Questions for Henry Somers-Hall's Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference

Abstract

Henry Somers-Hall has written a great work of scholarship that does much more than simply compare Deleuze and Hegel. He shows in a profound way that both Hegel and Deleuze are working to overcome inadequacies in Kant's transcendental project, and that despite the extremely sparse number of references to Hegel in Deleuze's work, Deleuze should not be read as avoiding Hegel but rather as proposing an alternative to Hegelian solutions to Kantian problems. Along with its exceptionally clear prose and careful expository development, the book's greatest virtue is its climax, in the last two chapters, where the possibilities for mutual critique between Hegelian and Deleuzian positions are explored.It is this mutual critique I'd like to extend, here, specifically around the problem of how Hegel and Deleuze think contingency in nature. This issue emerges in Somers-Hall's eighth and final chapter, a comparison of Deleuze and Hegel's different accounts of the structure of organic life. At issue is how well Deleuze and Hegel account for two central features of contemporary evolutionary theory: 1.) the necessity for the existence of sub-optimal forms of life, and 2.) the requirement that anatomical structure be analytically separated from function, since we can observe similar structures in organs that serve different functions in different organisms. Because Hegel views nature teleologically, such that the structure of an organism is intelligible only in terms of its function, it seems that his view is inadequate to evolutionary theory. And because Deleuze does not view organisms teleologically, he seems in a better position to appreciate evolutionary theory (233).I will elaborate on Somers-Hall's accounts of Deleuze and Hegel on the organism in a moment. But I'd like to frame my discussion in the following way. Because Deleuze does not view nature teleologically, he seems able to appreciate the positive role of chance, or the accidental, in nature in a way that Hegel cannot. This seems to give his view a descriptive advantage over Hegel. But my question in what follows is this: can chance, even in nature, be understood in a completely non-normative way?1 Letting chance rhyme with contingency, for the moment, can we decide between systematic views on the role of contingency in nature purely or simply on grounds of descriptive adequacy? The paucity of Somers-Hall's references to the ethical dimension of Deleuze's and Hegel's thought invites me to pose the question in this way.On my reading, Deleuze following Nietzsche never understands chance in completely non-normative terms. When speaking of chance, Deleuze tends to do so not only in normative terms, that is, in terms of good and views of chance, but even in mythopoetic terms, evoking the gods of earth and sky in Nietzsche and Philosophy, and in Logic of Sense, evoking stoic humor, which plays with sense and nonsense by treating chance as if it were oracular, as a form of divination.2 Even in the more sober, abstract idiom of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze divides the modern approach to randomness into a good approach that emphasizes the singularity of each event, as opposed to the bad or conservative approach through a calculus of probabilities that subordinates singularity to sets or series of logically equivalent possibilities.3Deleuze is not alone, here. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard explicitly criticized Hegel for being unable to appreciate the singularity of existence precisely on the basis of the inability of the dialectic to appreciate chance.4 And Nietzsche's affirmation of chance under the banner of eternal return serves as a major inspiration for Deleuze's counter-Hegelian conception of difference as linked to a non-identical form of repetition.5 Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche link the affirmation of chance to an explicit ethics, as well as to an aesthetics. Nietzsche especially has a profound impact on Deleuze's thought, as evidenced in key passages of Difference and Repetition. …