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18 2 Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of Forces: Deleuze’s Critique of Hegel Nathan Widder I would like in this chapter to examine the relationship Deleuze establishes with Hegel with a view to avoiding the false alternative often bandied between Deleuze’s critics and defenders: that either Deleuze is a naive and ill-informed reader whose polemic against his rival misunderstands how dialectical his own thinking is, or that Hegel is unimportant to Deleuze’s thought and thus any misreading of Hegel is irrelevant. The textual evidence to support both sides of this exchange is easy enough to find. Deleuze, for example, states that what he “most detested” in his education in the history of philosophy “was Hegelianism and dialectics.”1 And he famously declares in his seminal work on Nietzsche that “there is no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy . . . forms an absolute antidialectics and sets out to expose all the mystifications that find a final refuge in the dialectic,”2 which presumably means that Deleuze sees no possible compromise between his own thought and Hegel’s. Without dismissing these harsh statements, and while acknowledging that Deleuze’s general approach to Hegel is quite an exception to his creative (if not always faithful) readings of both friendly and rival figures in the history of philosophy, I nevertheless maintain that there is a real sophistication to Deleuze’s critique of dialectics , and a subtle and complex relation that is established underneath his language of blunt opposition. To advance this view, I will examine the discussions of force, consciousness , self-consciousness, and desire in the early chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit,3 locating the moments where Hegel’s dialectic falters in such a way that Deleuze can provide new formulations of these terms. I will then examine these new formulations as they appear first in the theory of forces presented in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and then in the account of desire found in the appendices of The Logic of Sense. In engag- 19 N E G A T I O N , D I S J U N C T I O N , A N D A N E W T H E O R Y O F F O R C E S ing the Phenomenology in this way, it is less important to me whether Deleuze actually had the same critical reading in mind when launching his attacks on Hegel than whether such a reading and critique can make sense of Deleuze’s moves in a way that provides a more complex and sophisticated portrayal of the Hegel-Deleuze relation. What I hope to make clear is that Deleuze’s position against Hegel, including his declaration of irreconcilability, can be redeemed through a rigorous and critical reading of Hegel, even if Deleuze did not provide this himself. I believe that what emerges from this enterprise is a Deleuze who neither neglects Hegel nor reads him poorly, but who rather rivals and completes Hegel’s thought, much like Nietzsche, for Deleuze, rivals and completes Kant.4 Readers familiar with Deleuze’s wider corpus know of his indebtedness to a particular reading of Hegel and a line of critique that emerges from it. In his 1954 review of Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence,5 Deleuze aligns Hegel’s project with what will become the general thrust of his own, holding the lesson of Hyppolite’s Hegel to be: “Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only an ontology of sense.”6 This notion of sense provides the general terrain on which Deleuze’s relation to Hegel must first be approached.7 Hyppolite’s text challenges the humanist or anthropomorphic readings of Hegel that, à la Kojève,8 take human collective spirit to be the Absolute Subject.9 To dispute this view, Hyppolite concentrates on the second of two appearances of the Absolute in the Phenomenology, where, in the closing pages, phenomenology transitions into logic. The nature of this transition demonstrates that human self-consciousness and history are merely focal points where an Absolute beyond humanity is actualized concretely, these focal points, in turn, negating themselves and returning to this Absolute. In this way, the Absolute is immanent to the empirical and human even while remaining different from them, allowing Hyppolite to argue that it provides the sense and direction for human being and history without becoming an essence standing above or behind them. Thus...

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