THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM

Volume XXXIII, No. 2, Summer 2002

DELEUZE, HEGEL AND THE TRANSFORMATION

OF SUBJECTIVITY
1

SIMON LUMSDEN

In The Age of the World Picture, Heidegger argues that the emergence of the
modern subject conflates Man and subject in a manner that is absent in premodern philosophy, which afforded no special relationship of Man to the notion
of the subject. But with Descartes, Man becomes that being upon which all that
is, is grounded as regards the manner of its being and its truth. Man becomes the
relational center of that which is as such.2 This shift emerges only because of a
wholesale shift in ontology. This is initiated through a change in the way in which
the world is represented. The mark of the modern representation is that what is
taken to be in being is in being only to the extent that it is set up by man, who
represents and sets forth.3 Heidegger contrasts this modern approach with the
Greek conception for whom, rather than the thought of man being the primary
determination of being, being is taken as presencing itself to man.
Deleuze too tries to shift Man from his central place as the determiner of
all meaning. In his case, the infinite edifice of conceptuality and representation constructed by the philosophical tradition may well multiply figures and
moments and organize these into circles endowed with self-movement, but
these circles no less turn around a single center, the great circle of consciousness (Difference and Repetition 68/94).4 Usurping Man from this radial point
1

3
4

The research project of which this paper is a part was funded by an Australian Research Council
post-doctoral research fellowship. I am indebted to Daniel W. Smith for his comments on an earlier
draft.
From The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977): p. 128.
Ibid., The Age of the World Picture, p. 130.
Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Diffrence et Rptition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), hereafter cited as DR. French
page numbers follow page numbers from the English translation.

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does, as with Heidegger, involve re-directing ontology from Man to being, but
the univocal being to which Deleuze refers is a transcendental difference. The
subject is shifted by placing the source of concept creation not in the subject but
in the empirical, which he understands as the domain of intensities and individuations that operate outside of the universalizing patterns of representational
thinking.
Poststructuralism has self-consciously positioned itself in opposition to the
metaphysics of subjectivity that runs from Descartes to Hegel. The idealist infatuation with self-consciousness is just an extension of the Cartesian metaphysical
subject. Hegel is presented as the culmination of this philosophy of the subject,
epitomized in his famous assertion that substance is essentially subject.5
Deleuze in particular has been vitriolic in his critique of idealist subjectivity.6
However, for at least the last 25 years, the metaphysical view of the Hegelian
subject which was taken as the culmination of the European tradition beginning
with Descartes has, in the most influential Hegel scholarship,7 come to be understood as something of a fiction, a fiction begun by Heidegger and continued by
much of the post-1968 French philosophical tradition.
The particular concern of this paper is with the notion of individuation on
which Deleuze bases his alternate consideration of subjectivity. Whereas the fundamental limitation of thought for Hegel is that it cannot think the singular as
such, in Deleuzes case, the transcendental landscape can be reconstructed by
extricating the singular from any dialectical and negative formulation of itthis,
at least in part, underwrites the notion of individuation and the conception of subjectivity that proceeds from it. What I want to argue here, however, is that both
Deleuze and Hegel proceed from very different assumptions about the nature
of thinking and conceptuality to nevertheless posit models of subjectivity which
are both anti-reflective, self-transcending, and de-centered. The way Hegel rec-

Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Volume 9 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. by H-F. Wessels and H. Clairmont (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988),
hereafter cited as PhG. German page numbers follow paragraph numbers from the English translation, PhG 25/18.
Dominique Janicaud and Jean-Luc Marion see Heidegger as falling into this camp as well; see
their respective essays The Final Appeal of the Subject and The Question of the Subject in
Heideggers Being and Time in Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. by Simon Critchley and Peter
Dews (Albany: SUNY, 1996).
See, for example, Robert Pippin, Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self Consciousness (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Terry Pinkard Hegels Phenomenology: The
Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stephen Houlgate, Freedom,
Truth and History (London: Routledge, 1991); and Paul Redding, Hegels Hermeneutics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1996).

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onciles self-consciousness and consciousness in the end of the Phenomenology

of Spirit challenges the very idea that the subjectivity at issue in Hegel is one
which has anything like an absolutely certain self-knowledge. Hegel in particular tries to collapse any representation of the subject as a unified and transparent
self-relation.
INDIVIDUATION, RECOGNITION, AND REPRESENTATION
One could describe the differing pathways Hegel and Deleuze take with regard
to thoughts on selfhood, subjectivity, and self-consciousness with reference to
the opening few paragraphs of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Sense-Certainty
attempts to think a singular object in its immediacy, in the first instance as a
variety of indexicals, but this strategy fails to think the object of experience as
immediate. The immediate experience of an object is examined: we envisage an
immediate object before us, but once we utter something about the object even
as minimal as This, we utter the universal. It is, Hegel says, just not possible
for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean (PhG
97/72). Like Deleuze, Hegel thinks that what characterizes the sensible is its
singularity [Einzelnheit]. In Hegels case, however, this singularity as thought
is mediated by universals: a sensuous object that I alone mean is only mine, it
belongs to me as this particular individual. But if language expresses only what
is universal, then I cannot say what I only mean.8 It is a limitation of language
that it can only express the universal. Hegel, in asserting the necessarily mediated character of language, is not dismissing the immediate experience of sensecertainty. What he is dismissing is the idea that there is a given that experience
could deliver untainted in our representations of it.
The path the natural consciousness travels down from sense-certainty to
absolute knowing Hegel described as the way of despair. In the initial movement in which the natural consciousness moves from this rich field of the sensuous along its pathway of knowing, the natural consciousness is plagued by a loss
of unity that it cannot recover and by an immediate object that it cannot describe.
This process unfolds over the course of the Phenomenology, and nowhere in the
text is the singularity of an immediate object ever described in a manner that
could be said to provide a concept for what that singularity could bemoreover,
this is not something Hegel is interested in doing, because the logic of mediation
prohibits asserting the difference of the object in any but conceptually mediated
terms. Consciousness has to try to make itself at home in the world as thought
8

G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences. Trans. by T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991):
20R.

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and as known. The problem posed in the knowledge claim of sense-certainty is

that our meaning in the instance of experience is not the universalthis, says
Hegel, is what is left over (PhG 99/72).
It is precisely these leftovers with which Deleuze is concerned. It is not just
our inability to think the singular object outside of systems of mediation that is
lost in Hegels dialectical conceptual development, but, according to Deleuze, the
empirical is also jettisoned and with it any genuine notion of difference. In order
to reassert empirical difference as the condition of conceptual difference, Deleuze
must demonstrate the corrupt character of dialectical and representational thinking. However, before examining the way he presents this, I want to return to the
way in which Deleuze distinguishes his own beginning of philosophy from the
Hegelian beginning.
Deleuze, in both Difference and Repetition and Nietzsche and Philosophy,9
explicitly positions his own consideration of the problem of beginning philosophy against the discussion of sense certainty and indexical reference that begins
Hegels Phenomenology. He argues that the opening of the Phenomenology sets
the scene for the character of Hegelian dialectic and of all the concepts that are
formed through its development. In the opening dialectical development of the
Phenomenology:
Hegel substitutes the abstract relation of the particular to the concept in general for the true relation of the singular and the universal in the Idea. . . . Hegel betrays and distorts the immediate in
order to ground his dialectic in that incomprehension, and to introduce mediation in a movement
which is no more than that of his own thought and its generalities.10 (DR 10/189)

In contrast, Deleuze wants to think the immediate and the singular in a manner
that does not dialectically dissolve the singular into universality. In Difference
and Repetition and Nietzsche and Philosophy, he is concerned to invalidate the
opening movement that propels Hegels dialectic in the Phenomenology. He can
contest this beginning because he thinks one can create a concept for a difference
that is not mediatedone can create concepts for what he terms the individual
[Lindividu].
In the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze begins with one of
the traditional problems of philosophy since Aristotle: where to begin philosophy
(a question that reaches its zenith in German Idealism). This chapter contests

10

Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983); hereafter cited as NP.
This claim is repeated in NP p. 4. See Bruce Baugh, Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuzes
Response to Hegel in Man and World 25 (1992): 13348.

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Hegels attempt to think the beginning of philosophy. Deleuze argues that for all
Hegels dissatisfaction with Descartes Cogito, his own attempt to present a presuppositionless beginning itself presupposes the sensible, concrete, empirical
being (DR 129/169). Hegels discussion of the this, here and now, which
attempts to demonstrate the inadequacy of these indexical referents to explain the
empirical, does presuppose, Deleuze argues, the empirical this, here and now
which is not able to be represented. In this sense, the beginning of the Phenomenology presupposes an empirical reality that is intended to correspond or not
correspond to the knowledge claims of sense-certainty, and this empirical reality
must accordingly be prior to the epistemic claim. In effect, Deleuze argues, what
Sense-Certainty fails to appreciate is that the empirical is the condition for the
conceptual. The empirical object is unable to be contained by a single identity or
a conceptit is a singular object with a multiplicity of senses. This multiplicity
is indefinite, and the interpretation of the object is open.
Deleuze concludes from what he takes as the empirical presuppositions of
Hegels beginning that there is no proper beginning for philosophy. Moreover, he
argues that this beginning also presupposes a natural capacity for thinking: that
thought can seek truth or equates with truth. This pretense of presuppositionlessness rests on an image of thought that remains unexamined, namely: thought
has an affinity with the true (DR 131/172). This image or subjective presupposition guides the entire philosophical endeavor. Following Nietzsche, he
describes this philosophical endeavor as built on a morality of good will, as only
a morality can persuade us that this project of philosophy has a good nature.
Accordingly, a genuinely philosophical beginning (if this is, it is to be presuppositionless) would act against this image and this moral by liberating thought
from this image, as this image corrodes any genuinely critical aspiration for
thought.
The operation of this image, first and most cogently put forward with Descartes,
assumes the good virtue of common sense to assess claims to universality. Good
sense assumes itself to be universal and known as such. Recognition is appealed
to as the model that underwrites this assumption that thought can know the true.
For Deleuze, the epistemological and homogenizing function of recognition coordinates all the faculties toward a logic of identity that presupposes its universality, and such a coordination is assumed to occur in all subjects. The coordination
of the faculties to achieve this form of identity in objects relies upon a ground
in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the faculties are modalities. This
is the meaning of the Cogito as a beginning (DR 133/174, my emphasis).
Thought is synonymous with this unified subject as it too is supposed to present
a unity of the various faculties in thinking. Thought in being so aligned with these
recognitive faculties is thereby presented as conforming to this uniform and

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universalizable identity experience. Recognition as such comes to define the

very meaning of what it is to think.
Deleuze makes a clear division between two ways of doing philosophy: the
first is essentially conservative, motivated by a truth quest guided by an unexamined good will, and the second, which emerges with Nietzsches affirmative
thought, is the genuinely philosophical endeavor of breaking thought free from
the limitation of representation (the model of thinking with which the philosophical tradition is beset).11 The model of recognition can never escape from
the pattern of recognizable and recognized, and this simply affirms existing
patterns of identification and established values. The quest for truth, if pinned
on this recognitive model, is neither challenging nor particularly difficult as it
simply rediscovers all the current values that it presents as eternal truth
(DR 136/177). This too, as we shall see in the next section, is why Deleuze is
so critical of the reflective model of consciousness and the Cartesian ego. He
argues that it assumes the very model of self-consciousness that it takes itself
to be and sets out to find in another. Rather than being open to transformation or
affirmation, it is just a self-identity that merely fulfills itself in what it sets out
to find.
The genuinely new can be established only by a thought of difference, which
cannot appeal to a logic of recognition and representation. The new thought does
not assume our common sense and innate thinking; the thought that escapes this
paradigm must express a thought that has not always existed. Representational
or recognitive thinking sees only itself in the objects it encounters; it is an activity of thinking that only has thinking busy with its own image, but is not, for
Deleuze, thinking. Genuine thinking is the result of an encounter which forces
us to think (DR 139/182), the condition of which involves the destruction of
imagistic thinking, and this destruction lies at the origin of thought. The force
that prompts thinking is not recognizable, but is rather an object of a fundamental encounter (DR 139/182). Whatever is encountered has as its primary
characteristic that it can only be sensed (DR 139/182). This primary characteristic is not able to be coordinated and recognized by other faculties; it only
gives rise to sensibility. These sensibilities are grasped in a range of affective
tones. Sensibilities are not determinate entitiesthey present themselves as
unmediated. They do not conform to existing ideas and concepts; in this sense
[they are] opposed to recognition (DR 139/182). They are experienced not as
a determination of being, but as the being of the sensible (DR 140/182). It is
a sensibility that stands alone as experience. Our concern here is not to give a
detailed examination of this sensibility, but only to examine it in so far as this

11

See DR p. 150.

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attempt to re-construe sensibility outside of any mediated understanding structures Deleuzes revision of the notion of subjectivity.
As we have seen, sensibility falls outside of existing patterns of recognition,
and the intensity of sensibility is not a pattern of identity coordinated by the faculties. The intensities themselves are the condition for both thinking and the
communication between the faculties. The intensities do not emanate from the
thoughts of a unified subject whose transcendental character is the condition for
thought and whose thinking aligns with a recognizable identity of the object.
Genuine thinking is, in contrast, a forced broken connection which traverses the
fragments of a dissolved self as it does the borders of a fractured I (DR 145/190).
Underlying thought itself is this force of sensation, which conforms neither to a
categorical architectonic of thought nor the unity of the faculties of the subject.
If thinking itself can be extricated from the recognitive and representational
model, then the traditional model of subjectivity and the character of its thinking
can be transformed.

INDIVIDUATION AND THE SUBJECT

For Deleuze, the link between individuation and thought is a more profound
determination of subjectivity than the I think, because in subject formation, sensibility is taken as preceding the self-referential reflective language of Cartesian
self-consciousness. Moreover, sensibility and intensity have a field of operation
that cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto the subject or a transcendental categorical framework. Conceiving the I as the dominant motif of subjectivity simply
universalizes the I as species. The I has a universalizable function which allows
its recognition and representation. Individuation by contrast is not universalizable
in this fashion. Not only does [individuation] differ in kind from all determination of species but, as we shall see, it precedes and renders the latter possible. It
involves fields of fluid intensive factors which no more take the form of an I than
of a self (DR 152/197, my emphasis). This intensive field is best understood, as
commentators such as Baugh have remarked, as a transcendental empiricism. Formulated in this way, the problem of the relation of the empirical to the object as
known, about which we referred in the last section, is, in Difference and Repetition, effectively transposed onto the problem of subjectivity. The I attempts to
contain the notion of subjectivity, to reduce its multiplicity or fluidity to a singular identity.
The notion of Individuation is at the heart of Deleuzes attempt to rethink
subjectivity and steer it away from the representational and recognitive limitations of self-consciousness. Individuation cannot be equated with the self or
the I:
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By contrast every individuating factor is already difference and difference of difference. It is

constructed upon a fundamental disparity, and functions on the edges of that disparity as such.
That is why these factors endlessly communicate with one another across fields of individuation,
becoming enveloped in one another in a demesne which disrupts the matter of the Self as well as
the form of the I . . . the individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its
nature. (DR 257/331)

I and Self represent the subject as self-identical and syllogistically situated

within the universality of the species (DR 256/329). They present the subject in
a determinate form that limits the subject to these representational and recognitive strategies. In contrast, the intensities of individuation, which precede and are
the conditions for the self and the I, are fields of indetermination that do not
conform to these patterns of I and self. This field is chaotic and dissemblanced;
it is described as the ground of the I and the self. This ground cannot be mapped
onto the I or the self; indeed, this individuating domain should replace these
abstract universals.12 These differences are, as Deleuze says, without doubt borne
by individuals. But even if they are constitutive moments of the subject, they
are not to be understood purely in relation to the identity of the I or the semblance of the self (DR 257/331).
The dynamism and disjuncture of this individuated subject render it incapable
of being thought of in representational terms. This of course is not to say that
there is no subject, but simply that the model of subjectivity as ego, self, or as
any originary unity is inconsistent with the image of thought which underscores
it. Deleuze shifts the image from one of identity to incommensurability, to
an incommensurability of thought and an individuated conception of being.
Deleuzes dissolved subject or fractured I is characterized as such because it
is undermined by the fields of individuation (DR 152/197). This subject without
a preliminary unity, which he refers to as ecceiteis or hecceiteis,13 is able to be
described as a non-syllogistic dispersal of singularities because it is constituted
by the transcendental empirical. Because this field of intensity, which is the conditions for thought, subjecthood, and so on, cant be made present to the subject
nor is it a template of a transcendental subject, this subject can never have the
structure of the Cartesian I. Whatever one can positively say about Deleuzes
subject, and he makes few positive comments about this subject in Difference and
Repetition, it cannot be reflective, it cannot be assumed to know itself in any
transparent, self-presenced, or self-determined manner, because its identity is not
self-identical but multiple.
12
13

On the epistemic or interpretative status of this domain, see Baugh, op. cit., p. 135.
A Philosophical Concept . . . in Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. by E. Cadava, et al. (New
York: Routledge, 1991): p. 95.

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DELEUZES CRITIQUE OF HEGELIAN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

It has become somewhat fashionable to assert the driving force of Deleuzes
philosophical identity in strict opposition to Hegel. For example, Hardt says
Deleuze: wants to have nothing to do with self-consciousness and the self it
gives rise to. He views it as a sickness, as a ressentiment caused by the reflection
of a force back into itself . . . the entire terrain [of Hegels Phenomenology] is oriented toward promoting the sickness of interiority and self-consciousness.14 In
the case of Hardts book, there is almost no discussion of the character of idealist self-consciousness, except by way of reference to Nietzsche. This passage
makes it seem that the Hegelian notion of self-consciousness is somehow transparent or straightforward. Moreover, without some attempt to make a genuine
engagement with these thinkers, we are left with simply an opposition, an opposition that disallows any real confrontation between the two traditions. And
as others have suggested, Hegel then takes on the function of the negative that
reproduces the very values of ressentiment that are to be usurped.15
There is little direct discussion of self-consciousness in Difference and
Repetition. The main focus of the discussion of subjectivity there focuses on Ego
and Self. However, there are enough comments regarding consciousness that
we can infer his dissatisfaction with the notion. The clearest account of Deleuzes
dissatisfaction with the Hegelian model of subjectivity is presented in Nietzsche
and Philosophy. Deleuzes interpretation of Nietzsche takes the central motif
of his thinking to be force, arguing that all societies, concepts, consciousness,
phenomena, and so on reflect states of forces, with these forces being either
affirmative or re-active. Bad conscience, ressentiment, nihilism, pity are reactive
forces; these reactive forces are, for Deleuze, most cogently represented in
Hegels dialectic thinking.16 Against this speculative element of negation, opposition or contradiction Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference,
the object of affirmation and enjoyment (NP 9). Nietzsches positive account of
forces asserts that In its relation with the other the force which makes itself
14

15

16

Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): p. 38; see also
Baugh, op. cit., p. 145 n.2.
See Catherine Malabou, Whos Afraid of Hegelian Wolves? in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed.
by Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Deleuzes reading of Nietzsche as above all anti-Hegelian has been convincingly presented as exaggerated on numerous occasions and I do not wish to engage with this here; see in particular Daniel
Breazeale, The Hegel-Nietzsche Problem in Nietzsche-Studien 4 (1975), pp. 14664; Stephen
Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Critique of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); and Robert R. Williams, Hegels Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).

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obeyed does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference (NP 89). Although Hegel, as Deleuze admits,
is concerned with difference, the way in which that difference is conceptualized,
through the motor of the dialectic, is in the service of identity. Negation has the
central role in this dialectical movement, and it is against the reactive power of
negation that Nietzsches affirmative thinking stands.17
The critique of dialectic sketched in Nietzsche and Philosophy is further developed in Difference and Repetition, where dialectic, understood in terms of activity and re-activity, is transposed onto the discussion contrasting individuation with
representation and recognition. Dialectical thinking is the methodology of the
metaphysics of presence because it appears to conceive all relations on a model
of negativity: establishing identity through a negative formulation, I am I because
I am separable from that which is exterior to me; in this case, the identity is a
reaction to what is other. This procedure replaces difference with a logic of mediation and double negation. What is other to the self is transformed through this
mediated relation into a constitutive moment of the self-identity of the subject.
All that is other to the object is presented as merely a negative image of the object,
and as such, all difference is dialectically appropriated to establish the identity.
The problem with the way Hegel conceives difference is, for Deleuze, that the
logic of the dialectic ensures that the difference conceived cannot be pluralistic.
Difference, conceived on the dialectical model, is instantiated only through
mediation and this negates difference.
All thinking and difference that are conceived on this image of thought are
given a home in the identity of an originary concept grounded in a thinking
subject (DR 266/341). This model of thinking and its host distorts the individuated play of intensively conceived thinking. Hegelian self-consciousness is the
apogee of this distorting tradition. The master-slave struggle epitomizes selfconsciousness, as it crystallizes two motives at work in this tradition: representation and recognition. Self-consciousness is associated with the gamut of terms that
take the aberrant path that Plato inaugurates, which does not disturb thought
memory, representation, recognition, and identitythese concepts are concerned
with thought satisfying its own prefabricated image of itself through which it projects itself onto the world and then recognizes itself in those things. Memory, recognition, and consciousness preserve existing patterns of identity; self-consciousness
is simply this paradigm writ large; the external play of difference is sublated [aufgehoben] in an inter-recognitive game that interiorizes all difference.
17

Hegels critique of the reign of terror in the Philosophy of Right offers a very similar argument;
there he sees the identity that the reign of terror seeks to establish as a purely negative expression
of the will. See his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen W. Wood, trans. by H. B.
Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5z.

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The master-slave struggle epitomizes the desire to represent values, power,

concepts, and so on by making them uniform and universalizable. The demand
for recognition manifests a desire to fix meaning through a mediated process that
implores the other to acknowledge the true as determined in a specific sense,
thereby allowing its reciprocal exchange. Once again, this only preserves, it does
not create. Difference thus becomes subordinated to the concept and, as such,
difference in thought disappears (DR 266/342).18
The desire for recognition and to be represented is motivated primarily by a
will to reproduce the subjects own self-understanding in the other. If this serves
as the model of philosophy, then what must be accepted is not genuine thinking
of the new, but merely the imposition of ones view of oneself on the other. This
image of thought is then taken as thought. This, he argues, is why representation
poisons philosophy, as this pattern of relations, rather than allowing thought to
be self-transforming, merely recirculates extant values.
HEGELS SUBJECT
If we can return to where we began this paper with two differing paths of
thinking, Hegel asserts the singular object of sense certainty cannot be thought
except in a mediated manner, and Deleuze disagrees, positing an empirical field
of differentiation that is transcendental. Deleuze argues that the beginning of the
Phenomenology wanted to ridicule pluralism, identifying it with a naive consciousness that would be happy to say this, that, here, nowlike a child stuttering out its most humble needs (NP 4). Although it is not my concern to show
the inadequacies of Deleuzes reading of Hegel, nevertheless, this misinterpretation of Sense-Certainty is significant if one is to begin to refigure the DeleuzeHegel relation.
If I can be permitted to anthropomorphize the opening of the Phenomenology
for a moment, far from being happy with its attempt to explain the object of
experience with the indexicals this, here, and now, this shape of knowing
(sense-certainty) is presented by Hegel as clearly inadequate and dissatisfied with
itself (this reflects Hegels conception of reason as perennially restless and dissatisfied). The inability of Sense-Certainty to conceptualize the play of difference that it experiences is a problem for the natural consciousness, a problem that
drives it forward to try to find a more adequate explanation of the objects of its
experience.
18

This does, however, presuppose that this affectivity can impact on thought; difference has a
mediated relation to thinking and mediates thinking, it is just not a pattern of mediation which is
representable.

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The aim of Sense-Certainty is not to ridicule the empirical; indeed, Hegel

describes sense-certainty as the richest and poorest knowledge (PhG 91/69).
Hegels dissatisfaction with the empirical as a determination of thinking, knowledge, and subjectivity presents itself clearly, if negatively, in the examination of
this issue in Baughs discussion of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism. He
remarks that contrary to Kantianism or Hegelian idealism, it is the empirical
which explains the conceptual and the abstract conditions of all possible experience not the reverse.19 In this claim, in which the empirical is said to explain the
conceptual, Baugh is trying to capture the transcendental status of the empirical
in Deleuze. Deleuze does argue that the empirical is the condition for the conceptual, but this is a very different matter to saying the empirical explains the
conceptual. The central lesson of Sense-Certainty is not that there is no sensuous manifold, but rather that the empirical cannot explain anythingthat is its
problem precisely. Only thought can achieve this, and this is why consciousness
can only be at home in thinking, not in the empirical as such. The alienation of
the empirical given from the natural consciousness attempt to conceive it is a
source of anxiety for the natural attitude in Sense-Certainty. Deleuze also would
object to conceiving the empirical as explaining the conceptual: the explanation
takes place in ideas for him, but the status of those ideas is positioned against any
dialectical instantiation.20
We have seen that, for Deleuze, the play of intensities has implications for
refiguring the subject; it ensures that the subject should be conceived as a noncoincidence with self and the non-identity to self. Ego, self, consciousness, and
self-consciousness need to be jettisoned in favor of pre-individual singularities
and non-personal individuations.21 It is possible to conceive of the contestation
about the epistemic state of the empirical as causing the divergence in Hegels
and Deleuzes models of subjectivity.22 Although it is clear that the status they
accord to the empirical is different, the character of subjectivity at issue is much
less divergent than has often been represented.
Self-consciousness takes the shape it does in the Phenomenology because of
the beginning of the Phenomenology. Sense-certainty sets out to present the
empirical as the true, but it finds that any attempt to explain it as such places the
truth in the knowing, not in the object. All the developments of the Phenomenol19
20
21
22

Baugh, op. cit., p. 135.

What is here at issue for Deleuze is the limitations of representational thinking generally.
A Philosophical Concept . . . in Who Comes After the Subject? op. cit., p. 95.
Hegels consideration of the role of the empirical has to be understood in light of his attempt to
overcome the gap that he thinks Kant places between consciousness and world, because of the way
Kant conceives the concept-intuition distinction. On the importance of this issue in Hegels thought,
see Robert Pippin, Hegels Original Insight in International Philosophical Quarterly 33
(September 1993): 28595.

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ogy flow on from this beginning. As it unfolds, the character of knowledge shows
itself bound up with an increasingly complex field of relations. My concern here
is not to map out those relations and determinations, but simply to sketch the way
in which this pathway transforms the notion of subjectivity. This pathway does
not produce or assume a self-identical subject who is coincident with itself and
with the whole, but rather the path of the text refigures the conscious subject as
de-centered, self-transcending, and actively undermining of the Cartesian subject.
In Deleuzes brief account of Hegelian self-consciousness, consciousness
through its quest for recognition simply imposes itself on the world or recycles
existing forms of understanding of both itself and the world. Self-consciousness
is just the ego or the cogito externalized and then reappropriated and writ onto
substance. In this sense, it is an interiorizing force. In contrast, Deleuze describes
the subject as formed by ideas and experiences of itself that are necessarily more
than it can know of itself because it is contingent on the transcendental empirical. It is, as such, radically anti-Cartesian. The progress of the Phenomenology
also involves moving from a limited Cartesian conception to an understanding of
subjectivity as essentially self-transcending.
Every shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology presents its knowledge as
certain, yet each claim to know appeals to something beyond the knowing at issue
to validate its claim. As each shape collapses, a matrix of determinate relations
is expressed. The realization of this reorients the conscious subjects relation to
itself, such that the focus of its self-understanding becomes concerned with the
determinations of what allows it take itself as an object (its self-consciousness)
rather than with an essential I. In the very opening of the Phenomenology
(Sense-Certainty), the mediated nature of consciousness knowing is manifested,
as it were, against the intentions of the natural consciousness, who simply believes
it has direct knowledge of sensory objects, and it is these mediations which the
text goes on to explore. The truth of knowing is initially posited in something
otheran external object. This pathway of the text eventually establishes that
thought can only be at home with itselfthe empirical cannot be understood as
determining thought and self-consciousness. From one perspective, the Phenomenology is a project of self-comprehension. As the shapes of consciousness
unfold, we are directed towards the conditions of knowing. Consciousness
knowledge claims show themselves as operating within a network of relations
that allow cognition. Consciousness, as it moves along its way of despair and
path of suffering, eventually recognizes these conditions as the conditions that
allow its very selfhood. It gradually recognizes the determinate nature of its
knowing, and recognizes further that these are the conditions by which it understands itself.
The process of self-examination, by which the Phenomenology proceeds, leads
consciousness to see that the way in which it understands itself and its object
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reflects these conditions. For Hegel, the comprehension of both the knowing relation and consciousness itself involves much more than simply a singular consciousness engaging with the world or the direct awareness of self. One can only
understand oneself within a system of conceptual relations that are the product
of a myriad of determinate forces. It is these determinations that transcend the
conscious subject, but are also the condition for its very subjectivity, that Hegel,
in the Phenomenology, sets out to examine. These conditions determine selfconsciousness, and Hegel is concerned that our self-understanding reflects
these conditions. The more it understands itself in terms of these conditions, the
more it understands its own self-transcending character, as it sees the character
of its subjectivity not as a singular self-identical subject, but in terms of an interplay of conditions that are beyond it and yet are inscribed in the very way it is
aware of itself and the world.23
The journey of the Phenomenology takes consciousness beyond itself; it does
return to itself, but the subject it returns to is radically transformed from the
singular consciousness of the first three chapters of the Phenomenology, whose
knowledge of the world it tries to capture in what amounts to correspondence
claims to truth. The subject comes to understand the relations that underwrite its
own thinking as not merely its own.24 It renounces the exclusiveness of its beingfor-self. It comes to understand itself in terms of the relations underlying the way
it experiences itself and the world. These conditions are unable to be mapped onto
the I in any straightforward sense. The relations are not self-coincident, but reflect
the manifold of its normative and interpretative context.
In Hegels case, those relations and problems that frame our experience of
our self and the world are not swarms as they are on Deleuzes view, but are
seen much more in Kantian terms as conditions and determinations. However,
that does not mean he thinks we can know these conditions in any definitive
manner or that they are coincident with the subject. Certainly these conditions
cannot be conceived of as empirical qua empirical, but only as thought, those
relations and ideas can only be presented in thought. The role of the empirical
in the formation of self-consciousness cannot be understood in empirical terms,
as the empirical can only be conceived in conceptually interpreted terms,
which is of course not to say that the empirical is not a determination of the
subject.25
23

24

25

I discuss this issue in more detail in A Subject for Hegels Logic in International Philosophical
Quarterly 40 (March 2000): 8599.
Again, this contrasts with the reading of Hegel by Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guittari: An
Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996), p. 53.
For a thorough reappraisal of this issue in Hegel and German Idealism in general, see Paul Redding,
The Logic of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), chapters 47.

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Even Deleuze, with the peculiar transcendental status he gives to the empirical, argues it can be made present in thinking. The intensities that characterize
the empirical field are not just affectivities, they are also ideas, but ideas which
allow us to reconfigure the subject as a fractured I or a dissolved self. Swarming
at the edges of the intensities are ideas, ideas that are expressed in individuating factors. These ideas are, Deleuze says, problems that emerge from the relations between the individuating factors. He thinks we can bring into thought this
play of difference. If he does not assume this in some sense, the project of transforming thought, which he clearly sets out to achieve, can have no force. If the
empirical is to remain unable to be, in some sense, grasped in thought and yet
seen as the most forceful determination of thought and the subject, then Deleuzes
whole project would recede into a pre-Kantian metaphysics or mysticism.
Thought has to be able to appeal to this realm of the empirical in order to transform itself; the empirical does impact on the conceptual and we can grasp this.
In order to grasp it, the previous representational way of considering the knowing
relation has to be radically revised. Central to this revision is the disposal of the
metaphysical subject.
From Deleuzes point of view, Hegelian self-consciousness is, as we have
seen, an interiorizing agent, a subject writ large whose identity is self-coincident.
The trajectory of self-consciousness rhetoric is always reactive, extinguishing
difference through dialectical mediation. Although I have really only been able
to gesture at Hegels notion of self-consciousness here, the pathway of selfunderstanding as he describes it in the Phenomenology is not concerned with
mapping out an assumed set of internal relations onto the external world, but
rather transforming the subject such that its character is perpetually selftranscending. The difference between Hegel and Deleuze is not between, on the
one hand, a model of subjectivity which is fractured because of its relation to an
empirical domain that cannot be overlaid onto the subject (Deleuze), and on the
other hand, a subject that is simply self-identical (Hegel). Hegels subject has
precisely such an overreaching relation with conceptuality.
Hegel and Deleuze are often contrasted in this way: Hegel, through his monolithic self-consciousness, posits all meaning internal to the subject, whereas
Deleuze refigures his subject such that its identity is fractured by the transcendental status of the non-representable empirical. In short, one interiorizes all difference and the other externalizes it. But the real difference between Deleuze (and
Poststructuralism in general) and Hegel is the way in which they consider the
subjects relation to determinations that are external to it. In Hegels case, the play
of determinations that constitutes spirit and that must frame any conscious agents
self-awareness and experience can be understood as self-determined. Hegel does
take spirit to be all reality, but finite consciousness could not make present to
itself all those conditions and relations; indeed, those relations are constantly
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being revised and transformed. Nevertheless, one cannot look beyond meaning
derived in Spirit to find the determinations of the ways in which we make
meaning; that is the limit of knowing for him: there is no other to thought within
thinking itself.
Deleuze does not want to conceive of thought in this way, and this is why he
places such emphasis on the empirical as transcendental. However, it remains to
be seen if Deleuze can give the empirical a transcendental status while maintaining philosophys role as concept creator. This is only the beginning of an
exchange between Deleuze and Hegel as to whether or not such an approach is
viable. The concern for their apparently divergent models of subjectivity has only
been an obstacle to this debate. What I have tried to do here is clear some of the
ground so that we might begin to have that exchange between these two thinkers.
To simply say Deleuze wants to have nothing to do with the sickness of the
philosophy of self-consciousness has served only to curtail that debate.
University of Sydney, Australia

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