“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.
Tags: Deleuze, Malabou, Negativity of the Postive, Nietzsche, Zizek
