Reflections on Time and Politics

6. Syntheses of Difference and Contradiction

6 Syntheses of Difference and Contradiction in suggesting a route from Hegelian dialectics, Deleuze asks, ‘‘Is not contradiction itself only the phenomenal and anthropological aspect of difference ?’’ (Deleuze 1997b, 195). This might suggest a simple inversion of the historical and logical that, as with Marx, would see our logic as the product of our history, not the reverse. But Deleuze refuses this route: a historical dialectic, for him, advances no further than a logical or ontological dialectic in terms of finding a conception of difference adequate to a philosophy of immanence. What is required is a concept of becoming that exceeds and gives sense to the becoming of history,1 just as Hegel’s logos becomes in a nonhistorical manner while underpinning the sense of history. Hegel’s, however, is a becoming of contradiction, which negates itself into the phenomenological passage of history. Deleuze’s, by contrast, is a movement of difference surpassing contradiction—in Nietzschean terms, also employed by Deleuze, it is untimely or in the time of the eternal return—although it too implies a temporal or temporalizing becoming that is not historical. Hyppolite’s reading of Hegelian contradiction specifies the requirements Deleuze must satisfy for his alternative ontology of sense. Hegel’s conceptions of force, quantity, and quality provide the counterpoint for Deleuze to develop his concept of difference. As Hyppolite maintains, only speculative contradiction, for Hegel, can fully determine identity and meaning so as to provide sense. Merely empirical differences and transcendental contradictions that fall short of specula1 . ‘‘The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a ‘nonhistorical cloud.’ This isn’t to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action: Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events themselves or becoming . What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history’’ (Deleuze 1995, 170). 64 Reflections on Time and Politics tive reflection ultimately establish indifference and reinstate a philosophy of essence. Empirical thought denies the power of determination to negative difference: to say what a thing is not tells us nothing of what it is; instead, knowledge requires a positive content. This position, however, contradicts itself, since any positive content, taking the form, ‘‘X is Y,’’ refers the thing beyond itself, so that it both is and is not itself.2 Kant recognizes this contradiction and the totality that follows from the synthetic character of understanding and judgment, but he fails to appreciate its full implications. Kant reduces the Absolute to an Idea posited by thought as its condition and limit, failing to surpass the understanding’s separation of subject and object and falling back onto psychologism and anthropomorphism (Hyppolite 1997, 82–83). Both Kantian and empirical thought thus carry residues of indifferent positivity—empirical diversity for one and the noumenal thingin -itself for the other. Speculative knowledge surpasses these essentialisms, showing that no essence lies behind appearance because the Absolute is mediation. Speculative difference, however, must take the form of contradiction. The Absolute can express itself only by sustaining its unity through diverse forms; to be self-determining, it must distinguish itself from its opposite without becoming one pole of this opposition. Negation must be compatible with identity, and opposition alone sustains both genuine diversity and identity, because a thing is individual only by differing from everything it is not: ‘‘Opposition is inevitable . . . because each is in relation with the others, or rather with all the others, so that its distinction is its distinction from all the rest’’ (Hyppolite 1997, 115). Negation must also inhabit both subject and object, thought and existence. Only then can speculative thought raise the Absolute from substance to subject, becoming the self-expression of being: ‘‘Speculative knowledge can be simultaneously knowledge of being and selfknowledge only because to know oneself is to contradict oneself, only because these two moments that we ordinarily separate in order to attribute one to the object, the other to the subject, truth and reflection, being and the self, are identical. Their identity in their contradiction is the very dialectic of the Absolute’’ (76). Being real, negation cannot be limited to human thought or propositions. 2. ‘‘The rule of empirical knowledge lies in not contradicting itself in its object, and, since this rule is merely negative, the rule amounts to looking for the...