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TWO DIFFERENCE AND IDENTITY INTRODUCTION In the last chapter we explored the extent to which Deleuze tries to overcome what he considers to be the limitations of the Kantian approach to philosophy. Kant’s approach essentially required predication to take place through a third term, the understanding, that provides a common ground upon which the autonomous elements of the judgment can take a common form. In highlighting Deleuze’s criticisms of the Kantian model, we saw how these very limitations provide a direct path to the central axioms of his philosophy. It also allowed us to see that Deleuze can be situated firmly in the post-Kantian tradition. We concluded with the recognition that the success of Deleuze’s deduction was limited, in that Sartre’s ‘decisive’ new concept of the transcendental field itself presupposed a structure analogous to that employed by Kant. In this chapter, we will concern ourselves with the more general problem of representation by looking at the logics of Aristotle and Russell. We saw how Kant was unable to go beyond an account of the transcendental as formally conditioning the empirical. By analyzing the logics of Aristotle and Russell, we will extend this result by looking at the limitations of representation more generally. After having done so, we will sketch the general approaches of both Hegel and Deleuze to the problems thrown up by the representational approach to philosophy. The key issues we will address are the problems of transition and of univocity. At issue for Deleuze are two interrelated questions. First, there is the question of the position of the concept of difference itself within the tradition . For Deleuze, difference itself has always been understood by thinkers as a difference between concepts. As we shall see, this understanding of difference is particularly clear in the case of Aristotle. This has prevented the formulation of a concept of difference itself, as difference has always been subordinated to identity: “difference must leave its cave and cease to 41 42 HEGEL, DELEUZE, AND THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION be a monster” (DR, 29). Second, there is the more general problem of the homonymy of being. As Heidegger argues, the question of the sense of being is covered over by the metaphysical tradition from Aristotle, as “ ‘being’ is used in many ways.”1 Thus the unity of phenomena is lost within Aristotle’s analysis. We will begin from the analysis of being in terms of species and genera put forward by Aristotle, as it is here that the problem of the univocity of being is first discovered in the form of the problematic of homonymy, synonymy, and paronymy. These questions are related by the fact that for Deleuze, it is an illegitimate concept of difference that is at play in the work of Aristotle and his successors. This concept effectively prevents an understanding of several phenomena, from temporality to unity (there can be no determinate concept of being for Aristotle). These points of silence Deleuze will call the catastrophes of representational thought—the points where difference shows through in spite of the limitations placed on it by identity. After dealing with Deleuze’s analysis and criticisms of the form of difference at play in Aristotle, we will move through Porphyry the Phoenician ’s formalized Aristotelianism to the problem of analogy in Aquinas. At this stage a problem presents itself, in that the systems of Aristotle and Aquinas both have no clear separation between metaphysics and logic (the problem of analogy in Aquinas, for instance, comes to light in an attempt to differentiate the being of God and man; in Aristotle, the problem of definition is tied to his theory of essences). A final analysis of the problem of univocity will therefore be made, this time in terms of the calculus of the Principia Mathematica. As modern symbolic logic attempts to provide a purely formal description of deduction, it can be seen as providing the pure schematic of representational thought. We will see that this purely formal description cannot, however, avoid a fall into an equivocal concept of being. Formal logic, therefore, and those schools of philosophy that define themselves in terms of the rigor of formal deduction that it provides, are themselves fundamentally tied to a metaphysical interpretation of being from which they cannot escape, since this interpretation is not even an axiom of the system but, and prior to this, a function of the very laws through which the axioms themselves are interpreted. This analysis will center on Russell...

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