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5. Actualization: Enrichment and Loss
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76 5 Actualization: Enrichment and Loss Bruce Baugh One aspect of the difference between Deleuze and Hegel which has not received sufficient attention is their opposing views on “actualization,” the becoming actual of a potential or of what Deleuze calls “the virtual.” For Hegel, actualization is the outward manifestation and expression of a truth or reality that had only been implicit. This process of manifestation is at the same time an articulation of what had been inchoate, a determination of the indeterminate, a becoming concrete of what had been abstract. In short, for Hegel, actualization is a process of enrichment: the actualized, whether it be “truth,” a shape of “spirit,” or an “idea,” is infinitely richer than the unactualized potential. We see this in Hegel’s critique of inarticulate “sense-certainty” and of “the beautiful soul” which refuses to express itself in action.1 Truth, or the Absolute, must manifest itself as a differentiated totality, as a system: “The power of Spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread itself out and lose itself in its exposition” (PS, 6). Unexpressed potential, such as an unexpressed feeling or an intention not expressed in action, is merely “the untrue, the irrational” (PS, 66), “pure abstraction” (PS, 407), “pure being or empty nothingness,”2 “self-willed impotence” that flees the world for the inwardness of pure intentions and fine sentiments (PS, 400–403). For Deleuze, by contrast, every actualization involves a loss of the infinite richness of the virtual. The virtual contains a multiplicity or manifold of divergent tendencies, any number of which can be actualized depending on the circumstances, but each actualization is an impoverishment relative to the richness of the virtual. Thus we read that “every solution” in the form of an organ “is a relative success in relation to the conditions of the problem or the environment” but is nevertheless “a relative failure (échec) in relation to the movement which invents it”; “life as movement alienates itself in the material form that it creates; by actualizing itself, by differentiating itself, it loses ‘contact with the rest of itself.’”3 77 A C T U A L I Z A T I O N : E N R I C H M E N T A N D L O S S Similarly, insensible intensities are “always covered by a quality which alienates or contradicts” them by leveling out and homogenizing their constitutive differences.4 Consciously recollected memories are “images” extracted from an ontological and unconscious past which cannot be represented (B, 71). There is a single, vital time of the virtual prior to its differentiation into differing fluxes of duration, a single virtual multiplicity underlying the plurality of lived durations (B, 81–83). In general, Deleuze seems to hold that the actual can only betray the virtual it actualizes by constituting the extensive and qualitative elements which are subject to negation through limitation and the dialectic of contraries (DR, 188). The virtual “knows nothing of negation” (DR, 202–3, 207); these arise only at the level of the actual. Consequently, for Deleuze, there is thus a sense of loss with respect to actualization, almost a melancholy, one that is quite at odds with the affirmation of life and of expression in his books on Spinoza5 and even the Dionysian affirmation of suffering in his Nietzsche books.6 This sense of loss brings him rather closer to “the philosophy of tragedy” (Shestov) and its romantic antecedents (Jacobi, Schiller). I will thus begin with the romantics who form the target of much of Hegel’s critique of “immediacy” or “unmediated experience” in its givenness, and then look at Hegel’s critique of immediacy, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and finally at Deleuze’s theory of the virtual and its actualization. Paradoxically, Deleuze is just as distrustful of experience in its apparent immediacy and givenness as Hegel; like Hegel, he takes conscious experience to be an appearance and an effect of forces and processes that not only do not appear to the experiencing consciousness but also can never become conscious. Deleuze is not a champion of romantic “subjectivity”; he is, on the contrary, profoundly skeptical of the whole notion of the “subject.” Rather, what he shares with the romantics is the conviction that, as Kierkegaard puts it, in existence, possibility or potentiality stands higher than actuality. For Hegel, it is just the reverse: actuality always stands higher than possibility. Romanticism and the Cult...