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.
Tags: Deleuze, Hegel, Hegelian Wolves, Malabou, Narrative Style, Philosophy
