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133 8 Deleuze and Hegel on the Limits of Self-Determined Subjectivity Simon Lumsden At the heart of Deleuze’s critique of Hegel is a contestation as to how to conceive the disenchanted world that the Enlightenment bequeathed us. The scientific rigor of modern philosophy reconfigured the self-world relation in a manner that for the most part made the knowing subject the arbiter of everything earthly. In the idealized narrative of modernity this inverted Copernicanism is presented as a revolution, indeed the greatest revolution in human history, since it liberated humanity from all forms of dogmatism. If the center of the universe and all meaning determination has shifted from God to a “finite synthetic self,” who now assumes all these attributes, then Deleuze argues this disenchantment did not involve any radical change in understanding.1 From this perspective modern philosophy is continuous with premodern philosophy. The fulfillment therefore of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which had promised to reconceive our relation to existence by dethroning God and traditional authority, requires a similar dethroning of the modern subject . For Deleuze that dethroning requires shifting the focus of philosophy from subjectivity to a reimagined empirical. If we are to find a philosophical program adequate to existence then we need to be cognizant of the limits of modern philosophy for achieving this task. In making those limits apparent Deleuze is in effect continuing the critical tradition of examining presuppositions. It is the presuppositions of modern philosophy, its unacknowledged dogmatism, that have constrained thought and philosophy. But Deleuze’s philosophical project is not just critical; his positive project endeavors to give expression to a philosophical thought that is adequate to being, being understood primarily as difference. This rethinking of difference and his criticism of the philosophical tradition will also have implications for the core philosophical problems. Deleuze’s characterization of the philosophical tradition as “the dogmatic image of thought” captures a set of methodological presup- 134 S I M O N L U M S D E N positions. These presuppositions (representation, good sense, common sense, the good will, dialectic, idealist conceptual schemas) are all employed as controlling forces by which the philosophical tradition imposes its own conceptions of order on the world and thought.2 These and other images of thought all distort thought. The focal point of all these “distorting ” postulates is the cogito: “These postulates culminate in the position of an identical thinking subject, which functions as a principle of identity for concepts in general” (DR, 265/341). The transcendental subject that coordinates the faculties, subsumes being with its conceptual schemas, grounds and constrains all thought through its representations and its recognitive determination of being makes “difference in thought disappear ” (DR, 266/342). Against this view Deleuze argues that thought is not under the control of the subject. These postulates are simply illusions and presuppositions that have taken rhetorical hold of thought. While the dogmatic image of thought and its attendant self-identical subject range the entire history of philosophy, and Deleuze is especially critical of its formulations in Descartes and Kant, it is Hegel’s thought above all that takes this illusion to its extreme point. Deleuze’s analysis of Hegel, especially in Difference and Repetition and Nietzsche and Philosophy, is critical of three closely related concepts: selfconsciousness , which he sees as a stagnant self-producing subject; the dialectic, a methodology for a philosophical program that cannot think difference other than as contradiction; and recognition, the conservative way in which Hegelian thought makes judgment. My concern in this chapter is with only the first of these, though exploring this criticism will also involve some discussion of the other two issues. What I want to argue here is that while Hegel has a self-determining subject at the center of his project, that subject cannot be understood as straightforwardly stagnant , self-identical, or under the control of a good will. Understanding the distinctly Hegelian features of self-determination requires us to look at two key issues: first the subject in modernity, and second the reception of Kant’s critical thought, especially the concept-intuition distinction, an issue central to both Deleuze’s and Hegel’s thought. Poststructuralists, and Deleuze in particular, are highly critical of any closed system of meaning determination, whether that be tied to God, transcendental subjectivity, or subjectless systems of meaning determination (structuralism). All such philosophical endeavors are fixed and stagnant. Recognition, representation, the good will, and the conceptually mediating character of subjectivity are the pejorative terms...

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