Deleuze’s Challenge: Thinking Internal Difference

Abstract

In his early essay on Bergson, Gilles Deleuze advances the claim that: To think internal difference as such, as pure internal difference, to reach the pure concept of difference, to raise difference to the absolute, such is the direction of Bergson's effort.1 In this account we recognize not only Bergson's effort, but the orbit and aim of Deleuze's own thought: an oeuvre dedicated to marshalling the resources necessary to articulate a notion of difference irreducible to identity, and prior to the logic of contradiction; a difference that does not reside between things, but one that lives in the heart of things themselves, internal to what we labor to call their identity. The genius of Deleuze's early historical works, particularly with respect to his reading of Bergson and Spinoza, lies precisely in his ability to find in these thinkers the tools needed to affirm such a difference. But affirmation is not explication; hence, while Deleuze supplies us with a number of resources that support the former, realizing the latter, arguably, requires supplementation. Indeed, the question regarding the specific nature of this difference remains to be explored. Let us pose the question as follows: what does it mean to speak of a difference that is internal to identity or being? Or, as noted in a recent study by Michael Hardt: What can be meant by a that is not numerical? In other words, how can something be different when it is absolutely infinite and indivisible? What is a difference that involves no other?2 The weight of these questions will burden the following discussion; the aim of which is the clarification of the meaning of internal difference as expressed through the figure of qualitative or non-numerical distinction; one of the principle themes Deleuze deploys in affirming internal difference. Specifically, the following questions will demand our attention. First, what is the nature of qualitative distinction, that is, in what sense is it non-numerical? Second, how is it that internal difference is expressed through qualitative distinction? And third, insofar as internal difference is non-numerical, how is it ostensibly resistant to appropriation in terms of the one and the multiple? It is well known that Deleuze's interest in qualitative difference develops from Bergson's articulation of the same, by way of the between difference in degree, or numerical difference, and difference in nature or kind, that is, qualitative difference: What Bergson essentially reproaches in his predecessors is not having seen the true differences of nature.... Where there were differences of nature, we have retained only differences of degree.... It is in this sense that differences of nature are already the key to everything: we must start from them, we must in the first place find them again. Without prejudicing what the nature of difference as internal difference is, we already know that it exists, if we suppose that there are differences of nature between things of the same kind. Thus, either philosophy proposes this way and this aim itself(differences of nature in order to arrive at internal difference), or else it will only have a negative and generic relation with things. it will end up as criticism or generality, in any case in a merely external state of reflection. Placing himself within the first point of view, Bergson proposes the ideal of philosophy: to tailor for the object a concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely say is still a concept. since it applies only to that one thing. This unity of the thing and the concept is internal difference, which is reached via differences of nature.3 Moreover, a comparable motif appears in Deleuze's nuanced appropriation of Spinoza, where the doctrine of real distinction is also taken to be indicative of qualitative difference: The identification of an attribute as belonging to an infinitely perfect substance is, in the Ethics as in the Short Treatise, no provisional hypothesis. …