Taylor and FrancisRIPH_A_333754.sgm10.1080/09672550802335879International Journal of Philosophical Studies0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & [email protected]
Abstract
This article delineates the core concerns and motivations of the ontologicalwork of Gilles Deleuze, and is intended as a programmatic statement for ageneral philosophical audience. The article consists of two main parts. In thefirst, two early writings by Deleuze are analysed in order to clarify his under-standing of ontology broadly, and to specify the precise aim of his understand-ing of being in terms of difference. The second part of the article looks at thework of Heidegger and Derrida in order to distinguish Deleuze’s conceptionsof ontology and difference from theirs. A final section clarifies Deleuze’sefforts to undertake the construction of an ontology divergent from the domi-nant tradition and in contrast to the emphasis on the closure of metaphysics inthe thought of Heidegger and Derrida.
Deleuze remarked once in an interview that he felt himself ‘to be a puremetaphysician. … Bergson says that modern science hasn’t found its meta-physics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interestsme.’
1
In this respect, Deleuze is quite literally a meta
physic
ian in the sensethat his thought never travels far from a direct engagement with physicalphenomena. In Deleuze’s locution, being a metaphysician is synonymouswith pursuing ontology. Deleuze is an ontological thinker through andthrough. The key task of this article will be to clarify what Deleuze under-stands ontology to be, without going too far into what exactly thatontology entails. This article is in fact undertaken in light of the growingnumber of detailed and insightful treatments of Deleuze’s ontologicalthought.
2
While such works contribute significantly to the continuingproject of explicating Deleuze’s difficult texts, they can remain opaque tothe reader of Deleuze’s work who has not already grasped Deleuze’sunique ontological project, especially if such a reader expects to encountera thinker whose work is self-evidently continuous with certain otherstrains of Continental thought, particularly those rooted in Hegel andHeidegger. It is to such a reader that this article is addressed.
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In order to illuminate Deleuze’s core ontological vision better, I willcontrast his thinking to that of Heidegger and especially Derrida. The twochief points of contrast will be (1) how ontology is understood and the meth-ods of its pursuit, and (2) the relationship of the pursuit of ontology to thereading of the history of philosophy. I will proceed by offering comments ona number of discrete texts. Two of Deleuze’s early writings, the review ofJean Hyppolite’s
Logic and Existence
(1954) and ‘Bergson’s Conception ofDifference’ (1956), provide clear indications of Deleuze’s chief ontologicalconcerns at an early stage. By commenting on Heidegger’s
Being and Time
and
Identity and Difference
I hope to illuminate Deleuze’s rather differentorientation toward the question of being and different manner of engage-ment with the philosophical tradition – a difference which distinguishes hiswork from much of contemporary philosophical commentary. A brief lookat Derrida’s ‘Différance’ will indicate Derrida’s continuation of Heidegger’streatment of the history of philosophy as well as the different register ofDerrida’s deployment of concepts of difference from those of Deleuze. Thiswill be followed by a brief reading of one small section from the first chapterof
Difference and Repetition
concerning the univocity of being.
1 Deleuze’s Review of Jean Hyppolite’s
Logic and Existence
(1954)
It is perhaps surprising that one of Deleuze’s earliest mature writings is asympathetic review of a book about Hegel. Given what appears to be greatantipathy to Hegel in his later writings,
3
the measured tones of the revieware at least unexpected. However we take Deleuze’s attitude here, thereview serves as a platform for Deleuze to announce subtly the concerns ofhis own burgeoning thought.
Hyppolite’s book of 1953, following his celebrated commentary of 1946on Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
, staked a claim against the Man-centred reading of Hegel provided by Kojève which had had such vastinfluence in France in the previous decades.
4
Rather than stressing the roleof Man at the ‘end of history’, Hyppolite provides a reading of Hegel thatdisplaces Man from centre-stage and focuses on Hegelian philosophy as agrand ontological project. It is this emphasis on ontology that Deleuzehighlights at the outset of his review and that provides the first key tounderstanding Deleuze’s later writings. Deleuze writes,
Hyppolite questions the
Logic
, the
Phenomenology
, and the
Encyclo-pedia
on the basis of a precise idea and on a precise point.
Philosophymust be ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology ofessence, there is only an ontology of sense
…. That philosophy must beontology means first of all that it is not anthropology.
5
Deleuze explicates this contrast between anthropology and ontology withrespect to Kantian thought. The key point concerns the asymmetry that
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remains in Kant’s critical thought with respect to subjectivity and objectivity.While Kant does propose an identity of the subject with the object of knowl-edge, this object is not ‘the thing itself’, but only, as Deleuze says, somethingrelative – that is, relative to the faculties of the transcendental subject. Beingas such is not reached in Kantian thought, which remains ‘anthropological’despite moving beyond ‘the psychological and the empirical’.
Hegelian thought, by contrast (according to Deleuze’s reading ofHyppolite), seeks to ‘reduce’ the anthropological remnants of Kantianphilosophy. ‘The external difference between reflection and being is inanother view the internal difference of Being itself, in other words, Beingidentical to difference, identical to mediation’ (RLE 192). (We can notehere that this language of internal difference and of Being as identical todifference will resurface in Deleuze’s essay on Bergson and in
Differenceand Repetition
as keystones to his own (anti-Hegelian) ontology. We mustthen remain attuned to the precise point of divergence between the two.)The frequent retort to the purported pretensions of Hegelian invocationsof the absolute is that Hegelian thought returns us to the dogmatic meta-physics of pre-Kantian philosophy. In Deleuze’s terms, the move fromanthropology to ontology is viewed as a ‘taking oneself for God’ (RLE193). But as Deleuze reads Hyppolite (reading Hegel) this criticism ismisplaced because ‘Being … is not
essence
, but
sense
’ (RLE 193). ForDeleuze in this context this means that there is no ‘“beyond” of the world’,and he ties this directly to Hyppolite’s emphasis on the Hegelian transfor-mation of metaphysics into logic. The wager of Hegelian thought on thisview is, we might say, the maintenance of a (quasi-)divine
logos
withoutany transcendence. This move has implications not only for being itself,but also for philosophical method.
The key problem, as Deleuze formulates it, is: ‘if ontology is an ontologyof sense and not of essence, if there is no second world, how can absoluteknowledge still be distinguished from empirical knowledge?’ (RLE 193).Since there is no beyond of this world, it alone must be the object of philo-sophical knowledge. But if this is the case, what would be the differencebetween empirical knowledge and absolute knowledge, if not a differenceof object? Hyppolite’s answer, according to Deleuze, cannot be mappedonto a traditional distinction between essentialism and empiricism. That is,the absolute cannot be identified with the essential that lies beneath, orbehind, the empirical. Furthermore, for Deleuze, essentialism and empiri-cism are equivalent in the way that really matters, that is, reflection remainsexternal to its object. The Hegelian solution removes the external momentof reflection, but in doing so internalizes difference within being itself (ofwhich reflection is now a moment). In other words, the absolute will not beanother being (essentialism), but rather a certain view on beings. (We cancertainly see how Kant prepares the Hegelian move: the thing-in-itself,while retaining the form of a being standing behind phenomena, is not,
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strictly speaking, a different being from what appears; it is just whatappears without being worked upon by the faculties of the transcendentalsubject.) It is worth quoting Deleuze in full on this point:
In contrast [to essentialism], the ontology of sense is the totalThought knowing itself only in its determinations, which are themoments of form. In the empirical and in the absolute, it is the samebeing and the same thought; but the external, empirical difference ofthought and being has given way to the difference identical withBeing, to the difference internal to Being which thinks itself.Thereby, absolute knowledge actually distinguishes itself fromempirical knowledge, but it distinguishes itself only by also negatingthe knowledge of indifferent essence.
(RLE 194)
While Deleuze will question Hyppolite’s Hegelianism in the next and finalparagraph of the review, the terms of this explication anticipate much thatwill be of concern for Deleuze in his own work. Most especially, Deleuzewill strive in the later writings to formulate an ontology that does just whatHyppolite’s Hegel does, in one precise respect: comprehends being as suchwithout positing any being beyond the empirical, but nevertheless maintainsa distinction between empirical knowledge and ontological knowledge.Deleuze’s project along these lines will follow a rather different path fromHegel’s (a path marked by a commitment to immanence and what Deleuzecalls ‘transcendental empiricism’), but bears a striking family resemblance.Once this is seen, the sympathetic tone of Deleuze’s review is much easierto understand.
While Deleuze’s mature alternative to this Hegelian ontology of sense isextremely subtle and elaborate, the fundamental divergence is alreadyannounced by Deleuze at the end of the review. Let’s listen again toDeleuze as he articulates his agreement with Hegel/Hyppolite:
Following Hyppolite, we recognize that philosophy, if it has anymeaning, can only be ontology and an ontology of sense. The samebeing and the same thought are in the empirical and in the absolute.But the difference between thought and being is sublated in theabsolute by the positing of the Being identical to difference which, assuch, thinks itself and reflects itself in man. This absolute identity ofbeing and difference is called sense.
(RLE 195)
Deleuze, it seems, is ready to follow Hegel/Hyppolite this far and on theseterms (at least in 1954). Where, then, does Deleuze diverge? The key issue,
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513
one that will resurface frequently as a leitmotif in Deleuze’s work, iscontradiction. According to Deleuze, Hyppolite is ‘altogether Hegelian’ inhis adherence to Hegel’s commitment to contradiction as the highest formof difference. Only when difference is ‘carried up’ to contradiction is theabsolute reached. Being must not only differ from itself; it must contradictitself. Internal difference must be realized as internal contradiction.Deleuze’s anti-Hegelian project is then succinctly announced in onecompact question: ‘can we not construct an ontology of difference whichwould not have to go up to contradiction, because contradiction would beless than difference and not more?’ (RLE 195). This ontology of being asdifference, in which contradiction is less than difference, is announced butnot developed here in the Hyppolite review. For the initial stages of thatdevelopment, we must turn to Deleuze’s essay on Bergson from 1956.
2 ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’ (1956)
If the review of Hyppolite’s book provides some signposts directing us toDeleuze’s mature ideas about difference and ontology, these ideas begin toget worked out in earnest in his 1956 essay on Bergson. While published in1956, this essay was composed a few years earlier, closer to the compositionof the Hyppolite review.
6
Indeed, some of the language cited above isdirectly echoed in the Bergson essay. That this essay represents a positiveworking-out of the possibilities hinted at at the end of the review can beseen in the following:
The originality of Bergson’s conception resides in showing that internaldifference does not go, and is not required to go as far as contradiction,alterity, and negativity, because these three notions are in fact lessprofound than itself, or they are viewpoints only from the outside. Thereal sense of Bergson’s endeavor is thinking internal difference as such,as pure difference, and raising difference up to the absolute.
7
As my goal is only to give a clear outline of the nature of Deleuze’s concep-tion of an ontology of difference, I will not offer here a detailed expositionof Deleuze’s dense and difficult commentary on Bergson’s philosophy. Thatwould require continual reference to Bergson’s own writings and is outsidethe scope of my concerns. Rather, I want to focus on those aspects ofDeleuze’s essay on Bergson that provide an understanding of the registersof being and conceptuality that difference occupies for Deleuze. It will bemy contention hereinafter that Deleuze’s concern for difference is in no waydiffuse and has a rather specific target. By specifying this target, we will geta better sense of the distinctness of Deleuze’s thinking.
The notion of
internal difference
lies at the heart of Deleuze’s explicationof Bergsonian philosophy and his own thinking as well. Internal difference
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is meant to redress two deficiencies of classical thought. On the one hand,internal difference stands for the difference of an individual from others ofthe same kind. As Deleuze works out later and at length in
Difference andRepetition
, the seminal reference for the traditional concept of difference isfound in Aristotle, where difference is a matter of differentiating specieswithin a genus.
8
The uniqueness of the individual represents a severeaporia in Aristotelian thought. Indeed, only by leaning on the dualism ofhylomorphic schemas is Aristotle able to account for the uniqueness ofindividuals (i.e., individuality is grounded in an individual’s material [
hyle
]and is not a ‘conceptual’ matter).
9
For Deleuze/Bergson, this represents afundamental failure of philosophical thought – philosophy must attempt toaccount conceptually for the individuation of individuals.
The other aspect of internal difference concerns
differences of nature
,which cannot be aligned with generic differences. Our commonsense group-ings according to genera are often organized along the lines of utilitarianinterests. Deleuze cites Bergson’s example of pleasure. While there existsthe generic group of pleasures, this grouping is effected by a uniformity ofhuman interests, interests that likely obscure the inherent differences ofthose things categorized under the genus (BCD 33). The crucial point hereis that being cannot simply be divided along seemingly self-evident genericlines since these will usually obscure the true differences of being, differ-ences of nature. These two aspects of internal difference are summed up inthe following:
[E]ither philosophy proposes for itself
this
means (differences ofnature) and
this
end (to arrive at internal difference), or else it willhave merely a negative or generic relation to things and will end up apart of criticism and mere generalities – in any case, it will run the riskof ending up in a merely external state of reflection. Opting for thefirst alternative, Bergson puts forward philosophy’s ideal: to tailor ‘forthe object a concept appropriate to that object alone, a concept thatone can hardly still call a concept, since it applies to only one thing’.This unity of the thing and the concept is internal difference, whichone reaches through differences of nature.
(BCD 33)
Two complementary currents run through Deleuze’s reading of Bergson –indeed, they run through all of his work: one concerns giving an account ofbeing as it is, and the other concerns the methods by which we can come toknow the ways of being. There is a subtle interplay between these twodimensions – being will determine those methods that grant us insight intoits ways, and successful insight will allow us better to articulate beingfrom within. As Deleuze lays out clearly in his later book
Bergsonism
, the
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515
overarching name for Bergson’s method is ‘intuition’, and it possessesa precisely isomorphic relationship to being as captured by the mainBergsonian concepts (
durée
, memory,
élan vital
).
10
A key methodologicalconcept that Deleuze borrows from Bergson is the
problem
. Intuition asmethod can be understood as the correct posing of problems, the problemsthemselves being understood as constitutive of certain states of affairs inthe world. Problems thus are not conceptual difficulties to be solved, but arerather ontological dispositions that are the fundamental constitutive aspectsof being itself. Intuition as method is then an attempt to capture in thoughtthe way that being is in itself. In order later to see the contrast to Heidegge-rian phenomenology, emphasis should be given here to the way in whichnatural/physical phenomena (e.g., the dissolving of a cube of sugar) occupya central position in the thinking of Bergson and Deleuze. Superficial assuch concerns might seem, I would argue that they fundamentally setDeleuze apart from a thinker like Derrida. But more on this below.
What, then, is announced already in Deleuze’s essay on Bergson? Para-mount is Deleuze’s insistence that difference be understood to be operatingwithin being itself in a primary fashion and that this is true difference.Again, in contrast to the Aristotelian legacy, which will articulate truedifference at the level of the concept, indeed, as a matter that can only really
exist
on the plane of thought and speech (
logos
) (difference among individ-uals is a kind of mute, almost unknowable, certainly unarticulable type ofdifference), Deleuze views difference as operating prior to, underneath, andperhaps against the grain of the concept in its traditional sense. We mustimmediately qualify these remarks and make clear that Deleuze is notsimply trying to save the dignity of the individual from its absorption intothe conceptual differentiations of species and genera. The positing of theindividual (
this
thing in front of me) is itself bound up with the operation ofthe concept to the extent that I identify it already as belonging to or fallingunder a universal. To understand being as difference we cannot begin withindividuals in the usual sense rather we must inquire into the
genesis
ofindividuals, we must come to understand how individuals come to be fromtheir ways of being, especially since we will never be able to provide aconvincing account of how real individuals might ‘fall out’ of concepts. Thuswe must venture with Deleuze into an understanding of difference astemporal. This necessity is brought out in the essay on Bergson with theintroduction of the notion of
tendency
.
It is not things, nor the states of things, nor is it characteristics, thatdiffer in nature; it is
tendencies
. This is why the conception of species-specific difference is unsatisfactory: we must closely follow not thepresence of characteristics, but their tendency to develop.
(BCD 34)
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This represents the first step on the way toward an ontology that bears littleresemblance to those having Aristotelian roots, an ontology that Deleuzewill at first identify closely with Bergson’s own. What Deleuze has in hissights is an account of being which begins from being’s internal differentia-tion (as being’s most fundamental trait) and that this difference is notconceptual difference (in the Aristotelian sense). Furthermore, we cannotthink this difference as a static attribute of being but rather must think it interms of development and temporality. In addition, a preoccupation withsubstantial individuals must be replaced by new kinds of categories, e.g.,tendencies.
In the next few pages of his essay, Deleuze goes on to explain why thenotion of tendency (which I have invoked but not really explained) is not yetsufficient and must give way to what Bergson calls duration. By quotingDeleuze again, we will see clearly that the burden of his project is to arriveat an understanding of being in which the foundation is difference, anaccount in which being and difference can be identified
immediately
:
In a word, duration is what differs, and this is no longer what differsfrom other things, but what differs from itself. What differs has itselfbecome a thing, a
substance
. Bergson’s thesis could be summed up inthis way: real time is alteration, and alteration is substance. Differenceof nature is therefore no longer between two things or rather twotendencies; difference of nature is itself a thing, a tendency opposed tosome other tendency. The decomposition of the composite does notjust give us two tendencies that differ in nature; it gives us differenceof nature as one of the two tendencies. And just as difference hasbecome a substance, so movement is no longer the characteristic ofsomething, but has itself acquired a substantial character. It presup-poses nothing else, no body in motion. Duration or tendency is thedifference of self with itself; and what differs from itself is, in an
unme-diated
way, the unity of substance and subject.
11
(BCD 38)
The above will no doubt fail to convey the fine-grained conclusions ofDeleuze’s Bergsonian reflections in this essay, but the crucial point is nowclear. Only by articulating a set of concepts that allow us to see being as amatter of internal differentiation, and then using such concepts to worktoward an understanding of being in its specific-generic register (here is theplace of the virtuality/actuality distinction in Bergson’s and Deleuze’s work),can we do justice to being itself. To state the matter rather simply, differenceis not a concept for Deleuze; it is the name for being. To the extent thatDeleuze is a philosopher of difference, this is true only to the extent that forDeleuze difference is being, and philosophy is and must be ontology.
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As it will be a key issue in what follows, it should be stressed here thatmy core contention in the remarks above is that Deleuze, qua ‘philosopherof difference’, is in a fundamental sense a classic metaphysician inasmuchas he wants to provide a philosophical (i.e., conceptual) account of thephysical world. It is telling in this regard that this aspect of Deleuze’s workremained at the forefront (or, at least, on the surface) until the end. Invok-ing an often-used example in Deleuze’s work, we read the following in hislate book on Leibniz:
To be sure, organic folds have their own specificity, as fossils demon-strate. But on the one hand, the division of parts in matter does not gowithout decomposition of bending movement or of flexions. We seethis in the development of the egg, where numerical division is onlythe condition of morphogenic movements, and of invagination as apleating. On the other hand, the formation of the organism wouldremain an improbable mystery, or a miracle, even if matter were todivide infinitely into independent points.
12
As a programmatic encapsulation, we might say that Deleuze wanted to bea
philosopher
of embryonic development.
13
3 Heidegger, Ontology, and Tradition
Deleuze’s questioning of the Hegelian recourse to contradiction, of theelevation of contradiction as the purest form of difference, is at the sametime a questioning of Hegel’s dialectical method. This method, we come tolearn in Hegel’s logical writings, is not an external, or formal, methodimposed upon the content of thinking; rather, it turns out that the methodand content are identical. The movement-through-contradiction that takesus through the conceptual registers of the
Science of Logic
is, ultimately,the self-thinking of that which is to be thought. And what is to be thought isbeing. Hence, logic turns out to be identical with ontology.
14
For myaccount of Derrida below, it is also important to note that Hegel explicitlysees the work of systematic philosophy, logic most of all, as the culminationof and reflection upon the tradition of Western philosophy. The theses,formulations, and positions of earlier philosophers come to be seen as theexternal, historical working-out of the self-development of the concept(
Begriff
), a working-out that only comes to consciousness of itself inHegel’s own thinking.
Various aspects of this basic Hegelian approach to ontology and philoso-phy influence the aims and methods of Derrida’s work. But we must alsoconsider Heidegger in order to understand why and how Derrida’s thinkingproceeds as it does. Additionally, I have included these remarks aboutHegel here in this section to show how, despite important differences,
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Heidegger’s thought shares two fundamental similarities to Hegel’s. First,just as for Hegel there is no essential difference between the form andcontent of philosophical thought, the same holds for Heidegger;
and
theseforms and contents spring from reflection upon the very posing of thequestion of being. The second part of this sentence is important since itmight be only on its basis, and not on that of the first part, that we mightdistinguish Hegelian or Heideggerian ontology from Deleuze’s. Indeed, itmight be the case that all (or most) genuine ontological thought discoversthis identity of form and content. Second, a going-over of the traditionaltexts and thoughts of the tradition finds a fundamental place in the ontolog-ical project that Heidegger pursues, just as it does for Hegel. Indeed, wemight say quite succinctly that for both Hegel and Heidegger, ontologyrequires the simultaneous retrieval and de(con)struction/overcoming of thetradition.
I will outline briefly below the formulation of Heidegger’s ontologicalproject in the Introduction to
Being and Time
and analyse an example ofhis recourse to the tradition in a late text,
Identity and Difference
. Thesediscussions will serve as reference points in later sections of the article.
As anticipated above, Heidegger’s project in
Being and Time
unfoldsfrom an analysis of the project’s own starting point. In the brief Preface tothe book (with the epigraph from Plato’s
Sophist
concerning a battle ofgiants over the question of being) Heidegger announces that he will be‘rais[ing] anew
the question of the meaning
[Sinn]
of being
’.
15
He alsomakes clear that by ‘being’ he means at the outset nothing more than thebeing that we attest to in everyday speech. Hence the question of the mean-ing of being amounts, in the first instance, to something like the question ofwhat it means to make statements such as (to use Heidegger’s examples),‘The sky
is
blue’, or ‘I
am
happy.’ From the outset, then, being is not to beinterrogated as
a
being, or as what is common to beings, but rather in termsof what is implied in our own attestations to matters at hand.
Yet before taking up any such analyses of propositional usage, Heideggerfocuses attention on the
question
of the meaning of being rather than themeaning itself. Again, we will see that the meaning will come to be revealedfrom within the question (or the questioning) itself. Heidegger states thatthe question of the meaning of being must be
formulated
(i.e., analysed andworked out in a self-conscious manner) and that such formulation requiresthe elucidation of various
structural moments
: what is asked about, what isto be ascertained, and what is to be interrogated (see
BT
4). What is askedabout (first moment), is nothing more than that which ‘determines beings asbeings’. Heidegger emphasizes here (in advance) that what does suchdetermining is ‘itself not a being’, and that one must avoid the essentiallymythological tendency to trace beings ‘back in their origins to anotherbeing’ (
BT
5). What is to be ascertained (second moment) is the meaning ofbeing itself. Heidegger alerts the reader here to the fact that, given that what
DELEUZE’S DIFFERENCE
519
is asked about is not a being, the conceptualization required to ascertain themeaning of what is asked about will be ‘essentially distinct from theconcepts in which beings receive their determination of meaning’ (
BT
5).The third moment of the question is that which is interrogated.
16
It is herethat we can see how ontology is identical to phenomenology for Heidegger.It is worth quoting some lines here:
Insofar as being constitutes what is asked about, and insofar as beingmeans the being of beings, beings themselves turn out to be what is
interrogated
in the question of being. Beings are, so to speak, inter-rogated with regard to their being. But if they are to exhibit thecharacteristics of their being without falsification they must for theirpart become accessible in advance as they are in themselves. Thequestion of being demands that the right access to beings be gainedand secured in advance with regard to what it interrogates.
(
BT
5)
Ontology, as the pursuit of the question of the meaning of being, willrequire that beings, or some being (
das Seiende
), become accessible as theyare in themselves. As Heidegger makes clear in §7, ‘The PhenomenologicalMethod of Investigation’, the cultivation of such accessibility is the verytask of phenomenology and hence of ontology. Human being (Dasein), asthat being that poses the question of the meaning of being, marks itself asthe privileged being that must be interrogated, indicating another way inwhich the unfolding of the project is simply an analysis of the question ofbeing itself.
Once it is made clear that it will be a self-showing of the human that willbe needed to pursue the question of the meaning of being (i.e., to pursueontology), another theme arises, namely, the important role of a retrieval(
Wiederholung) of the question of being or destructuring (Destruktion) ofthe history of metaphysics. In a compressed form, we can say that Dasein ishistorical in its very being, and this whether or not Dasein is aware of itshistoricality. Being historical means that Dasein, whether self-consciously soor not, is determined by its history. If Dasein is to become accessible to itselfin its being, Dasein must show itself as historical. Only by becoming trans-parent to itself in its specific modes of historical determination can Daseinfree itself from the determining influences of a tradition into which it isthrown (and it must be thrown into some such tradition). (See BT 17–18 onthese points.) Foremost amongst the traditional inheritances of Dasein17 isthe history of metaphysics. Heidegger writes that inasmuch as ‘traditiondeprives Dasein of its own leadership in questioning and choosing … this isespecially true of that understanding (and its possible development) whichis rooted in the most proper being of Dasein – the ontological understanding’
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(BT 18–19). Hence the retrieval of the originary sources of Greek ontology(enigmatically indicated by Heidegger in this immediate context by refer-ence to ‘the original experiences in which the first and subsequently guidingdeterminations of being were gained’ (BT 20)) and the destructuring of thedevelopment of metaphysics which follows become a key aspect of gainingthe phenomenological accessibility required for the pursuit of the questionof being. Let it then suffice to say that what Heidegger seeks to find in thehistory of philosophy, from Plato onwards, is the record of a waywardnessin our thinking, however hard to avoid that waywardness may have been.
It is equally the case, however, that Heidegger continually turns to thedominant voices in the Western tradition in order (by a careful listening) tohear what might be genuine thinking of being in their texts. The hermeneu-tical approach that Heidegger develops in his readings of traditional texts,from the seminars on Aristotle in the early 1920s through to the end of hiscareer, has been highly influential. Without examining it in depth, we mightonly note that Heidegger seems at all times to aim to disclose in such textsintimations of his own ontological thinking even though these cannot beread right off the page. This is one way of construing something mentionedabove, namely, that Heidegger’s treatment of the metaphysical tradition ismeant to be at once both a repetition or retrieval and an overcoming; we canwork toward that overcoming (which is perhaps only always to-come) bydisclosing through careful reading that which the tradition has thoughtdespite itself.
A very brief consideration of one such reading from ‘The Principle ofIdentity’ will help to illustrate this mode of reading and its goals. The pre-Socratics hold a special place in this regard. (It seems that they stood closerto the ‘primordial experiences’ mentioned above.) In this lecture, Heideggeruses the consideration of a Parmenidean fragment to step back before theentrenchment of metaphysical categories and at the same time prepare theway for a leap beyond the limitations imposed upon the questioning of beingby traditional metaphysics. The fragment at issue is one that posits (at firstglance) an identity between thinking and being. The fragment can be trans-lated, ‘For thinking and being [are] the same.’18 While this identity will beaffirmed in various ways throughout the tradition, culminating in Hegel’sScience of Logic, Heidegger wants to use the fragment to rethink what theParmenidean relationship between thinking and being indicates. What Iwant to stress here is the way in which Heidegger’s treatment of texts fromthe tradition is continuous with his overall phenomenological orientation.Through a consideration of (in this case) Parmenides, Heidegger wants toshow how we can do some work toward letting being show itself as itself.
Less an argument than a sequence of indications, Heidegger’s reflectionson Parmenides’ fragment begin by pointing out that in contrast to themetaphysical thesis that ‘identity belongs to being … Parmenides says:being belongs to an identity’19 (ID 27). That is, identity is not an attribute
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(even the attribute) of being; rather, ‘thinking and being belong together inthe Same and by virtue of the Same’. But if, Heidegger says, we simply stophere, we only think of the ‘belonging together’ in terms of traditional meta-physical categories, that is, the relationship is thought of as being deter-mined by the ‘together’, and this is construed as that which is ‘establishedin the unity of a manifold, combined into the unity of a system, mediatedby the unifying center of an authoritative synthesis’ (ID 29). We have notleft the orbit of metaphysics.
To do so, according to Heidegger, we must lay stress on the ‘belonging’instead of the ‘together’. Aware that his audience might suspect that hisreflections are ‘no more than an empty play on words’, he claims that thissuspicion will be dispelled if we ‘let the matter speak for itself’. Note the indi-cations of phenomenological method. Heidegger moves rather quickly here,but his next comments suggest that letting the matter speak for itself meanspaying attention to the fact that already in our consideration of the belongingtogether of thinking and being we have been attending to the belongingtogether of man and being. And it will be by a reflection on the essentialbelonging that binds man and being that we will grasp the meaning ofParmenides’ fragment. It is worth quoting in full Heidegger’s statementconcerning this belonging, as it succinctly encapsulates both his style ofthought and its aim:
Man [Mensch] obviously is a being. As such he belongs to the totalityof being – just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. To ‘belong’ herestill means to be in the order of being. But man’s distinctive featurelies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to being, face toface with being; thus man remains referred to being and so answersto it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to being, andhe is only this. This ‘only’ does not mean a limitation, but rather anexcess. A belonging to being prevails within man, a belonging whichlistens to being because it is appropriated to being. And being? Letus think of being according to its original meaning, as presence.Being is present to man neither incidentally nor only on rareoccasions. Being is present and abides only as it concerns manthrough the claim it makes on him. For it is man, open toward being,who alone lets being arrive as presence. Such becoming presentneeds the openness of a clearing [Lichtung], and by this need remainsappropriated [übereignet] to human being [Menschenwesen]. Thisdoes not at all mean that being is posited first and only by man. Onthe contrary, the following becomes clear:
Man and being are appropriated to each other. They belong to eachother. From this belonging to each other, which has not beenthought out more closely, man and being have first received those
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determinations of essence by which man and being are graspedmetaphysically in philosophy.
(ID 31–2)
Metaphysics and its categories (e.g., being as presence) are determined bythe more primordial belonging together of man and being, a belongingtogether that Heidegger indicates with the language of appropriation,Ereignis. A genuine thinking of being would require us to leap beyond thelanguage of metaphysics. Let us note that in the companion lecture to ‘ThePrinciple of Identity’ Heidegger raises some doubts about whether this leapout of our traditional metaphysical language is possible, or whether we areconfined to tracing the limitations of this/these language(s).
In some respects, Deleuze and Heidegger are very close in their concep-tions of ontology. Indeed, Heidegger announces in the opening pages ofBeing and Time that philosophy should be identified with ontology – thesame point that Deleuze stresses in the Hyppolite review. Also shared is arefusal to engage in an ontology that seeks to delineate a being that wouldstand apart from all other beings and be responsible for beings as theircause and ground. In this respect, both adhere to an ‘ontology of sense’.But, as I would like to emphasize here, Deleuze’s preoccupations standquite apart from the Heideggerian ones. Two key differences stand out.On the one hand, Heideggerian philosophy would remain much too‘anthropological’ for Deleuze. Deleuze does not seek to have being ‘showitself’ through our own way of being, or through a preparation that wemight make for being’s own self-showing. Deleuze instead will turn largelyto phenomena revealed by the physical sciences to disclose ways of beingthat can serve as catalysts for the formation of concepts through which wecan construct the metaphysics appropriate to these phenomena. Hence,this difference encompasses differences of both object and methodbetween Heidegger and Deleuze. On the other hand, Deleuze largelyeschews the end-of-metaphysics and epochal registers of Heidegger’sthinking. As this is something Derrida takes from Heidegger, I will leavemention of this for the sections below.
We will now pass to Derrida and see how both the conceptual playcharacteristic of Hegel’s Logic and the end-of-metaphysics concerns ofHeidegger sharply distinguish Derrida from Deleuze as a ‘philosopher ofdifference’.
4 Derrida and Différance
Derrida’s lecture ‘Différance’ was delivered in January 1968 and publishedlater in the same year. This was the year after Derrida published Writingand Difference and the same year that Deleuze published Difference and
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Repetition. Along with Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Speech andPhenomena, also published in 1967, Derrida’s books represent reflectionson difference that had occupied him at least from his work on Husserl inthe late 1950s.
In the discussion above we saw that Deleuze’s commitment to an ontol-ogy of difference goes back to the early 1950s. There we saw that differencenames for Deleuze being itself, and that being is spoken of by Deleuze mostparticularly by reference to the physical world (with all of the qualifications‘physical’ would require here). We should take seriously Deleuze’s claim tobe an empiricist, at least in the sense that he wants to provide a comprehen-sive ontology that accounts for the (naïve as it might sound) becoming(genesis) and being (individuation) of the things around us (both thosetypically considered natural as well as ourselves and our social and politicalstructures).20 Therefore, even while Deleuze will state late in his career thatphilosophy is the invention of concepts, at a fundamental level concepts arenot what Deleuze’s thinking is about.
In what follows, I want to suggest that Derrida’s work is about concepts.That is, Derrida’s thought does not just use, discuss, or invent concepts; atits very core is the attempt to wrestle with conceptuality itself. To put itbluntly, where Deleuze’s thought attempts to construct an ontologicalaccount of the world, Derrida’s thought attempts to comment on metaphys-ics as a discourse. And even if Derrida might wish to extend the notion ofdiscourse so that it (almost) meets up with ontology, he will not, in the mostbasic of ways, be thinking about the same things as Deleuze. Let me thenattempt to capture succinctly this (rather Hegelian)21 aspect of conceptualdiscursivity in ‘Différance’ and what I take to be its relationship to a ratherHeideggerian engagement with the history of philosophy.
The point here will not be to provide an overview of Derrida’s work, butonly to indicate that with which it is primarily engaged. Putting this in termsof difference, we can ask what it is that Derrida sees as differing. As forDeleuze, for whom ‘difference’ becomes a kind of first principle, indicatingnot a relation between more primary things but the very constitutive sourceof thingliness itself, so for Derrida différance is not secondary to fixedentities that would differ from one another, but instead names a (ratherineffable) operation which also accounts for the possibility of differentialrelations themselves. But what then would the objects of these relations be?
Midway into ‘Différance’, after drawing some structural connectionsbetween the work of Saussure and différance, Derrida writes:
Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in asystem within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by meansof the systematic play of differences. Such a play, différance, is thus nolonger simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, ofa conceptual process and system in general.22
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Hence Derrida makes it quite clear here that différance, while not itself aconcept, is something like the ground of conceptuality itself. Indeed, thequalifier is necessary here since différance cannot be taken to be someprimary being that would simply precede that which it makes possible.‘Différance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating originof differences. Thus, the name “origin” no longer suits it’ (D 11).
Along with what Derrida will call the spacing of differentiation indicatedabove, différance is also a matter of temporality, temporization. This dimen-sion of Derrida’s work connects it directly to the project of Heideggerianontology. At the heart of Heidegger’s project is the critique and exposure ofthe privileging of presence in the key concepts and structures of Westernmetaphysics. This, indeed, is the great error in the tradition according toHeidegger, the one that obscures and occludes the primordial futurity ofDasein’s being-in-the-world and, later, the eventful character of being(being as Ereignis). Différance is continuous with this Heideggerian critiqueto the extent that as a quasi-arche of that which stands in the present,différance is marked by deferral and delay. Or, more properly, those veryconcepts and structures of presentness are themselves, despite their overtcharacter, marked by deferral and delay, and this markedness is différance.
When they are characterized in this way, it is certainly possible to drawparallels between Derrida’s différance and Deleuze’s difference, especiallyto the extent that both attempt to mark out a non-entitive ‘source’ ofdeterminate individuation. The difference seems to be between what isbeing individuated: concepts on the one hand, physical/psychical/socialentities on the other. In order to bear this out, let us see why and howDerrida turns to Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger in the final portion ofthe lecture.
Derrida claims that ‘[d]ifférance appears almost by name in their texts’(D 17). What does it mean for différance to appear in texts that are notDerrida’s? Derrida devotes only one long paragraph to Nietzsche. Theunfolding of this paragraph is instructive for discerning the focus ofDerrida’s thinking. He sets out by indicating the way in which conscious-ness is not a primitive phenomenon for Nietzsche but is rather the productof a play of differential forces. That is, this differential play is anterior tothe existence of consciousness. Furthermore, ‘[f]orce itself is never present;it is only a play of differences and quantities’ (D 17).23 Force for Nietzschewould thus name the kind of differing/deferring principle that Derridanames différance. But where we might anticipate how force, in its constitu-tion-by-differing, is explanatory of certain biological, psychic, or moralphenomena for Nietzsche, Derrida emphasizes a rather different register:
Is not all of Nietzsche’s thought a critique of philosophy as an activeindifference to difference, as the system of adiaphoristic reduction orrepression? Which according to the same logic, according to logic
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itself, does not exclude that philosophy lives in and on différance,thereby blinding itself to the same, which is not the identical.
(D 17)
Derrida’s wording does not demand that this is Nietzsche’s principal or soletarget in his thought, but it is significant that Derrida here emphasizes theimplications of Nietzsche’s thought for philosophy (rather than, say, life asDeleuze would have it). As the lines that follow make clear, Derrida’sconcern here is to see how the thought of différance might allow us to gainsome transparency with respect to our traditional categories. It is worthquoting these lines in full in order to see more fully how Derrida’s thoughtis directed toward conceptual discursivity:
The same, precisely is différance (with an a) as the displaced andequivocal passage of one different thing to another, from one term ofan opposition to the other. Thus one could reconsider all the pairs ofopposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which ourdiscourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to seewhat indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance ofthe other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of thesame (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as thesensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred,differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred,differing-deferring; all the others of physis – tekhn[emacr ] , nomos, thesis,society, freedom, history, mind, etc. – as physis different and deferred,or as physis differing and deferring. Physis in différance. And in thiswe may see the site of a reinterpretation of mim sis in its allegedopposition to physis).
(D 17)
There is certainly a gesture here toward a differential ontology of the kindDeleuze pursues, but such an ontology requires more than exposing thedifferential play of concepts with which the tradition has pursued ontology.It requires, as Deleuze emphasizes, the invention of new concepts, conceptsthat would account for the way in which a self-differing and deferring physiscan manifest itself as tekhne, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind.But let us move on to Derrida’s brief discussion of Freud.
Derrida seems to turn to Freud in order to pick up on the relationshipbetween a play of forces (or energetics in Freud’s locution) and conscious-ness. Once again, the primacy of consciousness is at issue in such a way thatconsciousness will be seen as the manifestation of a hidden, yet constitutive,differential play. The concepts of trace (Spur), breaching (Bahnung), and
e
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inscription (Niederschrift) are invoked as those aspects of psychic life whichoperate in the mode of différance, explanatory of the conscious life of thesubject. Derrida even mentions that this play is a matter of life, ‘an effort oflife to protect itself by deferring the dangerous investment’ (D 18). At thispoint, however, an apparent ambiguity enters the text. Once again, it isunclear whether Derrida’s discourse means to say something about thedifferential play that constitutes the conscious subject or the play ofconcepts employed to explicate this constitution.
And all the oppositions that furrow Freudian thought relate each ofhis concepts one to another as moments of a detour in the economy ofdifférance. One is but the other different and deferred, one differingand deferring the other. One is the other in différance, one is thedifférance of the other. This is why every apparently rigorous andirreducible opposition (for example the opposition of the secondaryto the primary) comes to be qualified, at one moment or another, as a‘theoretical fiction’. Again, it is thereby, for example (but such anexample governs, and communicates with, everything), that thedifference between the pleasure principle and the reality principle isonly différance as detour.
(D 18)
Without venturing to diagnose the sources or implications of Derrida’seffacement of Freud’s energetics, let us only note again the emphasis placedhere on the discursive and conceptual registers. This, it seems, is the properdomain for the operation and explication of différance. Let this suffice forthe place of Freud in the lecture.
The final portion of Derrida’s lecture takes up différance in an explicitlyontological manner. In a series of transitional paragraphs (where Levinasplays a brief but pivotal role) in which he emphasizes the delaying aspectsof différance, Derrida brings the discussion into direct contact withHeidegger’s thought. The initial question posed is how différance stands inrelation to the ontological difference as thought by Heidegger and how thetraditional ontology of being as presence can be ‘interrogated’ bydifférance. In some respects, Derrida wants to indicate that his discourseon différance is scarcely different from Heidegger’s:
In a certain aspect of itself, différance is certainly but the historical andepochal unfolding of Being or of the ontological difference. The a ofdifférance marks the movement of this unfolding.
(D 22)
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Derrida certainly recognizes and means to extend Heidegger’s challengeto Western metaphysics. Just as Heidegger wants to bring our thought tothe point that we can see the covering-over of the ontological distinctionas a necessary moment of being itself, Derrida means to employ différanceas the graphic placeholder for the necessarily unrepresentable, unpresent-able, quasi-transcendental condition for beings in their presentness andmultiplicity.
But the thought made possible via différance extends further than this.Derrida asks, in what seems the key ontological paragraph of the lecture,whether the (Heideggerian) quest for the ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ of being andthe ‘determination of différance as the onticontological difference’ are not‘still intrametaphysical effects of différance’ (D 22). In other words, Derridaasks boldly, if quietly, whether the Heideggerian project is not still a part ofmetaphysics, rather than the initial step out of metaphysics. Or, moreprecisely, if Heidegger’s attempt to think being not as presence but as differ-ence is a genuine challenge to Western metaphysics, does différance allowus to comprehend this (Heidegger’s) attempt as part of the movement ofdifférance itself, a movement which would be constitutive of, but alsoexceed, the metaphysical epoch? For our purposes, I would only emphasizethat despite the challenge levelled at Heidegger’s thought here, Derrida’sunderstanding of his challenge remains essentially Heideggerian. Theproject of différance appears here as a radicalization of the Heideggerianproject. Inasmuch as différance is a matter of ontology, it is Heideggerianontology.
It is not necessary here to analyse the reading of Heidegger’s ‘TheAnaximander Fragment’ that Derrida undertakes in the final pages of thelecture; but it is worth mentioning where this analysis terminates. The finalnote of the lecture is that ontology, even as pursued by Heidegger, isimpossible – even as pursued by Heidegger, Derrida insists, becauseHeidegger holds out the hope of a ‘word’ that will disclose being beyondthe strictures of metaphysics. Derrida thinks we should abandon this hope:
For us, différance remains a metaphysical name, and all names that itreceives in our language are still, as names, metaphysical. And this isparticularly the case when these names state the determination ofdifférance as the difference between presence and the present(Anwesen/Anwesend), and above all, and is already the case whenthey state the determination of différance as the difference of Beingand beings.
(D 26)
What we know, or what we would know if it were simply a questionhere of something to know, is that there has never been, never will
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be, a unique word, a master-name. This is why the thought of theletter a in différance is not the primary prescription or the propheticannunciation of an immanent and as yet unheard-of nomination.There is nothing kerygmatic about this ‘word’, provided that oneperceives its decapita(liza)tion. And that one puts into question thename of the name.
There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. Andwe must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside the myth of apurely maternal or parental language, a lost native country of thought.On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzscheputs affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step ofthe dance.
(D 27)
Let us note that Derrida returns again to the level of discourse as the levelat which ultimate statements about ontology need to be made. This is oneof the ways in which, as I stated above, Derrida is very much a Heideggerianthinker. Let us note too that while Derrida instructs us not to mourn the lossof our ontological hopes, that we must joyfully affirm their impossibility, indoing so he acknowledges that these hopes are impossible.24
5 The Univocity of Being, or Why Ontology is Yet to Come
In contrast to Heidegger’s attempt to read the history of metaphysics assymptomatic of the necessary self-oblivion of being and Derrida’s attemptto think the impossibility of even Heidegger’s ontological hopes, Deleuzeundertakes a very different attitude regarding the history of metaphysicsand the possibility of pursuing ontology in the opening chapter of Differenceand Repetition. And while Deleuze has his own diagnosis of the origin of theerrors of the ontological tradition (i.e., common sense and good sense),25 hethinks that there is a way out and that the way out has been preparedalready by a small set of figures from the tradition. In other words, Deleuzesimply thinks that most ontological thought has been wrong and that acorrect ontology is possible given the right principles. We have seen alreadythat this ontology, in its Bergsonian mode, is one in which being as suchmust be thought as difference and that difference cannot be thought interms of the Aristotelian account of genetic difference. The lasting legacy ofthis Aristotelian account is the thinking of being in terms of analogy – a termand conceptual scheme developed by the Arabic and Scholastic thinkers todeal with the Aristotelian problem of homonymy. That is, while a science ofbeing qua being is possible, according to Aristotle, being is not said of eachand every being in the same way. Rather, it is only if it is recognized that all
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ascriptions of being point toward substance/ousia that being as such can beinvestigated. This recourse, however, leads to the privileging of substancesover the other categories as those beings which are most pre-eminentlyindicative of being qua being, so much so that ultimately only one being(the first cause) can truly be said to be. That would not be the officialAristotelian position (Aristotle has too much concern for concrete particu-lars), one suspects, but the thought tends in this direction. And it is thismovement toward a hierarchy of beings within ontology proper thatDeleuze cannot abide.
Hence we must take Deleuze in all seriousness when he says shortly intothe first chapter of Difference and Repetition, ‘There has only ever been oneontological proposition: Being is univocal.’26 He goes on to say, ‘[t]here hasonly ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a singlevoice. We say Duns Scotus because he was the one who elevated univocalbeing to the highest point of subtlety, albeit at the price of abstraction’ (DR35). We find here, in Deleuze’s retrieval (to use Heidegger’s term) ofScotus’ ontology, an inversion of the approach taken by Heidegger andDerrida. The tradition is not to be read in order to trace and comprehendits waywardness and closure; instead, Deleuze looks to the tradition forfigures who have already worked against the grain of that tradition and helpto indicate a way out. Scotus represents for Deleuze (despite his undeniableembeddedness within the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition) the mostimportant historical marker for a way out of traditional metaphysics.
This is not the place to give an extensive treatment of the concept ofunivocal being.27 In brief, against the dominant trends of theologicallyminded metaphysics that strove to distinguish a transcendent being from thebeing of created things, Scotus declares that a science of being mustacknowledge that being, wherever it is encountered, however it is thought,must be the same being. Scotus has his own theological motives for such adeclaration (i.e., doctrines of analogy threaten to cut us off from Godconceptually), but these matter little to Deleuze. Instead, Deleuze findshere the grounds for a radical ontology of difference. How so? The key isthat even though it is the same being that is met with in all encounters withand thoughts of beings, being is not said in the same sense for every being.That is, while the dominant tradition would have it that there is a differenceof being between (some) beings (e.g., God and his creatures), for Deleuze,it is the same being that differs in such ways that differences of beings areachieved without any real differences of being having to be posited.
This thought now links up with where we left off with Deleuze’s earlyreading of Bergson. In outline, univocal being as the ground of an ontologyof difference is identical to the Bergsonian orientation toward duration,where duration is conceived as the self-differing whole of being. Bergsonthus represents one of those figures from the history of philosophy to whomDeleuze will look for something right that the tradition largely got wrong.
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Spinoza and Nietzsche represent two others (see DR 40–2), the two whoextend and improve the univocal ontology of Duns Scotus. Deleuze’s use ofStoic thinking and Lucretius’ poem in The Logic of Sense should also bementioned here. This Deleuzian constructive project of assembling an ontol-ogy that finds foundational concepts in marginal figures of the Aristoteliantradition is in marked contrast to the de(con)structive project that Heideggersketched out for Part Two of Being and Time, and partially realized in thesummer lecture course of 1927 (published as Die Grundprobleme derPhänomenologie in 1975) and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929).In this sketch that closes the Introduction to Being and Time, Heideggerstates that Part Two will contain the ‘[b]asic features of a phenomenologicaldestructuring of the history of ontology on the guideline of the problem oftemporality’ (BT 35). This phenomenological destructuring, we are told, willproceed through considerations of, in turn, Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle.Is it insignificant that these are all named by Deleuze as enemies?
Let me finish merely by drawing out the conclusion that for Deleuzeontology need not be done in accordance with the dominant strains of thetradition and that, therefore, it need not be constrained by the limitationsof that tradition (as Heidegger and Derrida would have it). Rather, giventhe creation and deployment of new concepts, some to be built uponconcepts from the history of philosophy, ontology can still be pursuedunhesitatingly. For Deleuze the problem is not that we have come to theend of the epoch of ontology; rather, true ontology is only now beginning tobe done. Ontology is yet to come.28
St. John’s College, Annapolis
Notes
1 Quoted in Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds), Between Derrida and Deleuze(London: Continuum, 2003), p. 49.
2 See: Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as DifferentialOntology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Manuel Delanda,Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002); JamesWilliams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introductionand Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Peter Hallward,Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference (London: Verso,2006); John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy (London: Continuum,2006).
3 For a diagnosis and imaginative response to this antipathy, see CatherineMalabou, ‘Who’s Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?’, in Paul Patton (ed.) Deleuze: ACritical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 114–38.
4 For accounts of Kojève’s influence in French philosophy, see Michael S. Roth,Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), and Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire:Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1987).
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5 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logique et Existence’, p. 191, printedas an appendix in Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlorand Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 191–5. Insubsequent citations in the text the abbreviation RLE will be used.
6 According to Keith Ansell Pearson in Germinal Life: The Difference andRepetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 21.
7 Deleuze, ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’, in Desert Islands and OtherTexts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taorima (Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 39. In subsequent citations in the text the abbreviationBCD will be used.
8 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1994), pp. 30–5.
9 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Zeta, 8.10 See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), Ch. 1.11 We might recall here the following from G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of
Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 10: ‘[T]heliving substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truthactual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation ofits self-othering with itself.’
12 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 6–7.
13 Embryonic development is standing in here for self-differentiating and individu-ating events in the broadest sense. Note as well the need to differentiatebetween an ontology of being that would do justice to phenomena such asembryonic development and the science of embryonic development. On thelatter issue, see Todd May, ‘Gilles Deleuze, Difference, and Science’, in GaryGutting (ed.) Continental Philosophy of Science (Malden, MA: BlackwellPublishers, 2005), pp. 239–57.
14 We can leave aside here why and how logic must alienate and contradict itself bypositing the (logically mute) realm of nature, only to be reunited with itself in thesphere of Geist.
15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1996), p. xix. In subsequent citations in the textthe abbreviation BT will be used.
16 These three moments, the asked about, the ascertained, and the interrogated,correspond to the German words das Gefragte, das Erfragte, and das Befragte.The first carries connotations of something sought out or in demand; the secondindicates that which is asked for, the third refers especially to someone beingasked questions.
17 Here, of course, we can see the Eurocentric, even German-centric, orientationof Heidegger’s historical thinking, an orientation that he was not blind to andquite willing to justify. See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics,trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), Ch. 1.
18 Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Heidegger’s German translation is ‘For thesame perceiving (thinking) as well as being’. Heidegger’s German is ‘DasSelbe nämlich ist Vernehmen (Denken) sowohl als auch Sein.’ The originalGreek is See Identity and Difference, trans.Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 27, 90. Insubsequent citations in the text the abbreviation ID will be used.
19 I have changed the capitalized instances of ‘Being’ in this text to lowercase inconformity with Stambaugh’s practice in her more recent translation of Being
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and Time. For her own account of this practice, see her Introduction to her Beingand Time translation.
20 In other senses, it is not self-evident what Deleuze means by calling himself anempiricist. That he wants to resist what he sees as the basic position of ‘rationalist’philosophy is clear. This position, for Deleuze, is one where certain ‘ideals’become realized in the phenomenal world. Deleuze wants to reverse this orderand conduct philosophy in such a way that idealizations are drawn out ofphenomena, indeed, are discovered there for the first time. A succinct accountof what Deleuze means by empiricism can be found in the ‘Preface to the EnglishLanguage Edition’ of Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002),pp. vii–ix.
21 One would do well to read ‘Différance’ in conjunction with ‘From Restricted toGeneral Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference,trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), on the issue ofdifférance in terms of conceptual economy.
22 Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 11. In subsequent citations in thetext the abbreviation D will be used.
23 It is interesting to note that in this place in the text Derrida quotes a fewsentences from Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie concerning quantity andforce.
24 It would be worthwhile to draw out a comparison of Deleuze’s ontologicalprogramme with that of Jean-Luc Nancy. Like Derrida, Nancy draws his princi-pal points of orientation, as well as his conceptual and linguistic register, fromHegel and Heidegger. But unlike Derrida, Nancy seems to have set aside theend-of-metaphysics preoccupations of Heideggerian thought and has set himselfthe task of working out a rather traditionally conceived ontology using the tracesof (what we might call) différance in the tradition and in Heidegger (in somerespects rewriting the fundamental ontology of Being and Time by stronglyemphasizing the place of Mitsein). In this respect, like Deleuze, Nancy is at workon a constructive differential ontology. That they share this ground would be thebeginning of a fruitful contrasting. See, especially, Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Of BeingSingular Plural’, in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson andAnne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
25 See Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), pp. 74–81.
26 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35. In subsequent citations in the text theabbreviation DR will be used.
27 With respect to its importance for Deleuze, see de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis,pp. 225–41, and Hallward, Out of this World, Ch. 1.
28 I want to thank Ed Butler for his very helpful remarks on numerous drafts of thisarticle.
