Installation of Modern Art–IoMA

Some years ago, it must have been four or five, my friend Cutter Wood had an idea for the expanding MoMA in Manhattan. In doubling its building size, the museum had to demolish some of its neighboring buildings. One was an apartment building with an old Irish pub on the ground floor. Cutter’s idea then was to slice the side off the apartment building facing the museum, turning it into an exhibit of live New Yorkers. Forget about reality TV shows; this would be a reality exhibition show. Think MTV’s Real World without the careful editing–the “real world” in all of its dramatic mundanity.

There are plenty of people that have already criticized MoMA’s expansion: if you search the New York Times for “MoMA expansion,” you will find articles like “Where MoMA Has Lost Its Edge” and “Architecture Curator’s Challenge: Warm Up A Frosty MoMA Inc.” Leaving the particular criticism to the art critics, I want to here imagine, beginning with Cutter’s idea and with help from Mario Perniola, what a modern museum’s expansion could look like. Essentially, I want to consider how to turn a museum into an art installation.

The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic redefines modern architecture on the basis of a new way of feeling, what many would say is a lack of feeling. One example of this is Inorganic’s affinity, as I see it, for Cutter’s idea. Take for example this passage from the chapter “Plastic Landscapes”:

“The fundamental confirmation of the inorganic orientation of architectural experience…The rejection of functionalism, the critical revision of the fundamentals of architecture, the often indeterminate, porous aspect of interiors of buildings that lack any clear delimitation, the privileging of a public building topology destined for transit, performances, cultural tourism, the dissolution of housing units, attention to spaces of transit rather than residences, are similar aspects of a tendency oriented toward the abandonment of any organic character”(86).

The deconstruction and assimilation of an old apartment building into a massive modern museum seems an exemplary project for demonstrating the above aspects of modern architecture. Slicing off one or more sides of the apartment building would enact a becoming-porous. And would there be a better way of confusing a museum’s limits than incorporating alien bodies like a common-place apartment complex? The museum would dissolve not-so-much the housing units as their organic sanctity, opening them up to public spaces of transit. To be sure, this would be an extreme experiment in cultural tourism!

More than simply a fanciful idea, the connection between Perniola’s Inorganic and Cutter’s idea jumped out at me towards the end of the book, when Inorganic describes what it considers to be one of the most “radical examples of inclusive metaliterature”(125). This is in keeping with Perniola’s aim of cutting the sanctity of life into an infinity of pieces, turning life into things. At the same time, Perniola faults Perec for de-sexualizing his book; for Perniola, sexuality essentially belongs to the kingdom of thins rather than either the spiritual or vital dimension that both Perniola and Perec displace. Perniola suggests that the lack of sexuality with Perec’s Life (“life” is in italics!) is due to a lack of a philosophical perspective that could impregnate the book’s thinking with an “emotional rapidity capable of unleashing a neutral and abstract excitement”(126). Taking a cue from another Perniola chapter, “Philosophical Cybersex,” this philosophical perspective, I think, consists in creating a virtual reality that would be less voyeuristic (and hence more sexual) than Perec’s novel.

Instead of an outsider looking into the apartment building from the street, IoMA would have to displace voyeurism by turning museum visitors into performers rather than observers. This would involve additions to Cutter’s basic idea.

For starters, as I alluded to above, it would be important for the apartment building and museum to merge. The museum would engulf the apartment units from the sides and maybe even above, making it a dysfunctional and somewhat unsightly appendage. What would be important is for the museum to abut the residential units on at least two sides, allowing transit between the two buildings to vary from seamlessness to absurdity. A few floors of the apartments could be remodeled to be a simple extension of the museum space; on other floors, the apartment building could remain essentially intact.

For the Real World exhibit, on those intact levels, the apartment would keep most of the standard amenities of any other New York apartment building. The biggest difference would be the dissolution of the walls in favor of a glass surface. This glass barrier could be a sometimes one-way mirror, other times transparent window. Thus the “real person” living inside the museum apartment would be capable of watching the museum-goers, even if only as brief distractions from their daily routine. This would complicate the atmosphere of the exhibit, undermining the immutable god perspective of a complacent and gawking visitor. There would be potential for extreme misunderstandings: imagine, as the real-world person, you check your teeth in the mirror of your glass wall for a bit of stuck food; on the museum side of the glass, exhibit-goers lurch back at the brisk appearance of you approaching the mirror and then barring your teeth. Not only would the motion be unsettling in itself, the exhibit-goers would not be sure whether it was a one-way mirror or transparent window, whether you meant it as a joke or were irritated by something stuck in your teeth. Probably both.

Essential to the exhibit would be a continual shifting of the museum-goer/real-world person relationship. This would frustrate participants’ reflexive wish to fix the exhibit into one thing, thus making the participants realize that they, we, are the things. Perniola says of installations, they “are a kind of happening represented by things rather than people…Installations must not be considered the object of a visitor’s evaluation…It is the installation that feels the visitor, welcomes him, touches him, feels him up…One does not go to exhibitions to see and enjoy art, but to be seen and enjoyed by art”(107). Between Perniola and Cutter, the Museum of Modern Art would become the Installation of Modern Art.

With the proper framing of the Real World Exhibit, visitors would be likely to experience awkward feelings of ambivalence. One such framing would disseminate the atmosphere of petty surveillance to everyone involved in the exhibit. Imagine cameras on the interior of the glass barrier, photographing people’s reactions, the IoMA store selling prints of the most memorable and forgettable, the New Yorker running one snapshot in their caption contest. Those willing to watch the “real people” would be required to become “real people” themselves, entering their faces and clothing into the public record as well. With attention passing through both sides of the glass, there would be an element of instability of feeling that would ensure that all involved would become a thing.

The exhibit would unsettle at least one political debate, that of privacy. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I appreciate the worthiness of defending privacy. Such an exhibit would, first, showcase surveillance technologies: it is one thing to know that many institutions record your presence, but to do it with an extreme of fidelity and clarity coupled with the ability and willingness to publicly disseminate the material, that is something altogether different. In addition to those who will have their fifteen minutes of fame, there would be embarrassed people who feel humiliated and violated, people upset who would not have expected it. In all of this is almost a moral: we should not oppose the government’s domestic spying program on the basis of an already non-existent right to privacy. We should oppose the government’s spying because the government is, among many other things, a violent organization with a taste for scapegoats and witch hunts. American citizens, like myself, will not stop the government from using its surveillance resources; we can only, ourselves, surveil the government itself. A less attractive subject than relatively impotent and anonymous people.

Exhibit-goers, I hope, would, in realizing the extent and pettiness of their surveilling drive, would divide their attention elsewhere. You, the neighbor whose eyes and ears perk up at anything out of the ordinary, or, God forbid, something indecent, do us all a favor and train your eyes, ears…your feeling on something much more indecent and dangerous, a police state. But perhaps, we are expecting too much from the Real World exhibit; it would just be another trip to the museum, right? For now, we can wonder if a museum, even the MoMA, might experiment with a Real World exhibit.

Inorganic Cut-outs

Here, in chronological order without pretending to be a summary of its most important points, are cut-outs from Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Before going in any one direction with the book, I wanted to relate some of its oddity, give you a sense of its persuasive insanity. Having grouped the passages by their chapters, I will also provide some minimal context in places (anything after a heading’s colon marks is quoted directly from Sex Appeal:

From the beginning, “Senses and Things”:

Contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme experience that has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy and sexuality(1).

Things and sense are no longer in conflict with one another but have struck an alliance thanks to which the most detach abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement are almost inseparable and are often indistinguishable…philosophy’s speculative extremism and sexuality’s invincible power(1).

Maybe an allusive homage to Gilles Deleuze, the next chapter it titled, “Sex Plateaux”:

To free oneself of orgasmomania, which has raged for decades and has conditioned negatively the lives of generations, is the first step toward the neuter, suspended, and artificial sexuality of the thing that feels(3).

From “God, Animal, Thing”:

When I say that man is a thing that feels, at first I extinguish, blunt, and close off the feeling, or, at least, I take away its liveliness, its brio, its flagrancy, but secondly I promote its extreme sharpness, I make it similar to a point, to a needle, to a sword(6).

From “Becoming Extraneous Clothing”:

The body experienced by neutral sexuality is not a machine, but clothing, a thing(10).

It is precisely up to the philosopher…his task and his responsibility to state that the kingdom of things is not so much the triumph of technology and capitalism as much as the empire of a sexuality without orgasm(11).

As long as sexuality is tied to vitalistic and spiritiualistic representations, the sharp feeling of philosophical abstraction functions as a block: thus, and not without irony, one could recommend a philosophy course to those who suffer from premature ejaculation(11).

From “Exemplary Addictions”:

It is not a question of getting inspiration from immoderate and excessive experiences in order to compose texts or write books, but of understanding philosophy as a practice that creats a dependency similar to that instituted by drugs, as a need that cannot be satisfied unless in a temporary and unstable manner, because it is infinite(15).

It is not at all a question of using common drugs as instruments for philosophizing or for the practice of sexuality–to have interesting thoughts or some exciting images–rather, that the encounter of philosophy and sexuality generates a similar effect as opium and its by-products. thus it seems that philosophy and sexuality move on the side of evil in a much more essential and constitutive manner than ever before(16).

From “Kant and the Spouse as Thing”:

Precisely because of their excess, sexuality runs toward marriage and philosophy towards the university…It is time to see marriage and the university on the side of evil, as pushers of sexual and philosophical excess that one cannot do without, rather than on the side of good as remedy to sexual and cognitive libido(19).

From “Sadism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

The empire of the senses, that is the infinite search for always new sexual sensations, proves the inability of sexuality to reach excess on its own(25).

The excess of Philosophical sexuality is not something that one reaches through a progressive increase of sensations and situations but is already given all at once..It neither states: “I feel” or “we feel”, but asserts impersonally “one feels”(26).

From “Philosophical Cybersex”:

Neutral sexuality is not inhumane or inhuman, it is perhaps, posthuman in the sense that it finds its starting point in man(29).

We have not yet accessed the artificial and always available world of things that feel. This access is made easier if we start from parts of the human body that are less sexually characterized…The breath unites the greatest sensorial stimulation because it strongly arouses our sense of smell, with the greatest abstraction, because it evokes two cavities, the lungs and the stomach, which we will never be able to penetrate…In the breath, the noble exhalation of the lungs, which one imagines having a pinker and thinner coating than the vulva’s or the anus’s, mingles with the heavy exhalation of the stomachs contents, to which be added, alas in an invisible way, our sperm(31).

The corneous quality of hair gives an impression of the inorganic. But hair, at the same time, presses with force to come out of the cutis of the head, so that the absence of life of the thing is connected with the experience of an abstract power(32).

From “Bodies as Clothing”:

The real opposition is not between body and soul, but between life and clothing(46).

As long as we remain prisoners of the idea that living bodies excite us more than clothes, we will never escape the organisicistic aestheticism that consider sexuality in terms of life(46).

From “Fetishism and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

How can the fetishism of borrowed money constitute an imaginary, symbolic, and emotional reference point for the philosophical sexuality of the thing that feels?(59)

From “Hardcore Sonority”:

The essence of music is neither sentiment nor life, but more essentially, sound, understood precisely in the neutral and inorganic indifference evoked by this word(65).

What distinguishes the inorganic from the disorganic, the pile, the mess?(66)

The sex appeal of the inorganic relies on the generous and hospitable spatiality of the world of things–bodies, sounds, and thoughts–that infinitely welcome us with unlimited accessibility(69).

From “Plastic Landscapes”:

Architectural experience is a drifting, an uncontrollable dragging through which the continuous change of perceptive framework changes continuously what can be seen(84).

In deconstruction is implicitly an architectural and philosophical maximalism which is solidly anchored in the neutral, impersonal, and suspended character of experience. It puts into motion a device of de-spiritualization and de-vitalization that can be applied to any material(87).

Cyberspace is the practical realization of Schelling’s idea according to which architecture is spatialized music(91).

From “Desire and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

The opinion of Ignatius Loyola, according to whom eternal love is even more ready to bestow holiness than we are to desire it, fits in with this tradition whereby what is given, what is available, namely, the present is much more valuable than what is desired, coveted, that is the future(98).

The sex appeal of the inorganic is closer to an existence full of wonder than to the very equal and apathetic life of the Sceptics…The sex appeal of the inorganic is more an after-desire than a without-desire(99).

The checkmate of desire consists precisely in the impossibility of maintaining the tension between existence and carnality(100).

From “Overflowing Installations”:

The collection represents an important step toward teh sex appeal of the inorganic because it despiritualizes and devitalizes what it collects(103).

The libido of collecting is not yet a neutral sexuality because it is still too cautious and timid.

Installations are a kind of happening represented by things rather than by people(107).

From “Division and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

Androgyny seems to me as remote as one can imagine it to be from the sex appeal of the inorganic. It is the victory of organic unity over sexuality, metaphysics over neuter, thinking over feeling. Closer to the sex appeal of the inorganic is hermaphroditism…[not] the unification of opposites [but rather] their neutralization(115).

Inorganic sexuality is not able to understand why there should only be two sexes, and not as many sexes as there are numbers, that is, infinite sexes(117).

The Stoics [claim] that all bodies can be divided to infinity and that man, as a result, is not made up of a greater number of parts than a finger, or the universe of a greater number of parts than man. As a result, there are no ultimate parts and the whole real is solid, continuous(118).

From “Inclusive Metawriting”: Why do I find the expression ‘inclusive metawriting more loaded with sexual intensity than most obscene words(126)?

From “Pleasure and Sex Appeal of the Inorganic”:

And now we come to the saddest topic of this book: pleasure!(132)

Hedonism is characterized by an inane and conceited idleness, an indolent and mellifluous self-complacency, a self-important and obtuse enervation which is only capable of bragging of its own savoir-vivre(132).

All the defenders of pleasure are more or less, openly or secretly, partially or entirely, enemies of sexuality(132).

From “Perverse Performance”:

“I would rather go crazy than feel pleasure,” Antisthenes used to say(142).

(the book’s very end)The sexualization of philosophy and the arts is probably a perverse effect, that is an unforeseen and undesirable consequence provoked by the political irrelevance of these activities. But an even more perverse effect would be that through the sex appeal of the inorganic one would re-establish a live relation between them and society(144).

The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

This book, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, written by Mario Perniola, has patiently waited for me for four years. One of those books that sits on a bedroom shelf more a guilty reminder of money apparently mispent than an enticement. I always loved the title, the kind of thing that can inexplicably come out of someone’s mouth, bewildering the contented and frustrating the cynical.

It is a happy fortune that books do not lose anything with age, not this one anyway. Once unfolded, it begs for pulling this way and that, whether pulling of the book or oneself.

Provoking Hegelian Wolves

“To the famous positivity of the negative Nietzsche opposes his own discovery: the negativity of the positive”(NPh 180).

Catherine Malabou, in her essay that I last posted on, unleashes a pack of wolves on Deleuzian philosophy. One of those wolves, the one I am most familiar with, is Slavoj Zizek’s Organs without Bodies. I would be very curious to hear what Malabou thinks of Zizek’s monstrous creation, as he would himself likened it.

Zizek adopts the central premise of “Hegelian Wolves,” the claim that Hegel is the sole outsider of Deleuzian philosophy. The premise’s justification, as well, is adopted by OwB with little added: in both, we are told that Hegel, as a ‘proper philosophical name,’ fails to designate an impersonal mutliplicitous force that is in excess of the Prussian individual who bore the name. The textual support for this, with only passing reference to primary textual sources, is that even Deleuze’s other philosophic enemies–Plato, Descartes, and Kant–have a multiplicitous conceptual personae within the Deleuzian paradigm.

Deferring, for a moment, to Malabou and Zizek, I appreciate that both probably have a wider familiarity with the body of Deleuzian philosophy, a familiarity from which they could possibly assert this. But, it is important, I think, to underline just what their claim entails: not only does it claim that Hegelian philosophy is oversimplified within the whole of Deleuze, but, also and especially, the much greater claim that this is an unique instance different from anyone else Deleuze encounters.

The same claim in “Hegelian Wolves” is less misleading than in the booklength monograph of OwB. To begin with, Malabou attributes this exceptional quality to Hegel while alluding to passages in which Deleuze, even if abruptly, addresses him (such as in NPh, What is Philosophy?, etc). Zizek, on the other hand, repeats Malabou’s proposition without any Deleuze-Hegel perspective outside of that which emanates from himself. From reading OwB, you would not know of one instance in which Deleuze addresses Hegel.

In two and a half pages (45-48), the beginning of the chapter “Hegel 1: Taking Deleuze from Behind,” Zizek tries to make the case that Hegel is the “absolute exception” of Deleuzian philosophy. We hear again, as we did in Malabou, that Deleuze approached Plato, Descartes, and Kant but not Hegel. Trimming a passage from Negotiations, Zizek describes Deleuze’s approach as a “Taking from Behind,” as opposed to Malabou’s neutral description of ‘creating a conceptual personae.’ Running off with the idea, b the end of the chapter’s opening pages, Zizek asks us: “Why should we not risk the act of taking from behind Deleuze himself and engage in the practice of the Hegelian buggery of Deleuze? Therein resides the ultimate aim of the present booklet”(48).

The little evidence given that Hegel is an absolute exception then passes into a discussion of method–how should we take Deleuze from behind. The evidence, indeed, is not a conclusive case supported by textual sources, but is glossed over by the suggestive atmosphere of “Why not?”. For Zizek in particular, this is not an isolated error but rather based on a psychoanalytic logic that devalues the importance of such argumentation in view of unconscious processes.

This logic is supplemented in this instance by the negative example of Francis Fukuyama. As indicative of “textbook philosophy,” Fukuyama, in his history of philosophy, builds his argument by attributing ideas directly to individuals, such as in the form “Hegel believes that…”(OwB 50). The positive lesson we, the readers, are supposed to draw from this is that philosophy is “not about the beliefs of different individual persons”(OwB 50). In terms of the book as a whole, the assertion is that contemporary Deleuzian philosophy is not about the French man who penned it in the 20th Century.

This is, in essence, a more theoretically expressed form of Malabou’s “Hegelian Wolves.” Their punch is a provocative injunction to their readers rather than an appeal to an objective body of literature. The persuasiveness of both is not a matter of textual support but in their ability to accuse their readers of a latent belief. Their arguments’ validity comes to this: if the reader cannot qualify Deleuze’s relationship to Hegel as no more different than Deleuze’s relationship to, say, Plato, as Deleuze’s relationship to Plato is different than that to Descartes, then they are right. Insofar as the reader can only say, “Deleuzian philosophy affirms while Hegelian philosophy negates,’ Malabou and Zizek are on to something. Let me here, as one of the those readers, detail a more substantive account of Deleuze’s relationship to Hegel.

First, I will locate where and how Malabou and Zizek have brought me.

Malabou and Zizek’s relationship is complimentary: Malabou invites Zizek to the thrust of his speculative reasoning. In gesturing at the substance of Deleuze’s reading of Hegel, Malabou dismisses its constructive relevancy. To do this, she cites a passage from Nietzsche and Philosophy that reads “We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche’s work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principle concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights”(NPh 162). The passage moves in two directions: first, it is supposed to typify Deleuze’s strictly categorical dismissal of Hegel, and, second, it beckons the reader to reconsider what “against whom” means for Deleuze.

Both Malabou and Zizek must negatively account for the textual Deleuze in order to move the discussion onto the contemporary Deleuzian reader. Above I mentioned Zizek’s digression on the shared ontological existence of philosophy and the history of philosophy that Fukuyama failed to appreciate. If we return to Malabou, we find the root of Zizek’s digression in a blunt and self-serving claim. Purported as a matter-of-fact, Malabou, referring to NPh, tells us that “Anyone who as read Deleuze knows those pages well. What purpose would be served by reproducing or paraphrasing them?”(118). While this discussion is not soon to benefit from a comprehensive poll of Deleuzian readers, I, for one, can say that I did not read NPh until after a number of Deleuze’s other writings, including A Thousand Plateaus. I read OwB before I happened to read NPh. With what certainty would Malabou suggest that readers of Slavoj Zizek have read Nietzsche and Philosophy, a book critical to understanding the Deleuze-Hegel encounter that is wholly absent from OwB.

Juxtaposing Malabou and Zizek’s shared difficulty on this point further reveals the argument’s fundamental weakness. Malabou discredits NPh, a move that Zizek is tacitly grateful for, on the basis that we cannot be sure whether “Neitzsche makes Hegel his single, worst enemy”(118). Although dependent on this maneuver, Zizek would not as easily of made it himself because it relies heavily on the notion of authorial fidelity. Even though I am criticizing Malabou and Zizek for ‘complicating’ what was already a complicated relationship by ignoring NPh, I do not do so on the grounds of authorial fidelity. That is to say that Malabou unfairly dismisses NPh by dismissing the possibility that Nietzsche had a single worst enemy. This is unfair because we are not tlaking about Nietzsche alone, but rather the Nietzsche that Deleuze (re)creates in NPh.

Writing almost a hundred years later, what Deleuze sees between Nietzsche’s genealogy and Hegel’s dialectics are as important (in these circumstances) as what Nietzsche himself saw. If, as Malabou suggests, we cannot limit ourselves to a static Deleuzianism (this less than twenty years after Deleuze’s death), then she, and by extension Zizek, should be more sensitive to how Deleuze recreates Nietzsche in NPh.

Malabou and Zizek’s accounting of the textual Deleuze is defined in negative terms (justifying why it should not be present) but is also impotent. Looking closer at NPh, we find troubling passages for the given caricature of Deleuze-Hegel. Deleuze writes, “It has been said that Nietzsche did not know his Hegel. In the sense that one does not know one’s opponent well”(NPh 8). How quickly, then, should we dismiss the extent to which Deleuzian philosophy is anti-dialectical? It is imperative for any claim that Deleuze avoids Hegel to show how this evasion differs from, as Deleuze sees it, the false impression that Niezsche avoided Hegel.

My divergent narrative of Deleuze-Hegel comes to this: I think Deleuze addresses Hegel in the negative!

Consider it this way: imagine yourself, as a matter of vital course, as being against the idea of a productive negativity. Do you express your disagreement by negating negativity? Deleuze “takes” Hegel from behind” when he writes about Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Philosophy, whose last chapter is titled “The Overman: Against the Dialectic,” details a conceptual personae that defines Hegel in negative terms.

On what basis does Deleuze orient Nietzsche towards Hegel?

Apart from some childish notion of good or bad, Deleuze understands a way in which Nietzsche and Hegel are closer to each other than either of them are to him. The common referent for both Nietzsche and Hegel is time, hence their central concepts of genealogy and dialectics respectively. Deleuze’s medium, by contrast, is that of sound, hence the concept of the Refrain. By the same token, Deleuze’s counterpart, “enemy” if you will, is psychoanalysis, especially the psychoanalysis heavily influenced by linguistics (such as Lacanism). Arguably Deleuze’s greatest aim is the becoming-musical of language, deterritorializing the conventional sounds of language. Thus, I do not think Hegel is Deleuze’s worst enemy, his philosophy’s “absolute exception.”

The insights that Malabou and Zizek respectively impart to Deleuzian philosophy are, I think, separate from and in spite of their characterization of Hegel being its worst or absolute or lone enemy. It is not only provocative but also constructive to bring attention to the unique ways in which different philosophies play off of each other. Contemporary readings of a philosophy, which can bring to light latent aspects but also obscure vital ones, is as important as the figure’s individual expression of it. Keeping both in contact with each other better ables us to discern the vital force that pulses through it.

Malabou and Zizek identify an encounter that contemporary philosophers have generally simplified, but they do so with little regard for how the original philosopher thought of it. In doing so, the exploration of Deleuze-Hegel is limited in direct proportion to how much of it is contrived. Separating this exploration from the dialectical tendency to see the two philosophies as diametrically opposed to each other, will enable, I think, a keener sense for both Deleuzian and, if only in negative terms, Hegelian philosophy.

Catherine Malabou’s “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” and its Style

Provocative. Catherine Malabou’s essay, “who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” is, by any measure, provocative. I mean that in a good way, but also in a bad way. To put it in a slightly different way, you could say its provoking. “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” plays Gilles Deleuze and GWF Hegel off of each other, not in order to resolve the conflict but to uncover more of the conflict’s dynamics.

A little background on the conflict: the essay’s title refers to a chapter, “One or Several wolves,” of Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus. In the chapter, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Freud for reducing a patient’s fantasy of a pack of wolves into one single wolf father figure, Malabou’s essay suggesting that Deleuze has likewise reduced the scope of Hegelian philosophy.

Malabou’s style was at times frustrating for me. Malabou challenges readers by defying partisanship while recreating and, in a way, intensifying a partisan conflict. This style or recurrent pattern manifests itself in another essay, “Polymorphism Will Never Pervert Childhood,” in which Malabou juxtaposes Deleuze with Jacques Derrida. In “Polymorphism,” Malabou hints at a violent silence between Deleuze and Derrida, without overtly telling the reader what direction her voice takes in the passage between the two thinkers. In “Hegelian Wolves?” Malabou again, as it were, plays both sides, but this time in an explicit conflict. Near the beginning, Malabou declares her afaffiliation with Deleuze: “From the place of my firmest conviction, as it were in the heart of the [Deleuzian] crowd or pack…” but only in order to pervert Deleuze…”that I will venture to ask whether, in the case of Hegel, Deleuze [repeats] the gesture that he condemsn in Freud”(114).

What is somewhat frustrating, for me, reading Malabou is that her writing feels like a cross between a polemic and a news article. In the first seven pages of her essay, Malabou stages the encounter by shaming orthodox Deleuzianism (look in the yellow pages for a church coming near you) for its hypocrisy with regard to Hegel. Yet this is more the perspective of an principled daughter rather than a Hegelian, for Malabou pays respect to the two thinkers intractable differences as Deleuze himself saw them(qtd on 118). Malabou does not clearly weigh in on one side in order to welcome, even if partially, the other. And we should thank her for this.

The problem I have with Malabou’s style consists chiefly of this: “Hegelian Wolves” has a wide enough scope to raise questions but not enough depth to adequately characterize them. After its opening’s polemical tone–”In spite of appearances my foreword is not polemical”(118)–”Hegelian Wolves” feels like its holding something back. An insider has leaked news of a bastard filiation between Deleuze and Hegel, and, what’s worse for us who are orthodox, is that they have not told all.

Beginning with the suggestive parallel of reductionism in Freud, Malabou’s essay accords an exceptional status to Hegel as the sole object of universal Deleuzian derision: “the ‘bow-wow’ of contemporary philosophers”(117). There are, if you look closely enough, two pieces of evidence for this exceptional status. First, we are told in passing that Deleuze constructs a conceptual personae for all of his other philosophic enemies: Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Descartes(116). Second, we are shown a brief passage from What is Philosophy? to demonstrate an instance in which Deleuze could have constructed an Hegelian personae but settles for fixing Hegel in an “immobile image” of a “severe and fatigued figure”(117). These two pieces of evidence hardly make a case for Hegel’s exceptional status, but polemics nor news articles lend themselves to making convincing arguments. That is not to say that Malabou lacks anything in logic, but rather that she is more intent on provoking and stimulating a response than encapsulating it herself.

The atmosphere of evidence that Malabou creates turns on a quote from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy: “We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche’s work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principle concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights”(qtd on 117). Deftly, without signaling that this begins the decent from the circumstantial clouds of evidence, Malabou redirects our attention to the Hegel-Deleuze block of becoming that she is presently creating. Sensing that the essay’s tone has outpaced its substance, the next paragraph begins with the “In spite of appearances” quote. The rest of the foreword deals with method.

For a method, Malabou rules out summing up the positive statements that Deleuze made on Hegel because it would amount to a “list of complaints”(118). Having read the entire essay, looking back I can see a latent methodological choice, one that Malabou is not prepared to articulate at this point in her essay. The choice is this: Malabou decides to abbreviate both Deleuzian and Hegelian philosophy in order to contract them into a single Hegel-Deleuze block of becoming. At this point, though, Malabou describes the process as “an uncovering of the network or dynamic of the conflict…a non-critical crossing of pathways”(119). A lot hinges on the word “non-critical”: describing a certain something that is not uncritical.

You could simply read this, as would be fitting for a news journalist, as a disinterested perspective. At its best, I take Malabou’s idea of a non-critical perspective to mean that she wants to be critical but not judgemental. In tangible terms, it means that, as a Deleuzian, we should not categorically dismiss Hegel, should not as a rule expel him from the grounds of discourse. To this end, “Hegelian Wolves” suggestively succeeds. We should not, indeed, stricken Hegel’s writings from philosophic discourse.

My frustration with Malabou’s style is what I see to be its perspective’s tendency towards disinterestedness and conciliatory equivocation. The latter two-thirds of “Hegelian Wolves” jumps back and forth between passages from Deleuze and Hegel, looking for and, in effect, creating a connection between the two thinkers. It is not that I want Malabou to, as in a debate, take a side, but I want Malabou to, more clearly and substantively, make a side.

The concise clarity with which Malabou jumps back and forth between Deleuze and Hegel in the latter two-thirds of “Hegelian Wolves?” reassures me that we are following a heretic rather than a disillusioned or unwittingly disloyal partisan. Malabou is someone else altogether.

The climax, if you will, of this back and forth between two conflicting realms, occurs in the “problematic of animal habit“(130). In this problematic is identified “an economy of multiplicity,” through which we will find a middle passage through the two kinds of multiplicity that have already been identified, teleological and adestinal. The first logic of becoming, the one directed towards a determinate end such as being and nothing, is associated with Hegel, the second, the unnatural and transitory “ontological jazz,” is associated with Deleuze.

In jumping back and forth, Malabou keeps Deleuze and Hegel apart. First, in the final third of “Hegelian Wolves,” we have a passage from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition that refers to Deleuze on the Aristotelian conception of the living as composed of small animals(131). In this way, Malabou introduces the Deleuzian idea of contraction through contemplation: “It is simultaneously through contraction that we are habits, but through contemplation that we contract”(from DR 74). At another time, I want to return to this passage but presently I report it as the thematic pin that binds Deleuze, here in DR to Hegel in Philosophy of Nature.

Malabou spends most the rest of the paper sketching Hegel’s problematic of animal habit in PN. I’ll leave you to read the particulars of this connection to you in its original context. There is a convincing logic, here, one that locates a similar dynamic within the two thinkers. The import of this dynamic, I will have to explore later. But for now, thinking about the style of “Hegelian Wolves,” I want to end on how the Hegel-Deleuze relationship is described.

Malabou, in keeping with her goal of ‘complicating’ the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel, remains vague about just how we should conceive it. “One is struck by the fact that, in the PN, Hegel develops a problematic of habit that is very close to that of Deleuze”(132). “Very close”? Very close, to me, sounds like someone whose textual support shows sameness but, since that’s inconsistent with the overarching argument, very close will suffice. Another example of vagueness: “I have tried to read Deleuze’s relation to Hegel as symptomatic”(135). Here, Malabou admits that the ‘exceptional status’ argument essential to her essay’s narrative has weaknesses, without pointing out any weaknesses or suggesting how it would be stronger. My third and final example of vagueness: In attempting to bring this configuration to light I have machinated an unusual relation between Hegel and Deleuze”(136). An unusual relation? After thirty pages exploring the relation between the two, “Hegelian Wolves” should have something more precise to say than “unusual.”

Perhaps a lack in precision is necessary in order to retain its power to provoke. For provoke “Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?” certainly does.