The Expulsion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the Ethics of Internal Difference

To compare Deleuze with another thinker is already to proceed in counterpoint to Deleuzian practice, to refuse at some level to follow Deleuze's own method. The monograph (as applied to Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, to name only philosophers) is Deleuze's favored method of investigation. Deleuze does not orchestrate encounters of contradictory voices, but instead revoices the philosophical character (personnage) he is studying. He isolates himself (selectively) in a windowless monad with the object of his inquiry to enumerate the essential qualities upon a single plane of immanence. If, with Guattari, Deleuze offers readers a bewildering multiplicity of objects to consider, these are understood to be singularities, each enclosed in the splendid isolation of its "operative function" (1993: 3). Between these singularities and the totality that Deleuze calls the univocity of being, no dialectical relations inhere, but rather an absolute leap of perception.

Deleuze and Adorno thus appear to stand in irreconcilable opposition.¹ The former the philosopher of immanence and the univocity of being, the latter the foremost thinker of irresolvable contradictions and negative dialectics, they look to very different precursors and speak entirely different philosophical languages that allow for precious little communication to occur. Yet to leave each to his proper plane of immanence—in which their respective truth may be expressed without dissent—would be to abandon critique for the history of ideas. Instead, I think it is possible to compose a dissonant relationship between these two seemingly antagonistic thinkers. In this article, I propose to examine Deleuze's early writings via a critical reading of the founding operative concept of the Deleuzian project: "internal difference." If Alain Badiou rightly locates the precondition of Deleuzian thought in the "univocity of being," this remains "a silent, supra-cognitive or mystical intuition" (31) about which one can say no more than to repeat the mantra: "Being is One." What one can talk about instead are the modes or "simulacra" of the One, and the implications for modal beings if one adheres rigorously to this univocity. The concept of internal difference thus allows Deleuze to begin exploring the world of simulacra after the founding intuition of the univocity of Being. Focusing on Deleuze's texts from the 1960s, I question the logic of internal difference in light of the later Logique du sens, before addressing the ethical implications of internal difference as described in Nietzsche et la philosophie. While Deleuzian concepts (particularly the panoply generated in Milles plateaux) remain endlessly productive for progressive contemporary thought (witness Hardt & Negri), this essay constitutes an attempt to think through what remains (for me) the most problematic dimension of Deleuzian thought: the univocal celebration of a power-based ethics.

It is widely recognized that Deleuze begins his philosophical project not with the affirmative impulse of his later works, but as an explicit critique of Hegelian dialectical difference. In Nietzsche et la philosophie, Deleuze judges the dialectic "abstract" and "empty" insofar as "the Being of Hegelian logic remains merely thought being" (1962: 181, 211 my emphasis). Hegelian difference remains an external conceptualization of difference "with another thing" (a spatial difference), "its difference with all that it is not" (a difference of contradiction) (2002: 33). This critique of Hegel takes on an oddly personalized tone of ressentiment at odds with nearly all of Deleuze's work and his explicit norm of respect for another work: "One must take a work as a whole, follow it and not judge it… receive it whole…. There are people who only feel intelligent if they find 'contradictions' in a great thinker" (1990: 118, 124).² For Deleuze's Nietzsche, Hegel is the "adversary" (1962: 9), while for Deleuze himself, Hegel is the "traitor" upon whom Deleuze displaces the negative—affects as much as logic—allowing him then to proceed univocally, free of contradiction in the project he inherits from Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza to "think differences of nature, independent of all forms of negation" (1966: 41). Similarly, at the level of Deleuzian logic, the attempt to represent "pure positivity" always proceeds negatively as an expulsion or bracketing of...