In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

97 6 Political Bodies Without Organs: On Hegel’s Ideal State and Deleuzian Micropolitics Pheng Cheah Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegelian dialectics is well known.1 According to Deleuze, Hegel is Nietzsche’s archenemy and Nietzsche’s pluralist theory of forces is resolutely antidialectical: “The concept of the Overman is directed against the dialectical conception of man, and transvaluation is directed against the dialectic of appropriation or the suppression of alienation. Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge. We can already feel it in the theory of forces.” “We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche’s work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principal concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against whom it fights.”2 Intellectual historians will undoubtedly someday elaborate on Deleuze’s antipathy as part of a more general rebellion of post-1968 French philosophy against the tyranny of Hegelianism. In Vincent Descombes’s succinct words, “in 1968, all that was modern—that is, Marx, Freud and so on, as before—was hostile to Hegel.”3 The aims of this chapter are more circumscribed. It focuses on one particular strand of Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism: the way in which his account of life breaks with Hegel’s organismic account of life and the political implications of this break insofar as the living organism supplies the metaphorical template not only for Hegel’s theory of the ideal state (the state as Idea) but also, more generally, for almost all normative theories of the political in modernity. If Deleuze’s nonorganismic vitalism offers an understanding of life that is no longer centered on the organism or on organization as the source of life, then how can we conceive of the political body in nonorganizational terms? Or, which is the same question , what is a nonorganizational politics? 98 P H E N G C H E A H The Hegelian State and the Animal Organism The clearest statement of modern political organicism—the fundamental connection between the vitality of organic life and the rational legitimacy that constitutes the strength of the modern territorial state—is found in the following passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The idealism which constitutes sovereignty is the same determination as that according to which the so-called parts of an animal organism are not parts, but members or organic moments whose isolation and separate existence [Für-sich-Bestehen] constitute disease . . . It is the same principle which we encountered . . . as self-relating negativity, and hence as universality determining itself to individuality [Einzelheit], in which all particularity and determinacy are superseded.4 The principle of self-relation is the key to Hegel’s theory of the organic state. It axiomatically joins the condition of freedom achieved in the state to the animal organism. For Hegel, freedom is the concept’s selfdetermination , its teleological development to actuality in which it gives itself objective being whilst preserving itself. This principle of selfrelation —the concept’s return to self from particularity and objective externality—is the basis of the ideal state as the actualization of freedom . But since this principle first becomes objectively present to us in the animal as organism with a nervous system, irritation, and sensibility, the modern state in which freedom is actualized is literally a spiritual organism, in which the principle at work in the animal organism is raised to the higher level of spiritual life. The animal is thus a template for understanding the ideal state. It supplies the general framework for Hegel’s elaboration of the state’s concrete institutions and their relations to each other, to civil society, as well as to individual citizens in such a manner that the vitality of the state is repeatedly distinguished from anything artificial or mechanical (techne or Kunst). Unfortunately, the misinterpretation of the organismic metaphor as a way of thinking in which the part is always subordinated to the whole has led to a corresponding misinterpretation of Hegel’s political organicism as a simple form of right-wing political conservatism in which the individual and his subjectivity are always sacrificed to the cohesion of the state, thereby paving the way for political authoritarianism and totalitarianism . Accordingly, Hegel’s state as Idea has been linked to the Prussian state of his time, thereby allowing it to be connected to Bismarck and later, to National Socialism. There is also the problem of Hegel’s iden- [3.15.4.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

Share