An Obscured Genesis: Deleuze From the Dialectic to the Problematic Daniel Weizman May 2020 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Abstract This thesis suggests that Deleuze’s early philosophy, culminating in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, unfolds as a polemic between two structural positions – the problematic and the dialectic. This polemic sheds light on “political” aspects in Deleuze’s work as a student of authors such as Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, Martial Guéroult and Ferdinand Alquié, in a period in which he places critical weight on the attempt to escape the constraining influence of their positions. Reading Bergson, Nietzsche, Hume, Kant and Hegel through his teachers, Deleuze seeks to expunge from his thought every trace of their mediation, so as to be able to pose new problems for philosophy. To this end Deleuze puts forward the notion of philosophy as being essentially problematic, irreducible to empiricist, transcendentalist or dialectic dispositions and delineated by unique problems. This notion is established as a calculated move marked by an anti-Hegelian rhetoric, Hegel being the epitome of “old” metaphysical problems that must be overcome. The introduction of Deleuze’s critique of his teachers, who could be considered somewhat marginalised authors from the more recent history of French philosophy, and the establishment of the problematic-dialectic dyad as fundamental to Deleuze’s development as a philosopher, hopes to bring out critical aspects of his work that remain strategically buried in the text. Chapter one introduces Deleuze’s triangulation of Hyppolite-Guéroult-Alquié starting from his confrontation with Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and continuing to his early efforts to put forward a satisfying “middle ground” with respect to these authors’ disparate positions, from which emerges a unique preoccupation with problems that will persist in Deleuze’s work throughout the 1950s and 60s. Chapter two examines the extent to which Nietzsche and Philosophy is a critical response to Hyppolite’s renowned interpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, Genesis and Structure, a response which amounts to Deleuze’s interpretation of eternal recurrence as an anti- Hegelian mode of problematization, and which would later be transformed into the Deleuzian project of the overturning of Platonism. Chapter three is a reading of Empiricism and Subjectivity as an anti-Hegelian polemic profoundly inspired by Wahl’s vision of empiricism as a problematic and problematizing theory that responds to Hegel’s critique of “self-certainty” and of empiricism in general. Chapter four considers Deleuze’s Kantianism a strategic endeavour to shift the tectonics of philosophical rigor from a preoccupation with the Absolute as the ultimate ground for knowledge, to a revival of the problematic Idea as that which incites experimentation with the “thickness” of sensibility demolished in the first moment of the Hegelian dialectic, a shift whose successfulness is placed in question. Acknowledgements My first acknowledgements are to my supervisors, Professor Éric Alliez and Professor Peter Hallward, for their invaluable guidance and insights. Particularly, I have to thank Éric for demanding from me more than I could have ever done so myself, and for pushing the scope of my work to completely new territories I would not have otherwise discovered. I would also like to thank Kingston University for funding this project, and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), for providing me with a pedagogical environment that was both supportive and critical, allowing me to carry my work forward. I thank Daniel Nemenyi and Noa Levin for their support throughout these past four years, Iain Campbell for editing and for his generous feedback, and Ori Gilad and Ohad Zehavi, two extraordinary Deleuzians whose encouragement and advice helped me to both ignite and complete this project. I dedicate this dissertation to my partner Aya Yariv Gordon, whom I thank for her patience and her wisdom, and for enduring the trials and tribulations of a PhD, to my mother Hani Weizman, my brother Itamar Weizman, my mother in-law Rachel Yariv, and to my daughter Mika Gordon Weizman, who joined us at the finish line. Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 1. Breaking ground: a problematic vision of ontology The question of sense: Deleuze contra Hyppolite . 12 A problematic triangulation: Guéroult and Alquié (and Hyppolite) . 25 Bergson: critique of problems . 34 Bachelard and the “problematic” . 51 Conclusion . 62 2. The camel, the lion and the child: Nietzsche as adjudicator of problems Introduction . 63 The revaluation of problems: Nietzsche contra Hegel . 65 Eternal recurrence as a problematic synthesis . 81 Reaching the pure state: Plato and the problem of claimants . 89 The overturning of Platonism: the escape to non-being . 99 Conclusion . 108 3. The problem of “subjectivity” in Hume Introduction . 110 “Why would the Empiricist say that?”: subjectivity as an “empiricist” problem 112 Existential and problematic empiricism: the delirium of the mind . 129 “Culture is a false experience, but it is also a true experiment” . 142 The problem and the problematic from Hume to Kant . 150 Conclusion . 155 4. Kant and the “problems of reason” Introduction . 157 A problematic alignment of Kantian critique . 159 Escaping the grasp of the Concept: the problematic Idea . 174 The I is a problem . 188 False problems and their discontents . 204 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 220 Introduction “The philosophical learning of an author is not assessed by numbers of quotations, nor by the always fanciful and conjectural check lists of libraries, but by the apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself”.1 This quote, taken from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, while referring to the claim that Nietzsche’s anti-Hegelianism was not backed with a rigorous scholarship of Hegel, might indicate something with respect to Deleuze himself: that while the relationship he maintained with his philosophical allies was straightforward and transparent, the one he kept with his self-proclaimed enemy, Hegel, points to the more discreet yet significant directions to which he carried his work. Deleuze’s hostility towards Hegelianism is well-known, and has been depicted either by examining the extent to which his reading is misinformed, deliberately or recklessly,2 or by attempting to bridge between the two authors’ fierce disparity (a third option has often been simply endorsing Deleuze’s position).3 But these might be the wrong approaches with respect to Hegel’s unique position in Deleuze’s thought, considering the accusations that, like Nietzsche, Deleuze “did not know his Hegel … [i]n the sense that one does not know one’s opponent well”.4 On the other hand, if we would adopt the same approach Deleuze does concerning Nietzsche, we risk misunderstanding his entire work if “we do not see ‘against whom’ its principle concepts are directed”.5 1 NP 168. 2 Catherine Malabou, “The Eternal Return and the Phantom of Difference,” Parrhesia 10 (2010): 21- 29; Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1986), 1-23. 3 Karen Houle and Jim Vernon, eds., Hegel and Deleuze: Together Again for the First Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013); Henry Somers-Hall, Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012). 4 NP 8. 5 Ibid., 162. 1 But in order to see “against whom” Deleuze positions himself, it might be more productive to first distance ourselves from the “battleground” itself, changing both orientation and scope, as the critical assaults on Hegel that cut through Deleuze’s work give the impression of an unrestrained polemic lacking any systematicity, and therefore appear to be opposed to Deleuze’s most basic philosophical impulses. However, an earlier text reveals a more scrupulous analysis of Hegel. It is through his review of his former teacher Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence that one can raise the stakes for a systematic unfolding of the anti-Hegelian thread which runs through Deleuze’s work in the 1950s and ’60s, by focusing on a single concept that upholds its own sense of mystery in Deleuze’s oeuvre: the problem. Throughout this thesis I intend to bind together two seemingly unrelated issues in Deleuze’s philosophy: namely the problematic and the dialectic as two essential structural positions with no possibility of compromise between them, but whose very positioning as such indicates the critical force that drives the Deleuzian machine of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. Deleuze’s meditations on the idea of “problems” as rigorous and ideal structures that reach far beyond the limitations of “solutions” or of human knowledge in general take up a distinctive place in his early work: while Deleuze himself may not be recognized as a purely “problematic” thinker, but rather an “affirmative” one, given the primacy of this term throughout his work (hence his more expressed affinity with Spinoza and Nietzsche), it is nonetheless absolutely essential for him to demonstrate how this conception of problems belongs to philosophy and to thought by right. This conception of problems is depicted by Deleuze as being constantly suppressed under the dogmatism of certain metaphysics and the banalities of the image of thought, which subordinates problems to a form of solvability, insofar as this form allocates problems with sense and efficacy, a predisposition that goes back to philosophers such as Aristotle and whose avatars can still be found in contemporary philosophy. 2 Deleuze’s extensive use of terms such as “problem”, “problematic” and “problematization” is at times somewhat obscure, perhaps because, as we will see, the full scope of their meaning is realized as they are put to use rather than through theoretical refinement.