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204 12 Hegel and Deleuze on Life, Sense, and Limit Emilia Angelova In this chapter I draw Hegel and Deleuze into slightly closer proximity than either Deleuze or most scholarship on Deleuze (or Hegel) might admit. I take up Alexandre Kojève’s1 and Andrzej Warminski’s2 semiotic readings of Hegel and then contrast these with Deleuze. This contrast is warranted since, against semiotics, Deleuze locates the sign and sense outside of consciousness, and in the fold of Life. Deleuze reverses the old question of “what is” to an “epistemology”3 asking “what does sense do,”4 and thus restores the sign as the receiving of thought (much like the receiving of the other) to the power of its dignity. For Deleuze, a mere modifier of the ontic-ontological difference between beings and Being, for example, Dasein as a structure that questions,5 is not adequate to capture what runs below judgment as “beneath or prior to knowledge” (F, 109). Similarly, Foucault’s reduction to Power-Being, as we shall see, falls short of Deleuze’s inquiry into the “rarity or dispersion [of space]” and into “bursts of passion that cut space up into new dimensions” (F, 3). Rather, since Deleuze eliminates interiority, the intensive time reduction to sense expresses the present always in two times, the corporeal series of bodies and the incorporeal, quasi-causal series of delayed effects without bodies, Chronos and Aion respectively.6 Via Warminski, I claim that, contra Deleuze, it is important to find in Hegel an order or ordering, a sensitivity of sorts, prior to the universal idea and structure, yet crucial to the genesis of the idea; in other words, a sense very much like the sense (sens) that is so central to Deleuze.7 As Warminski has shown, the sign in Hegel, while minimally structured, calls for a transition to self-consciousness; as such, instead of a desire that supersedes and is external to life (as in Kojève’s absolutization of the sign as Selbstbewusstsein), we find a self-consciousness that relates back to and springs forth from a sense (sens) already present in life. The issue of limit, relation, and end is, in Hegel, one of death, and completing the universal requires comprehending the death of the individual. Because 205 H E G E L A N D D E L E U Z E O N L I F E , S E N S E , A N D L I M I T of the sense inherent in life, death could not equate to the sign as actual anthropogenesis. Death, however, has only extrinsic status in Deleuzian singularity and is excluded from the plane of life as difference immanent in itself. Taking up Warminski’s Hegel, I suggest that, on Deleuze’s theory of exclusion, even what is definitive of singularity would in fact entail a substantive notion of relation, limit, and indeed, death.8 Desire, Negation, and Sign in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit There is no doubt that the eight or so pages on “life” (PG, 168–77), preceding the classic text of the section on “Lordship and Bondage,” are central to the tradition of scholarship that focuses on desire as key to Hegel and his theory of negation.9 Setting himself apart from the traditional view, however, Warminski claims that “life” is not determinately negated in consciousness; rather, he argues, there is a disjunction between life as a phenomenon that consciousness cannot supersede and the unity that consciousness grasps when it comprehends life as a genus (Gattung). For Warminski, then, life entails a “disjunctive reading” in which the “we,” or the Hegelian reader, witnesses or relates simultaneously to knowledge of two extremities that are not to be reconciled. As finite, life multiplies itself in the procreation of individuals, while, as infinite, life is living consciousness grasping itself. Hegel thus notes the failure of finite life to produce its own self-negation, or a sign for itself. Finite life just produces more individuals of the species—it does not produce the species as such. Following Warminski (“HM,” 183), the key text on this issue is the Phenomenology of Spirit, 172: Life—in the result of its dialectic, that is, genus [Gattung]—points to or indicates or beckons toward another than it (life) is, namely, consciousness , for which it (life) can be as this unity, or genus. For Hegel, life is substance and the simplicity of Spirit, which does not grasp itself: life does what is right or...

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