Every story needs a villain

Joseph Kugelmass Says: May 5th, 2007 at 1:19 am Ironically, if there is a Derridean trace nestled in the Deleuzian system, it is probably in the concept of the “possible” rather than anywhere else. Deleuze’s writing is astonishingly free from absence or lack, unless one were to unsympathetically read such things into his plenitude and states of differentiation. That puts him at odds with Derrida.

Still, since the possible has to remain an entirely “open” category, and cannot be verbalized or cognized at all without passing over into virtuality, it does resemble the originary trace: it is the condition of possibility for the virtual, but it is also erased by what it engenders, and is displaced to “elsewhere.”

I’m curious about the relationship between determination/negation here, which divides and reorganizes the existent real by introducing discontinuities, and creation pure and simple, which makes somewhere where nothing was before. Another way of putting this is to ask by what medium the virtual passes into an actual; one assumes that the actual must have some kind of materiality if it is to surpass the subject towards any sort of shared experience. How does Deleuze deal with Hegel’s theories of the Master/Slave dialectic, and how does he deal with Hegel’s theories about determinate being?

Anthony Paul Smith Says: May 5th, 2007 at 2:39 am ‘Still, since the possible has to remain an entirely “open” category, and cannot be verbalized or cognized at all without passing over into virtuality, it does resemble the originary trace: it is the condition of possibility for the virtual, but it is also erased by what it engenders, and is displaced to “elsewhere.”’

I don’t know if this is quite what the possible is, at least not in his book on Bergson. Granted, this particular essay is limited because, as I say in the first paragraph, I’m looking at the way he writes through other figures first. My MA will deal with Difference and Repetition where he starts to write more explicitly in his own voice. Though, I think it is important to take him at his word with regard to his works on other philosophers. These are his kind of co-creations.

Anyway, the possible, doesn’t seem to be an open category at all. If anything the concept of the possible produces the mistake of thinking that the Whole is “given”. There is a Whole but only a virtual Whole - so an ideal Whole, real but not actual, ideal without being abstract. This is the critique of the negative (which, incidentally, Merleau-Ponty also uses in his criticisms of Husserl and, to a greater degree, Sartre), because the Whole as possible is already given, determined, and the only way anything can become real and actual is by limiting the possible.

Now I think, and this might be a contentious reading, that dividing up and reorganizing the existent real, or more accurately the virtual Whole, is a meontic operation. It’s not replacing something for nothing, but there is no nothing as such. When you insert the nothing into Deleuze’s philosophy, and at points when he does, I think it becomes rather incoherent in this way. I don’t know that I understand the question of ‘the medium’. The virtual and the actual are two parts of the real, so reality itself is the medium. Of course it is material, but it is also memory, it is also dark matter, dark energy, food webs, or all sorts of other things that challenge our understanding of what matter actually means.

I don’t know enough or have enough interest to know much about Deleuze’s relationship with him. He does have criticisms in his Nietzsche book, but they are Nietzsche’s. There is an interview with him in the Desert Islands text where he says in response to a question about why he hates Hegel so much, “Every story needs a villain.” So, I’ve always just taken Hegel to be a personae for Deleuze to work against, rather than a figure he is producing a study thereof. One other tangential remark on this, in Anti-Oedipus they make the claim that there is no longer any human master, only two orders of slaves. Ask Sinthome, that guy gets into this part of Deleuze studies and he seems to know what the hell he is talking about with it too.