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183 11 Limit, Ground, Judgment . . . Syllogism: Hegel, Deleuze, Hegel, and Deleuze Jay Lampert Deleuze’s longest discussion of Hegel, the fifteen-page passage in Difference and Repetition, chapter 1, 61–76/42–54,1 is (until the end of it) his most positive. What interests me is not his criticisms of Hegel, but the way Deleuze forces Hegel’s dialectic into more becoming, and Hegel forces Deleuze’s differences into more history. Deleuze discusses three themes in Hegel’s logic: limit and the infinite; contradiction and ground; and judgment and proposition. These are drawn from the three books of Hegel’s Science of Logic: Being, Essence, and Concept. Deleuze shows Hegel to be an opponent of organic philosophy (perhaps a surprising point, but a good one), and a proponent of the orgiastic. He shows how Hegel connects difference with the infinite rather than the finite (the large infinite, in contrast with Leibniz’s small infinite).2 Deleuze uses these Hegelian points to drive his own theory of difference, implying that Hegel’s Logic offers untapped potential.3 Deleuze’s passage on Hegel does not exhaust his theory of difference, and Hegel’s chapter on Ground is not his last word on dialectics, but the encounter of the two texts is symptomatic of each and of both together. We can summarize DR 61–76/42–54 as follows: Hegel succeeds in avoiding the subsumption of difference under a pregiven larger whole. To do this, he pushes to infinity the interplay at the limit between self and other. This drives each difference to the extreme of contradiction, at which point differences vanish into their ground. Yet this ground is the source of still more difference. Hegel’s “ground” is almost primordial difference . Unfortunately, Deleuze concludes, Hegel articulates difference in unidimensional judgments (49/33), like Leibniz assuming wrongly that differences converge rather than diverge. To emphasize Hegel’s potential with a Deleuzian eye, I take up three doctrines. 184 J A Y L A M P E R T Hegel’s categories of limit, finitude, and the infinite focus on selfothering , where selves reciprocally make themselves inside each other. “The instability of the surface of otherness” is infinite.4 Hegel’s category of ground cancels every totality via the contradiction of its members. The whole is groundless; or, difference is the only ground it has. Hegel squeezes more difference out of the infinite than Deleuze thought possible. But it is Deleuze who discovered this potential in Hegel. Hegel’s theory of judgment shows how disjunctive judgments express infinite possibilities. A judgment is only completed in a syllogism, and the ultimate syllogism is a mechanical object. I examine Deleuze’s DR 61–76/42–54 paragraph by paragraph. To define “ground,” I turn to DR 349–55/272–77 from the “Conclusion” chapter where Deleuze returns to Hegel. Deleuze’s text merits line-byline analysis. There is no value in the generalizations either that Hegel is ontologically totalitarian or that Deleuze is a poor reader, or in hoping that Deleuze will reduce to Hegel or vice versa. Two great philosophies are not diminished by their confrontation. Still, even a strong Deleuze advocate (like myself) cannot accept Deleuze’s claims without precise arguments, and cannot assume that if a given argument does not work, his point is profound anyway.5 Deleuze’s DR passage on Hegel has a momentum. Deleuze introduces Hegel as a success story in the history of difference, and only later introduces Hegel’s failings. But if Deleuze is right in the first case—as I think he is—it undermines his later criticisms. Difference and Repetition, Chapter 1 Part 1. Difference and the Infinite Paragraph 61–62/42 The passage on Hegel picks up after Deleuze has argued that finite distinctions suppress difference in the service of identity. In whole-part and genus-species relations, the parts and species are small differentia, which have meaning only as divisions of the larger wholes or universals. Deleuze associates these relations with the “organic,” a connection that is not obvious . Deleuze does not define the organic in terms of interactive functions across an auto-affective lived body in an environment, which might be a standard definition. Still, it is fair to say that living bodies persevere as wholes, and reproduce as members of a species. Though the analogy is stretched, Deleuze’s thesis that Hegel is anti-organic is a good corrective to popular interpretation. [3.17.150.89] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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