Re: AUT: RE: CLR James, Hegel, Deleuze etc.

["Chris Hurl" <munkah@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Lowe for your thoughtful comments.  I find it quite useful to get down to the bare bones and work from there.

Reading your comments, I find myself questioning the taken for granted opposition between Hegel, the statist, and Deleuze and Guattari, the anti-statists. Certainly your comments have been useful in opening a more genuine dialogue between them.

First off, I must clarify that when I was stating that Deleuze and Guattari were being "undialectical", I was quite aware of the absurdity of this statement.  It was a tongue-in-cheek reflection on my own statement.  And yet I was trying to point at what Harald describes in "turning it into a closed system and so to speak arresting the dialectical movement".  While it is not without its problems, I think Hegel's State is often oversimplified and used to discredit him in his entirety.  The move to the State as a closed universal system is not consistent with the open-ended process of dialectics.

Now Lowe, you point out what seems to be a key difference between Hegel and D&G.  While Hegel apparently elevates the abstract to the Universal, D&G refuse to take this step and consequently adopt a much more materialist philosophy.  You say:

"Their [D&G's] only dispute is when this abstraction is raised to the point of universals".

I think it is a mistake to presume that Hegel celebrates abstraction as universality.  For Hegel, this move is deeply problematic.  For instance, in in conception of the Notion, Hegel argues,

"Life, Spirit, God, and also the pure Notion cannot therefore be apprehended by abstraction, because it keeps off from its products Individuality, the principle of singularity and personality, and thus reaches nothing but universalities lacking both life and spirit, colour and content".

For Hegel, the move towards dialectical reason necessarily incorporates the concrete.

That being said, I also agree with Harald when he problematizes the abstract nature of this discussion, the lack of a historical perspective.  While I admire the push by Hegel, as well as D&G towards a way of thinking that "moves", I find their abstract expression debilitating and even, at times, counterproductive.  The value of Marxism, I think, is in situating movement through historical analysis, analysis which brings together both the universal and the particular in the singular and concrete in an open-ended fashion.

--chris




>From: Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau@xxxxxxxxx>

>Reply-To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>Subject: Re: AUT: RE: CLR James, Hegel, Deleuze etc.

>Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:49:52 +0100

>

>"Deleuze saw him as the theorist of the State in a very undialectical

>fashion, failing to recognize how Hegel was simultaneously pointing to

>a universal State, a State which became everything while at the same

>time becoming nothing."

>

>Well if the dialectic is methodologically something that Deleuze calls

>into question then it woudn't make much sense to read the State

>dialectically. And whatever happens to the State in Hegels thought is

>not their concern. They in Mille Plateau find and want to emphasize

>what it means to think outside the State. This is neither a Hegelian

>nor a Marxian problematic. Its one they develop very obliquely from a

>Nietzschian insight into "images of thought", and how the State

>structures a Statist thinking.  Against the State then they propose a

>model of exteriority based upon a thinking adequate to the exteriority

>of war to the State, or more precisely a war-machine. So regardless of

>what happens to the State the very means of the State is what they're

>calling into question. I'm oversimplifying heavily, but this is the

>gist.

>

>"Now it seems Hegel is of use particularly in understanding the

>relationship between the abstract and the concrete, the universal and

>the particular terms that cannot be isolated from one another but also

>cannot be completely melded together.  They bleed into one another in

>dialectical fashion.  Yet there is a disjuncture presumed, a

>disjuncture that I don't think Deleuze and Guattari really get at."

>

>Yet they do. Since you're speaking of D&G I won't even go into D's

>appreciation of Hegel in D&R. But even in D&G's final work What is

>Philosophy they speak in the opening pages about what Hegel so

>"powerfully" does in his handling of the problematics of abstraction.

>Their only dispute is when this abstraction is raised to the point of

>universals. Its again a problem (for them) with what they want from

>their materialism. They say once one has ones abstraction from

>perception that it is not sufficient to end there but that they feel

>more methodologically comfortable not raising universals but extending

>perception. The relation between wholes and particulars is not

>sacrificed, rather its simply not closed off in thought. It remains in

>the brain's being in the world. In Mille Plateau, in Deleuze books on

>Cinema and in portions of What is Philosophy they explain more of what

>this means (and much farther than Bergson does, even though its his

>work which they're developing upon vis-a-vis this issue at least).

>

>Lowe

>

>

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