in Anti-Oedipus on the form of Kants Critique of Pure Reason and then
use the form of Kants own project to develop a critique of Kant. I will
argue that the critique of Kant in Anti-Oedipus is, in general, successful,
but that there remains a fundamental way in which the schizoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari offer is ultimately unsatisfactory. Specifically, I will argue that Deleuze and Guattari presume the phenomenon
of mineness without being able to account for it adequately. I will
argue in particular that our experience of ourselves must be given to
us via an experience of other autonomous self-consciousnesses. At this
point, we will see that Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, has anticipated this problem and that it is his account of the dialectic of recognition that satisfactorily carries forward the story of desire laid out in
Anti-Oedipus.
Kant on Understanding and Reason

Kants critical project in the Critique of Pure Reason serves two purposes.
On the one hand, Kant secures the possibility of objectivity within experience. On the other hand, Kant rules out the possibility of an unconditioned knowledge of things-in-themselves. These two results are both
rooted in the same aspect of experience, namely, the categories of subjective synthesis that provide unity to experience.
Kants epistemology is a kind of phenomenology. Kant argues back152
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ward from meanings with which we do in fact engage to the epistemic

conditions that must be in place in order for such experiences of meaning to be possible. Kant ends up discovering that there are three essential
cognitive powers that must be in play in order for us to have experiences
of objects. These are the powers of sensibility, imagination, and understanding, and these powers make meaning possible through effecting,
respectively, the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, the synthesis of
reproduction in imagination, and the synthesis of recognition in a concept.1 I will discuss each of these briefly.
Roughly, Kants point is as follows. We must be active in our openness to experience or there would be, between ourselves and our world,
no encounter, no being-aware-of. It is only because we pose a specific
question to our worldbecause we look from within a particular frameworkthat we can experience a world in answer. Experience must begin
with a reception, with a being-struck, an intuition. This intuition, however, can only happen to a being that is open to being struck. It is only
because we ask, effectively, Is there something striking us? that we can
be aware of anything. Space and time are the forms of our openness to
being struckwe ask, where? and when? and it is only because these
fields of space and time are in principle meaningful to us that we are capable of discerning an impact, capable of intuition, sensitive.2 Thus even
at our most passive, we are activebeing struck/affected requires a capacity to be affected. Thus, to sense is a power, a function of enabling
meaning, specifically in the form of intuition.
Furthermore, however, our experience has a lasting character and
a coherent character. We are not just struck and then struck again and
then struck again with no encounter between these experiences. Rather,
we experience these intuitions as coordinated with each other, spatially
and temporally, in such a way that we experience the significance of one
in relation to the experience of anotherthis one is before that, beside
that. This again requires of us that we have an ability. We must be able still
to be engaged with the significance of an intuition even as we are no longeror not yetactively intuiting it. This powerthe power to engage
with an absent intuition as if it were presentis the power of imagination.3 An experience of coordination, in which we navigate significances
that are not immediately present, rests upon our imaginative power. To
imaginethe ability to present the absentis the second constitutive
power involved in enabling meaning.
The third essential power is the power of understanding (also
described as apperception, that is, perception of perception, or
self-perception). This is essentially the power of self-reflexivity or selfcommentary within experiencethe power to say of ones experience,
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this is that. Kant refers to its power as the synthesis of recognition in a

concept, or the ability to deal with representations of other representations, meanings about our other meanings.4 We are familiar with this
power of understanding in our daily life when we learn that many particular items within our experiences are instances of some more universal
identityoh, these are all participants in a conference. Kants point is
that this power not only operates within the world of our experience but
also is a power that must already be at play for us ever to have a world
of experience. The power of understanding is the power to recognize
coherent identities that extend through multiplicities. Any meaningful
relationship of different experiential elements rests on such a recognition. We might equally call it the power of interpretation. Thus, along
with intuiting and imagining, interpreting must always be at play in the
enabling of meaning: it is from these three powers that the very tissue of
experience is woven.
Now what is the form this tissue of experience takes? What is the
familiar meaning for which Kant is discerning the necessary preconditions? Specifically, it is the experience of objective reality. Normally,
we have the experience of a world composed of thingssubstances with
discernible identities and measurable propertiesthat enter into causal
interaction with other things in such a way as to present a coherent world
open to scientific investigation. This is the experience for which Kant is
determining the necessary preconditions. In order that a subject might
be conscious of such a world, that subject would have to organize its experience from the start according to expectations of substantiality, causality, and systematic community: only a subject who puts such a priori
demands upon its experience could ever encounter an object, an independently defined reality that is open to our subjective investigation but
not causally affected by our subjectivity.5 What Kant, then, goes on to
specify in greater detail is the specific set of categories or a priori conceptsthe specific schemata for conceptual recognitionthat together
make up the scheme of an object. It is because we all operate with such
universal and necessary categories that we are able to recognize the kind
of world in which we can perform science, that is, that we operate in a domain in which we are able to make objective judgments. These syntheses
of intuition, imagination, and interpretation together make a coherent
world, accessible to all similar cognitive subjects. The syntheses generate
the coherence within the tissue of experience.
The categories are the specific, necessary functions of interpretation that together allow a sensible manifold to appear in the form of
coherent objectivity, the functions that allow us to experience, that is, a
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community of substances integrated according to causal relations, and

manifest through coherent patterns of sensation.6 These categories allow
us to interpret our sensation in such a fashion as to experience our world
objectively, and this is indeed what allows for a science of things as they
appear to us. It is our tendency, however, to use these same interpretive
powers in an effort to move beyond the practical coherence they lend
our scientific endeavors to develop a coherent, compelling theoretical
account of being as such, and it is the real force of Kants critique to
demonstrate that this practice is not, in fact, cognitively legitimate. Kants
overall project in the Critique of Pure Reason is to show that our attempts to
use conceptual reasoning to establish a presuppositionless metaphysics
are based on the use of powers that lend coherence within experience
beyond the terrain of their legitimate employment: we make transcendent
use of what are legitimately only transcendental (that is, immanent) principles of meaning.7 Causality, for example, is an essential dimension of
coherent experience; we abstract the concept of causality from its role
as a dimension of the meaning of experience, however, and presume
that we can demand of experience as a whole that it be explicable in
terms of causality, that is, we argue that experience must have a first
cause, explaining either our experience as caused by a self in itself
(a position whose untenability is exposed in the Paralogisms of Pure
Reason), or that there must be a causal reality-in-itself that lies behind
the object of our experience (a position whose untenability is exposed
in the Antinomies of Pure Reason). We try to hold the happening of
experience itself answerable to a meaningfulness that experience itself
makes available, a version of the experience error that Merleau-Ponty
diagnoses in his Phenomenology of Perception.8 Essentially, we want our experience to make sense in an ultimate sense, but our efforts necessarily draw upon meanings that are necessarily internal to experience and
Kant demonstrates that our efforts to produce such an ultimately satisfying theoretical account fail and lead to incoherence and contradiction,
rather than to science.
I have begun with this sketch of the main outlines of Kants critical
project in the Critique of Pure Reason for two reasons. On the one hand,
Kant is, I take it, typical of the specific way of thinking to which Deleuze
and Guattari are most opposed; indeed, Deleuze says of his book on
Kant, I wrote it as a book on an enemy.9 On the other hand, though,
this Kantian program of critique is remarkably parallel in format to the
program of Anti-Oedipus. I am interested, then, in showing how it is that
Deleuze and Guattari carry out a critique of the Kantian philosophy by
employing the very form of the Kantian critique.
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Anti-Oedipus and Schizoanalysis

Like Kants Critique of Pure Reason, Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus
focuses on the syntheses that generate meaningindeed, the syntheses
that generate reality. This synthetic generation of meaning goes by the
name of desiring production. The synthetic apparatus Deleuze and
Guattari identify is threefold, as is the apparatus discerned by Kant.
Furthermore, the specific three syntheses are remarkably reminiscent
of the three syntheses Kant identifies: production replaces Kantian intuition, recording replaces Kantian imagination, and consumption
replaces Kantian apperception. Further, Deleuze and Guattari, like Kant,
identify a legitimate and illegitimate use of these syntheses, and they
specifically distinguish these two as the immanent (transcendental) and
transcendent uses, exactly as does Kant.10 The project in Anti-Oedipus
mirrors the project of the Critique of Pure Reason with, however, two central differences. The first is that it is the very objectivity that Kant interprets as the legitimate use of the syntheses of experience that for Deleuze and Guattari is the product of the illegitimate use of the syntheses.
The second is the different relation that Deleuze and Guattari recognize
between desire and sense, compared to that which Kant recognizes. Let
me begin with a quick review of the three syntheses identified by Deleuze
and Guattari.
The original of all sense is desiring production. Desire is the multiplicity of machines establishing and interrupting flows, making connections and breaking them off, coupling and separating. Desire is the and
. . . and . . . and . . . Like Kants intuition, desire is thus the immediate,
that behind which there is nothing further. Desire is the starting point
and the element of everything further, and all more developed meaning
must answer back to desiring production as its source and motor (A-O,
715, 8089; 18, 6875).11
The flows and interruptions pass. They are not, however, simply
lost. Their happening is inseparable from an inscription, a recording
taken of them. As soon as they are produced, productions also become
of . . . : of what? Of a body without organs, the giant egg of a recording
surface that is no entity over and above the productions it records but
which is precisely their entry into a logbook in relation to all the others.
The body without organs is roughly the lived readiness to engage that
is the virtual identity of the network of flows and interruptions. Like
Kants imagination, then, the synthesis of recording is the tissue of remembrance and expectation into which productions are immediately
entered upon being produced (A-O, 1522, 89100; 916, 7584).12
And finally, there is the synthesis of consumption. The product is
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enjoyed, consumed, and in its consumption a subject takes pleasure, a

subject is consummated. The consumption of the product in the experience of pleasure is the production of a consummated subject, that is, the
subject is itself the last productthe residueof the whole production
line of desire. The subject is not a preexistent substance but is rather an
identity generated only in its consummation and thus only able to say,
in a reference backward from the experiencing of enjoyment, so thats
who I was. Like Kantian apperceptive understanding, then, the third
synthesis in Deleuze and Guattari is the self-referential moment of recognition within meaning (A-O, 2229, 100126; 1622, 84105).13
The gist of the analysis of Deleuze and Guattari is that subjectivitythe very sort of subjectivity that Kant takes as his starting pointis
never realized: we never are such coherent subjects, but are rather, multiple partial selves, regionally coherent but never fully, systematically orchestrated. Let me say a bit more now about this issue of subjectivity in
Kant, to be a little clearer about the critique of this notion in Deleuze and
Guattari. To do this, I want to return to Kants synthesis of recognition in
a concept and discuss two further notions he develops in explicating this
synthesis, namely, the transcendental object = x and the transcendental unity of apperception. Let me introduce these ideas through quoting
Deleuzes discussion of them in his book on Kant.
Deleuze asks, regarding his interpretation of Kant:
Can we say with complete accuracy . . . that synthesis is sufficient to
constitute knowledge? In fact, knowledge implies two things which go
beyond synthesis itself: it implies consciousness, or more precisely the
belonging of representations to a single consciousness within which
they must be linked. . . . On the other hand, knowledge implies a necessary relation to an object. . . . The manifold would never be referred
to an object if we did not have at our disposal objectivity as a form in
general (object in general, object = x). Where does this form come
from? The object in general is the correlate of the unity of consciousness. . . . Therefore, the real (synthetic) formula of the cogito is: I think
myself and in thinking myself, I think the object in general to which I
relate a represented diversity.14
This is a helpful discussion of Kants argument: the meaningfulness of

experience rests on the ability of a subject to interpret its experience as
about an object, and the presumption of a unitary object to which it
refers its experience is itself premised upon the ability of the subject to
be present to itself throughout all of its experiences, that is, the object to
which it refers its experiences must itself be referred back to a selfsame
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subject. Ultimately, then, the coherence within experience is just the

articulation of the demand that I be myselfcoherence is my holding
together of a consistent identity throughout the full range of the history
of my consciousness. This is the ultimate ground and significance of objectivity. Now, as I said, the analysis of Anti-Oedipus leads to the claim that
the subject is unrealized in experience and remains multiply diverse and
residual, and this is the very nature of the production of meaningfulness.
Kants Critique of Pure Reason, on the other hand, makes the unity of the
subject the ground of meaningfulness. Indeed, even if the argument is
not that that unity is a permanent acquisition, at the very least that unity
of the subject must be the invariant telos of all experience, the infinite
striving to be itself that provides the very arena for meaning. I want to
pursue this opposition between the two works a little further.
In Anti-Oedipus, what we think of as the normal, individuated subject is itself a product of the Oedipal takeover of desire. This normal
subject is imposed upon desire, and, indeed, it emerges only in the familial triangulation daddy-mommy-me, which is itself the 3 + 1 that depends on a definitive relation of lack to the phallus. In other words, AntiOedipus argues for two claims that are very relevant to assessing the force
of Kants argument, namely, (a) that the individual ego Kant identifies
is itself only a member of a trinity of selves, and (b) that this self, and indeed the whole trinity, is further dependent on another identity to which
it is referred, namely, the perfect self-possession of the phallus. Thus,
we could see Anti-Oedipus in part as expanding upon Kants five layers
of synthesis (sense-imagination-concept-object-ego) to produce layers 6
and 7 (family-phallus). But the point of Anti-Oedipus is not to advance
this Kantian story through its analysis of the organizing role of Oedipus.
Rather, the point is to show that already in what Kant deems the legitimate use of synthesis, the proper terrain of desiring production has been
exceeded. The illegitimate transcendent use of the syntheses that Kant
sees in reason, that is, is already at play in his own approach to understanding. Kant understands experience to be by nature the experience of
objectivitythe experience by a well-formed, normal individual of a detached, well-formed, independently real objectwhereas, Deleuze and
Guattari maintain, experience that takes this form is experience that has
already been normalized: it is a derived rather than the original form
of experience. Kant, they contend, has confused something established
within experience, namely, the norms of objectivity and normalized subjectivity, with something that is normative for experience, thus himself
committing a form of the experience error he exposes in the dialectic
of pure reason. In the language of psychoanalysis, we could say that Kant
has not recognized that the experience organized around the reality
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principle is not original, but is a development within and transformation of experience organized around the pleasure principle, where
experience governed by the pleasure principle is not a well-organized
network of clear and systematic relationships between well-defined identities, but is a patchwork of processes of localized sense-making that link
partial subjects to partial objects by the relations of condensation and
displacement that constitute the logic of affective, desiring life.15 Let
me quote a passage from Anti-Oedipus:
Partial objects now seem to be taken from people, rather than from the
nonpersonal flows that pass from one person to another. . . . Oedipus
has as its formula 3 + 1, the One of the transcendent phallus without
which the terms considered would not take the form of a triangle. It is
as if the so-called signifying chain, made up of elements that are themselves nonsignifyingof polyvocal writing and detachable fragments
were the object of a special treatment, a crushing operation that
extracted a detached object from the chain, a despotic signifier from
whose law the entire chain seems consequently to be suspended, each
link triangulated. There we have a curious paralogism implying a transcendent use of the syntheses of the unconscious: we pass from detachable
partial objects to the detached complete object, from which global persons derive by
an assigning of lack. (A-O, 85, 8687; 71, 73, emphasis in original)
What has happened is that the subject that is the residuum of production
has been treated as productions ground, with the result that desiring
production is seen to belong to the subject (where it, too, now, is further
understood as dependent on the complete object it lacks). The world of
desire, on its own quite satisfied with its own regional sense-making, is
now reinterpreted as participating in a reality governed by the demand
for universal sense. The multiple desires are seen as so many expressions
of the total person (whose identity is their telos), and therefore seen as
secondary and incomplete on their own, whereas they are in fact originary, and on their own terms not at all incomplete, not at all defined in
terms of any lack.
What this entails is that the very notion of objectivity is inseparable
from the notion of the Oedipal subjectKants analysis of objectivity
depends on his ability to refer the sense within experience to the sense
of a coherent subject/substance of experience, but Deleuze and Guattari show that this subject is the Oedipal subject of psychoanalysis (the
subject itself made one only as its lack of the phallus). Kant has thus
wrongly imported the demands of meaning within the Oedipal world
an aspect of empirical lifeinto the realm of transcendental synthesis;
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or, we could say that he has taken the notion of subject, which properly
is only the passing synthesis of consummation, and hypostasized it into
a transcendent substance which is then used as the basis for analyzing
the original synthesis. In this way, then, Deleuze and Guattari follow out
Kants project to the point of showing Kant himself to be guilty of the
very offense he attributes to rationalist metaphysics:
A consciousness is nothing without the synthesis of unification, but
there is no synthesis of unification of consciousness without the form of
the I, or the point of view of the self. . . . Only when the world, teeming
with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and preindividual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last the field of the transcendental.16
Let me turn now to describing what I take to be the other revision to

Kant, namely, the transformation of the relation of desire and sense that
comes with this critique of objectivity.
With Heidegger, we could see Kants analysis of experience as
flawed from the start because it takes the experience of objects to be
original, whereas objects are derived from the breakdowns of the experience of readiness, and it is something like this that is going on in AntiOedipus.17 We are seeing that the modeling of experience on the recognition of an object is inherently Oedipal, and we need to redescribe the
logic of sense.
In fact, Kants portrayal of experience as objective goes hand in
hand with his separation of the story of sense from the story of desire.
The primacy of the detached, self-sufficient, indifferent objectthe ideal
of his theoretical philosophyentails that the object has a significance
of its own that it imparts to us. We can see that, virtually by definition,
its sense is not in any way determined by our desire. This is indeed how
Kant views experience. We recognize things theoretically, and we apply
our desires to them, but the realm of recognition and the realm of desire
are entirely separate.
What Deleuze and Guattari recognize, however, is that we cannot
begin by presuming an ontologically independent world of things from
which we would then derive an explanation for our experience: the sense
independent things is precisely a sense that emerges within our experience, that is, our having that sense is to be explained by our experience,
rather than being something that can explain our experience. Desire,
then, is not the subjective contact of an ontologically independent subject with an ontologically independent object, but is, instead, the enactment of the domain within which there is. Desire is itself precisely
the production of reality. The immediacy of senseintuitionis no dif-
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ferent from the immediacy of desire, and, inasmuch as this is the one
and only arena, that happening of sense within which any further sense
emerges, the immediacy of sense and desire is no different from the
immediacy of the real. Thus, in what is perhaps the most extreme phenomenology, knowledge of reality simply amounts to a description of the
flows and interruptions that characterize our desire. The ever-changing
multiplicity of desiring-production is the only phenomenological subjectit is to the parameters of desire that we must turn to determine
the parameters of the real. Consequently (a) the analysis of practical life
cannot be separated from the analysis of theoretical life, as Kant does
in the first two critiques, and (b) desire cannot be subordinated to or
regulated by any other source of meaning, since all meaning is simply
desiring-production. Thus with the critique of objectivity comes the installation of desire at the very heart of meaning (rather than its Kantian
location as a separate force applied to the world of objectivity).
In sum, then, the rigorous adherence to the Kantian demand that
we reveal phenomenologically the immanent bases of sense amounts to
a radical critique of the Kantian philosophy that both abandons the primacy of the ideal of objectivity within meaningful experience and installs desire at the foundation of all sense. Deleuze and Guattari have
attempted to radicalize Kants project, articulating the implications of
staying true to the limits of immanence (the transcendental, in Kants
language), rejecting any attempt to explain experiencesenseon
the basis of alien, transcendent standards. Rejecting the importation of
alien norms and standards, however, does not by itself entail that norms
and standards as such are inherently alien to sense, inherently alien to
immanence. Indeed, turning now to Hegel, we will see precisely that desire immanently gives rise to a certain telos of normalization and objectivity. We will see this specifically by describing the experience of other
subjects, an experience, I will argue, that is insufficiently comprehended
by the conceptual tools that Deleuze and Guattari provide.
Desiring-Production and Other People

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel begins his study of self-consciousness
by considering the experience of desire.18 While not an explicitly selfconscious positing of myself to myselfnot the self-reflection of the
egodesire is a practical self-assertion, a feeling of I, even if it is not
noticed as such. Desire has as its manifest object the thing which is the
object of its desire. Desire is not lived as a strategic planning by an al-
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ready formed self, but is an experience of the compelling magnetism

of the various determinate matters that draw ones attention; nonetheless, implicit in this attractive object is the experience of the desiring
subjectivity in that what desire harvests from its object is what satisfies
its terms. Even if its terms are not self-consciously recognized or strategically deployed by the desiring subject, that desiring subjectivity is nonetheless co-constitutive of the attraction: desire is not an inert passivity
with no character of its own, but is precisely desire, is precisely a determinate openness and desire to be attracted. Desire is the lived, practical
presumption that being is for me, that is, when I operate out of desire,
I appropriate the world as if my realitymy desiresuperseded the objects right to independence (PG, 167, 13839).19
Self-consciousness is desire in general . . . [and] has a double object:
one is the immediate object, that of sense-certainty and perception,
which however for self-consciousness has the character of a negative; and the second, namely, itself, which is the true essence, and is
present in the first instance only as opposed to the first object. Selfconsciousness here exhibits itself as the movement in which this antithesis is removed, and the identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for
it. (PG, 167, 139)
Desire is thus, in Hegels language, an experience of self-certainty, a

lived conviction of the legitimacy of my claim to centrality: Certain of
the nothingness of this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness
is for it the truth of the other; it destroys the independent object and
thereby gives itself the certainty of itself (PG, 174, 143). While being explicitly object-oriented, desire is thus implicitly an experience of itself, an
experience of self-consciousness.
To this point, there is no conflict between the interpretation of
desire in Hegel and in Anti-Oedipus. Both recognize desire to be a level
of engagement that operates below the level of the normalized articulation of subjects and objects, a nonthetic embrace of part-objects, a nonstrategic coupling that give rises to an experience of self as the sense of an
enjoyment whose subjective and objective terms could not be defined in
advance of their co-enactment.20 But, as Hegel writes, self-consciousness
which is simply for itself and directly characterizes its object as a negative
element, or is primarily desire, will . . . learn through experience that
the object is independent (PG, 168, 13940). These terms we have so
far laid out, in other words, are not sufficient for the understanding of
desire. Let us look further at Hegels analysis of desire to see how desires
object reveals the insufficiency of desires own terms, ultimately demon-
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strating that desire is implicated in relationships of inter-subjectivity and

objectivity.
Desire is the lived experience of being as for me. Being, here, is
not recognized as reality, that is, not construed as for itself (which is,
indeed, why Freud describes desire as operating on the pleasure principle rather than the reality principle).21 To live from this perspective
is to live from the sense that there is a surplus of desire over determinacy:
determinacyitis not real in-itself, not an exclusively self-related,
independent reality that deterministically governs all behavior including
our own, but exists as what Hegel calls a negative self-relation, that is,
determinacy is experienced in relation to my desire.22 The simple I
[desire], Hegel writes, is this genus or the simple universal, for which
the differences are not differences only by its being the negative essence
of the shaped independent moments (PG, 174, 143). Desire is a negative
self-relation in that desire is its determinacy, but desire is determinacy in
the mode of not-being it, as Sartre might put it: I am taken with determinacy, immersed in it, but also detached from it, related to it. To experience desire is to experience the excess, the negativitythe lived space of
possibility, the virtualitythat exceeds any positivity, any determinacy.
But to live with the recognition that determinacy is not the last word
but that it is, rather, the front end of desire entails that determinacy
always carries within it the implicit question, of what desire are you the
front end? In other words, if the very premise of desire is that determinacy never simply is itself but is always in principle superseded by desire,
is always the way a certainty has become explicit for self-consciousness in
an objective manner (PG, 174, 143), then when desire relates to a determinacy, it is relating to something already defined as defined by another
desire: determinacy is never simply present, but is the presence of an
absence, and thus desire, in relating to a present determinacy, is always
in principleby its own constitutive premiserelating to that which has
an absence at its core:
The truth of this certainty is really a double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness. Consciousness has for its object one which,
of its own self, posits its otherness or difference as a nothingness, and
in so doing is independent. . . . The object of self-consciousness is . . .
independent in this negativity of itself; and thus it is for itself a genus, a
universal fluid element in the peculiarity of its own separate being; it is
a living self-consciousness. (PG, 176, 144)
To live from desire is to be open in principle to the possibility of other

desires, and to live from the recognition of ones desire is to live from
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the recognition in principle of other desires. In other words, to be a selfconsciousness is to be open in principle to other self-consciousnesses: It
is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness (PG, 177, 144). To be the
kind of being who can recognize itself is to be the kind of being who can
recognize others.
But what is it to recognize others? The other, as the desire that exceeds determinacy, the negativity that contextualizes positivity, is precisely
what cannot be present, and, thus, to be open to others is precisely to be
open to what cannot be present. Desires own constitutive premise, however, is that this what cannot be present is the essential and independent reality that defines the sense of determinacy: A self-consciousness,
in being an object, is just as much I as object (PG, 177, 145). Being
an explicit self-consciousness thus opens one to the realm of negativityfor-itselfabsolute negation23as the reality beyond immediate determinacy, and thus, even as desire is the experience of self-certainty, even
as desire experiences its own negativity as what is determinative of the
sense of the determinacy in which it is absorbed, desire is equally the
experience of itself as heldthrough this determinacyin essential relation to a defining reality that eludes its grasp: it is held by the negativity
that is the other self-consciousness, the other possible self-certainties that
equally enact themselves in this same determinacy. Self-consciousness is
faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. . . . It has
lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being (PG, 179, 146). One can live
ones mineness, ones self-certainty, without having to notice it as such:
desire, precisely, is an orientation toward the object. This relationship to
the object is definitive of desire: Desire and the self-certainty obtained
in its gratification are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes
from superseding this other: in order that this supersession can take place,
there must be this other (PG, 175, 143). In encountering the object, however, one encounters the site that is the fulfillment of the trajectory of
someone elses desire, someone elses self-certainty. To act from desire is
implicitly to enter into the mine-field of other self-consciousness.
Hegels point is that, inasmuch as desire experiences itself as the
truth of its object, its own activity naturally involves it in asserting itself
over the exactly parallel claims of other desiresother self-certainties
that assert themselves in and through precisely the same determinacies
that are the objects of the first desire. The attitude of desire thus always
has competition with other desires on its horizon. Let me complete the
above quotation:
Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come
out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for
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it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded

the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the
other sees its own self. (PG, 179, 146)
Because desire always exists in this context of implicit competition with

the desire of the other, its desire to establish itself as the truth of its object
is the desire to be recognized as the truth by the other desire. It is ultimately the others desire that is thus the object of the desire, and desire
is thus inherently the desire of the other. The life of desire thus naturally
ushers in an engagement between desires in which each one has its immediate sense of self-certainty challenged by the conflicting assertion of
the other. The life of desire thus inherently puts upon us the need to establish a viable sense of self through negotiation with those other desires,
parallel to our own, that are engaged with the same lived imperative to
carry out such a negotiation:
Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far
as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless
because what is to happen can only be brought about by both. (PG, 182,
14647)
This mutual negotiation is what Hegel calls recognition (Anerkennung):

They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another (PG,
184, 147).
The further details of Hegels analysis of recognition do not need
to be taken up here. What is essential is to notice that there is a distinctive
sense of other selfa sense by definition not reducible to the terms of
any determinacy, any presencewhich is inherent to the experience of
desire. Furthermore, this sense itself has an imperative force, in that it is
lived as the demanda demand ushering from the internal constitution
of desire itselfto negotiate a viable sense of self with the other. There
is, in other words, an immanent imperative to communicate, which entails the establishing of a shared language, shared terms of reference
for identifying each other and the things of the world. In short, there is
an immanent imperative to establishing what is ultimately a normalized
identity in a system of social relations.
This analysis reflects no preference on Hegels part for normalization, nor is there any sleight-of-hand by which some metaphysical notion of subject or spirit is illicitly installed prior to the analysis. Rather,
it is desire itself that by its own nature must be open in principle to the
appearance of another desire on its own horizon and, for that reason, is
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already internally or immanently defined by the imperative to answer to

the unpresentable absence of the other. This distinct, irreducible, imperative sense of autonomous other is presumed, but not accounted for,
in the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari. Let us see how that is so.
Let us now think again about desiring machines. Imagine the machine that connects the flow of milk from the breast to the mouth onto
the floor. Experientially, this is not a story of two subject bodiesthat
of the child and that of the mothercoming into contact and having a
liquid pass between them and then onto a third thing, namely the floor
(though it looks that way to our objective adult perception). Rather,
the mouth, breast, milk, and floor together realize a machine, itself the
locus and realization of a passing, temporary identity. This assemblage,
stuck together as the flashing of a certain locally coherent intensity, provides the who of the experience. It is such collages, such disparate
assemblages of fleeting intensities, that populate the world of desiring
production.24
But let us consider the elements grafted together in such machines.
From the point of view of the world of Oedipal subjectivity, the elements
that are united in the milking machine just described belong to different
people: the childs mouth, the mothers breast. Let us consider what this
entails phenomenologically, that is, from the point of view of desiring production. What we will see is that these descriptions are not just
alien Oedipal importations, but that, on the contrary, the recognition of
such personal ownership is immanent to the experience of desire itself.
What we recognize as the separation of the childs and the mothers bodies entails that the very elements of desires realization themselves have
contested identities. The child-as-milking-machine enjoying itself in the
breast is enjoying itself in a domain in which the mother also enjoys herself, and such counter-enjoyment shows itself in desire as resistance. The
mother, for example, does not want to continue feeding the child and
applies force to remove the breast from the childs mouth; the child, for
example, does not want the breast removed and strains to keep its lips
connected to the nipple. One and the same determinacythe breastis
the site in which two opposed desires, two opposed self-certainties, are
enacted: each desire is struggling to realize itself within the domain of
the others (opposed) desire. The breast, the mouth, the floor are so
many sites for proprietary claims, sites for conflictbut specifically conflict that takes the form of one mine vs. another mine. The resistance
the child faces, then, is not just the recalcitrance of the material, but precisely the opposition of another desire, and the resistance can indeed be
experienced as such by the child.
Children (and, of course, parents) are not unaware of the subjectiv-
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itythe absence for itselfof the other. The absent other who offers
resistance is not experienced simply as an instrumental impediment to
the project of suckling or not-feeding. On the contrary, the experience
of breast-feedingboth from the side of the child and from the side of
the mothercan itself be a way of engaging with the others subjectivity, that is, breast-feeding can precisely be a site of communication, of
inter-subjective contact: the child can suckle at the breast precisely out of
a desire to engage with the mother as subject, and the enjoyment of suckling can be an enjoyment of community as much as it is sensually gratifying: as Brian Massumi, describing the babys behavior, notes, The joy of
eye-to-eye contact with its mother resonates through its body and comes
out the far end in a kick.25 The child, in other words, is responding to
whatever determinacy it is encountering in the world as the presence of
the mother: the absence that is the other self is precisely one of the elements of the assemblage, of the machine. But such an assemblage can
no longer be accounted for without invoking the language of subjectivity
and inter-subjectivity, that is, a language that acknowledges the irreducible ontological autonomy of the self-defined absences that constitute
desiring subjectivity.
But because the other is precisely an absence, that is, because it is
precisely that which can never be explained on the basis of present actualities, there would be no possibility of experiencing such an other if one
were only open to apprehending determinacy. Only a beinga desire
that is already constitutively open to the sense other person could come
to recognize another person. This sense other person is precisely the
sense of a self-defined absence that exceeds any possible determinacy
and is thus not reducible to the syntheses of production, recording, and
consumption; nor can it be explained by an Oedipal imposition.26 If desire were not always already open to the sense other self, no such sense
could ever arise within its experience.
For this reason, the sense of I or me is thus destined to emerge
within desiring production. What Hegel describes in his analysis of desire
in the Phenomenology of Spirit is precisely this situation in which desire,
open in principle to the desire of the other, is destined to encounter that
other as an immanently motivated experience of transcendence, a sense
of other for itself emerging within the domain of the for me. This
other for itself first emerges as that which opposes me; in other words,
me is originally the sense with which the other challenges my desire,
demanding of me that I reciprocate with my own sense of me (PG,
17684, 14447). The relevant self within desire, then, is not so much
the residue that is the synthesis of consumption, but is, rather, the self
to whom I must answer, the self whose autonomy and irreducibility is al-
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ready woven into the very sense of the elements fused together into the
assemblages of the desiring machines themselves, a self that demands of
me that I similarly be an autonomous and irreducible subjectivity.
In this sense, then, the sense of I is something very much like the
telos of desire, for it is the natural response to the natural emerging sense
of someone elses that is forced upon me by the immanent logic of desiring production itself, inasmuch as desire already sets flows in motion
that cross boundaries of the mine. It is precisely in such mine fields
that desire operates. Once desire takes the form of a challenge to one desire by another, the question cannot fail to be an opposition of mine vs.
mine, so the demand for coherent self-identity is already immanent in
the very logic of desire, the very logic of sense. This telos, though, is an
immanent telos. In other words, it is not something someone planted
there, and it is not something that preexists as a desired goal. It is a telos,
rather, in the sense that it arises as the natural consequence of the internal dynamismin Hegels language, the dialecticof desire.
Desire, in other words, is inherently defined by answerability to the
other and thus by the immanent demand that its own self-certainty be reconciled to the self-certainty of the other. Desire, then, is not satisfactory
to itself in its immediacy, but immanently projects for itself a standard to
which it must answer by transforming itself: desire itself has a natural trajectory of growth toward a reconciled experience of inter-subjectivity, or
what Hegel calls mutual recognition or spirit (Geist), which is itself an
experience of shared, objective world.27 In other words, the very aspects
of Kants portrayal of experience that Deleuze and Guattari criticize as
the result of illegitimate, transcendent uses of synthesis are, on the
contrary, immanent to the self-development of desiring production itself.
Conclusion
There is tremendous parallel between the arguments of Anti-Oedipus and
those of the Critique of Pure Reason, and in general, the schizoanalytic
revision of Kant covers the ground of bodily, pre-personal experience
initially laid out by the German idealists. What is lacking in Deleuze and
Guattari, though, is the acknowledgment that desire implicates us in the
domain of inter-subjective conflict and thereby inaugurates the dialectics
of inter-subjective recognition. This points to a general deficiency in the
way in which Deleuze and Guattari discuss desire, giving insufficient ontological weight to the other as an autonomous realm of sense. Hegels
analysis of the desire for recognition, on the contrary, precisely shows
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how the autonomous, unpresentable other is always on the horizon of

desiring production, and that therefore the dialectic of inter-subjective
recognitionspiritis the immanent telos of desire.
Discovering this telos of desire does not, however, eliminate desire, nor does it challenge its characterization as the non-egoic enmeshment in part-objects we analyzed above. It shows, rather, that desire is
not the whole of sense, and that its terms, therefore, are insufficient as
such to analyze and interpretto understandthe whole realm of experience and reality. Desire points beyond itself and reveals itself to be
implicated in the domain of interpersonal answerability, the domain of
inter-subjectivity, objectivity, morality, spirit. Self-certaintythe singular immediacy of desiring lifeis the fabric within which higher subjective realities come into being: desire is ultimately only fulfilled in
being the desire of the particular personal subjects who are themselves
of the spiritual communitythe universalto which they belong.
Desire will always remain an irreducible domain of immediacy that,
in its singularity and givenness, remains opaque to understanding; desire
will always operate with a logic that does not acknowledge the terms of
the normalized opposition of subject and object; but desire is a dimension of sense that reveals itself to be always already contextualized by
further dimensions of sense which are not reducible in their significance
to its terms. Specifically, desire is an originary matrix of sense that is already inherently open to the sense other person, and thus destined to
experience in terms of that. Finally, though this sense has the dialectic
of recognition on its horizon, there is no guarantee that desire will be
enacted such as to answer adequately to the demands of recognition; indeed, Hegels most famous analyses (of the struggle to the death and
master and slave) precisely show how we can fail to live up to the terms
of recognition. What is true, though, is that the demand to live up to the
terms of recognition is a meaning that beckons from within the experience of desire, and is not an alien imposition.
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New
York: St. Martins, 1929), A97110. See also A7680/B1025.
2. This is the argument of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Critique of Pure
Reason, A2249/B3773. Compare A98100.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A100102. See B151: Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present.
4. Ibid., A10310. See also A5052/B7476, and A6769/B9294.
5. Ibid., see A11014 and A12530. Substance and Accident, Cause and
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Effect, and Reciprocity are the categories of relation. They are centrally discussed under the heading Analogies of Experience. See A80/B106 and A176
218/B21865. The study of the categories is the general subject of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole.
6. For a detailed and thorough analysis of Kants argument, see Beatrice
Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
7. This is the subject of the Transcendental Dialectic. See Critique of Pure
Reason, A29398/B34955 and A32132/B37789. On transcendent vs. transcendental/immanent, see A29596/B352. On the cognitive value of the categories as limited to the realm of possible experience, see B14650.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 5. I have pursued some parallels
between the arguments of Kant and Merleau-Ponty in The Spatiality of SelfConsciousness: Originary Passivity in Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, Chiasmi
International 9 (2007): 21932.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers: 19721990 (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1990), 13.
10. See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, LAnti-dipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrnie 1, nouvelle dition augmente (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1972/73), 88; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 75: In what he termed
the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence
of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as
appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysicsits name is Oedipus. And that a revolutionthis
time materialistcan proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal
psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the
immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis. LAnti-dipe is referred to in text as A-O, with the French pagination
first, followed by the English pagination; all quotations are from the English translation. See also Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike
Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), 309: The ambition of Anti-Oedipus
was Kantian in spirit. We attempted a kind of Critique of Pure Reason for the unconscious: hence the determination of those syntheses proper to the unconscious;
the unfolding of history as the functioning of these syntheses; and the denunciation of Oedipus as the inevitable illusion falsifying all historical production.
Compare Eugene W. Holland, The Anti-Oedipus: Postmodernism in Theory; or
the Post-Lacanian Historical Contextualization of Psychoanalysis, Boundary 2 14
(1985): 291307, 293.
11. On the connective synthesis, see Brian Massumi, A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.:
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MIT Press, 1992), 4748, 56. On the notion of the machine (and the significance of Deleuze and Guattaris analysis in Anti-Oedipus in general), see Todd May,
Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
12129.
12. On the recording synthesis, see Massumi, Users Guide, 4950; on the
body without organs, see 7071. For the notion of the virtual, see May, Gilles
Deleuze, 4655.
13. On the synthesis of consumption, see Massumi, Users Guide, 5051. On
the nature of the subject, see Massumis excellent summary discussion on 8081,
and compare also 3334.
14. Deleuze, Kants Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1516. The transcendental object = X and the transcendental unity of apperception are both introduced in the discussion of the synthesis
of recognition in a concept, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A10310.
15. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, vol. 21 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 6668. The
logic of condensation and displacement is central to Freuds analysis of dreams
throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 5 of The Standard Edition.
16. Deleuze, Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
102, 103.
17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 1516, especially pages 1023.
18. G. W. F.Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, vol. 10 of Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970),
13739 and 14345; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraphs 16667 and 17377. Referred to parenthetically in text as PG, followed by the paragraph number of the English
translation and the pagination of the German text in the form (166, 137). The
best analysis of Hegels account of the dialectic of desire with which I am familiar
is David Ciavatta, Hegel on Desires Knowledge, Review of Metaphysics 61 (2008):
52754. My own analysis of desire closely parallels Ciavattas.
19. See Ciavatta, Hegel, 52930.
20. See ibid., 54344.
21. See ibid., 534 and 546 for the notion of desire as a lived, performative
refutation of realism.
22. Hegel identifies the self-related negativity of desire, such that it relates
to itself in relating to what is not itself, in PG, 167, 13839, and 175, 14344; for
the logic of negative self-relation in general, see Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vols.
5 and 6 of Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1986); Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller
(New York: Humanities Press, 1976), vol. 1, bk. 2, sec. 1, chap. 1, pt. C, Reflection
(Reflexion). For the logic of reflection as it first emerges in Hegels Logic, see
Dieter Henrich, Hegels Logik der Reflexion: Neue Fassung, in Die Wissenschaft
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der Logik und die Logik der Reflexion, ed. Dieter Henrich, Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 18
(Bonn, Ger.: Bouvier, 1978), 203324.
23. But this universal independent nature in which negation is present as
absolute negation is the genus as such or the genus as self-consciousness (PG,
175, 144).
24. The scenario of the baby at the breast is itself discussed (very well) by
Massumi, Users Guide, 7173. Massumis entire discussion of personal development (6880) should be compared with my discussion in this final section. Massumi offers a compelling and subtle schizoanalytic account of the development
of a person, which addresses at many levels the conflictual experience of other
selves, which is my topic in this final section. Excellent as this analysis is, however,
it still presumes rather than explains the fundamental meaning other person
with which we contend in our experience. Note especially the initial discussion
(7374) of the inconsistent availability of the mothers breast; I am arguing that
the terms offered by Deleuze and Guattari for explaining our experience of experiencing another as another person always falls short of explaining that meaning fully. Such an objection is not answered by identifying the process by which
a sense of self is developed in the mirror stage, for such an account still requires a justification in principle for how it is that we are able to engage with
such a sense (demonstrating such conditions of possibility is, of course, precisely
Kants transcendental project, the project to which Deleuze and Guattari commit
themselves in Anti-Oedipus). On the significance of the mirror stage, see Holland,
The Anti-Oedipus, 29394. Compare Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book XI: Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 207, 214,
221, and 235; and Luke Caldwell, Schizophrenizing Lacan: Deleuze, [Guattari],
and Anti-Oedipus, intersections 10 (2009): 1827.
25. Massumi, Users Guide, 68. See also 69: The supermolecule [baby] sees
its father and the smile is translated into a curl of the toes; it sees its mother and
kicks.
26. In The Bodily Unconscious in Freuds Three Essays, in Rereading Freud:
Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, ed. Jon Mills (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2004), 3350, I have made a parallel argument to show that Freuds
psychoanalytic categories similarly fall short in principle of being able to explain
the sense other person upon which his analyses in fact rely.
27. The goal of mutual recognition is identified in PG, 184, 147; 177, 145
as spirit.
10
Hegel and Deleuze: The Storm

Juliette Simont
According to Deleuze, Hegelian contradiction is nothing but a false appearance which does not even resemble difference. According to this
interpretation, the dialectic is completely governed by the privileged position it bestows on identity: there is contradiction only in light of this
principle. Difference is judged from the start with reference to the calm
reign of identity, and is thereby barred from ever truly sojourning in
thought. As such, it is effectively damned, its slightest occurrence seemingly incapable of manifesting itself save as that horrifying extreme which
is the torn, exacerbated, provocative domain of contradiction ( just as,
for an honest man, the slightest gap with respect to his norms is constituted in an explosive transgression). At the same time, contradiction
provides the dialectic with the scandalous figure it needs to tame difference and bring it back within the fold of identity, imprisoning it there
forever. In other words, difference is only extreme (contradictory) with
respect to a presupposed identity, and since it is extreme it must be reconciled at all cost. But we see that, really, it is already reconciled, such that
what we have is only an illusory extremism, a scandal making much ado
about nothing, a scandal without autonomy that has emerged only from
the necessity of the Same: It is said that difference . . . must extend to
the point of contradiction once it is taken to the limit. . . . [This] is true
only to the extent that it is identity that pushes it to that point . . . Hegels
innovation is the final and most powerful homage rendered to the old
principle. . . . [Its] delirium is only a preformed delirium which poses no
threat to the repose or serenity of the identical.1 Nothing has changed,
then, from the Ens quo nihil majus of theology to the dialectical contradiction: they are in fact one and the same.
Grard Lebrun, having read Difference and Repetition shortly upon
completing his own book, La Patience du Concept (The Patience of the Concept), asked this of the Deleuzian dialectic: When reading this, the problem that must rightly be addressed (a task I shall not here undertake)
is roughly this: what is this identity which is burdened with taming the
greatest of differences? Is it once more the identity of the classics?2 This
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is the question I would like to explore, taking up what appear to me to be

the central elements of the Deleuzian critique. I want to try and answer
the above query with the resources of Hegels Science of Logic, in particular
those of book 1, which deal with the logic of beingthe dialectics of
quality and quantity.
The misgivings expressed by Deleuze with regards to Hegelian discourse do not prevent him from recognizing that there is something
original in the way it handles the relation between difference and identity. Philosophy has always developed mechanisms for the selection of
difference that aim to channel it, to subordinate it to identity, to make
it thinkablewhich is to say, to exclude violence as such from the field
of thought. But it is particular to the dialectic that it excludes difference
in the very attempt to include it infinitely, at its most strained point, at
the peak of its conflictuality. The dialectic assumes that the principle of
identity to which it is answerable can and must cover without residue the
field of difference, here construed as infinite difference. Before this (Deleuze sees the Aristotelian tradition as the paradigm exemplar of such
pre-dialectic times), far from spreading to the outer limits of difference,
the principle of identity used to impose only limiting criteria on difference, within which it deserved to be considered in its own right, and
beyond which it simply disappeared into the realm of the unformed. In
other words, difference was assigned a genuine place at its intersection
with the principle of identitythis last dictating the outline of the intersection. The space of difference thus tolerated was defined by the Big
and the Small, and transgressing these boundaries placed difference
either below the identity of the concept, or above it. The fortunate occurrence of a harmonious agreement between identity and difference,
just big enough and just small enough, was the figure that characterized
specific difference. In this scheme, individual differences had nothing to
do with the identity of the concept, because they were too small and accidental, enclosed in their punctuality. Generic differences fared no better,
because they were too large, could not be combined, and were bereft of
relations. But specific difference was the difference of the concept, being
both an enrichment of its identity and a submission to it.
His sights set on difference, Deleuze calls this the era of finite
representation. It involves re-presentation, because it allows difference
to be present only to the extent that it is represented beforehand, within
the ambit of identity. It is finite, because only part of the difference is retained by the identity of the concept as relevant and deserving of being
re-presented. Hegel is one of the thinkers who effected this passage from
finite to infinite representation. Instead of letting the limits of being
get fixed by thought and the thinkability of difference, difference now
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blends itself with thinking, such that difference knows no limits. Yet a
further consequence of Hegels infinite representation is that thought
expands its government: nothing escapes it anymore. No longer content
with reigning over the essences, it annexes what is inessential in existents and thereby legislates all that finite representation had left in its
original state as falling beyond its jurisdiction, outside of identity, outside
of thought.
In setting up such a confrontation between Hegelian and Deleuzian thought, we must attend to the ideas of Leibniz. There are, according
to Deleuze, basically two ways to recover the infinity of essence and the
inessentiality of existence at work in infinite representation: either from
the essence or from the inessential. In other wordsand these are Deleuzes termsone can begin from essence as something infinitely large,
encompassing everything that is itself and its parts, and everything which
it does not contradict, as its figures, to better capture them in its essential identity; such would be the meaning of the Hegelian Concept. Or
one can start from the series of the infinitely small, from the fog of the
inessential, from a continuum that is not encompassing but which, on
the contrary, is included in its entirety in each individual essence, this
individuating itself only because it sheds light on, turns down, or bends
differently that continuum. Such would be the meaning of the Leibnizian monadology. If, in Hegel, one speaks of a Substance-subject that
always subtends things as a meeting point of unity where differences melt
into each other, in Leibniz, one speaks instead of a superjet (Deleuzes
term), that is, a subject that is adjacent, appended to a world which always
precedes it and which it differentiates by differentiating itself as an individuality. God, says Leibniz, did not make Adam a sinner, but rather the
world where Adam sins; or again the Adam-monad is the condensation of
a series of singularities which it casts upon the backdrop of an indistinct
world: living in a garden of earthly delights, generating a woman from
his own rib, being the first man, sinning.3
Of these two modalities of infinite representation, Deleuze prefers
the Leibnizian modality. This is because it seems to assign a legitimate
place to difference, manifesting it in its very emergence, at that inopportune moment when it extracts itself from the obscure continuity of the
inessential, from the ashes of the multiple. The dialectical contradiction,
that spectacular symmetrical play of the Self and the Other, preempts the
very possibility of such an autonomous difference: the moment difference happens is never grasped in the force of its alteration, but is rather
construed as a reflection or splitting of the other term, which the other
of a Same differentiates from itself by reappropriating that very difference. Vice-diction, owing to the fact that it is asymmetrical and nonre-
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ciprocal in the relations it establishes between individualities, or between

the ordinary and the singular, or again between the law of continuity and
the principle of the indiscernibles, speaks to a difference in itself, a
difference outside identity: it attempts to imbue itself with that moment
of crisis, anger, and cruelty, where difference tears itself apart from a
backdrop that does not respond in kindlike a lightning bolt across a
somber sky, to take up an example of Deleuzes that I will return to later.
If difference differs from the Same, it is because this last does not differ
from it and occurs in that element so despised by the dialectic, to wit,
unilaterality:
Imagine something which distinguishes itselfand nevertheless that
from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it.
Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but
must also trail behind it, as though it were distinguishing itself from
that which does not distinguish itself from it . . . There is cruelty, even
monstrosity, on both sides of this struggle against an elusive adversary,
in which the distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish
itself from it but continues to espouse that which divorces it. Difference
is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction. (DR, 28)
Pitting Hegel against Deleuzian thought amounts to verifying if the dialectic is indeed, as Deleuze maintains, unfit to grasp the two constitutive
dimensions of vice-diction, namely the serial multiplicity of cases and the
unilateral condensation of difference. Does the dialectic reject this in the
name of the greater unity of all intrinsic condensation of multiplicities?
Does it really fail to take into account the mild noise of the insignificant?
Does it dilute into a transparent reciprocity the unilateral condensation
of difference, as Deleuze so forcefully contends?
Let us address the series first. It would indeed seem that the series
is the sworn enemy of the dialectic. Bad infinites, all of them serial, are
scattered throughout the Doctrine of Being in the Science of Logic, awaiting their dialectical overcoming. For instance, in the dialectic of quantity,
they go from the Hallerian description of eternity in terms of a piling
of worlds, to those tendentious Newtonian methods of calculation which
juggle approximation. In all cases, the object of the Hegelian critique is
the series, with its flagrant deficiencies.
On this view, it is wise to keep track of the bad series, since its
aimless progression is akin to a trampling, a repetitive liquefaction which
spreads out without ever bothering to synthesize itself. In sum, one ought
to remain on guard because the vagrant multiplicity of the bad series
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refuses to submit itself to the dialectic. Is the series of numbers not the
most appropriate target of the Hegelian critique of quantity? It is well
known that Hegel does not hold quantity in high regard. Evolution from
the quantitative element is, for him, tantamount to mov[ing] in a realm
of thoughtlessness.4 It is apparently devoid of concept (SL, 216, trans.
modified) because whatever is worthwhile in a normally constituted concept usually owes its complexity to the concreteness of those relations
which it institutes between various contents of thought, to the organic or
interior unity by which it links them. But quantity is a barbarian concept
of counter-nature which seems made only of absence-of-relation, of externalization without any return to itself. In other words, it is philosophically worthless.
But, upon further reflection, we find that Hegels relationship to
the notion quantity is far from simple. Contrary to what is usually held,
if he criticizes quantity, it is less in the name of a restoration of more
unityof a qualitative or organic synthesis found anewthan because
quantity fails to anchor itself to a fixed point in its hurried flight, giving
itself something beyond its own mobility. In other words, quantity harbors a vain nostalgia for a quality that has suffered an irremediable defeat
at the hands of the quantitative. The dialectic of quantity must therefore
be understood as a record of the resistance which the quantum (or determinate quantity) opposes to its own quantitative status by trying to
latch onto a quality. It must be glossed as the story of how those acts of
resistance exhausted themselves, revealing their futility.
Let us retrace the principal events of this tale: (a) the first way quantity tries to stay anchored to quality is in the elaboration of two species of
distinct sizes (extensive size, obtained by adding a multiplicity of parts,
and intensive size, whose univocal nature, always given as a totality before
its parts, would account quantitatively of quality itself); (b) as a case in
point, it becomes impossible to assign in any stable manner these types of
sizes to a truly different being. Both are unity and multiplicity; they differ
only by virtue of the accentuation of one term over the other. But they
are not totally different: in the twentieth degree (intensive size apprehended in its univocity) there is also twenty degrees, just as there are one
hundred centimeters in a meter (extensive size); and inversely, in extensive size, there is also the unity of one meter, and not just the summation
of the hundred centimeters. Quantity therefore tries to escape this instability by displacing quality to another field: in one respect (which Hegel
calls the being-there of quantity), it is condemned to change, that is,
to oscillate between the intensive and the extensive, but it would also have
a portion of essentiality withdrawn from the reach of all change. (c) From
the fact that it is impossible to fix difference between its essentiality and
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its changing being-there (since variations initially deemed superficial can

for all intents and purposes engender an immobile essence, like water
evaporating at one hundred degrees), quantity is led to abandon the
markers by which it had attempted to contain its own indifference within
quasi-qualitative limits. It thus founders in the infinite, inevitably trying
once again to catch up with itself by means of the infinitely large and
the infinitely small, those mixed beings belonging to the order of disparation of all limit given their infinite character, but belonging also to the
order of limitation given that they are either large or small. Finally, the
good quantitative infinite which the dialectic of quantity terminates in is
not qualitative at all, but nothing other than quantity itself, having finally
relinquished the bonds that previously held it fast, openly assuming its
character as the indifferent escape it is, owning up to its faceless continuity, in a seriality freed of all its previous qualitative pretenses: the resolution of the [bad infinite] is the restoration of the concept of quantity,
namely that quantity is an indifferent or exterior limit (SL, 239).
This leaves the second respect in which we can subject the dialectic to Deleuzian thought: is it really incapable of unilaterality? Must it
proceed to exchange the same and the other andwith the relation of
backdrop and formalways fashion a relation flattened by its reciprocity,
as captured by this ubiquitous formula of the Doctrine of Essence: Form
presupposes matter . . . Conversely, form is presupposed by matter . . . form
and matter reciprocally presuppose one another (SL, 45152). If so, then
no lightning tempestuously flashes across the dark sky, since it differentiates itself from that sky both in advance and when it returns, in the eternal circle that is difference spread out, split in half, and doubledperforce identified with the movement of mutual presupposition.
But from the mere fact that a term acts on its other and reverses
itself in it, that it reverses the other, it does not necessarily follow that
both are covered up in some unity. It is easy to make light of the reversible slogans that drive the Logics movement toward identity. In the dialectic of quality, the qualitative something is rather the limit it pretends
to exclude, this other which it had hoped to keep at bay is instead found
within. In the dialectic of quantity, we find an accumulation of alchemical turnarounds: continuity is discretion instead, and vice versa; the intensive is the extensive instead, and vice versa. However, it is far from
obvious that these turnarounds act to the benefit of a homogeneous and
monolithic identity where all difference is erased. In lieu of this, we could
say that the Logic affirms the following: if a term is not the other (and this
interval or hiatus is needed for the reversal from one to the other), this is
not because they designate objectively distinct regions of the real. Their
difference is not thereby extinguished; rather, it emerges from the fact
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that they are the variable balancing or multiple evaluation of a lack of equilibrium
that is internal to thought. The differences do not have a fixed being, one
cannot tie them to indubitable foundations, they ruin each other; they
do not disappear in some definitive identity. But their presence is no longer explicable solely by an appeal to this resource: since they are not, they
remain to be done, they do themselves, they pose themselves in this or that fashion, orin keeping with the term one encounters time and time again
in the Science of Logic and which Deleuze could not disown (given the importance he gives it in his reading of Nietzsche)5they are worth or assert
their value for, difference. In other words, they tear themselves away from
their lack of necessity, like the lightning bolt of the formless [linforme].
The dialectical formless, that dark sky of the Logic, is thus seen to be the
internal relation of terms, their always-menacing equivalence, which acts
as a perpetual impulse driving their unilateral differentiation, positioning them with respect to themselves, as momentarily crystallized categories which shine in the midst of a constantly unstable exchange. And,
just as Deleuze holds that there is no difficulty in maintaining together
the law of continuity and the principle of the indiscernibles, we might
say that there is no tension whatsoever, but rather a coherence that is one
and the same between the relational reciprocal dialectic of the terms and
the unilaterality of difference, and through which is carried that relation
which is always preferentially inclined to one side or the other.
It is indeed the value of difference that is at stake in the dialectic.
In the dialectic of quality, despite the malleability which the concept of
the qualitative limit is capable of, there is very much a struggle between
different qualities. Nothing principled is established in the qualitative
relation of things, neither in their respective determinations, nor in the
distance which digs between them their limit; and that is why such a limit
cannot do otherwise than assert its value: Something . . . shows its limit
as a being-in-itself and asserts its value [geltend machen] in its being-other,
even if this is not kept away from itself.6
The same goes for the dialectic of quantity. However one happens
to find the rotating equivalence of moments, one will find a continuity
and discretion there, as well as intensity and extensity. But this is true
only so long as each time they assert their value as such, that they interpret
in a given direction, without any prior necessity determining them to
carry their evaluation this way instead of that. There is indeed continuity
and discretion; quantity is continuous in the sense of being the uninterrupted flow or melt[ing] away (SL, 187) that carries away all limits; but
it comprises in itself the interruption or discretion which is denied. Since
each is the moment of the other, is Hegel forced to conclude that their
difference is thereby effaced? Not at all: what we find is that he insists on
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the unequalizable aspect of quantity which pushes it to assert the value

now of this moment, now another, by throwing off-balance the unstable
equivalence which links one to the other: each of these magnitudes
contains both moments, and . . . the distinction between them consists
only in this, that in one of the moments the determinateness is posited
(SL, 200).
Examples like these abound, and suffice to show that the figures of
the Logic have been made precarious, reversed, and contradicted. They
are not stifled under the cloak of unity through some omnipotent dialectical overcoming; rather, they indicate the status of value, valuing, or
evaluation which their multiplicity manifests.
What motive is there for exploring the points of contact between
Hegelian and Deleuzian-Leibnizian thought? Is this task to be undertaken solely to combine both philosophers into a single dialectic? That
is out of the question. However, the irreducibility of their systems does
seem to me to be rendered most manifest when it is torn from a backdrop
of shared assumptions, from a fabric of resonancesonly when their irreducibility is taken as established a priori. Let us grant that between the
reciprocity of the same and the other and the unilaterality of difference
there is an internal relation, and not a harsh opposition. By no means
does this prevent Deleuze from tilting that relation in the direction of
dissociation, from bestowing value to all that those terms do not exchange.
Likewise, nothing prevented Hegel from bestowing value on the narrowest
interweave of the unilaterality of difference and reciprocity which endlessly swallows and dissolves it.
Valuing alterity for its own sakeand deliberately staying mum on
its relation to identityamounts to the declaration: Nature! Upon hearing this cry, thought does not cease flowing toward its matter, so that
through it the waves circling the rocks and shoals may have a voice, as
well as the contemplative superstition of grains and wheat, the coherence of the ticks tri-dimensional systema mundi, the concerns of a thirsty
dog as it deciphers aquatic signs, and that famous absolute lightning
screeching its mark across the sky in itself, so that every human eye can
finally see the dark sky in a unifying-differentiating relational view: one
does not think without becoming something else, something that does
not thinkan animal, a molecule, a particleand that comes back to
thought and revives it.7
Spirit! Such is the wind that blows over the plain of the dialectic,
its gusts picking up even the smallest speck of being. This is not to say
that thought thereby regards less highly the molecule, animal, or vegetable as exterior to its ideal truth. Thought instead crawls toward them,
so that by coming to itself from them, it may see that they are but a
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becoming-thought (which is why there is a Philosophy of Nature). In keeping with the theme of lightning, let me conclude by briefly glossing
Hegels remarks on the storm in the Encyclopedia.
A dialectico-cosmic fable: the Earth is the individual body, the absolute planet, which alone is able to bring together in a point of ipseity
the rigidity through which bodies corporalize themselves by opposing
themselves to the simple self of light (which cannot make anything visible if corporeal opacities do not stand between itself and itself). There
are bodies only to the extent that their seizure of autonomy with respect
to the light entails a loss. Accordingly, the moon is a rigidity held captive
by its tendency toward opposition, exhausting itself in it, without any
return to itself, destined to sterility and servitude with respect to that
other body which it has in its axis. The comets are those disheveled bodies which retain from the opposition only the process of mobility, without
giving themselves any rigid consistency. They are pure occurrences of dissociation, eccentric vagrants in a fugue, incapable of holding themselves
together and thus impotent to prevent their gradual crumbling to dust.
But the Earth is the rigidity which opens up into genuine differences,
and it manages to hold these into cohesion. The differences at hand are
the elements: air, that undifferentiated and insidious simplicity, sublimating the differences. Fire, which is air gathered by compression, a negative individuality or active difference consuming the other bodies which
cannot help but consume itself in this process, so that the oppositional
power which animates its being-for-itself is suppressed by itself and comes
to a neutral state, namely water. Water is that plastic element, the means
par excellence, without individuality or form, that which receives its determinations from without (as a vaporous sublimation or icy compact).
Terrestrial earth is the global element which animates the exchange of
these various elements by way of a meteorological process, of which the
storm is the unfinished form: the complete manifestation of this process is
the thunderstorm, to which the other meteorological phenomena attach
themselves as rudiments, moments or unripe realizations.8
Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the fruit of a playful exchange between earth and fire, and the rain is beholden to water; but only
the storm brings together in one event the sudden clash of air with itself,
the devastating power of fire, waters gaseous volatilization, its condensation into clouds, which foretells a return to the planetary soil whence
they arose. The storm alone lassos together all the elements.
We see, then, what separates this Hegelian vision of the storm from
Deleuzian lightning. In the latter, the violent flash of electric current
serves but one function: to bring Earthiness back to oneself thanks to
differentiation, furthering the Earths individuality by and within the cir-
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culation of the elements. Lightning has meaning solely in the context of

a system of totalizing relations, which is to say within thought as it bears
upon the Earth, in a back and forth between it and the avatars of the sky.
Here, lightning extracts itself asymmetrically from that which has no relation to it (that is, the dark background), and differs in itself, outside all
relational systems. But can we really detach ourselves from our human
footing and adopt the absolute vantage point of this luminous streak?
Translated from the French by Marc Champagne, with Niels Feuerhahn and
Jim Vernon
Notes
2. Grard Lebrun, La patience du concept: Essai sur le discours hglien (Paris:
Gallimard, 1972), 321.
3. See Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 60. We must therefore understand
the world (that is, the set of series that can unfold in a convergent manner) as
preceding the individualities: God did not create Adam as a sinner, He created
the world where certain properties are going to condense as Adam the sinner.
4. G. W. F.Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969), 213.
5. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
6. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die objektive Logik, Erstes Buch:
Das Sein (1812) (Hamburg, Ger.: Felix Meiner, 1986), 81.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 42.
8. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V.Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 120.
11
Limit, Ground, Judgment . . .

Syllogism: Hegel, Deleuze, Hegel,
and Deleuze
Jay Lampert
Deleuzes longest discussion of Hegel, the fifteen-page passage in Difference and Repetition, chapter 1, 6176/4254,1 is (until the end of it) his
most positive. What interests me is not his criticisms of Hegel, but the
way Deleuze forces Hegels dialectic into more becoming, and Hegel
forces Deleuzes differences into more history. Deleuze discusses three
themes in Hegels logic: limit and the infinite; contradiction and ground;
and judgment and proposition. These are drawn from the three books
of Hegels Science of Logic: Being, Essence, and Concept. Deleuze shows
Hegel to be an opponent of organic philosophy (perhaps a surprising
point, but a good one), and a proponent of the orgiastic. He shows how
Hegel connects difference with the infinite rather than the finite (the
large infinite, in contrast with Leibnizs small infinite).2 Deleuze uses
these Hegelian points to drive his own theory of difference, implying
that Hegels Logic offers untapped potential.3 Deleuzes passage on Hegel
does not exhaust his theory of difference, and Hegels chapter on Ground
is not his last word on dialectics, but the encounter of the two texts is
symptomatic of each and of both together.
We can summarize DR 6176/4254 as follows: Hegel succeeds in
avoiding the subsumption of difference under a pregiven larger whole.
To do this, he pushes to infinity the interplay at the limit between self
and other. This drives each difference to the extreme of contradiction, at
which point differences vanish into their ground. Yet this ground is the
source of still more difference. Hegels ground is almost primordial difference. Unfortunately, Deleuze concludes, Hegel articulates difference
in unidimensional judgments (49/33), like Leibniz assuming wrongly
that differences converge rather than diverge.
To emphasize Hegels potential with a Deleuzian eye, I take up three
doctrines.
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Hegels categories of limit, finitude, and the infinite focus on selfothering, where selves reciprocally make themselves inside each other.
The instability of the surface of otherness is infinite.4
Hegels category of ground cancels every totality via the contradiction
of its members. The whole is groundless; or, difference is the only ground
it has. Hegel squeezes more difference out of the infinite than Deleuze
thought possible. But it is Deleuze who discovered this potential in Hegel.
Hegels theory of judgment shows how disjunctive judgments express infinite possibilities. A judgment is only completed in a syllogism,
and the ultimate syllogism is a mechanical object.
I examine Deleuzes DR 6176/4254 paragraph by paragraph. To
define ground, I turn to DR 34955/27277 from the Conclusion
chapter where Deleuze returns to Hegel. Deleuzes text merits line-byline analysis. There is no value in the generalizations either that Hegel is
ontologically totalitarian or that Deleuze is a poor reader, or in hoping
that Deleuze will reduce to Hegel or vice versa. Two great philosophies
are not diminished by their confrontation. Still, even a strong Deleuze
advocate (like myself) cannot accept Deleuzes claims without precise
arguments, and cannot assume that if a given argument does not work,
his point is profound anyway.5
Deleuzes DR passage on Hegel has a momentum. Deleuze introduces Hegel as a success story in the history of difference, and only later
introduces Hegels failings. But if Deleuze is right in the first caseas I
think he isit undermines his later criticisms.
Difference and Repetition, Chapter 1

Part 1. Difference and the Innite
Paragraph 6162/42
The passage on Hegel picks up after Deleuze has argued that finite distinctions suppress difference in the service of identity. In whole-part and
genus-species relations, the parts and species are small differentia, which
have meaning only as divisions of the larger wholes or universals. Deleuze
associates these relations with the organic, a connection that is not obvious. Deleuze does not define the organic in terms of interactive functions across an auto-affective lived body in an environment, which might
be a standard definition. Still, it is fair to say that living bodies persevere
as wholes, and reproduce as members of a species. Though the analogy is
stretched, Deleuzes thesis that Hegel is anti-organic is a good corrective
to popular interpretation.
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Deleuzes hypothesis is that if large and small are interpreted by an

infinite ontology, rather than a finite one, then difference will take priority over identity. If the large is not a circumscribed totality, but extends
infinitely, then it is more universal than a genus; it follows that differentia, despite being small, will not be located in determinate positions. In
an infinite context, for everything large there is something larger, and
likewise for the small. Just as the infinite whole includes more than any
genus could, so each part in an infinite whole is more singular than a
species could be. In consequence, no axioms could regulate the subdivision of an infinite context. Differences are not subordinated, because the
large is no longer the measure for the difference between small parts. We
might say, for example, that on an infinitely divided linelike the infinitesimals of calculus, or like infinitely dense irrational numbersdifferences simultaneously emerge and vanish.
Deleuze likes mathematical examples that show that without a fixed
outer limit, it is difficult to distinguish between proximate and remote.
Finite numbers do not fill up the infinite number to its limit. Unlike organic wholes, the large is not distributed without remainder through the
small, and the small does not compose the large. Still, mathematics is not
an obvious paradigm for describing either organic or post-organic life, or
qualitative, perceptual, or social differences.
So if there is no finite whole, how do elements separate from,
engage, and metamorphose in mutual relations? Deleuzes term for the
idea that differences surpass their finite limits, and emerge and vanish in
a nontotalizable field, is Ground, the same term Hegel uses for differences that challenge one another, lose their identity, and reemerge as a
flux of appearance. Deleuze attributes to Hegel the theory that difference emerges from a nonorganic, orgiastic ground.
Excursus to Hegel IInnity

The infinite, for Hegel, is a singular becoming-other.
A quality stabilizes a things determinacy; it resists blending into
other qualities in that and other things (SL, 114). In positive terms, a
qualitys countering-action is something; in negative terms, it is finite
(SL, 116). Of course, a thing has to have its own qualities, not just relations. But a quality is not just inside a things border, it is also the things
way of interacting with its outside. To be something, a thing is an other for
another, itself as an other, itself other. The other is external to it, but the
other is where it operates, so the other is within its own self. This is what it
means to be finite: not to reach a border after exhausting its autonomous
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range of activity, but to be itself by altering itself, and sometimes perishing, in relation to its own outside. From chemistry, to plant life, to moral
duty (SL, 13335; Hegel thinks calculus is a specific case, not a model),
everything persists beyond its borders. And since that same process takes
place in other things that are outside it, a thing and its neighbor share
the work of othering. Each reflects (SL, 120), or inwardizes, the work
that it does inside other things. Hegel uses terms like identity and initself only to emphasize how strange it is that the in-itself of every thing
is in another thing. One might describe this negatively: the negation of
its other is the quality of the something (SL, 125). But the meaning is
that the constitution of each thing is open to external influences, at
the unstable surface of its otherness (SL, 124). If otherness is negation
(externality), it is also negation of that negation (immanence). Negation
is the unrest wherein each spontaneously repels itself from itself and
becomes its other instead of itself (SL, 128). Encounters are forced
(SL, 129). The surface where others equally conjoin and disjoin is the
limit. If the perishing of identity makes us sad, we call it finite; if we
find it affirmative, we call it infinite (ibid.).
The finite can never contain its own othering relation; infinity,
the logic of beyonds, is irreducible. But an infinite series of finites is
made of nothing but finites. This raises the problem of the bad infinite
(SL, 146). The infinite is neither inside nor outside the finite; it must be
found in the recursive alternation between the finite and its beyonds,
all of them enunciated as a presence (SL, 141). The good or affirmative infinite is just the process of becoming, a being-for-self
that arises when something moves through the other and becomes one
there. To store and access these excesses as excess, we need not a series,
but a second level. Hegel first calls this a substrate, but since it takes on
the features of the becomings it contains, Hegel renames it essence.
But limit-surpassing in turn contradicts every essence. The only true essence is the level of reality from which that strange becoming emerges;
Hegel calls it ground.
Return to Difference and Repetition,

Chapter 1
Paragraph 6263/4243
Deleuze is pleased to call the ground a womb (matrice, muddying the

orgy metaphor) from which differences are born. The old critique of
Hegel is that he overdetermines and overdemonstrates differences; a
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common critique of Deleuze is that he underdetermines differences,

leaving them undifferentiated, chaotic, even relativistic. If Deleuze is generously attributing something he thinks is a good idea to Hegel, namely
an indeterminate ground, defenders of Hegel will respond that Deleuze
wastes Hegels hard-won balance between finite determinacy and the infinite vanishing of determinations. In fact, neither the overdeterminacy
charge against Hegel, nor the underdeterminacy charge against Deleuze,
is convincing. Deleuzes interpretation of Hegel is good Hegel. For Hegel,
what falls to ground is not determinacy as such, but the supposedly selfenclosed identity of determinations, and therefore also their supposed
mutual opposition. Deleuze does not raise the issue of contradiction until
several paragraphs later, but the point of contradiction for Hegel is that
differential relations cannot maintain the independence of their relata
without turning them into mutually destructive opponents, so the relata
fall apart into free matters that have no status other than that they circulate in a substrative, subtractive ground. Hegel writes only four pages on
contradiction in the Science of Logic (43135). His argument is that identity cuts a thing off from its own beyonds; but the thing is those beyonds,
so the thing opposes itself; but it is preserved even in its self-opposition
(it makes itself into the negative of what it excludes from itself, 432);
therefore it frees itself from its oppositions; therefore it is no longer defined as contradiction, but as immanence; its identity as well as its oppositionality fall into a ground of plural becoming. The infinite is like
naturans, or the numbering number. This is why Deleuze calls Hegels
infinite orgiastic. It consists neither of transitions from one determination to another determination, nor of transitions from productivity to
determination. It consists of mutations in a zone of productivity.
Deleuze says that ground is where power is effectuated, but that it
is not a power source. It simply represents the fact that determinations
become more of, and more than, themselves. Deleuzes rather unhelpful
example is that a number increases to the second, third, or nth power.
But Deleuze also insists that (Leibniz and Hegel agree that) the power
of determination arises not just in serial mathematics, since ground supplies no rule for succession. Unorganized production can be good (in
games or choices) or negative (in the drive to suffer). But whichever the
paradigm, for Hegel (according to Deleuze), ground indicates the expansion of determinacy into, and out of, difference.
Deleuze says that ground is still a representational model. But it is
not clear why he says this, since ground is not a group of qualities or relations. It is natural to say that ground (Grund) is the reason why determinations are what they are, but Hegels point (which Deleuze emphasizes)
is that particular determinations cannot give the reason for their succes-
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sors, since a quality is a challenge as much as a reason. Finite determinations have reasons; but the sufficient reason for infinites can be anywhere.
Ground for Hegel is not a line of explanation, but a volume of appearance.
Excursus to Difference and Repetition,

Conclusion
Paragraphs 33740/26264
The Conclusion of DR includes an excursus to Hegel, distinguishing

four senses of ground (fondement). In general, ground cannot save difference, Deleuze argues, since it is ultimately either formless identity or
overdetermined (representational) reason. Hegel and Leibniz promised
orgiastic ground, but ultimately they both assume that differences converge on an insipid monocentricity of circles (a geometric metaphor
Deleuze takes more seriously than Hegel). Still, Deleuze himself is ready
to use the notion of ground as a sub-representative source. We might
see Deleuzes first three definitions of ground as criticism of Hegel,
and the fourth as Deleuzes alternative. Or we might see the movement
through the four definitions as Hegels own dialectic.
Paragraph 34950/272
(1) In the first definition, ground (Grund) means sufficient reason: to

ground is to determine why a thing is what it is, to name its essence. An
essence in turn selects different instances that represent it. Nonsimilar cases are excluded as rebellious, or as simulacra that only feign
the essence in question. Now, if Hegel had affirmed a classical theory of
this sort, it would be fair to criticize him. But this theory has little to do
with Hegels use of the term ground, and little to do with what Deleuze
earlier meant when attributing a theory of ground to him. Hegel does
discuss a sufficient-reason theory of ground. But he rejects it as tautologous pseudo-explanation, as if the reason a thing is x is that it has the
sort of foundation that permits x. For Hegel, far from defining essence,
properties expand themselves until they conflict with essentialist interpretation. For Hegel, ground contains no sufficient reasons, just phenomenal intersections across properties. If this is still a tautology, it is one of
contingent self-givenness, not transcendent doubling.
Paragraph 350/27273
(2) By the second definition, ground refers to a foundational level behind appearances. The difficulty with foundationalism, of course, is that
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ground must in turn be grounded. But this need not be viciously regressive. In hermeneutical circles, for example, mutual grounding makes
meaningful history; and in phenomenological apodicticity, the transcendental ego is verified by recursive regeneration. Affirming a second level
of determinacy need not be an illegitimate appeal to transcendence; it
can instead refer to the excess of self over self. To assign the cause of
something to its transcendental version would indeed be viciously regressive. But to assign its cause to moving foreground and background
determinacies is, if less explanatory, more descriptive.
Paragraph 35051/27374
(3) To ground is always to ground representation. Ground, in the third

definition, organizes and distributes determinations that coexist.
But how can infinite representations be distributed? Each is positioned
not just in relation to the finite determinations around it, but is also distributed virtually among infinite others that are not actually present
that are actually before and after it, yet virtually alongside it. Given infinitely complex relations, determinacies cannot have set positions in a
present, but they nevertheless arrive and pass. Determinations at different, incompossible times have to coexist on an omni-temporal plane.
This is Deleuzes theme of immemorial memory or pure past, a temporal circle (this time Deleuze uses Hegels circle metaphor in his own
voice), a shared ground of difference with no shared moment, just an
overlay of difference. But can we still call this a ground of infinite determinations, or is it a way of saying relations are ungrounded?
In short, differences need a ground; but their distribution defines,
and de-structures, groundedness, unraveling the circle.
(4) To ground is to determine the indeterminate: ground gives structure to ungroundedness.

This is Deleuzes own account of difference, presented as a twist on
Hegels. Something of the ground rises to the surface, between forms.
Just because a determination arises from an infinite ground means that
the latters forms proliferate and thus decompose; any model for explaining it breaks down. Each thing is still determinate, but with more
available, its lines of contact with others are not determinable. As Deleuze
puts it, determination does not limit or oppose the indeterminate; it is not
as if the indeterminate is real and the determinate is its distorted representative. Indeterminacy simply names the mutable forces of determinacy.
Deleuze says this forces thought: sense emerges from stupid,
animal, genital, nonessential, non-sense material. To think is to focus
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determinately on a shifting determinacy. Deleuze half-convincingly associates Descartess I think with determinacy, and I am with indeterminacy. The point is that Deleuze does not simply prioritize the indeterminate; grounding events in groundlessness is supposed to account for
their determinacy even better than sufficient reason would. Groundlessness explains not only the directly causal elements in a determinacy but
also its accidental, shifting, ambiguous elements distributed over many
groupings across disparate historical events. It is only nonsufficient reason, that is, the extra-sufficient ungroundable reasons, that ground determinacies, by showing how even unpredictable connections have a
form: namely, the pure empty form of time.
The time it takes to produce infinite variations characterizes the difference between the indeterminate and the determinate, and explains
how in the absence of images or rules, thought makes connections visible. The determinations effective being keeps coming into form out of
time, its ungrounded, counter-effectuating, stratum of othernessthat
is, its alter-strate.
No matter how well designed a theory of ground is, Deleuze says, that is,
no matter how rich in potential the groundless is, the fact that it is posited to explain representations leaves it too indeterminate, so it cannot
sustain difference. In fact, this is virtually Hegels conclusion as well.
Instead of the dual term representation-ground, we need each determination to be its own determinate indeterminacy, a single pre-individual
singular, less than determinate in design, but excessively determinate
in emergence. Without originally being what it is, it becomes its own appearances. Deleuze calls it a simulacrum. Jean Baudrillard treats simulacra as cultural images that insist on their nonreality while parading
ironically as real. But a simulacrum for Deleuze is simply a stand-alone
that exists only insofar as it appears.
Just as Deleuze moves from ground to simulacra, Hegel moves from
ground (through Existence) to Appearance. The existence of a determination is not brute fact, but the thorough grounding in a sum of
conditions. A thing appears in all the ways made possible by the facets
that force it to manifest.
To sum up, the orgy of determinations seems to imply a ground.
But determinations make and de-model their own appearances. Instead
of presupposing something else, a determination presupposes itself by
posing for, and from, its past. The ground of a determination is not its
original stuff, but its self-surpassing self-past-ing.
Deleuze suggests that although Hegel ridicules Schellings undif-
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ferentiated absolute as the night when all cows are black, Hegel rejects
difference just as badly. But in truth, Hegel is all about categorizing the
shapes of hidden difference. If Deleuze pushes Hegel to give up the remnants of teleology in appearance, Hegel pushes Deleuze to pin down the
history of appearance. They push each other not toward the unground
of in-difference but the unground in difference.
Another Return to Difference and

Repetition, Chapter 1
Part 2. Propositions
Paragraph 6364/4344
Deleuze and Hegel often use the same reason to choose opposite terminology. They agree that to express an infinite situation, the terms of the
expression should do the work of producing infinite variantsHegel
calls this judgment, Deleuze calls it proposition. If the expression
itself does not do that work, a subject with contingent psychological dispositions (the last resort for both Hegel and Deleuze) would have to be
brought in to do so. More important than the choice of terms, is what
Hegel offers to Deleuzes account of expression. A case in point concerns
disjunction in infinite judgment.
Excursus to Hegel II: Disjunctive Judgment

and Syllogism
Infinite grounds are too extensive to be asserted, so they can only be expressed by hypotheticals, which are cashed out as disjunctions; disjunction for Hegel is the culmination of both judgment and syllogism.
The hypothetical If A then B means that As being is in Bs (SL,
652); the antecedent enters into its concept. But its relation to its concept is only ever one of several disjunctive possibilities. If A then B does
not determine what the situation for B is if ~A. And since If A then B is
equivalent to ~A v B, either B will be get to be true, or A will not have
been true. The hypothetical form presents A and B as two situations, one
following the other, whereas the equivalent disjunction pairs the two in
one multi-valued situation. This is why disjunction is the form that better
expresses inter-grounding determinations.
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An exhaustive disjunction, A is B or C or D . . . describes the singular situation comprehensively, hence universally, by its particulars. Disjunction thus fulfills the goal of judgment: attaching universals to particulars inside singulars. The single subject includes all disjuncts, albeit
most of them by exclusion, a totality whose All need not be activated
(SL, 655).
What decides among disjuncts has to be made explicit (SL, 657).
Some difference, an additional premise, has to differentiate differences.
The task of laying out the differentiation of differentiators is performed
by Syllogism. In Hegels spin, hypothetical syllogism (by which he means
Modus Ponens) does this most explicitly. The first premise, If A then B,
is a normal judgment. The second premise, A, is a direct appeal to external fact: a thing in the world intervenes in logic. The conclusion, B,
is then half judgment, half actuality. In Hegels hypothetical syllogism, as
in Aristotles practical syllogism, the real world enters into the premise
as an interface between mind and body. Such a syllogism is an identity
that differentiates itself and gathers itself into itself through that difference (SL, 701).
Of all the possibilities of the world, one is split off in reality. Take
exclusive disjunction: A is either B or C or D; A is B; Therefore A is neither C nor D (SL, 701). In premise 1, A is the universal term; in premise
2, A is an individual; in the conclusion, A is particularized (SL, 702). The
subject term circulates through its variants and conditions. A is the
topic, so it is what is mediated; but it also undergoes changing focus, so
in its various positions, it interprets itself. In fact, this is no longer really
a syllogism at all, Hegel says, since technically, there is no middle term.
The whole argument takes place in the middle (SL, 703).
This auto-affection of terms through disjunction explains Hegels
transition from syllogism to Mechanism (SL, 704).6 A syllogism is a thought
that works itself out without depending on a subject. Such an operation,
according to Hegel, is machinic.
Return to Difference and Repetition

Paragraph 6364/4344 (continued)
For Deleuze, like Hegel, finite terms, being distinct, need to be coordinated by an interpreter. But infinite terms produce infinite variants,
filling up the space between the terms, thereby interpreting themselves.
Theorems regarding irrational numbers generate infinitely dense objects, as do theorems about political multitudes. They express not a fact
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about several things in relation, but disjunctive genesis. A proposition,

of course, contains only a finite number of terms. But a term such as irrational number or a new people means (it does not just instantiate in,
but means) an infinitely expanding range of differentiable possibilities,
stretching from zero (or hermit) to large alephs (or masses), extending into all the nooks and crannies of a floating range, a sliding scale.
A proposition that expresses a range of points, each of which performs
an operation, covers all cases indifferently, even identically, and still
ensures that each case is different.
Deleuze asks the cryptic question whether there is a choice. At first,
this seems to ask whether an infinite proposition privileges certain instances. The answer, given forthwith, is that instances disappear, but none
are excluded or vanish: in calculus, a point never has vanished, though
each is at the point of disappearing. The infinite cases are operational,
so infinite and finite have the same restlessness, which allows the one
to be represented in the other. This could almost be a quotation from
Hegel. The infinite is representable just because it grounds more differences than could be actual.
But now, having made this good point that we cannot choose between
the infinite and the finite, Deleuze suggests there is a choice between
Leibniz and Hegel, that is, between whether the infinite is said of [or
applied to] the finite or vice versa, that is, between large and small infinites. To me, the choice between finite and infinite seems to have already
been ruled out. However, there may remain a different choice between
Leibniz and Hegel, namely between essence and contradiction.
Part 3. Difference and Contradiction
Paragraph 6465/4445
Deleuze says that for Hegel, difference is a problem to overcome, and

contradiction is the intended solution: once differences contradict one
another, they are all refuted, and the situation is harmonized. Now, in
Hegels Science of Logic, ground comes after contradiction, not before it as
in Deleuzes map of the text. For Hegel, contradiction is not the solution
for getting rid of differences once they emerge out of a ground; ground
is the solution to how differences coexist after contradiction has torn
them apart. For that matter, if for Hegel difference disappears in ground,
why did Deleuze earlier present ground as a differential category?
Perhaps this is only a technical complaint. Deleuzes main question
is: given that differences coexist, why say they do so by opposition? The
answer, for Hegel, is that if two things are differentand they always
are, since identity reflects in an otherthey force a reaction from each
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other. The issue is not that there are extremes on a continuum (for example, that light contrasts with dark, intelligence with ignorance, and
democracy with suppression), but that properties expand in operation
(for example, that light introduced into a dark scene blows out images in
the shadows, ideas apply beyond their original subject matter, and desires
catch on). Determinations are what they are when they move through
each other. In isolation, if that were possible, differences would not implicate each other. But in a charged field, no determination resists the
tendency to become like its others, and thereby to get contradicted and
evolve. Difference is in this way implicitly contradiction, and is activated
only when contradicted. This is what Deleuze rightly says about difference in Hegel. He makes three more excellent points on Hegel, then a
questionable one.
First, the fact that a difference is en route toward an extreme of
pervasiveness or disappearance paradoxically makes each indifferent to
others. Abstracted from movement, each would have a particular position relative to its neighbors. But in reality, that is, in flux, each enjoys
a trajectory of its own, and the trajectory detaches it from its immediate
context. This independence has a price: to be free, it expels its identity
as it becomes its extreme other.
Deleuzes second excellent Hegelian point is that a determination
indifferent to context is an object. The stretching process of difference
reflects back into an objects plastic identity. It hardly matters whether
we call a given object positive or negative, flowing or interrupted, individual or field.
Deleuzes third Hegelian point is that if we think of the outside as
the negative of the particular, what is positive (or posited) in difference
is exactly that negative. Deleuzes objections begin here, but he objects
less to contradiction than to negation. It is worth emphasizing that in
Hegel, contradiction is not negative. The supposedly original identity of
objective boundaries is contradicted, but the moving ground that renews
them is too unstable to be contradicted. At some level, Deleuze sees that
difference for Hegel is more positive than negative (or at least, that it is
positive because it is negative) even when it destroys identity. But he criticizes Hegel for negativity anyway.
Deleuzes fourth point is that negative movement no longer allows
indifference to subsist. Strictly speaking, it is true that indifference does
not subsist in a substrate. But the point of Hegels ground is to put determinations into contact no matter what their likenesses or contraries.
Every determination, by its claims and products, intervenes completely
in every other, challenging it to the maximum, indifferent to its qualities. Contradiction is thus a minimal step away from indifferent ground.
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When Deleuze says on Hegels behalf that contradiction is what makes

difference, tests and selects for difference, annihilates difference and
thereby reproduces difference, this is all good.
Deleuze mounts his criticism at the price of a less convincing reading of

Hegel. He begins by saying Hegels real contradiction distinguishes a
thing from everything it is not (as well as from what it is, we should add). It
is right, for Hegel, to focus on real contradiction (as opposed to potential
contradiction), and to say that a determination contradicts everything.
Deleuze rejects this total mutual distinguishing, since it posits a
whole reality, ens summum, complete determination, the infinitely large
of theology. It is true for Hegel that involvement beyond limit has no halting point, but that does not really posit a whole ex machina, so much as
a process whose lines draw incompossibles on a plane of consistency (to
use more Deleuzian terms). Deleuze suggests that Hegel prefers theology
to mathematics, but really what Hegel prefers to math is logic. Deleuze
shortly abandons his weak charge that Hegel relies on theology, but his
follow-up charge that Hegel relies on the logic of genus is no better.
Deleuze says that Hegel begins with genus, then posits division,
suppressing or subordinating specific differences. It is as if Deleuzes
earlier interesting reading of Hegel has dropped out of the picture in
favor of a straw man. For Hegel, a genus is both itself and its species, a
whole and its parts, a synthesis that effectively destroys genus-species relations. Deleuze earlier had correctly said that Hegel began with finite
determinations and drew the infinite out of it, rather than beginning
with an infinite genus and naming its portions. Hegel indeed says many
times that Being is not a highest genus. In the Phenomenology, under the
heading of Observing Reason, Hegel treats genus and species as naive
categories for classifying natural phenomena.7 Genus is an unlikely place
for an encounter between Deleuze and Hegel.
But there is a further criticism at stake. Deleuze confronts Hegel
with Leibnizs notion of casesimperceptibly tiny movements, infinitesimals too small to have essences, ontological units whose substance
is thereby more inessential than essential. Small in-essences are not just
small essences, but determinate in a way unrelated to essences. This is
interesting: essences can contradict one another, but in-essences have no
properties to contradict, so their difference is not annulled in contact
(they are vice-dicted rather than contra-dicted). But it is not clear what
Deleuze thinks does determine an infinitely small case, or what makes it
a difference.
And why is contradiction not repeated at each level of smallness, no
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matter how difference is defined? As long as a finite determination contacts an other (and then through that one, another), located by its own
shape but forcing an encounter with its outside, then the same logical
relations that the large unit faces, should be faced by the small.
Deleuzes best case would be differences too fine to intuit, too objective to need subjects, too singular to compare, and too primary to contradict. Yet the exemplars he gives are not autonomous differences, but
relational ones, not minimally visible but ultra-measurable. He cites differential proportions across parameters, in the form dx/dy (as in formulas for curves), rather than simply dx. Deleuze calls interactive difference
complete, though not completed, distributions of distinctive points.
This model is nice, but it does not really make difference too small for the
logic of limit: it multiplies differential relations rather than singularizing
them; it depends on continua rather than innovation; and it punctuates
coordinates. Ultimately, it is not clear why Deleuze prefers Leibnizian
differences of measure over Hegelian differences of intuitive exchange.
Furthermore, when Deleuze criticizes Leibniz for assuming that differences converge rather than diverge, it is not clear how he distinguishes
divergence from contradiction. Divergence sounds positive; nothing is
annulled when different paths split off a mainline. But divergence is after
all more than diversity; it forces the issue, chooses among rivals, and
changes the result. Divergence may not reject any pathway; but contradiction too rejects nothing (it leaves nothing out of the picture), instead
tying rivals at the hip.
Deleuze should at least agree with Hegel that divergence is in each
case real and not just potential. Lines of difference do not remain separate once enacted, but re-present. Divergence points are not only incompossible but also in-com-actual; they make actual, irreversible differences.
In short, Deleuze should agree that difference cannot make determinations irrelevant to each other; the smallest difference makes a maximum
difference to another, and this forcing effect is what Hegel means by contradiction. Furthermore, the forcing effect of contradiction, for Hegel,
is what leads past the logic of essence, into the nonexplanatory ground,
and finally into the ontology of appearance.
Excursus to Hegel III: Contradiction,

Ground, Groundlessness
For Hegel, as soon as something becomes other, contradictions arise
within each thing, between things, and in logic. Contradiction does not
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mean that something is not determinate; it is that contradiction. The first

unity resulting from contradiction is the null (SL, 433); its quality, identity, and self-subsistence falls to ground (zugrunde gehen) (SL, 43435).
Of course, contradiction plays a crucial role for Hegel. But in Hegels text,
contradiction is superseded by the concept of ground. For Hegel, contradiction is not the ultimate logical structure. Dozens of categories express
reality and philosophical method betterground is just the first of these.
The category of ground is a transitional symptom, the recoil upon
itself of the sphere of essence (SL, 444), a first stab at articulating the
realm of appearances. Positing ground says that even when driven to
contradiction, determinations operate positively. The idea of absolute
ground is that forms are grounded in something already there. But the
question is less about what exists absolutely prior, and more about conditioning, that is, determinate ground. Deleuze picks up here.
The ground of a determination doubles it (SL, 457). But when
ground is conceived formallyas providence, or as transcendental categories, or any explanation at a separate level of ontologyits very independence makes it fail to explain or to ground. A real ground can
point at nothing other than the grounded. It is good for a ground to be
tautologous in relation to the grounded particular; it should vary for
each grounded determination. The supposed ground rightly disappears
into the grounded (SL, 461).
Ground can only do so much. It cannot give a thing more necessity than it actually has. The thing ultimately has to explain itself, namely
by becoming many versions of itself. This leads to one big ground of
the world, or Nature (SL, 464). But by the same token, the ground
does not select among causes or definitions. The choice between them
is free (SL, 463), since every aspect of a thing grounds the others. In
Hegels example, a house is grounded in different ways by its basement,
by gravity, by architectural style, by the acts of its occupants. In a similar
way, no criterion grounds moral decisions (whom to punish, or whom to
hire), since ground is simply the splitting of aspects (SL, 466) of the
case, no one of which is the substrate. A defendant really does have excuses, and also really does have evil intent, and also really could benefit
from reform, and also really is dangerous. In the end, grounding is about
the togetherness of determinations, about linkages and series (SL, 468)
diffused across a manifold (SL, 470).
In the absence of explanation from another level, the most we
should say is that some elements in a situation are conditioned by elements in the same situation. For Hegel, causes are more like qualitative reciprocations than like physical impacts. But the immanence of explanations entails that conditions are ultimately unconditioned (SL,
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474)not because there is an uncaused cause, but because conditions

consist of serial de-conditioning, as Deleuze says. Hegels table of contents is: GroundExistenceAppearance. Deleuze too, in his critique
of Hegel, turns ground into ungrounding, and then into appearance.
Return to Difference and Repetition

Deleuze finds two similarities between Leibniz and Hegel, four criticisms
of Hegel, and five senses of original difference; the last two senses express Deleuzes own view.
Deleuze sees that Hegels essences are not abstract, but selfexpansions (like monadic selves), implications of elastic nonorganic autoaffection. Nevertheless, Deleuze has two reservations about Hegels appeal to the infinite.
(1) Deleuze complains that the dialectic of finite and infinite is a
double discourse: one level for the particular and one for supersession.
In an interesting way, Deleuze rejects Hegel for retaining finitude, preferring a purer universal, a more abstract logic machine. Deleuze often says
that the reason we need not posit essences is that singulars are already
abstract and conceptual. The problem for Deleuze is not with the infinite
as such, but with deriving the infinite from the finite. If infinites needed
to start and end with finite particulars, they would either encircle the finite (with Leibniz) or each other (with Hegel) monocentrically. In fact,
Hegels circle metaphor imagines inter-cutting orbits. But this aside, Deleuze makes a good point that to describe difference, the infinite needs
to suppress the finite. Yet Hegel himself is often said to suppress the finite, and if this is true, he does what Deleuze wants him to.
(2) Deleuzes second complaint is that while infinite ground contradicts one kind of identity, it installs more serious kinds, by assuming there are local identities needing explanation. It is unclear whether
Deleuze thinks that there should be any explanation at all for local determinations. Orgiastic indifference suggests not; machinic assemblage
suggests the reverse. In any case, if Deleuze criticizes the notion of orgiastic ground, which he had earlier praised in Hegel and Leibniz, his own
account of difference is thrown open. In fact, Deleuze soon reaffirms the
orgiastic ground under the metaphor of swarming.
Assuming that Hegels identity-destroying ground, and the logic of
contradiction it uses to overcome essences, are nevertheless in the service
of identity, Deleuze mounts four challenges.
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(a) Opposition (Deleuze sometimes conflates opposition and contradiction) ties difference too closely to existence and finitude. It is as
if Kierkegaards criticism that Hegel neglects existence is exactly wrong.
Clearly, existence should not limit the virtual. But is Hegel wrong if he
says that difference exists?
(b) Hegels logical monsters, like A does not equal not-A, assume the identity of their atomic elements. That is, Hegel assumes that
in order for different things to be opposed, each must exist as a selfidentical unit. This position does not sound much like Hegel, who posits rather the infinite splitting of each term in opposition, and the reinstantiations of each in the other.
(c) When Hegels determinacies do diverge, their oppositional
structure runs too far, generating a new kind of totalitynot of substance, but the reverse: infinitely communicated interjection. Now, Deleuze might prefer that differences stop diverging, so as to escape forming new wholes, but it is not clear that he should. Difference immune
from identity-building would also be a kind of identity. And preferable
or not, no difference is exempt from passage. The only way to be nonnegatable would be to have nothing of interest outside it. But such an
affirmation would be unmachinic and empty.
There is, however, a more interesting way that differences might
not add up to a totality, namely if they have always added up already;
that is, if original difference means that there was never a difference; if
no finite difference ever existed. We might envisage a difference that
does have a limit, and does move and connect with another, yet is not
negated in that process since it had no identity to lose. If each determination is already its differences, then making it different will not negate
it. But does this mean that difference has no determinate content? If
each determination were a general mixture (mlange, which Deleuze
rejects in Logic of Sense),8 then while the upside would be that identity
were lost, the downside would be that so was difference. But if differences are indeed determinate, why not call them negative? After all, they
would override boundaries, flee constraints, abstract from properties,
become-other, and so on.
Deleuze says that Hegels ground permits only a pre-formed false
delirium, where identity circulates. But perhaps circulation for Hegel
is like Deleuzes distribution of lines of force on a plane of immanence.
Paragraph 7172/5051
Complaints about negation and identity do not challenge the kind of

Hegelianism that thrives on becoming and distribution. But there is
a further argument against Hegel, based on second-order differential
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fields. Deleuze articulates this by positing a swarm or pluralism of

free differences.
(d) Let us admit that first-order surface properties, like shape
or social status, do come in qualities and degrees whose limits can be
negated and surpassed. Perhaps second-order properties, like infinite
supersets, multidirectional viewpoints, or conceptual networks, are too
full to be simply negated. Like differential fields where space, time, and
measurements interact, a change reconfigures coordinates but does not
negate anything. Perhaps this multi-leveling is swarming difference.
The question is whether multivalence avoids negativity. Conceptual
fields are after all invaded by social fields, economic systems by group
neuroses, and so on. Deleuze tries the example of spatial phenomena
described by interactions across geometry, physics, sociology, and linguistics, as if there is no opposition between the parameters. In fact, however, material gravitation does undermine Euclidian geometry, language
does counteract social space, and so on. Adding levels of complication
does not entirely change the nature of limit. Adding to the metaphor
of swarming, and those of matrix (matrice again), bundles and networks, radiations in all directions, mobile planes, and intensive
depth, does not get beyond magnitudes with directional overcomings.
Deleuze wants differences to be disparate, overlaid interpretative transformations. But Hegel too, by adding categories, multiplies levels: a thing
is no longer quality but also quantity, no longer cause but also concept,
no longer religious but also historical, and so on. Deleuzes original
depth implies not fewer, but more limits and variants in more locations,
hence more overtakings. Deleuzes super-Hegelian analysis is so systemically complex that each case is infinite. But Hegelian analysis too is interminable, as practicing Hegelians know all too well.
Deleuze says that people who universalize opposition dream of futile combat, but this is psychologizing. For that matter, Hegels logic is not
just about oppositions, but also about the history of encounters between
categorical spaces. Hegel should certainly not assume a single paradigm
of combinability. If he sometimes does, Deleuze is right to push toward
genealogical multiplicity. On the other hand, Deleuze should certainly
not posit differences so free that they do not pertain to each other. If he
sometimes does, Hegel is right to push toward determinate interaction.
Deleuzes conclusion is that opposition (a) presupposes difference rather

than explaining it, (b) distorts difference by overcoming it, (c) pertains
only to one-dimensional parameters with previously established identity, and (d) makes difference sound like it negates something.9 Hegels
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attempt to posit an orgiastic ground fails, and returns to convergence.

This is a less interesting, powerful, and differential reading of Hegel than
Deleuze started with.
Deleuze appeals to four well-worn criticisms of Hegel: (1) Hegels
categories of Here and Now are supposed to generate singular differences, but cannot, since they are universals. (2) Dialectic claims to generate movement, but its words and propositions give only a false moment of rhetoric, and nothing follows from that. Deleuze cites Louis
Althusser for this Kierkegaardian point. (3) Hegels arguments have the
form Everyone recognizes that . . . , falsely assuming that every single
reader will accept the same universal claim. (4) Negation is secondary to
affirmation, and since Hegels dialectic works by negation, it is merely
epi-phenomenology.
The third suggests an odd abstraction. It may be true (indeed the
dialectic of universal and singular implies) that a universal claim cannot
fully represent, speak for, or univocally speak to all individuals. But
from the fact that some individuals will reject any given proposition, it is
not obvious that they are right. Deleuze does not say that he rejects certain propositions, only that some sensitive consciousness will always
reject any given proposition. But Deleuze is not a skeptic, a psychologizer, or a majoritarian. The idea that phenomenology cannot universally
be accepted as true by the individual subjects who perform it, who are
also the objects it describes, is interesting, but is itself a phenomenological, dialectical topic.
The second and fourth arguments suggest an old speculation: if
Hegel had put difference into the thesis position, rather than into the
antithesis or synthesis positions, would it have generated true movement, and would it have allowed originary difference to persist? This
hypothesis is always interesting, but it assumes that the original state is
the truest, and that movement permits something to persist. Originariness and persistence may not sound Deleuzian, but after all, his idea of
difference preserved in the pure past is a kind of persistence in motion.
Put that way, though, Deleuze encounters Hegel again. What Hegel and
Deleuze should both describe is how differences spread through time
and across categories.
Deleuze considers an objection to his own view: if we say difference is pure

affirmation, are we what Hegel calls beautiful souls? Does the refusal to
acknowledge negation make one a naive optimist who either ignores, enjoys, or seeks to justify destructive forces? Perhaps Deleuze should simply
embrace the beautiful soul, but he wants to avoid the charge.
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His defense is twofold: (1) Deleuze accuses Hegel of being an ugly

soul obsessed with opposition. If the beautiful soul is wrong, so is the
opposite. (2) Deleuze argues that there are two ways to avoid the beautiful soul and acknowledge necessary destruction: the politicians way
(Hegel) and the poets way (Nietzsche). If the beautiful soul is wrong, so
is Hegels route for avoiding it.
(1) Not every difference is destructive; and not every creative good
has a complementary destructive evil. Deleuze is right to ridicule the
old saw that we only love if we hate. On the other hand, Hegels dialectic is not about complementarities. For Hegel, contradiction arises not
because there is something else on the other side ready to attack, but
because each thing is already taking off in a different direction. Hegels
soul is not so much ugly as twisted.
Deleuze is right that in each situation, we should figure out whether
a difference produces a negation, or a negation produces a difference.
It does seem that some cases do exist where negativity is at the heart of
differenceDeleuze might think fascism is one. Cases of destructive, yet
nonnegative, difference also existfor example, in having done with
the judgment of God. But if we allow some cases where negation is the
source of difference, that is a significant concession; and if we insist that
most difference uses negation for good ends, then we are mostly beautiful souls.
(2) If one wants to avoid the beautiful soul, and acknowledge destruction, there are two routes. According to Deleuze, Hegel claims to
valorize destruction, but in fact (negating the negationon this Hegel
would agree) Hegel aims to overcome it. The question is: what is the result?
The politician (Deleuze adopts Nietzsches conceptual personae), cynically appealing to necessary destruction, suppresses difference (namely
his opponents) to prolong the established historical order. Deleuze
associates this route with Hegel, though Hegels slaughter-bench of history hardly sounds like partisan conformism. Still, it is correct that for
Hegel destruction is not an end in itself. Hegel is in this sense a beautiful
soul after all, which is perhaps not the worst thing to be.
The second route is the violent poet who, like Nietzsche, exercises
creative power, and overturns order for the sake of permanent revolution. Deleuze says that Nietzsche is not a beautiful soul because of his
sense for cruelty or taste for destruction. Yet Deleuze also says that for
Nietzsche, even destruction is beautiful. It is not clear how a taste for
destruction does not make Nietzsche, and Deleuze, a beautiful soul, or
more important, how it assigns the correct proportion of creativity and
harm to difference.
Ultimately, this is not the point for a theory of difference anyway.
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The ontological issue of difference in relation to finite and infinite, identity and other, existence and negation, cannot be displaced onto moral
or aesthetic questions about destruction. Deleuze is right that difference
is a source of affirmation. But that is what Hegel too means in making
negation and its yes-saying Aufhebung the source of imagination, memory,
singularity, nature, logic, and subjectivity.
Finally, the question whether negation is the thesis or the antithesis,
perseverance or destruction, oversimplifies Hegel. In dialectics, it is not
that one term is positive and the other negative; terms alternate function. For example, it may appear that in a state, revolution is negative,
and stability positive; but sometimes it is the reverse, and stabilization is
alienating, and revolution liberating. The topic of whether philosophers
who reject negation are beautiful souls, and whether philosophers who
affirm difference reject negation, is off the mark. The question is how
differences have an effect on one another.
Notes
1. I will refer not to page numbers, but to paragraphs in the text in the
form paragraph 6263/4243, meaning the paragraph that starts on page 62
and ends on page 63 in the original French edition, and starts on page 42 and
ends on page 43 in the English translation. Gilles Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
2. To emphasize Deleuzes encounter with Hegel, I deemphasize Deleuzes
comparison of Hegel and Leibniz (and Nietzsche).
3. Deleuze learned much of what is positive in Hegel from Hyppolite, but
I will bypass Hyppolite.
4. G. W. F.Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969), 124.
5. This puts a lot of pressure on Deleuzes text. Deleuze writes 15 pages on
Hegel; Hegel has 20,000 by way of response.
6. A being that is identical with the mediation is just what we mean by a
fact [eine Sache] in and for itself, or in other words, Objectivity (SL, 704).
7. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 17679.
8. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with
Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 5 and throughout.
9. Before concluding, Deleuze declares that Leibniz goes deeper than
Hegel: first, because he distributes the distinctive points and the differential elements of a multiple throughout the ground (something that Hegel could equally
be said to do); second, because he discovers a play in the creation of the world
(neither play nor world-creation are particularly differentiating categories).
12
Hegel and Deleuze on Life,

Sense, and Limit
Emilia Angelova
In this chapter I draw Hegel and Deleuze into slightly closer proximity
than either Deleuze or most scholarship on Deleuze (or Hegel) might
admit. I take up Alexandre Kojves1 and Andrzej Warminskis2 semiotic
readings of Hegel and then contrast these with Deleuze. This contrast
is warranted since, against semiotics, Deleuze locates the sign and sense
outside of consciousness, and in the fold of Life. Deleuze reverses the
old question of what is to an epistemology3 asking what does sense
do,4 and thus restores the sign as the receiving of thought (much like
the receiving of the other) to the power of its dignity. For Deleuze, a
mere modifier of the ontic-ontological difference between beings and
Being, for example, Dasein as a structure that questions,5 is not adequate
to capture what runs below judgment as beneath or prior to knowledge
(F, 109). Similarly, Foucaults reduction to Power-Being, as we shall see,
falls short of Deleuzes inquiry into the rarity or dispersion [of space]
and into bursts of passion that cut space up into new dimensions (F, 3).
Rather, since Deleuze eliminates interiority, the intensive time reduction
to sense expresses the present always in two times, the corporeal series of
bodies and the incorporeal, quasi-causal series of delayed effects without
bodies, Chronos and Aion respectively.6
Via Warminski, I claim that, contra Deleuze, it is important to find
in Hegel an order or ordering, a sensitivity of sorts, prior to the universal
idea and structure, yet crucial to the genesis of the idea; in other words,
a sense very much like the sense (sens) that is so central to Deleuze.7 As
Warminski has shown, the sign in Hegel, while minimally structured, calls
for a transition to self-consciousness; as such, instead of a desire that supersedes and is external to life (as in Kojves absolutization of the sign
as Selbstbewusstsein), we find a self-consciousness that relates back to and
springs forth from a sense (sens) already present in life. The issue of
limit, relation, and end is, in Hegel, one of death, and completing the
universal requires comprehending the death of the individual. Because
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of the sense inherent in life, death could not equate to the sign as actual
anthropogenesis. Death, however, has only extrinsic status in Deleuzian
singularity and is excluded from the plane of life as difference immanent
in itself. Taking up Warminskis Hegel, I suggest that, on Deleuzes theory
of exclusion, even what is definitive of singularity would in fact entail a
substantive notion of relation, limit, and indeed, death.8
Desire, Negation, and Sign in Hegels

Phenomenology of Spirit
There is no doubt that the eight or so pages on life (PG, 16877), preceding the classic text of the section on Lordship and Bondage, are
central to the tradition of scholarship that focuses on desire as key to
Hegel and his theory of negation.9 Setting himself apart from the traditional view, however, Warminski claims that life is not determinately negated in consciousness; rather, he argues, there is a disjunction between
life as a phenomenon that consciousness cannot supersede and the unity
that consciousness grasps when it comprehends life as a genus (Gattung).
For Warminski, then, life entails a disjunctive reading in which the we,
or the Hegelian reader, witnesses or relates simultaneously to knowledge
of two extremities that are not to be reconciled. As finite, life multiplies
itself in the procreation of individuals, while, as infinite, life is living consciousness grasping itself. Hegel thus notes the failure of finite life to
produce its own self-negation, or a sign for itself. Finite life just produces
more individuals of the speciesit does not produce the species as such.
Following Warminski (HM, 183), the key text on this issue is the Phenomenology of Spirit, 172:
Lifein the result of its dialectic, that is, genus [Gattung]points to or
indicates or beckons toward another than it (life) is, namely, consciousness, for which it (life) can be as this unity, or genus.
For Hegel, life is substance and the simplicity of Spirit, which does not
grasp itself: life does what is right or wrong for life, but does not know that
this is right or wrong for it. As immediate, life does not appear to itself as
such. This failure to appear, according to Warminski, founds what Hegel
calls desire, and thus gives rise to consciousness as self-consciousness.
Thus, on Warminskis view, the human significance of life that desire represents cannot serve as a delimitation of the human from within
the human (contrary to Kojve, for whom desire is an anthropogenetic
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discourse); rather, it is the failure of life to appear in language, that is,

as graspable in a concept from without, that entices consciousness into
a separate self-consciousness. Key for Warminski is the failure of life to
appear, a sort of gap in life, an element within life that anticipates the
for-itself (the concept/infinite life) in the in-itself (finite life). This failure to appear leads Warminski to conclude that, for Hegel, relation (and
self-relation) proceeds from a sense (sens) that exceeds any semblance of
subjective/objective modes of representations of thinking, thus aligning
the objective determination of desire with the nothing or sense.
As Warminski puts it, for Hegel, in the end, the determinations
of lifelike the subsistence and finitude of the individual and fluidity
and infinity of the genuswind up going through a dialectic of self and
other at least like that of self-consciousness and desire (HM, 182). For
Warminski, lifes substance is defined by the two-way process of the splitting-up of itself into shapes, or lifes seeking to reproduce itself: Thus
the simple substance of Life is the splitting-up of itself into shapes and
at the same time the dissolution of these existent differences: and the
dissolution of the splitting-up is just as much a splitting-up and a forming of members (ibid.). One level of reproduction of the concept/life
is that of the simple substance of individual life, by way of annihilating
the merely sensuous, for example, eating the apple. There is no demand
here for knowledge, for example, recalling this apple as that which was
annihilated, or knowing what an apple is over and above a mere thing to
be annihilated. The second level is procreation, life producing its own
self-negation, which involves both a self-nihilation (dissolution of these
existent differences) and a self-constitution (the dissolution of the
splitting-up is just as much a splitting-up and a forming of members): individuals work on themselves and each other to maintain the species in a
process that supersedes individuals of one generation in the next generation. However, this second level too fails to produce an object that can
be reflectively recollected. To negate and self-negate, knowledge must
be raised to a higher moment of the universal notion, so even procreating is only a rejoining, in which the individual living being annihilates
itself as individual by rejoining the infinite fluidity of the genus [Gattung]
and, at the same time, also reproduces itself as individual living being in
the progeny that is the result of this procreative act (ibid.). Life, then,
fails to undergo a proper self-destruction that is the condition of the selfconstituting and self-reproducing of knowledge and its objects.
Hegel puts into question the kind of knowledge in which selfreproduction would mark a determinate self-negation of life. Life (as genus) cannot know when it desires to eat and procreate . . . that what it
desires is (essentially, actually) to dissolve itself into genus and yet dialectically to be reborn as individual (HM, 182). Life, then, is substance since
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it does not truly know itself as independent but only in result; it knows
itself as itself thanks to a dialectic that assigns to it the universal (mediate)
unity in which it is reflected in itselfit knows itself only through a selfconsciousness that is not yet sufficiently awakened to itself. Life seems,
however, to be self-negating enough for self-consciousness (ibid.). Underscoring this point in Hegel, Warminskis use of enough here is ironic:
lifes failure to appear or mark itself as determinate through self-negation
is enough to anticipate and entice the phenomenon of self-consciousness.
Desire as self-consciousness, then, concerns a kind of knowledge
that is faced with the problem about lifes lack of appearancethe
nothingand with the coming into being of the nothing knowledge
ceases to be related to an object external to itself; knowledge is thus selfknowledge. For Hegel, knowledge of ourselves is not knowledge of man
as anthropological object, but a philosophy of self-consciousness. This
divide between the question of knowledge as anthropology and a philosophy of self-consciousness is announced in the introduction to the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Loosely put by Warminski, Hegels interest lies in
the question: There is knowing, Consciousness, what does it have to be
to be what it is, for it is? (HM, 190). The Phenomenology of Spirit does
not simply raise this question; it also makes a decision (Unterscheidung),
that is, enacts the very division between anthropology and philosophy
as its own self-conscious object. Furthermore, this is a decision to be accounted for, on the arbitrary distinction between man as a living creature (the object of anthropology), which Hegel is not interested in, and
man as knowing, as consciousness (the object of phenomenology), which
Hegel pursues (HM, 190; see also PG, 8082).
It is precisely attention to this arbitrary distinction between anthropology and phenomenology, and the authors need to decide between
them that marks what I call semiotic readings of Hegel. Yet, as we shall
see, there is a difference in the way that Kojve and Warminski construe
this arbitrariness. For Warminski, the arbitrariness is worked out of the
absence of the appearance of life, which figures as the absence of lifes
own other, that is, deaththe arbitrariness emerges out of a sort of
stopgap that life introjects into itself by way of phenomenalization, a
doubling of sense that is the birth of the linguistic sign by way of selfconsciousness.10 On Kojves reading, however, Hegel insists that the
non-being that humans should desire is desire; that is, what humans
desire is another self-consciousness, a desired desire.11 Desire desires
suicide, the death of man: it desires the end of man, a supersession and
delimitation of man as finite living being that thereby arrives at the infinite self-concept of man. Hegels claim, for Kojve, is thus that the sign is
anthropogenetic discourse, or the vehicle of a spiritual transformation.
Kojve understands the sign, Barnett suggests, in a decidedly modern
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light:12 (a) that spirits precondition is the arbitrariness of the sign; (b)
that because of this arbitrariness the question with respect to the terminus or limit must take on entirely new shape, a rational philosophy as
praxis; and finally (c) that consciousness is coterminus with history. For
Kojve, Hegel approaches the end of man as a move away from metaphysics and to the material conditions of praxis. The death of man as
metaphysical entity and his birth as object of desire just means that selfconsciousness is desire for another self-consciousness within a historical
limit.13 As Kojve writes: This power that thought has to separate and
recombine things [namely, the sign] is in effect absolute, because no
real force of connection or repulsion is sufficiently powerful to oppose
it (IRH, 126). For Kojve, the praxis of man is the meaning of the sign,
whose power to separate and recombine things ad infinitum is unlimited,
in effect, absolute (IRH, 13133). The finite work of man in history
and the universality of the species result from historical reproduction,
which, as reproduction, is the work of the sign. This entails equating the
sign to substantive individual, the master and slave relation, and privileging anthropogenesis as reproduction of the notion/life, namely, the sign.
In the next section, I will arguecontra Kojve, and with Warminski
that the sign is neither structural nor senseless, but that, for Hegel, it is
sense that bestows meaning upon the sign.
Sense and Aufhebung in Hegel

As we have seen, for Hegel, life is a genus only in consciousness, as its
result, that is, life points to something other than itself, viz. to consciousness, for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus (PG, 175). Lifes
pointing, moreover, is the sort that we find in consciousness (as other
to life) as signthe referral of something to something else as deriving
from consciousness. And yet, since finite life in itself is not ontologically
like its infinite concept, this pointing is rightly only a sign in its materiality, nothing like a representational linguistic structure. From the point
of view of the infinite concept, what does the pointing is the signs materiality: the pointing as pointing must be taken as something more than
itself. Like life, self-consciousness is a genus, but unlike life, it is also the
genus as such which must carry out this negation of itself in itself, for it
is in itself the negative, and must be for the other what it is (ibid.). Why?
Because self-consciousness does not see itself as a thing, but sees itself as
reflected in consciousness as its object, it sees itself in its own being in
itself as such as being for another.
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The question that self-consciousness poses for itself at this point,

I suggest, is: what are the conditions for pointing? Pointing from life to
the concept, to consciousness as something other/external to life is now
something past, but pointing to the concept is preserved in desire. Desire is such that self-consciousness is certain of itself only by superseding
this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent
life; self-consciousness is Desire [Begierde]. Certain of the nothingness of
this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for it the truth of
the other (PG, 174). Of interest to Warminski is that, just as consciousness emerges as self-consciousness in superseding lifes pointing, the
otherness of the other likewise emerges as desire only through (the
first) self-consciousnesss being able to supersede the others pointing as
meaning. The sense or sign of life is the transformation that irrupts into
self-consciousness, and in desire this pointing is complemented by discourse, or (via Warminski), with meanings dependence upon the pointing gesture of sign.
Put otherwise, in Desire, the antithesis of being and knowing is
given up and sublated by consciousness, the two moments have elided
their own falling apart (PG, 37). Being is sublated, or is the True, in
the form of the True, the simple oneness of knowing (ibid.). The difference, or disparity which exists in consciousness between the I and its
object, has demonstrated itself as the negative in general (ibid.). Sublation is this movement and moving principle (rather than void, defect), that is, a reductio ad infinitum as per Aristotle: a that for the sake of
which, that which can be desired is telos. Desire defines the being for
another as for its own sake of movement: invoking first cause versus
what some of the ancients conceived, especially the Stoics (ibid.).
Because the concept has made itself felt as that which sets forth
movement and self-movement, it drives this recognition, An-erkennung
(the true in the form of the true, oneness of knowing, which also can be a
translation of An-erkennung, given the contrast elsewherefor example,
PG, 76between erkannt and bekannt), which is Logic. Already in consciousness the disparity between the I and its object is just as much the
disparity of the substance with itself, whose movement, which organizes
itself in this element into a whole, is Logic (PG, 37). In Desire, through
this recognition, therefore, Substance shows itself essentially to be Subject. However, such a Science dare only organize itself by the life of the
concept itself (PG, 53, trans. modified, emphasis added), again drawing
us back to the term so vital to Warminskis account. Consciousness originates in this Life, as it is explicitly the concept of itself (PG, 80, trans.
modified). The superseding of consciousness in self-consciousness has,
then, a similar shape to that of the disparity of substance with itself, and
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that of consciousness with its object. The life of the concept will ultimately
prove for consciousness, through cognition, that there is no boundary
between cognition and the Absolute that separates them (PG, 73).
Hegel does not establish life by external standardsit is not life
that we desire. The burden of self-consciousness is that it has to become
identical with consciousness as its object. Hegel argues that wanting to
get hold of Absolute being is explicitly the moving principle of experience, the movement in which consciousness, alienated from itself,
returns to itself from this alienation (PG, 73). Returning to itself is a
pattern or entire series in necessary sequence, for with every new
pattern there is always a new essence . . . something different from what
it was in the preceding stage (PG, 87). There is thus no need to import
criteria, Hegel argues, since in the movement of consciousness . . . there
occurs a moment of being-in-itself or being-for-us which is not present to the
consciousness (ibid.). This momentthe origination of a new object
occurring in the movement of consciousnessis necessity itself [Notwendigkeit] (ibid.). Can it be that life is at every stage the new object?
Necessity itself occurs every time with origination of the new object
(destruction of the old making room for the new), and this process presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens,
which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness (PG,
87). Furthermore, in attending to the new object, a second series opens
up, which no longer has the status of a mere positing by consciousness,
established outside and alongside the particular. The new object is universal, and cannot be seen, for while it appears by way of a second
object which we come upon by chance and externally, it is in fact something contributed by us, through a reversal of consciousness, or scientific progression of consciousnessthis, however, is not known to the
consciousness that we are observing, which remains within false appearance (ibid.). Moreover, precisely the nothing of what was true in the
preceding stage, now sinks for consciousness to the level of its way of
knowing it and since the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the
in-itself, this latter is now the new object (ibid.). It is only at this moment, through determinate negation of the universal, then, that a new
pattern of consciousness comes on the scene (ibid.).
For Hegel, then, necessity itself involves dissolution, power, becoming, and Spiritwhat is effectively the repeating movement of the new
object, and with it, the raising of Life to the universal. On a par with Life,
Time is the form of the true, and as this form it ek-statically separates
itself in this movement into a ground outside. Time, the only form
of both the true and the actual, is the Subject (as Substance) that as to
its content, for us, appears simultaneously as movement and as a pro-
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cess of becoming; the tarrying with the negative that gives determinateness an existence, superseding abstract immediacy, is mediation itself
(PG, 32). Hegel invests dissolution with the power of the process of
becoming and Spirit is this power (ibid.). The circle that remains selfenclosed is Deathif it is what we want to call this actualityyet this
works to make the life of Spirit not the life that shrinks from death
(ibid.).
Thus, in this exquisite explanation of the eliding movement of consciousness, Hegel anticipates Heidegger and as well Deleuze: sign, life,
and time are expressions in the present. Completion of the series (Absolute Knowledge) in this down-spiraling movement simultaneously repeats
and suffers multiple shocks. Tarrying with the negative defies bondage
to end or a limit (neither the death of man nor the death of God)
but might accommodate a version of the death instinct and death drive
(Freud, Lacan):
Consciousness [unlike natural life], however, is explicitly the Notion
[Begriff ] of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and
these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. . . . Thus
consciousness suffers violence at its own hands . . . Its anxiety may well
make it retreat from the truth, and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state
of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its
own unrest disturbs this inertia. (PG, 80)
Consciousness suffers from neither a defect nor a void, yet rushes in unhalting progress toward its goal (the concept itself), admitting nothing except as it is comprehended [begreifen] in speculative science [begreifende Wissenschaft] in terms of the concept (PG, 80). This, then, is
an imperative that explains consciousnesss inability to find peace, its
unrest, and its disturbance out of inertia (ibid.). In sum, Life (as in
Warminski) satisfies a better reading criterion than anthropogenesis.
As such, Hegel owes a debt to Deleuze, for opening up the fold of
difference to which the I relates. Yet it would be inadequate, given ongoing exchanges in the second half of twentieth-century Europe, to ask
for a direct correspondence between Hegel and Deleuze, and this is not
the aim of what follows. With the transformation entered through Heidegger, a major rethinking of negation and negativity, notably the facticity of Dasein, its task of interpretation, and whether and how it derives
from the articulation of the question of Being, centers these debates (BT,
43337). With the debates in mind, Deleuze contests whether death in
Hegel is a negation. What I want to clarify here is that and how the no-
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tion of Thought, and finally Life, for Deleuze, carries more peculiarity
than for his interlocutors.
Sense and Exteriority in Deleuze

From his early works onward, and especially in his Foucault, Deleuze defends acategorial thinking and the inability of Thought, constitutionally, to delimit conceptual determinations, whose series has no beginning or end (F, 21). Thought itself, as subject, emerges in history only
later, and with this late origination in mind, historical epochs define a
long period of time, and thereby accommodate a postponement, deferral, and recurrence of difference within a chronological sequence (F,
100). As such, the Concept/Thought in Hegel is tantamount, for Deleuze, to revising the various concepts of series and life, as these appear
and are appropriated on the grand scale of history. However, it is not
in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but first in the Science of Logic, that Hegel
includes Thought as an independent subject of study. Hegel construes
the Phenomenology of Spirit as phenomenology (logic of appearance), the
science of the experience (Erfahrung) of consciousness, but the speculative (begreifende Wissenschaft) philosophy (from the standpoint of which
this phenomenology is incomplete) is the study of the form of being
in thought itself and thus is absolute knowing (in the introduction
to PG, 37). Deleuze, by contrast, distinguishes the germinations of antitranscendental thought, as he identifies Thought to be the same as the
fold of difference. For Deleuze (F, 12432), there exist three images
of thoughtGreek (use of pleasure, use of bodies, Self without man);
classical (man does not yet exist since preoccupation is with fixing the
place of man on the measure of the infinite, death of God); and the new
image (man no longer exists since preoccupation is with the Idea and the
thought of another inside me enters and leaves the I, opens up spaces
and frees up both ends of the surface line, death of man).
Deleuze radicalizes the destructive potential of Thoughts object,
which he first uncovers out of Foucaults four diagrams (folds) of discourse. Foucault decouples the ontic object from the ontic-ontological
one, as well as the conditions of possibility from those of explanation.
Foucault thus uncovers a new dimension in the object: Thought. Two
folds are internal to the new dimension of thought: the one end-form
is visibility (Magrittes well-known drawing of the pipe); the other is discourse or the statement (F, 9). Two epistemic functions are brought
forth contra a phenomenological structure of consciousness investing a
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correlation, a bond of subject and object, depositing intentionality in

things. In the two forms, then, the real conjugates, bends the articulation
of belief, an upsurge of light, visibility (Let there be Light!) and also
bends the statement of belief, command (Let there be Language!) (F,
6263).
For Deleuze, as for Foucault, statements contain an ontic object.
Contra the Heideggerian granting of ontological priority to the objects
own relation to existence, here the ontic opens up rather its strategies
of confinement of the Outside on the inside, this objects doubling, for
example, Foucaults well-known examples of the criminal and prison as
its ontic object, or mental illness and the hospital as its ontic object. No
derivation or deduction links the origination of the object to its ontic
distinctiveness, that is, the articulation of the condition of its possibility
is absent. As Deleuze admits, then, Foucaults two forms configure an
image of thought akin to Aristotelian first cause (LS, 67). This pries
apart the transcendental and anthropogenetic phenomenological pairing of perceiver/perceived, the visible and the invisible. The mode of
the finite is thereby opened up as the site of the difference, the univocity
of being, which self-preserves and self-distributes by way of sending out
contracts to the forces of the Outside into relation, such that difference
invaginates like a parasite invading a tissue (F, 98).
Deleuze reorganizes Foucaults folds in four new moves as follows.
First, the drawing of the pipe drops outside of the referent (This is not
a pipe!). This, secondly, opens up the fold in its visibility and demotes
its strategies to acts or an as if causation. For Deleuze, the strength of
the communication between the series tests the strength of understanding cause as author (artist, painter, lawgiver), as final Aristotelian causation would suggest. That is, to suspend the representational value of the
diagram is to suspend the injunction to impose a medium (This is a drawing!, visibility, and so on), and in turn, to suspend consciousness as judge
of the insignificance of things in the world. From this it follows that Foucauldian agency in micro-analysis must reduce below power-being (for
example, statements and complementary spaces) and to forces, folds that
open but onto the plane of immanence, without Self. Deleuze thus turns
to a spatium before sign as conscious structure and outside of Chronology.
Thirdly, Deleuze radicalizes Foucaults de-individuated individual
by replacing it with singularity as system, the thing in-itself as objectum
(DR, 231). Not only does the communication of difference pass through
a mimetic strategy, a soul without a body: Thought alone is the vertical
intensifier of difference, a sign that is also a singularity. Thought only behaves like an agency, as in Deleuzes dice-throw idiom, for it displaces
action as if from cause onto indeterminate acts, that is, a quasi-cause, at
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once corporeal and incorporeal, ideational and concrete, which in turn

carries huge implications for the idea of body as subject: Body-sieve,
fragmented body, and dissociated bodythese are the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body (LS, 87). Displacing agency upon
thought as intensifier and plane of immanence opens a penultimate dimension of thought: the temporizing instant (LS, 164). In the imaginary
space-time that the instant divides up, placing onto a plane of immanence the imaginary past-present to be tested against itself, the instant
simultaneously tests a will against itself and against a present that does
not contradict the Aion, the will but of an imaginary future-present (LS,
64). Deleuze thus reworks the event almost completely into the infinite
series that in Foucaults structure of agency is secured by way of the statement, Let there be Language! (F, 38).
Fourth, Deleuze restores the power of nonsense, as the other of
sense: nonsense is sign/effect, it enacts a donation of sense (LS, 69).
This in turn demotes to intensities of the pure sonorous sign the expletive Not. Foucaults This is not a pipe! belittles sign and sense into a
closure upon a pregiven form. Deleuzes new objectum and the thing, the
Thought-sign, is a monad, simultaneously a self-enclosure and an openending, a wounding accomplished by phonetic elements.
That is, for Deleuze, Foucaults Power-Being reduces to the statement, and to a repetition, where the figure of the Outside involves the
pure transmission of unique elements which remain points of indetermination, since they are not yet defined and limited by the curve of the
statement that joins them up (F, 11). But it is not enough to grasp the
difference that repeats, as when we demonstrate that the letters entered
A, Z, E, R, T on the typewriter form a fold. Rather, Deleuze radicalizes the
free end of repetition and uproots a distantiality that de-distances, desevers, and ek-statically grounds from the Outside. The upsurge of the
unseen in the seen instead fully exposes the I vis--vis its object, new
forces of the Outside, this rarity of space. Subordination is properly not
under an image; it is a deepening/sharpening of the system shaken up
to the ground by the monstrosity of a spatiality that decisively breaks with
the negative and negationor, as I will argue belowwith the Beingin as such (for example, being in love) of individual being as structure
(BT, 1045). Rather than settle for in-time-ness (Innerzeitlichkeit) or even
Temporality, Deleuze seeks to destruct further, penetrating the Idea
at the Aion (versus Chronos), a more innocent time interval still than
Foucaults archaeology.
Put otherwise, with respect to consciousness and the structuralist
sign trapped in language, Deleuzes is a genuinely radical claim (LS,
4950). In Heidegger, for example, the forces of the Outside are leveled
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down into the average-everydayness of being out of their distantiality (Abstndigkeit) (BT, 12627). To support Daseins transcendental dispersion
(Zerstreuung), in Heideggers universe, utterances depend upon reflecting back in and for themselves world and worldhood, the referential totality of sign, to adjust the usefulness of the tool, ready-to-hand (equipment,
das Zeug) (BT, 7779). Efficiency here implies a subordination of consciousness, sign, work, and the family, to individual being-in-the-world.
By contrast, Deleuze grants to Time as differential of Thought and the
given (the Unthought) an imaginary function: as the operation of the
eternal recurrence of forces (to be affirmed, related to, and so on), time
is imaginary throughout, it therefore more radically negates (frees up
into immanence) than does negation in consciousness (in the proposition, not here and not there). In other words, the exceptional status
of the temporizing instant lies in the fact that it shocks, displaces out of
arrest, since the difference out of which it expresses is not necessity, nor
nature, nor even freedom and destiny, but Eternity behind affirmation
and force, the power of relation. The event is that no one ever dies, but
has always just died or is always going to die, in the empty present of the
Aion, that is, in eternity (LS, 63). Now, recall that, for Heidegger, Beings
subordination to time, even to the propriative event, is premised upon
being interrupted, irruption in the midst of the world and as well outside of Beings epochal History. For Heidegger, the phenomenon of the
world, the having been of past-present has been covered over (forgetting of the forgetting of Being)and yet freeing up of the forgetting of
forgetting to another forgetting before (mans and ontologys) forgetting is nevertheless an an-archaic aim (BT, 2). Something similar is going
on with Deleuzes communication of eternitys aim, and the interest in
the unthought and the nonlinguistic in Heidegger might be closer positioned to the third form of man/God in Deleuze (indicated above).
This is exactly where Foucault, Deleuze appears to argue, surrenders to a utopian idea, appearing like a severe form of hallucination
or the hallucinatory theme of the double (F, 112). Deleuze chides Foucault for this surrender since it implies an onto-theological warrantee at
the source of meaning, Being trapped in the hands of the god of Chronos, cutting off the truth that it produces from its thread to the infinite.
As Daniel Smith puts it, for Deleuze, the problem with language and the
structure-sign is that one is led astray if one analyzes language in its full
blown, adult state, so to speak, without adopting a genetic point of view.14
Deleuzes geneticism of Thought repeats without Subject, for time as
subject is called memory and absolute memory doubles the present
and the Outside, while, for its part the Outside is a repetition (F, 107).
As Foucaults Theatrum Philosophicum established, Deleuzes phantasm
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of the body implies reliance on a minimum relation that exists between

bodies at the level of corporeality (the god of Chronos) as well as the
in-between rarity of space that belongs in the incorporeal (the god of
Aion). The body topologized by its own act, the phantasm, gives us a
metaphysics of the incorporeal event . . . a logic of neutral meaning . . .
and a thought of the present infinitive.15 Were there a place, or site, for
a death that is not a mere negation, but that would partake of the vital
forces of Life, it would be closer to a severe hallucination, a life that
no longer allows the folding of forces of the Outside, but frees up these
forces in the Overman (death of God), and frees these up in man as well
(death of desirous man/anthropogenesis).
Of course, the question concerning the death of the individual in
Hegel was widely exposed to criticism in existentialist circles in France,
immediately after World War II, perhaps best exemplified by Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the ethical constitution of the I is conceptually
inconstructible.16 The empirical-not-being-able-to-slip-away of the Is
first-person singular amounts to arrest, fixity in place since the deliveryover-to-the-Other is a possibility arising out of that which is constitutionally insuppressible in Being-with, of the facticity of a world shared with
others, as Heidegger puts it. One, thus, wonders if Deleuzes own conception of the phantasm of body/anonymous death might agree, despite
everything, with a Levinasian ethics without imperatives, but where the
third-person singular (he and ily a), anonymity, and indirect speech,
irreducibility, the great murmur constitutes a reversal, displacing it at the
level of phantasm, of death as such (F, 56). As in free indirect speech, it
is not position, various forms of the primordial I that speaks, and out of
which the statement in Foucault stems:
On the contrary, these positions stem from the statement itself and
consequently become the categories of non-person, he, one, He
speaks, or One speaks, which are defined by the family of statements.
Here Foucault echoes Blanchot in denouncing linguistic personology
and seeing the different positions for the speaking subject as located
within a deep anonymous murmur. It is within this murmur without
beginning or end that Foucault would like to be situated, in the place
assigned to him by statements. And perhaps these are Foucaults most
moving statements. (F, 7)
It may, thus, be that questions concerning even the alterity of the Other
in Levinas are coincidental with what Deleuze calls Life; divesting the
first-person singular of personhood (possession, egology, mastery) establishes the being-brought-before of an ethics in which being-with is
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uprooted from its essentialism, seems a problematic common to Levinas

and Heidegger, as well as Deleuze.
As noted above, Deleuze calls the third, postclassical image of
thought, Life. For Maurice Blanchots forms of exteriority, Deleuze reserves a group, that which appears in the form of the thought of the
Outside (F, 43). Instead of moving from an apparent exteriority to an
essential nucleus of interiority we must conjure up the illusory interiority to restore words and things to their constitutive exteriority (ibid.).
The Outside is confinement, and it is a condition of possibility (transmutation of truth, moving masses, regrouping forces) but also that which is
capable of confining; for example, the prison both is confinement itself
and is used to confine, hence the passion of the Outside (F, 120). For
Deleuze, transmutation concerns a transformation, or surmounting, of
the negation of Life: The eternal return transmutes the negation, it
turns the heavy into something light.17 But what operator is the one
that rises up to death? And if we begin with Blanchots tripartite form of
exteriority, how might this reduce to an ethics, an image of man, quite
literally the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides:
he is a composition appearing only between two others, a classical past
that never knew him, and a future that will no longer know him? (F, 89).
The indispensable question might be one from Foucault, that is, whether
subjection is only a condition upon which subjectivity is constituted. If
Deleuze might appear committed to operations of doubling, as with the
level of the phantasm of body, might this be because subjection/subjectivity is nevertheless that which death properimposition of doubling, Eternitys facelessness, Blanchots murmur of another anonymity
and admitting to the relation over and above nonrelationis said to
authenticate? (F, 100101).
Collapsing desire, Deleuze claims, is understandablefor it reduces to Law and Law can replace man, as in the old story of the death
of Godbut not Life, for without life there is no desire for an immortal
world. This reduction would still require that in the statement, in Foucault, the question is freed up to its immanence, restored to its power
when we see that Who is speaking? Which One? is not a tautology.
Forces folded within man and these folding in relation to the Outside,
bending man and bending reality, constitute subjectivity, a connection
with reality (power, affirmation, negation, and limit). Thus, even in death
(and, thus, beyond death) Life continues to relate. So, Deleuze asks with
Nietzsche, how can one desire to live?: the expression desiring power is
no less absurd than willing to live.18 But one wonders if we should add
here Lacans outstanding question: Have you acted in accordance with
the desire inside you?19 For can we, ought we, render the Other obsolete?
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Deleuze and the Exclusion of Death as

LimitA Hegelian Echo?
One question the above might pose is: does Deleuzes ontology of the present depend first on a methodological instruction concerned with accessibility? Deleuze isolates and brings to light the style of the one who is doing
the speaking (the writer, the philosopher). Moreover, the immanence of
difference incurs a breakage ascending to what Deleuze calls the image of
thought, which retains only what thought [that is, the given philosopher]
can claim by right [quid juris].20 The image of thought implies a strict
division between fact and right, for thought demands or selects infinite
movement or the movement of the infinite.21 The intensive reduction includes all levels, yet it at the same times excludes systematic limit and negation. Yet one could still ask: how does exclusion workwhat does it do?
The plane of immanence is something that Deleuze abrogates, it
folds/unfolds and reveals/conceals. Every philosopher institutes a plane
which is neither a state of knowledge, nor a method, nor opinion; acting
like a sieve, he creates concepts. One needs to insert the planeand
with it Deleuze confronts Hegels universalsyet without it, thought will
cease being a sense, or sign: The plane of immanence is . . . rather the
image of thought, the image that thought gives itself of what it means to
think, to make use of thought, to find ones bearings in thought.22 Consider Nietzsches Ariadne.23 Brilliantly, Deleuze traces the above account
of the act by taking up Nietzsches example of the Greek archaic myth
of Ariadnes thread as figure. We ask of the act: what does it do? Ariadnes
act, her spinning thread-machine, or what Nietzsche has represented as
the Spiders Web, is a single image of thought. Theseus (man), Dionysos (man-God), her two knots, her two husbands do not hamper her
singularitydisplaced upon a line of flight by her act, she is untouched
by them. Deleuze admits that even the single image of thought cannot
help becoming a reduction, whereby genital, dangerous thought, which
is in definition a weakling, an impotence, connects to itself in search
of its bearings. One surface on which the thread hangs is Ariadne, her
life, while the thread on which Ariadnes hangs herself, her death, albeit
congruent, not identical, is anotheralmost the same but similar, however small the difference.
The clue for Deleuze is, it seems to me, that the very limit, or limitation, or end, remains a substantive notion of death. On the one hand,
if singularity is a storya fiction more real than realitythen becoming
singular is aimed at the complete determination of the question-problem
complex. The story of Ariadne told this way is myth par excellence. This
chapter problematizes Deleuzes attack on Hegel for believing naively
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in raising the individual to the universal and the absolute (the story of
Desire). For Deleuze, We/I, the privileged member, consciousness, Ariadne, the agent of her desireobserve. What we cannot do is witness
thoughts own geneticism to testify, to engage in knowledge. Authenticating death proper, witnessing desire, speaking about it, entails completion
of the story, drawing the thread to a closewhich Deleuze does not want
to do. Nonetheless, only doing so, which is what we do when we speak,
when we make ontological claims, entails imposing a limit on the field
that the field itself excludes and expels. On the level of accessibility, I
have tried to show, we see a limitation at work in the singularities of the
field of sense, and thence an echo between Deleuze and Hegels position
that the self grasps itself through the limits of the other as pointing to
the sense of life.
Notes
1. Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1969).
2. Andrzej Warminski, Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life, in Hegel
After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), 17193.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), 109.
5. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962), 4243. Referred to
parenthetically in the text as BT, followed by the page number.
6. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 62.
7. The proper way to say this in Warminski via Paul de Man is that the sign
is catachrestic in nature. For the purposes of this chapter I simplify this usage
and call it simply sign. See HM, 18486.
8. An echo of my approach can be found in Deleuzes review of Hyppolites Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997), 19197, which argues that, for Hyppolites
Hegel, sense is related to ontology and becoming, something beyond the merely
anthropological. However, that encounter between Deleuze and Hegel is framed
by Hegels Science of Logic and the issue of becoming, and here I wish to approach
the issue through the Phenomenology and the issue of life.
9. G. W. F.Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, vol. 3 of Werke in zwanzig Bnden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus (Frankfurt, Ger.: Suhrkamp, 1970);
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
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1977). Referred to parenthetically in the text as PG, followed by the paragraph

numbers in the Miller translation.
10. For defense of Warminskis interpretation of sign, elsewhere in Hegel,
see Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 91105, 10519; and Werner Hamacher, PleromaReading in Hegel, trans.
Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
11. Stuart Barnett, Introduction: Hegel Before Derrida, in Hegel After Derrida, 137 (18). Barnett rightly credits Kojve for discovering these Hegelian fissures.
12. Ibid., 18.
13. Ibid., 19.
14. Daniel W. Smith, From the Surface to the Depths: On the Transition
from Logic of Sense to Anti-Oedipus, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental
Philosophy 10, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 13555, 138.
15. Michel Foucault, Theatrum Philosophicum, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. D. F.Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977),
16596 (176).
16. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 92.
17. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
18. Ibid., 79.
19. Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, eds., Deleuze and Ethics (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 110 and following.
20. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ariadne was the daughter of Minos, king of Crete. With her thread she
helped Theseus escape the labyrinth, although later he abandoned her on the
island of Naxos, where Dionysos found her and made her his wife. Deleuze follows Nietzsches appreciation of her myth; see Nietzsche and Philosophy, 18694.
13
A Criminal Intrigue: An Interview

with Jean-Clet Martin
Constantin V. Boundas
In the Postface to the Anglo-American Edition of his Variations, JeanClet Martin surprised his readers with the announcement of a new book
on Hegel. I begin to feel, he wrote, the need for a book on the Phenomenology of the Spirit, where the enemy will find a better place in the network of friendships, introduced by Deleuze in What Is Philosophy?, than
he has found in the smiles of the most ardent disciples. In this book,
there would be a follow up, a fugue for a new variation seeking counterpoints and singularities in the patience of the negative, instead of in the
joys and affirmations that Deleuze has legitimately found in Spinoza.1
We did not have to wait long. Recently, this book has been published by
La Dcouverte with the title Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie: Lire
la Phenomnologie de lEsprit de Hegel.2 And what a surprise it is! It asks a
philosophically bearded Hegel to yield his place to a Hegel with the long
nails and yellow eyes of Deleuze. The accursed share and the stubborn remainder of the dimanches qui chantent are now shown to be figures of a
criminal plot that labors to find the Absolute in what is most improbable:
It is the most improbable, but also the most quarrelsome and indefinable that strives to come to being (236).
In the title of Martins book, the word intrigue has the same amphisemy as the English word plot. It refers to the structure of a story,
the articulation of a play, or to the paratactic and hypotactic concatenation of episodes in a diegesis. But it also refers to the unanticipated twists
and turns, to the improbable sequence of events in a detective story that
holds us breathless. Hegels Phenomenology is, for Martin, an intrigue in
both senses. To prepare the reader to approach Hegels book as one
would a fable or a tale, Martin introduces his chapters with o lon apprend or o il est question or o lon dcouvre. Take, for example,
the first chapterThe Circle of Consciousnessthat Martin refers
to as First Scene. The summary that follows, placed in the center of
the page and surrounded by empty space, begins with the following sen223
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tence: O LON APPREND que le philosophe porte secours aux criminels et que la philosophie sentend en un sens extra-moral. The second
sceneunder the title The Roads of Desirehas the curtain go up
with this passage: O IL EST QUESTION de la rumination animale, du
dsir . . . and so on and so forth. Now, neither a play nor a tale nor a
detective story could be an example of their genre if their plot were arranged according to the deductive necessity of formal logic. It would not
be an intrigue. To present itself with intrigue, Hegels Phenomenology has
to attest to the contingency of becoming. History, writes Martin, cannot be conceived under the yoke of nature or the mechanical linking
of social facts . . . The Spirit has to tear itself off this double determination . . . in order to enter History successfully and to achieve the freedom
of its deployment (103).
But in what sense is the Phenomenologys intrigue criminal? In what
sense is it the tale of crime? Initially, Martin unearths an essay from 1807,
Who Thinks Abstractly?3 in which Hegel supports the philosopher,
who, in his effort to gather all factors relevant to the crime committed,
appears to side with the criminal, against the facile abstractions of doxa.
And then Martin goes on to write: We must assume a rapture, a scratch,
in order to reach lifean inaugural crime that creates an opening . . .
Only in the death, the crime and the sacrifice of its perfectiononly in
the contestation of the angelic perfection of the Ideadoes the Spirit
find the means to open itself unto existence . . . The Absolute does not
bring about a separation in the direction of the heights; it does not detach itself from the world in transcendence. On the contrary, it separates
itself in a Fall, which is a movement of being submerged and divided according to a trajectory of immanence. In the last analysis, it is evil that
stands for the root of creation (23637).
Now, instead of heaping quotations upon quotations, I invited JeanClet Martin to present his book to us by answering a few questions that
occurred to me as I was reading it. He graciously accepted my invitation,
and what follows is the transcript of an interview that I had with him in
October of 2010.
CVB: I would like to leave for others a discussion on your books fidelity to Hegel. I was intrigued by the fact that you, one of the best readers of Deleuze today, chose to write it without even setting aside your
Deleuze-colored spectacles. You have written on Borges, Van Gogh, Aristotle, and Nancy, but to us Anglo-Americans, you are best known as a
reader of Deleuzeand for good reason. When in 1989, I approached
Deleuze and asked him to help me choose contributors for the volume
on his philosophy that Dorothea Olkowski and I were then collaborating
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on, Deleuze spoke of you with total confidence. You were, at that time,
completing your Ossuaire and your Variations had not yet been published.
He knew, of course, of your bookhe had already composed the Letter
that now prefaces itand we know it, too, thanks to the translation that
Edinburgh University Press has made available. Your profound understanding of Deleuzes positions that emerges from its pages, your creative
fidelity to his work, and your dexterity at weaving variations that follow
the modulations of his thought fully justify Deleuzes confidence in you
and showcase your ability to think and write in accordance with Deleuzes
lines of flight. But I cannot hide from you the surprise I felt when I read
in the Postface of your book that you were experiencing the need to
compose one more variationthis time, with Hegel in mindwhere
the enemy will find a better place in the network of friendships introduced by Deleuze. As your reference to the enemy reveals, you do
not overlook the fact that, with very few exceptions, friends and foes of
Deleuze continue to emphasize the abyss that separates the identity of
the one from the difference of the other, to the point of assessing the
raison dtre of Deleuzes libidinal deconstruction as the dismantling
of Hegels Absolute Knowledge.4 We may then begin our discussion of
your book at this point.
One recent essay speaks of Deleuzes resentment towards Hegel
and adds that, of all major philosophers discussed by Deleuze . . . Hegel
receives by far the least sympathetic treatment; whereas in all the other
cases, Deleuze is able to retrieve something useful for his own philosophy,
his critique of Hegel is almost unrelentingly negative.5 As our interview
continues, we could try to come to grips with the specific arguments
Hegels is a philosophy of identity; the Phenomenology is a humanism; the
centrality of the negative muffles the voices of affirmation; desire collapses into need, and so onthat ground the conclusion of this author
and then bring your own assessments of Hegels intentions to bear on
your obvious disagreement. But, before we follow this road, could you
perhaps take us back to an earlier timethe time of the birth and origin
of your need to seek counterpoints and singularities in the patience of
the negative? How and why does a reader today experience the need to
reopen the files on the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel?
J-CM: This is a broad and complex question; therefore, I will be able to
focus on only a few of its points. Really, why would we want to return to
Hegel if we follow in the footsteps of Deleuze, who obviously does not
owe a great deal to Hegel? And I would not forgive myself were I to suggest that Hegel had anticipated the multiplicities or the variations of
Deleuze. To claim, like Slavoj iek, that Hegel had already sketched
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the horizon of contemporary thought is, in the last analysis, to say that
Deleuze and Derrida did not exist, that they invented nothing and it
would be enough to return to these more interesting precursors, Hegel
or Schelling. This way of canceling out the specificity of contemporary
thought by returning to Marx or to Hegel does not correspond at all with
my own position. Surely, Deleuzes reading of Marx would have been very
different from Marxs own. One must really be very nearsighted not to
understand that Deleuze and Hegel do not participate in the same century
or the same epoch and that it is impossible to find in Hegel what Deleuze
deploys from the perspective of another image of thought. It seems to
me that Hegel himself would have refused to give up the singularity of Deleuze, if he could have read him, precisely because he was determined to
keep the ages of the world distinct from one another and to show how the
experience of consciousness presupposes a form of empiricism. It is impossible not to discern in the Phenomenology of Spirit this form that returns
to the appearances instead of finding satisfaction with essences.
Well then, Why could not Deleuze appreciate Hegel? is a different question whose answer depends on the way in which Deleuze thought about
difference and repetition. The ritornello does not follow the movement
of a circle or an encyclopedia. This is itwe are on very different terrains, on milieus that cannot be superimposed. The ethologies of their
concepts cannot be compared with one another because their images
of thought are incompatible. It seems to me that, if Hegel is Deleuzes
enemy, the enemys position becomes interesting when we relate it to the
way that Deleuzein What Is Philosophy? 6 transforms the friend into
the engine of philosophy. Friends and enemies are found at the heart of
the history of philosophy. We see it in Seneca, for example, whoat the
center of an empire (where people switch positions constantly)reveals
a friendship that is stronger than any family tie. Nevertheless, this friendship is ever-changing, open to encounters; meanwhile the Greek city was
preoccupied with the rivalry of clans and the oppositions and quarrels
that Hegel himself denounces in his analysis of the family. I think that
every epoch finds its definition in the posture of the friend. Facebook
today offers us one example: each of us now has so many friends that
we would love to have a few enemies to really read our profiles, instead
of merely glancing over the simple clichs and announcements that are
buzzing around. Friends like these are, indeed, very sad companions. It
seems to me that Hegel is truly the enemy that Deleuze was waiting for
the enemy worthy of himhe who would oblige us to reread Deleuze by
way of a new strategy, instead of being satisfied with the often ridiculous
repetition of those friends who use deterritorialization and rhizome
without ever thinking about their actual meaning.
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So, Hegel and Deleuze are enemies. So be it! But how the enemy
sees the friendthis is something really interesting! What does she find
in him so remarkable that it makes her transcend the commonplace of
indifference? How does the ordinary become something remarkable and
singular? I think that the way in which I bring Hegel to bear on Deleuze
is the result of the respect that makes Nietzsche say that we need a bit of
air, that the friend suffocates us; that the one who has friends has many
more problems with them than with the enemies against whom he really
measures himself. As a personal anecdote, I would say that my book on
Hegel corresponds to an event of my own trajectory. I had submitted an
M.A. thesis on Hegel to the University of Strasbourg. The title was Critique
of Negative Difference. It was a reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit that I
often discussed with Deleuze, who used to tell me that it is good, this
workHegel is the first to think movement in the concept, to think
the concept in terms of movement. Well, when Deleuze says that so and
so is the first to . . . he really considers him a creator, the inventor of a
notion that he endorses with his own name. Hegel is the name of movement. No doubt about it! However, this movement is not the movement
of Deleuzethe rhythm and danse are not the same, the negative does
not proceed from affirmation in the same manner as Spinozas, its powers
are not of the same nature. But it is this difference of nature that makes
Hegel interesting as a dancer, as a wrestler, even if reluctantly and at an
inopportune moment one must fight to discover a different way of thinking. This makes me think of a remark Borges made about tango: it is a
duel, a danse of two enemy brothers, performed with knivesa mannerism of martial arts. In this context, my reading of Hegel makes possible
a radiography of Deleuze: a negativein the photographic sense of this
wordthat makes room for a new visibility. But under no circumstances
is it a question of Hegel making the same movement as Deleuzein the
place of Deleuzewhen we, the readers of Deleuze, know full well that
this place has its own signature.
CVB: Readers of Deleuze know that philosophies of difference are not
compatible with the thought of the negative, and that the Hegelian dialectic is an expression and a subterfuge of the servile will. In Nietzsche
and Philosophy, we read that for the affirmation of difference, [Hegels
dialectic] substitutes the negation of that which differs; for the affirmation of self, it substitutes the negation of the other; and for the affirmation of affirmation, it substitutes the famous negation of the negation.7
And we realize that this list of substitutions succinctly expresses Deleuzes
critique of Hegel. Even Jean Wahl, in an attempt to safeguard the prerogatives of dialectic, and despite his otherwise complimentary review
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of Deleuzes book, could not help but express his reservations toward
Deleuzes sustained effort to wipe out all vestiges of the dialectic from
Nietzsches philosophy.8 Among Anglo-American readers of Deleuze, there
is an ongoing dispute between those who believe that Deleuze remained
a dialectician of some sort, despite his denunciation of (a certain kind
of) dialectics, and those who prefer to hold on to his anti-dialectic stance,
without any qualifications. As you know well, this quarrel is not about
who has the better grasp of the texts or who can claim her unshakeable
fidelity to the legacy of the master. The quarrel has politico-philosophical
implications. It is, therefore, intriguing to discover in your book subtle
qualifications and circumspect hesitations that would prevent the negative and the dialectic from becoming the sworn enemies of a thought that
takes its flight from the joys of Spinoza and the affirmations of Nietzsche.
You hold that those who emphasize the omnipotence of the negative in
Hegels philosophy must not obscure the fact that it is the negative that
prevents the system from closing in upon itself. Moreover, you write, the
negative [would not] be able to operate . . . if the thing [did not] possess . . . the power and the capacity to bear the lack that torments it from
the inside. On the other side of lack, we have the force of an entity that
manifests its aptitude to transcend itself (29). Or again, as you speak of
need and desire, you say: We are far from a sheer lack, far from the void
of a desire that passively submits to the object that would mechanically fill
it . . . [It is not a question] of the expression of a privation but rather of
a veritable force, a push and a tendency that comes from the organism,
which is ready to take up this division that causes its inside to relate to
an outside (57). And, for good measure, you quote from Hegels Logic:
Negativity is the immanent pulsation of an autonomous, spontaneous
and living movement.9 Finally, when you speak of the Hegelian dialectic,
you characterize it in a way that brings it closer to the critical unmasking
that we are accustomed to associating with the genealogy: Hegel calls
. . . dialectical overturning a critical enterprise that attempts to bring
about the fall of all maskseven those that are to be found in the most
sublime nooks and crannies, being dissimulated behind the morality of
the master and the servant (191). But what would you say to the one who
voices his suspicion that your qualifications subordinate the negative to
an originary affirmation and fail to emphasize, beyond its critical function, the creative potential of the dialectic movement? Unmasking and
creating are not the same thingare they?
J-CM: It seems to me that Deleuze dislikes the dialectic not only for moral
but also for instrumental reasons. The dialectic is a tool. The eternal
recurrence is a completely different tool. The question then is what is
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the value of these tools from a functional point of view? Is not morality dependent upon functions whose distant effectsbut also the least
expected ones from the point of view of symptomatologywere discovered by Nietzsche? It is true that the dialectic is the tool of the weak, according to the reading that Deleuze reserves for Nietzsche, and that the
active forces do not operate in accordance with a dialectical mode. We
could speak of anti-dialectics in this context, if it were not for the fact that
anti is already dialectical. Affirmation abandons the dialectical scheme
because from the beginning it is pointed toward the futurea javelin
thrown in the direction of a distant target whose rules are not typical.
The dialectic, on the other hand, repeats in an identical style the
forms of exploration that depend on memory and, as a result, it remains
a prisoner of the pastnot unlike the donkey. We should leave behind
the obstinacy of the donkey. It is a question of forgetting, of the salutary
forgetting of those who affirm and the creative cry of a force liberated
from the same old refrain.
However, we cannot cling to this vision and extend it over the totality of Deleuzes work. Obviously it is a significant moment, absolutely
valid in the context of Deleuzes interpretation of Nietzsche. The mistake
will be to forget its instrumentality and to conclude that the tool of this
selective distinction of the passive from the active may be projected as an
absolute over the rest of Deleuzes texts. Can we ever imagine Deleuze in
the rigid posture of one who forces this scheme past the territory of its
own validity? Can we expand or exchange territories without modifying
the concepts themselves? We must take care not to freeze the opposition
and not to tinker with dualisms because of our obstinacy and our fidelity
to Deleuze. As soon as Deleuze reads Bergson, he is suddenly before notions that demand a new toolbox. It is easy to understand that the couple
Matter and Memory will not be able to function with accordance
to the mode active/reactive. A new machine must be built. Forgetting
may very well be a good thing as long as we are situated inside the break
within which Nietzsche operates. But quite the contrary, it is memory
that we need inside Bergsons break. We must then be prudent when we
read Deleuze, and be aware of the plateau whereupon we find ourselves.
Notice, after all, that in What Is Philosophy? Hegel strikes Deleuze as an
important dramaturgist when it comes to organizing the moments and
figures that compose the dimensions of the concept. This is not a contradiction in the economy of Hegels work; it is a simple redeployment
of tools. That Deleuze is not a dialectician does not prevent him from
creating an immense arrangement with the help of Bergson, with Creative
Evolution providing the historial montage and Matter and Memory the
counterpart, Logic. It is in the new reading of Bergson that Deleuze
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discovers the multiplicities and the new pair, actual/virtual, which is very
different from the active/reactive pair. In view of the newly discovered
territory, we are now measured against planes that overlap, that bring
about stratifications, extensions, and envelopments, while diffused in
matter and contracted in memory. Even if we were to try both machines
and taste similar intensities in different contexts, Bergsons cone is a
much more complicated machine than the twists and turns of the eternal return. On the other hand, it seems to me that, on this plane, the
fabrication of machines demands other alliances, friends other than the
Nietzscheanswhose avid reader I have never ceased to be. Inside this
factory, the enemy Hegel may come across as a partner, and as interesting
as Nietzsche, provided that we focus on the texts that Hegel dedicates to
the idea of life or even to the machine before we begin to discuss desire.
I return, however, to the question of the dialectic. There isnt the
slightest doubt that the Hegelians transformed it into a hackneyed tale;
it is the same mistake that a Deleuzian makes when he forcibly stretches
a concept over every plateau of his work. For my part, what I retain from
the dialectic is its dialect aspecta dialect that insinuates itself inside
the margins and infiltrates the seediest parts of Western culture to listen
to a language very different from that of morality, and to reveal from time
to time what morality, with its mask of good and common sense, often
dissimulates. Dialectics, therefore, I understand to be a dialect and even,
underneath the dialect and its operatic folklore, I see dialectics as a diabolical forcethe devil [diable] in his essence being diabolicalinside
minor dialects that shipwreck the power of the unilectic language. The
word unilectic, of course, does not exist but we should invent it when it
comes to the discourse of authoritythe pontifical language.
Deleuze is therefore elsewherebeyond the simple opposition dialectic/anti-dialecticno matter how clear the stakes of this pair may be,
as long as we stick with Nietzsche and Philosophy. Deleuze lives in an epoch
in which the infinite no longer exists as a problem: it has lost its appeal
and no longer has the same impact, especially when placed next to Chaos.
The Hegelian dialectic, I think, responds to the question of the modern
infinite, whereas the logic of multiplicities is rather a response to the
Chaos that the contemporary epoch requires us to face. I try to confront
this problem in my latest book, Plurivers: Essai sur la fin du monde,10 where
no dialectics would remember how to fabricate a world. Not even the
devil would be able to promise us a new lifeas he does in Faust. Only
the strange entities that Deleuze has us encounter through the impersonality of becoming-animal could do this. I think this is the real novelty of Deleuze: that he places us in front of the animalface-to-face
with animal sensations and animal spirits that the West must understand
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before they become extinct, and face-to-face with machines that we must
learn to handle before we leave this life. In Hegels philosophy, on the
other hand, becoming is still thought of in terms of the opposition nature/
culture: the question here is how to transcend the animal and how to be
free of the machine. And yet, inside the Phenomenology of Spirit where the
animals are often shown the door in the name of an essentially anthropological desire, my reading finds them reentering from the windows.
As for machines, we will undoubtedly have the opportunity to talk again.
CVB: That Hegel is the severe critic of Kant and his moral vision of the
world is beyond dispute. He sees that a grandiloquent morality grounded
on duty is the expression of a servile willand an empty expression, to
boot. You expose this critique masterfully. But does this critique make
him a genealogist of beyond good and evil? And if it does, are you
still entitled to read the Phenomenology as a criminal intrigue? It seems to
me that the clearest statement as to why the intrigue is criminal comes
at the very end of your book. You write: The Absolute does not bring
about a separation in the direction of the heights. It is separated from
itself through a Fall, and in accordance with a movement that causes it
to sink and to be divided along a line of immanence. In the last analysis,
it is evil that stands at the root of creation (237, emphasis mine). Now, if
Hegel holds evil to be the root of creation, you are right in receiving the
Phenomenology as a criminal plot. But then it will be difficult to maintain
that Hegels critique of the moral vision leads to a space beyond good
and evil. A space beyond good and evil can be maintained only if the
Fall ushers in a disease (not a crime) which, like pregnancy, gives rise
to the new, the better, and the nobler. In other words, the conclusion of
your book should accommodate crime and the evildoer as little as your
earlier discussions of figures of bad consciencestoicism, skepticism,
and so onhave done. It was, you recall, with these figures in mind that
you invoked Nietzsches diagnosis of pregnancy. And, despite your qualifications, to assimilate the Fall of the Absolute to crime will cause the
negative to have the last word; not to mention the fact that the God thinking His own thought of the Science of Logic will not match the arche and
the eschaton of the Hegelian saga.
J-CM: It seems to me that Hegels philosophy is not a moral philosophy,
and in this respect he is among the first to consider moral judgments to
be constructions whose histories must be accounted for. Indeed, morality has a history of morality and this is important when we think of Kant,
who posits morality as a fact of reason that cannot admit any outside
interference. Nothing touches it; nothing can affect it other than moral-
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ity itself. For Kant, the fact of reason that the categorical imperative
represents is a universal understanding with an absolutely unconditioned
causality that is autonomous with respect to natural causality. The imperative is the first factthe only fact that we can respect, without deriving it from any prior determination. Nothing exists before it! In the last
analysis, the Kantian critique gives itself ready-made what it should have
investigated. Is it possible to launch a different and stronger critique?
Hegels critique precisely consists of showing that morality itself is
a phenomenona historically determined mode of appearing. Leaving
behind the presumption that morality is given as an absolute, we must
reexamine its real formation. The claim that morality is autonomous
leads Kant in the direction of the phenomenon of an inaugural fact that
is valid for all places and all times. He is, therefore, doing everything
possible to keep morality away from phenomenology. In contrast, Hegel
thinks that a real critique must be less naive and that the critique of reason that considers itself pure must move beyond, very much beyond, the
aspirationsthemselves metaphysical and illusoryof theoretical reason to swallow the practical field. Produce a history of practical reason
no one had thought of it, with the exception of the Enlightenment with
which Hegel would very carefully establish relations. To say that there is
an origin of moral judgments means to assert that such and such a figure
has not always existed, that it behooves us to discover the point where this
figure begins, and to acknowledge that it manifests itself here; whereas
different forms prevail elsewhere. Such a submission of morality to an
origin and a beginning that it does not want to acknowledge I call a genealogy of morals. However, Hegels genealogy differs over many points
from Nietzsches, because Nietzsches pays more attention to the psychic
and instinctual [pulsionnelle] moral arrangement; whereas Hegel insists
on social facts and the geo-historical variation of moral judgments. Is it
criminal to think this way or is the term I use a mere metaphor?
A gesture of this nature seems criminal to me with respect to German idealism. I think that Hegels adventure would appear dangerously
insane to Fichte, taken up, as he was, in the splendor of the I = I. It would
come across as insensible to the splendor of morality inside which idealism
will try to drown theoretical reason, having taken the categorical imperative as the origin of the worldthe world as Will. (It seems to me that
Schopenhauer owes everything to Kant as far as this point is concerned; he
represents the last stage of idealism becoming skeptic.) I tried to rethink
of Hegel within the context of the image of thought that was dominant in
his time, and place him inside the philosophies of absolute identity, only to
realize that Hegel is not a member of the family because he has difficulties
with the Universitythe thing that endeared him to me, I should say . . .
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At any rate, Hegel is bound to come across as a renegade and, certainly,

he worked out a method that Nietzsche will not fail to adopt in his own
way as soon as he turns his back on Schopenhauer. To this extent, there is
a fracture that assumes the name Hegela singular point that does not
belong to his time; one that creates a margin that would scandalize and
will be necessarily incomprehensible to, and cursed by, his peers.
This is the first criminal point. It is, if I am allowed to put it this way,
intra-philosophical. But we can also count on a nonphilosophical occurrence to help us understand how Hegel behaved within the context of
his time and how he came to see himself as an old owl. Ridiculed by the
newspapers of his time, his abstractions mocked, Hegel replied with the
illustration of the criminal. The criminal is condemned by the opinion
that demands guilty pleas right away and, under these circumstances,
the opinion demonstrates an even bigger abstractiona judgment that
abstracts from all circumstances, provided that a person is found guilty
and is condemned as soon as possible. Therein lies the expeditious abstraction of the judgment of God. Hegel, it seems to me, sides with those
who are called criminals; that is, he sides with those who challenge the
common sense and the usual rhythm [les empecheurs de penser en rond] that
transgress the moral categories and show that they are the spontaneous
decision-makers of a society bent on protecting itself. Suddenly, freedom
is no longer on the side of morality; it is no longer the elegant factum
rationis of Kant, but rather it is lumped together with the excluded, the
pariah, the slaveon the side of those Foucault calls infamous men.
From now on, we are invited to understand that the slave is not only the
reactive, but that his liberty carries with it an insurrectional potential
the type of potential that Kant detested, as is evident from his devotion
to the masters we discover in reading What Is Enlightenment? This is also
why I say that Hegel is not an idealist, that it is impossible to put him next
to Kant or Fichte; that he reveals the powerful movement of Fallof a
creative Fall that opens up new potentialities. To founder is not always to
plunge into resentment and culpability; it is often to enter a new life
that of the humiliated and the offended, in the underground of infamous men and beasts of burden. All of a sudden, submitting morality to
a genealogy seems much more radical to me than the stubbornness with
which we try to forget the criminal side of the young philosopher to savor
the tranquil spirit of Hegels Logic, which lags far behind the contestatory
thrust of the Phenomenology. I think that a new reading of the Logic is required and I do not know whether I will have the time and the appetite
to do it myself. I allude a little to this problem in my Plurivers as I relate
Hegel to Russell. The Science of Logic seems to suit a logic of the paradox.
It brings about the pulverization of its founding eminence. But this is a
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complicated point that I leave hanging for the time being, as I am already
at some distance from your question.
CVB: You wrote: Hegels philosophy is not an anthropology . . . With
a gesture comparable to Nietzsches own, Hegel demands that man be
overcome. It is not possible to bring this philosophy over to Feuerbachs
humanism . . . The Phenomenology of Spirit can never be confused with
humanism, and the existence in the name of which Hegel offers us his
instructions cannot be reduced to the freedom of man (218). And you
went on to say: The Hegelian intrigue rises toward a logical arrangement,
toward the apprehension of a thought whose notions are no longer at
the mercy of man, but they rather demand the creation of a mode of impersonal and inhuman narration indebted to the Concept capable of explicating itself in accordance with its own ways (221). Nevertheless, you
do admit that between the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic there is
difference in form and content. The Phenomenology is a tale of initiation;
the Science of Logic asks that logic be understood as the system of pure
reason . . . [Its] content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal
essence, before the creation of nature and a finite mind.11 Now, it seems
to me that this difference demands that you offer a more elaborate explanation than the one you give of the relation between the Phenomenology
and the Logic. What is the relationship between the tale of initiation and
the noesis noeseos? How can one be initiated to the thought of God before
Creation if the road to initiation goes by the way of Dasein? How does
Hegel succeed where Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann have failed? It
seems that we need a more elaborate demonstration; that Hegel is in fact
an antihumanist; and that his antihumanism can be considered a variation on Deleuzes own. There is one more claim of yours that makes me
wonder: Man, you say, in the finitude of his most rudimentary values . . .
experiences a desire in view of which he appears to himself as a being
that must be overcome (218). Now, I grant you that Hegel thinks so. But
then you add: It is this desire that derails the merely organic life and
sends it over to the inorganic of art and philosophy. This may be Deleuzian, but I am not yet convinced that it is Hegelian. In derailing desire
and overcoming man, some of Hegels readers seem to have established
mans deification, rather than the production of the life of the inorganic.
J-CM: Well, this is a very complicated question and I do not exactly know
how to approach it. Let us begin with Heidegger. In Hegel, there is an
apprehension of modes of existence, the association of which is given the
name Spirit, and not at all the name of subject or substance. We cannot
count on any subject that is either given or can be logically constructed,
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nor can we count on any substance accessible to the human reason as

an a priori form. The Spirit is rather born from a Fall, from a process of
failure of the essence and only its most illogical characteristics show a
relationship with existence. The best candidates for existence are not
perfect essences (as is the case with Descartes, where we are only certain
of the fact that perfection exists necessarily). With Hegel, it is from a
different approach that we must think of essences in their power [puissance] to manifest themselves. To the point, one could argue that only
from accidental essences, and from notable incoherences can we expect
emerging and surprising effects capable of engaging History. I do not
think we could consider History in Hegel to be a history of metaphysics.
There are dimensions other than those of metaphysics that will carry us
to the depths of history. It is in this context that we should understand
the status of evil in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The Spirit, therefore, should not be thought of as the understanding of God or as the manifestation of human perfection and, in this
sense, the term Dasein could help us understand its profound inhumanity, keeping in mind that Heidegger also refuses to make Dasein
the property of man. Nevertheless, if Dasein is the expression of a world
rather than of man, neither the stone nor the animal is shown to be in a
relationship with Dasein for Heidegger; whereas in Hegel we can count
on inchoative forms of the Spirit (the pebble that causes circles in the
water, the dolmen, and so on). The expression objective spirit interests me in this context. Buds and animals reveal spiritual formations to
the point that Hegel will look to the buds as a figure of movement and
a force of overcoming (Aufhebung) that I refuse to accept as a metaphor.
And then, if we decide to look at the greatness of the soul, things are not
so cozy there either, as every mystic understands. The spirit is no more
human in its animal babblings than it is in its access to eternity, which
presupposes the death of man. This is the same with Christ who, in dying,
drags down man and God alike in his Fall. For all these reasons, I think
that we are very far from Heidegger, for whom truth obviously is not only
logical nor an affair of correct reasoning but also rather something that
dissimulates itself and retreats. There is in Heidegger a veneration of the
pre-Socratics, a sort of archeological phantasmreally, something for
the museuma nostalgia that we do not find in Hegel. Hegel constantly
shows that Egypt and Greece do not possess any truth that we have lost
or that we must restore with the help of etymology, which is, for me, the
summit of humanist preoccupations. In this context, I would add that
Heidegger and Nietzsche share philological family relationshipsthe
kind of concerns that we do not find in Hegel at alla writing that is
really based on language, either in its metaphorical veils or in its occult
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forest clearings. If Hegel is not Nietzschean, it is because of the accidental manner through which he envisages the relationship between Logic
and Existence.
Now, the inorganic, for me, means two things. It is, first, in the
Logic, which I understand on the basis of the Phenomenology, a desire to
recompose the faculties according to a new arrangement that we can
call Spirit. This rearrangement, however, does not have to endure, as
is the case with Heidegger and occasionally with Derrida, a reflection on
discourse or on the procedures of language. Hegel refuses to go through
language (which nonetheless does not fail to be the most accomplished
form of the organism and the organization of his corpus). I find throughout Hegel the example and the transversal play of processes that overflow
the function of the enunciation and discursive relations as they carry us
in the direction of other logicsthe logic of a stomach that digests, of
an animal that devours, of a plant that poisons, of a spider that sucks the
blood of its victim, or of a guillotine that cuts off heads. And this travels
by roads that are not those of significationsomething that occasionally
makes Hegel unreadable. This is it: I think that there are functions and
functionings in Hegel that we have not been able to appreciate because
of the primacy we continue to give, since Nietzsche, to language and to
our obstinacy of limiting the Logic to the confines of grammar, as well as
the proposition that grammatology in particular was supposed to have
deconstructed. And it seems to me that it is this impoverishing reduction to
grammar that Hegel puts out of play when he reflects on the composition
of a Logic upon completion of the Phenomenology. As for the question
of art, he is not explicitly concerned with poetry and tragedy, but with
many other forms of visibility where the question will be about a Spirit
that is not filtered through the snares of language. The aesthetics that
follows shows the antihumanism that dismantles the relationship of art
to imitation and beauty. But this is another point that threatens to take
us away from our purpose.
CVB: Permit me to quote you once more: Hegels book displays two
planes, each one of which has a different speed of composition: the raging, conflictual series of acting figures that we apprehend with the help
of events; and another series, which, in every section, reaches a different
point of interpretation. This latter series is a repetition that he who acts
in History does not see, being unable to read what he does and ignorant of the becoming that he helps hatch. This line of sense occurs behind his back; it is the series of momentsthe slower and ampler of the
twothe pacified thread of which the philosopher-historian is going to
follow retrospectively backwards (13031). This way of referring to the
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two planes makes me think that, according to your reading, the Hegelian planes with their difference prefigure Deleuzes distinction and supplementarity between becoming and history. And you seem to confirm
this suspicion when, a few paragraphs earlier, you quote from Deleuze
and Guattaris What Is Philosophy?: Hegel powerfully defined the concept through the Figures he created and the Moments he posited. The
Figures become parts of the concept because they constitute the aspect
through which the concept is created by and in consciousness, through
successive minds; whereas the Moments form the other aspect, according to which the concept posits itself and unites minds in the absolute
of the Self.12 Now, the difference that Deleuze and Guattari postulate
between becoming and history is essentially the difference between the
virtual and the actual. But then what do you mean to say when you write
that at the time of the Phenomenology, the moorings of this amphibious
being have yet to be found: the reconciliation of the two worlds that
Hegel senses moving inside himthe real and the virtualproves to be
very far away? (23435). Is your qualification of the two worldsmade
in terms of the real and the virtuala mere lapsus calami? Did you mean
to write, instead, the actual and the virtual? If it were not your intention here to express a point in a Deleuzian garb (whereby both actual
and virtual would be real), then you may be saying that, at the time of
the Phenomenology, the possible and the real are still far apart from each
other. But if your real at this point stands indeed for the actual-real
and your virtual, for the virtual-real, your reader may be excused for
being confused, since she brings to her reading the knowledge that the
incommensurability between becoming and history, in Deleuze, is not
affected by the passage of time. You could perhaps help this reader by
further elaborating on the anticipation/promise that you seem to have
built around a phrase that begins with an unless: There would be no
logic capable of accounting [for a new, superhuman existence], unless a
different Logic were to be reinvented, with a sense that is no longer terrified of the absurd (235, emphasis mine).
J-CM: Yes, you are right about the two planes to which you refer: they
do not adopt the same rhythm. I wanted to show that History, in Hegels
sense, is not a mere succession of facts chained together according to the
ternary circulation of what we call dialectics, but that, rather, we are faced
with a serial history, which is very different from that of the historians
of his time. Serial and qualitative. I would also like to draw attention to
the following fact: the word dialectics rarely appears in the text of the
Phenomenology of Spirit, and when it does, it is in an extremely minimalist
and timid way, as if it were to describe an immanent movement, a proc-
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ess that returns to itself and coils in on itself. It has nothing to do with
the meaning that the word has in Plato, Aristotle, or Kant who always
use it for their own specific purposes. But what have Hegels commentators done? Well, they have discovered dialectics to be ubiquitous, to the
point of completely forgetting the incredible and extraordinary events
of which Hegel speaks in the Phenomenology and in the Logic. They have
maintained a ternary skeletal structure, believing themselves to be happy
and reassured at the illumination of the affair, allowing the rest to be
registered as merely decorative. You understand of course that I followed
the inverse procedure.
We could forget about the word dialectics, that occurs only three
times in the Phenomenology, and move on, or we could explain it a little
explain why at the level of the Phenomenology readers expose themselves
to be more Hegelian than Hegel, yet so very stingy with justifications. It
was not through me that the reading of Hegel was forced. I tried instead
to go back to this emblematic thinker in an amiable way (without ever
forgetting the concerns I expressed in my earlier books where the approach is not the same and the criticisms have their place and their justification). There are, then, in Hegel two planesthe pacified plane of
moments, and the raging plane of figures that intersect in keeping with
a method we could call dialectics, provided that we do not forget the
infernal virtues of the dialectic to which I alluded in my third response
the wealth of dialects that spring up with it, to the point of obscuring the
very exposition of the system. And, of course, I have been thinking of Deleuzes claim in his book on Spinoza that distinguishes the volcanic chain
of the scolia from the continuous line of propositions in the Ethics.
Let us simply say that I could not resist the desire to read Hegel in the
way that Deleuze taught me to read Spinoza. Nor could I resist noticing
a certain relationship with the acceleration of the last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit that places us squarely inside eternity, inaugurating a
machine that did not exist earliera machine that Hegel calls Absolute
Knowledge, and which is neither the eternal return nor Bergsons cone.
And believe me, this machine operates with an efficacy that we do not
find elsewhere. How can we tackle this machine? I must confess that it is
a complete mystery and that the Absolute Knowledge is so illogical that
until now nobody has been able to tell us what makes it revolve, notwithstanding the declarations that find in it Science, System, and so on. It is,
indeed, very curious that we forget to ask what Hegel means by science
and system, and fail to remember that the science of the spirit has
nothing to do with what we call science in the domain of matter and
nature. Not to mention the fact that objective and subjective logic would
not suffice to bring us to the intelligence of absolute logic.
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Well then, to answer your question I would put the real on the
side of time, of the chain of time that the moments offer us; whereas
the virtual is to be found entirely in leaps and anachronisms. The latter
reveals the racing rhythm of figures that intervene in many different moments or places where, like a demon, they were not expectedcasual
and surprising, sharing in an instance that I would call eternity. The
real and the virtual, the moments and the figures, interlace time and
eternity. The question ishow is this passage realized? Is it in a logical
manner? My response is yes, if you wish, but on the condition that we
understand logic other than in the usual way reserved for this word, in a
way that is not exempt from absurdities, as I tried to explain in my fourth
reply in showing that perfection does not lead to existence, that it is
merely possible and unable to aspire to any virtuality. You could then ask
me about the nature of this paradoxical and quantic logic. You yourself
suggest the word sensation. This is perfect! It is something that proceeds from the statute of the image [tableau], from the circulation of
images having become for-themselvesas they pass from the in itself to
the for itselfto the point where they no longer need our brains to survive, having been entirely liberated in a form of pure, almost cinematographic, sensation. Thats it. It looks difficult, but this is the point responsible for the monstrous beauty of the whole, a point of tipping over to
which we will probably return.
CVB: You wrote some beautiful pages about Antigoneechoing the
beautiful pages that Hegel dedicated to her. You spoke of the indispensability of the family in the acquisition of identity; you highlighted the familys ability to make death lose its contingency and accidentality; and you
followed Hegel in his discussion of families capacity to create a space for
the desexualized and sublimated love of the sister-brother relationship.
Also moving are the pages that you wrote, following Hegel, on the clash
between the laws of the city and the laws of the family and on Antigones
double bind. And you went on to designate the relationship between
brother and sister as a motiveless relationship and a veritable body without organs (137). In a footnote to this designation, you claimed that this
concept of Gilles Deleuze fits marvelously to the passages that Hegel
dedicates to the concept of an essentially non-Oedipal family (137, n.
19). In fact, you suggested that Freud and Lacan failed to read Sophocles
with the care that characterizes Hegels reading. Had they done so, they
could not fail to recognize the anti-Oedipal and anti-psychiatric anticipations of Antigone (123). I wonder, having read all these claims, whether
you would concede the boldness of your own reading and of your own
conclusions. You know well that Lacans interpretation of Antigone has
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fueled readings and debates among readers that vigorously challenge

the plausibility of attributing non-Oedipal and BwO-like designations
to Sophocless masterpiece. Lacans reading makes Antigones appeal
to the law of the gods an unsustainable breach of the symbolic order.13
Not to be outdone, Judith Butler counters by discovering in this appeal
the scandalous performative disruption and perversion of the symbolic
order.14 When it comes to what Antigone is all about in the Greek tragedy, you know it very well, the interpretations are indeed legion: the intended supplementarity of the laws of the city and the laws of the family
have been advocated; Antigones refusal to assume any responsibility has
been emphasized; the claim that the real clash in the tragedy is between
the laws of the gods and their prohibition against killing anyone who
is a Greek, and the laws of the city, the application of which narrowly
governs the affairs of the city itself, has found merit with several readers. All these readings go against yours, and some of them have inspired
powerful political agendas. Do you want to take this opportunity to outline the merits of your approach?
J-CM: I must confess that my reading of Hegel kept itself away from what
Lacan might have thought. For the little that I know, there are at least two
fundamental differences between Lacan and my own complex reading of
Antigone. On one hand, a reconsideration of Creon and his becomingman that sidelines the father whose authority I do not think he embodies; and on the other, my impression that, at long last, the young girlthe
young woman, the woman in the direction of whom the becoming of the
statute mother is being propelledis about to be liberated. Creon is not
adopting a fathers attitude any more than Antigone seems to endorse the
role of a mother! What Hegel seems to say without pause is that, in this
distanciation from the couple father/mother, the brother/sister relationship loses its familial character, as I myself tried to show on the basis of my
reading of Derridas Glas. By the same token, it is true that I lift the tragedy of Sophocles out of the economy of the household and therefore out
of psychoanalysis to place it on the side of the anti-Oedipus that remains
hostile toward the familial romance. We have always known that the Oedipal complex does not work well with the girl and that Freud always had a
hard time with this subject. It seems to me that Antigone is the exact counterproof of Oedipus and that Freud omitted the reading of this sequence
as he concluded his universal complex with an appeal to castration.
I believe, by the way, that my reading moves away from our habit of
naturalizing Antigone as a representative of natural right (essentially maternal) and again away from this other tendency to hold Creon culpable
and to see him as a paternalist tyrant mobilizing an arbitrary or rather
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positive right as a result of his violence. There is no real opposition in

Sophocless story between natural and positive right. The feminine and
the masculine must be liberated from all vestiges of a factical naturalization; but also Creon, it seems to me, must be credited for liberating the
right from the terror of families and for betting on a State that does not
place the fathers slogan justice at the service of legitimizing holy wars
for the defense of an essentially maternal soil. Creon escapes the temptation of the maternal-justice being claimed in the name of the mother.
Everywhere, in all our school lessons, Creon is presented as a horrible
chap, a symbol of the coldness of the State, and we rebel at his repudiation of Antigones gesture, which is so much closer to the heart and to
intimate morality. But we then forget that the love that Antigone shows
her brother has nothing to do with anything genital; that it is something
extra-familial because it does not expect any sexual outcome; that it is a
love pure of all jouissanceand, if I may put it this way, a love beyond the
pleasure principle, in a new sense. We are very far from the incestuous
Oedipal situation and I do not think that we take it into account often
enough. This text does not work with either Freuds schemes or with Lacans
because the Oedipus complex no longer works in Antigones situation
the brother and sister have left behind every incestuous consideration, as
well as the prohibition itself, rendered universal around Oedipuss name.
Antigone would be at fault if she had allowed herself to sink to the attraction of a natural right, and to become caught in her becoming-woman
by a maternal capture looking for ways to save the honor of the family
instead of the imagethe desexualized imageof the brother who,
in fact, she embodied in such a singular manner. It is because of this
faultthis aborted destiny of the becoming-womanthat, according
to Hegel, the Greek city was unable to keep its democratic promises and
allowed itself to be deterritorialized by genetic economies. It is the Roman Empire that, for nomadic reasons, knew how to bring about an
extra-familial and extra-conjugal friendship, in a State where the function carried more weight than the honor of the paternal or maternal
name. Indeed, Caesar is not a family name. By the way, I think that my
reading shows the exit door to structural anthropology and to psychoanalysis, both, for those who know how to read between the lines.
CVB: The affair of Christ implies that God becomes man only on the
condition that man becomes a superior being, an overman, if I am permitted to assume, in an untimely manner, the expression that will become Nietzsches own (193). God steps outside the limits of His perpetual reclusion as He negates himself as One . . . In such a negation of
His retreat, mans approach to God is being prolonged; it is pursued in
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the vision that God has of HimselfHimself being taken in the hems of
His own dissipation and having descended to the point where evil begins
to expand. To the point that the eye of man and the eye of God are both
open upon the same background . . . as if, without man, God would not
be able to reach the knowledge of Himself, and, without God, man could
not overcome his all-too-human humanity (21718). In other words,
Hegel suggests that the kenosis of God is central to the transformation
of man. But the death of the mediator reveals that God is not one to
come in and help us escape our dire straits. Instead, Hegel, conflating
Easter and Pentecost, argues that the death of the mediator becomes
the presence of the Spirit. The agony of realizing that we humans are
finite becomes the realization that the life lived on the other side of the
death of God is what is meant by the life of the Spirit. That may well be
a new kind of life that transcends our prior existence. But does it justify
the coining of a new termovermanfor this new humanity, along
with the antihumanist rhetoric that this term carries with it? Besides,
the bi-conditional that links the transformation of man with the death
of God makes me wonder about the place of grace in Hegels system.
My reason for asking is this: Christianitys central claim, I take it, is that
soteriologically speaking, man cannot lift himself to salvation by his own
bootstraps. When, therefore, I read in your book about the overcoming
of man, I need to know whether the overcoming is proclaimed la Nietzsche (and his bootstraps) or whether Christ is, for Hegel, the one whose
death combines the ef hapax (absolute singularity) of his death with the
universality of the becoming-Spirit. This is where I would want to see
grace coming in. What do you think?
J-CM: This question of grace is interesting. It seems to me that, yes, grace
comes from the outside. I mean, it is not human, it hardens in traits and
figures that are beyond man and, at the same time, beyond God. Notice
that Christianity needed to match it with a holy spirit, with light, with a
son, with a trinity that is barely paternal and borders on heresy. I would
like to set aside the Hegelianand theologicalplane to make myself
understood as I turn toward my earlier work on eroticism.15 Grace seems
to me to depend on the set of lines that come to drape over a figure. It is
an inversion of the Aura. It is not an expression but rather an impression,
a print, a nexus of curbs, which meet and produce an intersection that
we can call a Subjecta subject as an ensemble of coordinates. Think,
for an example, of a Roman orator. He learns gestures, he casts himself
in gestures, he acquires the manner of a danseur in figures that exist independently of him, as he embodies signs whose signification is received by
his body. This could well describe the ecstasis that prepares us to receive
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a place waiting for us, like a scar that we embody. I really think that this
is the way to understand Deleuze when, in The Logic of Sense, he says that
our wound has been waiting for us, and that the event is a surface effect.
To understand this point better, lets consider Giacomettis sketches.
We see in them a multiplicity of intersecting traits, a veritable ball, an
intersection of threads coming from all directions, which, when completed succeed in creating a portrait. Where then does the figure come
from? It did not preexist like a substance; rather it happens like an incorporeal event being incorporated inside a concretization, a singular
concrescence of volutes, like a hurricane that comes progressively to give
itself an eye. It is not a face that shines, but rather the lines of the landscape that are being inflected upon it. The inversed aura does not become fused, it does not emanate; rather, it immanates: it is a gravitational
collapse of lines that produce a figure as they intersect. Thus, we come
nearer to the forces of the outside that are really the Spirit and come
from a distance to be joined in the movement of grace.
We can then see that Spirit does not mean consciousness or
self-consciousness. On the contrary, the movements of consciousness
need the Spirit to be concatenated. And this is why man must be really
overcome in favor of the impersonal, which is the light that shines when
God himself is lost in his own diffraction, much like a universe under
expansion or like the pluriverse that James knew something about. I see
the relationship between all of these with photography or cinema, both
of which are arts that capture the intervening of grace. And I wonder
whether this is what Hegel means with the notion tableau that circulates in the kingdom of the Spirit. We should come back to this.
However, it seems that this way of helping man and God meet each
other amidst this piercing light that conserves and effaces them both is
very different from what Nietzsche called death of God, and Foucault,
death of man. I would say that God dies in the way that a light bulb
burns out to liberate the light under which men are frightened/find a
new way [seffraient], seized that they are by the sudden entry of becoming [effraction], as if they had waited for the event that precedes them. It
is interesting that Hegel says that the philosopher is a bird of the night.
I cannot stop thinking of the eyes of the barn owl [Effraie]which is the
name of a species of owls in French, but also of fright, which is a clearing
[frayage], a composition of relationships and also a very great fear. Yes, I
cannot stop reading Hegel in a Deleuzian way (a bit more grave perhaps
than Deleuzes reading) where I can find cinema, image, the art of photography, and so on. Does this mean that I force what Hegel really said?
It is possible, but I would say that this is a good sign. We should read an
author to renew himinstead of repeating with the orthodoxy of the
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friend who always muffles him. This is my way of being Hegels enemy,
by reinventing him as I refuse the readings that have blessed him and
tempered him to the point of becoming a caricature. But, at the same
time, this way of understanding the light is perfectly in agreement with
Hegels times, especially as we learn that he was the reader of Goethes
Theory of Colors16 and, together with Schelling, he discovered that bodies
are electric phenomena. It is, in a certain way, the electrification of the
death of God in the universal effusion of a Spirit that reveals. Revelation
itself becomes a photographic revelation. But to understand this obligates us to first understand what a concept is for Hegel.
CVB: Your chapter on the Hegelian concept, as it emerges from the pages
of the Phenomenology, could have been written with equal plausibility and
without any addition or subtraction, about the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept, as it emerges from the pages of What Is Philosophy? The Hegelian
concept is not a notion (23); it is not an abstraction that retains the
general characteristics of a sample of similar entities (24); it is not placed
in the service of classification (25); it is not the result of a subjective intellectual operation (24). It is processual (24); it is an operation of the
real itself (24); its function is not to differentiate one set of entities from
another, but rather to account for the internal constitution of things and
the ability of different processes to have the same rhythm (2526). Since
Hegel, you claim, the concept is not an idealization external to things.
Rather, it designates the force of creation and destructionan intimate
life (26). When we turn to Deleuze, we find repeated in his work the
bold equation, concepts-events, and the equally bold proclamation of
the eventum tantumthe (one) eventwith its internal differentiation.
Two questions, therefore: Do you find in Hegel the anticipation of the
Deleuzian distinction between the virtual event and the actual state of
affairs? Would such a distinction make the Hegelian Concept virtual?
And, second question: Where would Hegel and Deleuze differ from one
another with respect to the Concept?
J-CM: You are right on many points, but it is not correct to say that I
would have written the same things if I were writing on Deleuzes concept. With Deleuze, we are inside a radical immanence and this is already
the case with Hegel. This is indisputableit is a philosophical fact. We
then discover in both situations the necessity to generate the concept
on the basis of experience. There is a Hegelian insistence on the idea of
experience, which by itself merits an entire monograph. But we do not
deal with the same experience in the works of the two philosophers. Deleuzes transcendental empiricism requires the virtual; that is, a form
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of different/ciation that we do not find in the Hegelian movement. At

this point, we should reread Deleuze, in order, at long last, to clarify the
proper way to insist on the notions of immanence and the outsidethe
two concepts that are not always well understood and that may even seem
contradictory to one another. Even before we read What Is Philosophy?
we can easily grasp that the Deleuzian conceptual matrix is different/
ciation with respect to which the pair, virtual/actual, is what permits it
to gain momentum. If I may put it this way, with Deleuze, unlike Hegel,
we have an idea of reality that is much more that of Borges. There are
in Deleuze many strata that attach themselves to the events that are actualized. I am referring to the double lineage of the event in Deleuze,
wherein the virtual haunts the actual without becoming concretean
immense chaotic machine that Hegel would not have been able to conceive because he did not know the same outsideperhaps he would even
refuse this outside. It seems to me that Hegel makes use of the negation
and nonbeing in places where Deleuze discovers the outside. Now, if we
come to What Is Philosophy? the concept appears to be more of a skeletal
structure, a set of fragments that are combined in a constructivist way, a
dry consolidation that Hegel would not share eitherhe who prefers the
round biscuits, the circles of circle, the intersections and fusions more
than the additions and the arrangements of exteriorities. This too merits
further development. The Logic would give us a better idea; but this is a
project for the future.
As far as I am concerned, there are many things that differ, but I
can provisionally sort them by a rather crude divisionthe distinction
between the infinite and Chaos. Hegel knows nothing of the Chaos that
Deleuze experiments with because he is positioned on a different scale of
time. We will say the same thing about Spinoza, whom Deleuze admires.
It is not the same mental geography and, as a result, the tenor of the concept would not be of the same nature. We should not forget that a concept, for Deleuze, will be added to components that are not themselves
concepts: these are the functions of science and the compositions of the
arts, in the company of which the concept will braid singularities. This is
equally true for Hegel, but in an encyclopedic way; that is, through the
cycle, whereas Deleuze works by means of a dramatization based on bifurcations and networks.
Well, this point is essential. Even if I were to discuss resemblances,
the fact is that the concept enters structures that do not result from philosophythe nonphilosophical adventure. Deleuzes concept of multiplicity will come to be related to the fractal functions of mathematics and
to the fissures of contemporary art that Hegel fully ignores. For me, these
are not the same machines; but having tried both, sometimes I love to
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accelerate on the one as I do with the other, to negotiate bends as I go

through the same motions. This is inevitable! It is a way of planting in the
Hegelian garden a few Deleuzian shoots that will grow from the middle
and slightly derail the orbits of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is very
exciting for someone who is at the controls and finds an old machine on
which to take a joyride.
I conclude with another point that appears to be Hegels invention. The concept, for him, is the Begriff. It is like a claw mark, something
haptic: it is not a question of putting my hands on the object to take
hold of it; it is rather to take an impression of it, take the fingerprints,
and memorize the grooves. I work with grooves in a book I called Le
corps de lempreinte.17 It is a book on the art of photography. I believe that
the Hegelian sublation is a photographic process, a capturing of shadows and lights that the Absolute Knowledge will dilute, and absorb like
a siphon. Here is an idea, an image of the criminal machine that Hegel
calls Absolute Knowledgethe Absolute being a solution within which
events come undone to leave marks that the concept will internalize.
But with this in mind, we already move to another circle whose speed
becomes infinite (like a rapid sequence of blinks).
CVB: In the concluding chapter of your final scene, The Survival of
the Image, you say: The Hegelian Concept creates the possibility of reanimating all the ectoplasms of whatever appears. This almost technical
feat does not have to wait for the invention of movies that it nevertheless
inspires. It finds its first manifestations, in Hegels time, in the strange
creation of Faradays wheel, capable of connecting sketches that are separated from one another. Their rotation induces a real perception of
movement, to the point that it renders possible the famous re-creation of
the galloping horse . . . This particular form of circularity . . . permits its
animations to acquire a virtual eternity (231). You are, therefore, crediting the Hegelian Concept with the ability to anticipate Nietzsches vision
of the eternal recurrencethis absolutely novel notion of movement
that you call mental movement (ibid.). In the next page of your book,
you introduce the notion of the spiritual automaton with these words:
The entire Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit celebrates this spiritual
automaton, capable of conferring upon the image the appearance of
reportagea reportage of our silhouettes, dead forever, yet also able
to project and to maintain themselves upon an absolute and inalterable
support (232). Now, the notion of the spiritual automaton comes to us
from Leibniz and Spinoza and, as you know very well, plays an important
role in Deleuzes attempt to leave subjectivism and humanism behind in
the context of his quest for the identity of being and thought freed from
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idealism. It follows, therefore, that the ordo geometricus of Spinozas Ethics

is not a whimsical choice, a mere pedagogical device chosen to impress
the mentally undisciplined. It is a demonstration that the laws of physics
(body) and the laws of logic (mind) work in tandem; in other words, that
being and thinking are identical in the incessant actualization of the virtual. Now, you argued in several places in your book that Hegels becoming leaves ample space for contingency. And we know that the presence
of the spiritual automaton in Deleuzes philosophy also does not prevent
him from giving contingency a royal place. This is, I take it, the main
reason why vice-diction assumes the place of prediction in his writings.
Would you mind explaining here how the spiritual automaton can leave
room for contingency in Hegelor in Deleuze, for that matter?
J-CM: My response will attempt to cover your points in general terms.
The Absolute, for me, is a process that requires a physics of thought, a
machine that revolves around itself to generate a powerful nonorganic
life. This life, once it moves beyond a certain regime, displays a dynamism that comes from contingency but has an absolutely necessary validitya kind of dice throw that is the inverse of Stphane Mallarms
or, as you say, a process of vice-diction. To write a philosophy book, as far
as I am concerned, is not to ask whether one becomes famous, whether
anyone is going to read us, whether the cover is beautiful, or whether it
will lead us to the vocation of an academic. Rather, it is the creation of
a kind of grace that has us feel something rise from the depths of our
thinkingsomething that does not come from us or, at least, if the idea
is ours, that it is able to communicate with something else that moves us
and transforms us into an insane machine. Herein lies the contemplative
aspect of philosophy. The philosopher is not a merchant of books: he is
the one who fabricates a probe, a lunar lemma that gives us a foothold
in a wild region, asking all along whether others would be willing to embark upon the same boat and whether there would be machinesbetter
lubricated than himselfable to do it. I think that Nietzsches eternal
return, Bergsons cone, and Spinozas conatus are examples of this sort;
and we could, of course, find others. This is what interests Deleuze in the
body without organs. Bergson himself, in The Two Sources of Religion and
Morality, did say that the universe is a machine to create gods, which is
indeed a very curious formula. And I also think that Hegel, whenever he
speaks of Absolute Knowledge, does not wish to inform us that he is a
man of science or that reading him would teach us anything. Absolute
Knowledge is not positivism. It does not offer the certainty of facts. It is
nothing but a pathway, a door that opens on a life that will come from the
animal or from desire, but a life nevertheless capable of finding its niche
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in regions that are no longer merely organic. It is not an affair of the

sublimation of instincts in a secondary process, but rather a sufficiently
direct construct inside which instinct is unloaded onto the eternal quiet,
and thereafter drags to his death its carrier along with the machine that
brought him there. To drink from the cup of the infinite, the way that
the Phenomenology of Spirit concludes, is not a small affair. And as we drink
from it, the problem of proving that we are eternal is not really important
to the philosopher, who is not a theologian. Rather, what is important is
to live from now on with the feeling that we are somehow eternal, experiencing in our own body that a line of the universe has been crossed and
that it behooves us to follow the spiritual automaton adept at creating it.
I think that this might resonate with Williams Jamess themes on
faith and pragmatism. It is a question of regime. The spiritual automaton, despite its diminished capacity, permits us to hear all the cracklings of its machine, like an association of ideas that would be achieved
as the machine stalls, with all the failings that this entails. Even in Spinoza, we must find the suitable speed. The first genre of knowledge is
a miserable failure where all the dented wheels bump into one another
and squeak. With the second genre, the outlook improves, but the contraption does not stop sputtering. Only when the machine performs at
its best does the automatism create a new kind of life. There are levers
that exist to launch the machine beyond its own speed. It seems to me
that, with respect to Hegel, this machine does not follow the wheels of
the chain of ideas that parallel the affects of bodiesnor does it follow Spinozas. Instead of fabricating the automatism of the idea turning away from the monstrous imagination, the Germans experience with
Spinoza a renewal pursued entirely on behalf of the imageespecially
with respect to Goethe, Hlderlin, and Schelling. Briefly, I would say
that Goethe is the first to put movement inside the idea, and also inside
the image. The image becomes animated, the disks are colorful and he
discovers the play of colors. He fabricates small machines that produce
black and white by having them rotate on their axis. Now, the image begins to move. And this happens the moment Hegel begins to write. And
then, only a few years after the composition of the Phenomenology, Faraday
invents the wheela spiritual chalice, which, with the alternations of
black-and-white bands, produces incorporeal and virtual effects, as well
as movements by means of which the horses dance and the birds flyas
types of magical lanterns. This is the Absolute Knowledge, a circulation
of tableaus registering and collecting the worlds scratches and sweepings
inside a bowl where it will be reflected. This is not the cinema; it is the
cinema that becomes possible from then on, what the cinema has available to be presented and actualized. It is the intellectual machine that
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explains why we started making movies. Indeed, when we read Deleuzes

books on the cinema, cinema becomes very exciting and we like to push
the transformations of movement and time a little further. I replied without breaking down your question to its components in order not to lose
its spirit. What is certain is that I read the chapter on Absolute Knowledge as if it were a photogrammatic whole unrolling history, much like
a black-and-white silent film could have done. It was entirely fascinating
and unexpected . . .
CVB: In recognizing Deleuze as the thinker of the transcendental understood as a sort of ungrounding, Miguel de Beistegui,18 by implication,
provides us with an excellent characterization of a philosophy of difference that would be worthy of its name. Difference, to be more than
a mere difference between two identities, must be the transcendental
condition of the endless ungrounding of being. No longer referring
back to subjectivity or to the conditions of possibility of experience, the
transcendental, in a philosophy of difference that would not revert to
identity, would be the agent of the actual generation and production of
phenomena that take place in a virtual time and a virtual space, no longer bearing a relationship to the well-known Kantian forms of intuition.
This point can also be expressed succinctly as follows: philosophies of
difference are in name only philosophies of difference as long as they
cannot reach for, and think, difference in itselfa process which is the
indivisible arrangement of a differenciating/differentiated real process.
However, this process cannot be thought without the simultaneous grasp
of the sort of intensive time that inherits the space left unclaimed after
timewith and after Kantsucceeded in coming off its hinges. As our
discussion up to this point indicates, Hegels concept is difference differentiating itselfdifference in itself. What is left to be determined is
whether or not Faradays wheel and Goethes experiments with color are
able to support an argument for the presence of intensive time in Hegels
Phenomenology as well as a vision of the eternal recurrence of the different.
You seem to think that the vision already exists. The circle, you write,
the wheel infinitely circulates a retinue of dead images, which, thanks
to their being superimposed on one another, are capable of moving in
one and the same place. This particular form of circularity of the optical
wheel that Faraday imagined promises its animations a virtual eternity: it
shows the galloping animal that revolves without beginning or end, when
the origin returns endlessly (231). It does not seem to matter that the
dead images that rotate are not in themselves the moving images of a
cinema-to-come. The symbol of the eternal return has already made its
presence felt. Would the reader then be justified to conclude that, for
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you, between Hegel and Deleuze, when it comes to a question of being

philosophers of pure difference, the difference is in the detailsa matter of degree rather than of nature? And if this is the case, how can we
help but conclude that your book proves Deleuze to be mistaken in his
assessment of the distance that separated him from Hegel?
J-CM: I do not think that Deleuze was mistaken in keeping his distance
from Hegel. Their difference is in fact a difference in nature. The mechanisms are not the same and the histories skirt each other, being nevertheless suspended from a common transcendental plane from which they
draw their inspiration and are detached, much like lightning is from the
black sky (here I repeat the formula of Difference and Repetition). Beginning with these traces that fuse together in all directions, I would say
that Hegel came to know a more important becoming in North America
than in France, especially through an entire series of nineteenth-century
thinkers that led to Jamess pluralism. As for Deleuzeno matter what
critics have to sayhe seems to me to be closer to Flix Ravaisson, to
Bergson and perhaps to Schelling, himself a reader of Spinoza. The
genealogies, therefore, are not the same at all. But there are bridges
and parallelisms that I made use of to pass from the system of negative
difference to Deleuzes more affirmative plan. I would say that there
is a plethora of Anglo-American thinkers, from F. H.Bradley to Josiah
Royce, who are not in the analytic tradition and who could help us work
out a new image of thought. There are necessarily differences of nature
between the Hegelian landscapes and the wild landscapes of the Deleuzianssimilar to the differences between continentsbut there are also
passages and discoveries to be made as we circulate between the two, in
a fault line that would contribute to the encounter between the Continental and North American philosophies, between literature and the
cinema. The real center of thought for the future is herea pluriverse
with pathways that diverge, but also intersect one another in the elaboration of a new machine intending to explore spaces and times of different
dimensions, like Royces map which is self-contained, but its coordinates
become deformed as we alter the scales. Royce was able to invent a fantastic world on the basis of the disquieting mathematical speculations on
the subject of the infinite being reflected inside the finite and its parts.
This is what interests me, and this could open a new line of research and
writing after my forthcoming book on Derrida.
Translated from the French by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
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Notes
1. Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010), 216.
2. Jean-Clet Martin, Une Intrigue criminelle de la philosophie (Paris: Dcouverte,
2010). Cited parenthetically in running text.
3. G. W. F.Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly? in Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts
and Commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (Peter Smith, 1988), 11318.
4. See Robert Sinnerbrink, Nomadology or Ideology? Parrhesia 2 (2006):
6287, who counts Judith Butler, Catherine Malabou, and Slavoj iek among
those who find Deleuzes and Hegels positions on dialectics to be compatible,
in the last instance, and Brian Massumi, Michael Hardt, and the majority of Deleuzes commentators, among those who hold the positions to be incommensurable.
5. Bruce Baugh, G. W. F.Hegel, in Deleuzes Philosophical Lineage, ed. Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 130.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
7. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 96.
8. Jean Wahl, Nietzsche et la philosophie, Revue de la Mtaphysique et de
Morale 3 ( JulySeptember 1963): 35279.
9. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. W. H.Johnston and L. G.Struthers, 2 vols.
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), 2:70.
10. Jean-Clet Martin, Plurivers: Essai sur la fin du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).
11. Hegel, Science of Logic, 1:44, 50.
12. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 1112.
13. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jacques A. Miller (London: Norton, 1997).
14. Judith Butler, Antigones Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
15. Jean-Clet Martin, Parures dEros (Paris: Kim, 2003), 6369.
16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors, trans. Charles L. Eastlake (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
17. Jean-Clet Martin, Le corps de lempreinte (Paris: Kim, 2004).
18. Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 21.
Contributors
BRENT ADKINS is an associate professor of philosophy and chair of the

Department of Religion and Philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem,
Virginia. His most recent books are Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and
Deleuze (2007) and True Freedom: Spinozas Practical Philosophy (2009). He is
the coauthor with Paul Hinlicky of Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with
Deleuze: A New Cartography, forthcoming in 2013.
EMILIA ANGELOVA is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the graduate faculty at the Centre for Theory,
Culture, and Politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. She has written articles on Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Emmanuel Levinas.
BRUCE BAUGH is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, History
and Political Science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British
Columbia, Canada; an adjunct professor of English language and literature at the University of Waterloo in West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; and
executive editor of Sartre Studies International. He is the author of French
Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (2003) and has written articles and
book chapters on Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger,
Sren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Baruch Spinoza, and other philosophers. He is translating from the French a collection of philosophical
essays by the Romanian-French philosopher Benjamin Fondane.
CONSTANTIN V. BOUNDAS is a professor emeritus of philosophy and
member of the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent
University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. His recent books include Deleuze and Philosophy (2006), Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century Philosophies (2009), and Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction (2009). He served
as guest editor of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy for its
special issue on Gilles Deleuze (Summer 2006). His translations from the
French include Deleuzes Empiricism and Subjectivity (2001) as well as Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze by Jean-Clet Martin, forthcoming in 2013.
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PHENG CHEAH is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality:
Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (2003)
and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (2006);
and the coeditor of Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (2003) and Derrida and the Time of the Political (2009).
KAREN HOULE is an associate professor of philosophy at the University
of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of numerous
articles on Deleuze and Flix Guattari, as well as on Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Spinoza. Her book Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion: Toward a New Image of Ethical Thought is forthcoming
in 2013. She also has written two books of poetry, Ballast (2000) and
During (2005).
JAY LAMPERT is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He has written many
articles not only on Hegel and Deleuze but also on Jacques Derrida,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Edmund Husserl, and other philosophers. He is
the author of two groundbreaking works on time and history, Deleuze and
Guattaris Philosophy of History (2006) and Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time (2012). He also wrote Synthesis and Backward
Reference in Husserls Logical Investigations (1995).
SIMON LUMSDEN is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University
of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His research is primarily concerned with German idealism and poststructuralism. He has written
articles for such journals as International Philosophical Quarterly, The Owl of
Minerva, The Philosophical Forum, Philosophy and Social Criticism, The Review
of Metaphysics, and Topoi.
JEAN-CLET MARTIN is a professor of philosophy at the Collge International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several books, the
most recent of which include Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie: Lire
la Phnomnologie de lesprit de Hegel (2010); Breviaire de lternit: Vermeer et
Spinoza (2011); and Deleuze (2012). His book Variations: La philosophie de
Gilles Deleuze was translated into English by Constantin V. Boundas and
Susan Dyrkton as Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (2011).
JOHN RUSSON is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. His research
extends from ancient philosophy through Hegel to contemporary Euro-
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pean philosophy. In addition to his many articles and book chapters, he

has written two commentaries on Hegels Phenomenology of SpiritThe
Self and Its Body in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (1997) and Reading
Hegels Phenomenology (2004). His other books include Human Experience
(2003), which won the Canadian Philosophical Association/Broadview
Press Prize, and Bearing Witness to Epiphany (2009).
ANNE SAUVAGNARGUES is a professor at University Paris Ouest, Nanterre La Dfense, and the director of the Department of Philosophy. She
specializes in French contemporary philosophy and has written numerous books and articles on Deleuze, including one recently translated into
English, Deleuze and Art, forthcoming in 2013. She serves on the editorial
boards of the French philosophical reviews Multitudes and Chimres.
JULIETTE SIMONT is a senior research associate at the Fonds National
de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique and a professor in the Institut de Philosophie at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. She is also deputy director of Les Temps Modernes, a literary review
founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.
HENRY SOMERS-HALL is a lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway,
University of London, in Egham, United Kingdom. He is the coeditor
of The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze and the author of Hegel, Deleuze,
and the Critique of Representation (both 2012) and Deleuzes Difference and
Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide, forthcoming in 2013. He is
working on Dialectics of Difference and Negation: The Responses of Deleuze and
Hegel to Representation, a new book based on his Ph.D. thesis.
JIM VERNON is an associate professor of philosophy at York University
in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Hegels Philosophy of Language (2007) and numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century
European philosophy, especially that of Deleuze, Derrida, Hegel, and
Kant.
NATHAN WIDDER is Reader in Political Theory in the Department of
Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Egham, United Kingdom. He is the author of Genealogies of Difference (2002), Reflections on Time and Politics (2008), and Political Theory
After Deleuze (2012).

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Hegel and Deleuze

Published by Northwestern University Press

For additional information about this book

Access provided by New York University (8 Nov 2013 12:24 GMT)

Hegel and Deleuze

Published by Northwestern University Press

For additional information about this book

Access provided by New York University (8 Nov 2013 12:24 GMT)

HEGEL AND DELEUZE

Topics in Historical Philosophy

Edited by Karen Houle and Jim Vernon

Northwestern University Press

Northwestern University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

At the Crossroads of Philosophy and Religion: Deleuzes Critique of

Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of Forces: Deleuzes

Hegel and Deleuze: Difference or Contradiction?

The Logic of the Rhizome in the Work of Hegel and Deleuze

Actualization: Enrichment and Loss

Political Bodies Without Organs: On Hegels Ideal State and

Deleuze and Hegel on the Logic of Relations

Deleuze and Hegel on the Limits of Self-Determined Subjectivity

Desiring-Production and Spirit: On Anti-Oedipus and German Idealism

Hegel and Deleuze: The Storm

Limit, Ground, Judgment . . . Syllogism: Hegel, Deleuze, Hegel, and

Hegel and Deleuze on Life, Sense, and Limit

Part 3. Conjunctive Synthesis

A Criminal Intrigue: An Interview with Jean-Clet Martin

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B.Nisbet

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols., trans. E. B. Spiers and

Phnomenologie des Geistes, in Werke in zwanzig Bnden, vol. 3, ed. Eva

Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971);

Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B.Nisbet

Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.Miller (Oxford: Oxford University

Hegels Science of Logic, trans. A. V.Miller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanities

Works by Gilles Deleuze

Bergsonism, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (New York:

Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia

Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature,

Foucault, trans. Sen Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia

Works by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi

What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New

Works by Other Authors

Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), sec. 54; trans. Werner

Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit,

HM Andrzej Warminski, Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life, in Hegel

Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique: Lindividuation

Alexandre Kojve, Introduction la lecture de Hegel, 2nd edition, ed.

Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the

Deleuze and Deleuzians on Hegel

supposes a profound restructuring of the true-false relation (DR, 150);

Hegelians on Deleuze and Deleuzians

sented most prominently by Peter Hallward19links Hegel (patron saint

of forces under the transcendent abstraction of achieved Absolute spirit.

Pheng Cheah, in Political Bodies Without Organs: On Hegels Ideal

thing heterogeneous on the subject, thus eliminating dualism on the side

tend toward an end, or proceed from a cause, but reciprocally condition

director of the Collge Intrnationale de Philosophie in Paris between