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Deleuze and Derrida DELEUZE AND DERRIDA DIFFERENCE AND THE POWER OF THE NEGATIVE Spinoza, Bergson, Lyotard, Hume, Leibniz, Foucault, Freud, Plato, Ar- istotle, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levi- nas, Irigaray, virtual/actual, dif- férance, simulacrum, (+/-), dy/dx VERNON W. CISNEY Deleuze and Derrida Difference and the Power of the Negative VERNON W. CISNEY Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Vernon W. Cisney, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9622 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9623 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0470 9 (epub) The right of Vernon W. Cisney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations ix Part I: Introduction 1 The Question 3 2 Grounding the Question 16 Part II: The Tremendous Power of the Negative 3 The Two Pillars of Deconstruction 69 4 Deleuze and Hegelian Difference 93 5 The Tremendous Power of the Negative 111 Part III: Thinking Difference Itself 6 Traces and Ashes 131 7 Deleuze, Plato’s Reversal, and Eternal Return 164 8 Derrida, Deleuze, and Difference 199 Part IV: Implications and Conclusions 9 Deconstruction vs. Constructivism 211 10 Conclusion(s) 249 Bibliography 283 Index 296 abbreviations | ix Abbreviations Unless otherwise noted, in-text citations refer to English translations listed here. Works by Gilles Deleuze B Bergsonism CC Essays Critical and Clinical DI Desert Islands and Other Texts DR Difference and Repetition EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza LS The Logic of Sense N Negotiations 1972‒1990 NP Nietzsche and Philosophy SPP Spinoza: Practical Philosophy TRM Two Regimes of Madness Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari AO Anti-Oedipus ATP A Thousand Plateaus WP What is Philosophy? x | abbreviations Work by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet Dialogues Dialogues II Works by Jacques Derrida AL Acts of Literature C Cinders D Dissemination FK ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ FL ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’ G Glas LI Limited Inc. MP Margins of Philosophy OG Of Grammatology P Positions PIA Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II Points Points . Interviews, 1974‒1994 SNS Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles VP Voice and Phenomenon WD Writing and Difference WM The Work of Mourning Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel EL Logic GL Science of Logic PH Phenomenology of Spirit Works by Friedrich Nietzsche BGE Beyond Good and Evil BT The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music EH Ecce Homo FW The Gay Science GM On the Genealogy of Morality TI Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer abbreviations | xi WTP The Will to Power Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None Works by Edmund Husserl CES The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology CM Cartesian Meditations IPP Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book LU Logical Investigations, Volume I: Prolegomena to Pure PCT On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893‒1917) Other Works Cited GS Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ID Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference LE Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence OBT Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track xii | abbreviations ‘So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away ‒ and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man. I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.’ Jorge Luis Borges abbreviations | 1 Part I Introduction the question | 3 Chapter 1 The Question If one were to crystallise twentieth-century continental philosophy into a single problem, it would be the ‘problem of difference’. The demand to think a concept of difference and differences that is not subordinate to a primary conception of identity, but would be constitutive of those given identities, is evident in Heidegger’s ‘ontico-ontological difference’ and in his later ‘dif-ferenz’, Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic notion of ‘flesh’, Levinas’s ‘face of the other’, Foucault’s ‘thought of the outside’, Irigaray’s ‘sexual difference’, Butler’s ‘gender performativity’, and Lyotard’s ‘differ- end’. These point to the ubiquitous sense in twentieth-century continental thought that, across all domains – ontological, ethical, social, political, and so on – our efforts to think the nature of things will always be short- circuited by the same self-enclosed, representational categories by which we attempt to think them in the first place. When confined to only what things have in common, thought cannot get at the heart of what makes them singular, what John Duns Scotus called ‘haecceity’, or the ‘thisness’ of a thing. To truly think the nature of the thing, thought must reach to the constitutive conditions of those identities, and to the differences and relations between those identities. The ‘problem of difference’ is that difference and relation necessar- ily elude the stasis of representational thought, which traditionally seeks to fix borders around conceptual content, thereby halting the passages between various concepts. In order to truly think difference, then, it must be conceptualised on its own terms, constrained neither by the logic of identity, nor, consequently, by the requirements of a standard philo- sophical concept. It must not be thought as a merely empirical relation between given things, nor should it be conceived in the Hegelian manner as a diametrically opposed contradiction which, by virtue of its bipolar 4 | deleuze and derrida and reciprocal nature, would ultimately unite dialectically into a higher, homeostatic identity. The ‘philosophy of difference’ is the designation for the philosophical response to this problem. Standing out in this tradition are Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, who address the problem of difference directly, formulating their own explicit conceptions, respectively ‘difference in itself’ and ‘différance’. While other philosophers are frequently occupied with questions of dif- ference in specific contexts (ethical, epistemic, subjective, sexual, etc.), Deleuze and Derrida grapple with difference ‘itself’. Hence, we can say, in a sense that I shall have to define and defend in what follows, that their conceptions of difference operate at the level of the ontological. Theirs are rigorous engagements with questions of being and time, identity, force, and meaning, across the history of Western metaphysics – spanning from Heraclitus and Parmenides to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger – and culminating in original and highly unique conceptions of difference constructed to engender the thinking of the impossible: the conditions of identity and thought themselves. It is to Derrida and Deleuze that Vincent Descombes refers when he speaks of the ‘remarkable point of modern metaphysics which all preceding discourse had indicated like a flickering compass’, calling the philosophy of difference the ‘crux’ of contemporary French philosophy.1 The aim of the present book is to articulate the fun- damental distinction between the philosophical conceptions of difference as formulated in the works of Derrida and Deleuze. Given their shared desire to formulate non-dialectical, non-Hegelian conceptions of difference, we might, with some justification, suspect that Deleuze and Derrida have the same or very similar conceptions of difference. In what little textual dialogue occurs between Derrida and Deleuze, it seems as though they themselves would agree with this assess- ment. While I cannot agree entirely with Jeffrey Nealon’s conviction that ‘Deleuze and Derrida so scrupulously avoided writing about each other’s work’,2 it is certainly the case that they address each other only rarely; and almost always in laudatory ways. On the event of Deleuze’s death, Derrida famously cited the ‘experience of a closeness or of a nearly total affinity’ with Deleuze with respect to the thesis ‘concerning an irreducible differ- ence in opposition to dialectical opposition’, later adding that, ‘one day, I would like to try to provide an account of such an agreement in regard to philosophic “content. .” ’.3 On occasions when they point to differences between them at all, the differences are typically brushed aside as merely stylistic or methodological. Derrida cites disparities in ‘what I would call – lacking any better term – the “gesture,” the “strategy,” the “manner” of writing, of speaking, of reading perhaps’.4 Deleuze also cites Derrida in an affirming way on a number of occasions, and appears to emphasise the question | 5 their differences as strictly methodological: ‘As for the method of textual deconstruction, I know what it is, and I admire it, but it has nothing to do with my own method.’5 Given these expressed affinities, and given their obvious similarities in formulating productive, constitutive concepts of difference, one might suspect that I am attempting to forge distinctions where there are none. On the contrary, I shall demonstrate that these methodological differ- ences are rooted in deeper conceptual tensions between the two thinkers, and precisely at the point on which they may seem most completely to converge ‒ their conceptions of difference. While this claim will have to be defended in what follows, there is sufficient evidence, even at the surface level of their comments, to warrant the investigation.
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