by Corry Shores
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[Note: All boldface and underlining is my own. It is intended for skimming purposes. Bracketed comments are also my own explanations or interpretations.]
Henry Somers-Hall
Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation.
Dialectics of Negation and Difference
Part 3: Beyond Representation
Chapter 7: Force, Difference, and Opposition
Very Brief Summary:
Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is more resilient to attack than Hegel’s, when both are pitted against one another.
Brief Summary:
If Hegel wanted to critique Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, he would show how Deleuze’s virtual and actual as contraries dialectically sublate, which collapses the basic distinction of Deleuze’s ontology. However, because Deleuze’s virtual and actual are two tendencies of the real and not contraries, such a Hegelian critique would not hold. From a Deleuzean perspective, Hegel’s dialectic could be viewed as a false movement, with Deleuze’s genesis of difference being the real movement. Yet Hegel purely from a logical standpoint might say that Deleuze’s difference does not exist.
Summary
In the previous chapter we compared Deleuze’s and Hegel’s interpretation of differential calculus, and we saw from it that Deleuze conceives there being a subrepresentational unconditioned and Hegel an infinite representational unconditioned. In this chapter we pit their theories against one another to see which one is better able to critique the other and defend against the other’s critique.
For example, Hegel might critique Deleuze’s actual and virtual by showing that the forces involved in each are dialectically inherent to one another, thus collapsing the ontological distinction on which Deleuze bases his transcendental empiricism.
More specifically, Deleuze opposes virtual and actual, and difference in itself from negativity. From the Hegelian perspective, this means Deleuze is using spatializing thinking of finite thought. If Deleuze had used infinite thought, he would have seen that the opposed terms dialectically converge, and thus this fundamental distinction in Deleuze’s philosophy does not hold.
But for Deleuze, the actual and the virtual are not opposed terms but are rather two tendencies of the real. Thus they do not succumb to a Hegelian critique which would try to sublate them.
The difference between Hegel’s and Deleuze’s treatment of the problem of the one and the many further clarifies their different concepts of difference. For Hegel, we encounter the problem of the one and the many when we do not use infinite thought to dialectically integrate them. For Deleuze we encounter the problem of the one and the many when we do not regard the many as a heterogeneous multiplicity of intrinsically related parts, like the colors making up white light or the phase portrait showing all the incompossible developments of a system. According to Deleuze, Hegel’s reliance on representation prevents him from seeing this other sort of difference which does not fit into Hegel’s system.
What we find is that Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is more resilient to attack than Hegel’s, when both are pitted against one another. Both Hegel and Deleuze have a non-spatialized sense of difference. Hegel’s is an integration of contraries, but Deleuze’s is an integration of singularities. A Hegelian critique of Deleuze’s virtual would not hold because it is not a contrary to the actual. So Deleuze’s philosophy cannot be subsumed into and critiqued by Hegel’s. However, within Deleuze’s philosophy we might say that Hegel’s dialectic is a false movement. But Hegel could respond that on logical grounds there is no such difference as the kind in Deleuze’s philosophy. So we now turn to organisms to test the applicability of their theories of difference.
Somers-Hall, Henry (2012) Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation. Dialectics of Negation and Difference. Albany: SUNY.
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