Re: Genealogies of Difference

Nathan,

Thanks for your responses. I am still somewhat confused about your concept
of 'ontology of difference' and I would like to take the opportunity to
press you a little more on that point.

1. You mention Hegel as your starting point and you invoke his ontology of
sense. At the same time you discard what you call 'metaphysics' by
separating it from ontology. Are you saying that ontology is not
metaphysical once it rids itself of notions like substance, essence etc.?
Hegel's 'ontology', (his dialectics) certainly get around these classical
metaphysical concepts, but most people would still regard it as deeply
implicated in a metaphysical project (sure, you could criticise this
perspective, and argue that Hegel was insufficiently hegelian, as for
example Adorno does in his Negative Dialectics). In any case, to put it
briefly, I somewhat question the popular displacement of metaphysics by
ontology. Does it amount to anything but semantics? Is not any philosophy
'metaphysical' in the sense that it makes statements about the possibility
of knowledge, values, social reality etc? In what way would an 'ontology of
difference' be different? You talk about the becoming conscious of
'metaphysical remnants'. Is this not a typical enlightenment theme, bound
within an ultimately 'metaphysical' conception of rationality and the
potential of self-knowledge (even if the self, here is not necessarily
individual)? I like Deleuze's rhetorics on difference, repetition,
relationality, fluidity and what have you, but, understood as an ontology,
does it not simply reconstitute a body of statements about the nature of the
social world (even if that nature is dynamic)? In short, don't you simply
replace the (admittedly unfashionable) term 'metaphysics' by 'ontology'?

2. 'difference that is different from identity and difference' - I am not
quite sure what to make of this. I can think of two ways to conceptualise
such a difference: a) a difference that always differs from itself and
therefore always exceeds its representation, but is nevertheless to some
extent contained in it- i.e. an immanent difference. b) a difference that is
radically exterior to any representation - in Benjaminian terms (or
Derridian, if you will) a difference that is always yet to come and whose
absence conditions the possiblity of meaning - some type of transcendence. I
suspect, due to your Deleuzian spin that you would opt rather for the first
type of difference. If that is the case, then in what way does this
'different difference' differ from Hegel's statement that being is becoming?

Finally, a minor point: I like your argument about the rethinking of time
that is required by an ontology of difference. However, on a purely
conceptual level, I still don't understand why this makes an ontology of
difference necessarily genealogical. Sure, it necessarily involves
theorising at a diachronic and synchronic level, i.e. going beyond linear
and chronological conceptions of time and history, but genealogy is only one
form such a theorisation can take.

Anyway, I am looking forward to having a look at your book. Is there going
to be a paperback edition?

Yves

On 26/01/02 11:39, "newidder" wrote:

> Yves,
>
> Thanks for the questions -- hard ones at that. I'll do my best to answer.
>
>> ===== Original Message From Yves Winter <winter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> =====
>> Nathan,
>>
>> This sounds like interesting work, but I wonder if you could perhaps explain
>> a couple of points regarding the abstract you sent to the list:
>>
>> 1. You say that you are outlining an ontology of difference. What exactly do
>> you mean by that and how would you situate yourself with respect to the
>> major ontologies of difference of the 19th/20th century (I am thinking of
>> Nietzsche, of Heidegger, of Deleuze and of Derrida just to mention the major
>> names).
>
> I suppose to start with the second part -- and keeping in mind that, certainly
> in the Anglo-American world, there are those who would argue that Nietzsche,
> Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida aren't doing ontology at all (I don't think I've
> ever heard anyone make such an argument about Heidegger) -- I'm particularly
> inspired by the Deleuzean variant of an ontology of difference, and Nietzsche
> as well, though a Deleuzean-kind of Nietzsche. What I do, which I think is a
> bit different, is situate this initially in relation to a reading of Hegel
> (what I think is a good and serious reading of Hegel rather than a simply
> dismissive reading, which is what makes it different from a lot of what
> appears in Deleuze circles). There is a precedent for this in Deleuze
> himself, in his review of Hippolyte's Logic and Existence, although I don't
> mention this in the book: Hegel shows that philosophy must be ontology but
> ontology must be an ontology of sense rather than essence. I start from
> Hegel's attempt (in particular the first three chapters of the Phenomenology
> (though the entire Phenomenlogy is concerned with this) to provide a
> dialectical derivation of the transcendental conditions of meaning that goes
> beyond the antinomies that remain in Kant and try to show on several fronts
> that this dialectical solution remains abstract on Hegel's own terms, and that
> what is abstracted away in the dialectical solution is difference --
> difference that is different from identity and difference.
>
> I don't know if this indicates what I mean by ontology, though hopefully it
> says something about what I mean by ontology of difference. I don't know that
> I could give an adequate dictionary-style definition of the first term, but
> what I try to argue in the book is that ontology needs to be separated from
> metaphysics, that "getting rid of metaphysics" doesn't mean "getting rid of
> ontology." At least on the Anglo-American side of things, the dominant trends
> in political theory and philosophy try to become "post-metaphysical" -- to get
> rid of the standard crutches of metaphysical thought -- through a minimalist
> approach -- i.e., they try to rest their political and ethical thought as
> lightly as possible on a minimalist conception of the self (as, for example, a
> rational agent) or on the contingent developments of our history, or on a kind
> of ironism (i.e., Rorty) that wants to say we can accept that our values have
> no foundation and still hold onto these values as though everything were
> basically the same. In these circles, the attempt to think comprehensively
> about philosophical issues such as difference is seen to inevitably turn
> thinkers back into metaphysicians (again Rorty, when he argues that Derrida,
> Heidegger and Foucault all in various ways fall back into metaphysics when
> they abandon the purely private realm of personal self-creation). Against
> this, I argue that being post-metaphysical means precisely developing an
> ontology that moves us away from still unconsious remnants of metaphysics --
> remnants that remain bound up in our values insofar as we fail to do what
> Nietzsche demands us to do: to revalue these values. These remnants are
> interwoven with our unconsious reliance on categories of identity and
> traditional alignments among these categories (i.e., as Nietzsche pointed out,
> and Foucault after him, that we still think of what is true as what is good,
> real, beautiful and pure).
>
>>
>> 2. How do you conceptualise the relationship between ontology and genealogy?
>> These are both big terms which are being thrown around all the time today
>> and I wonder to what extent they are compatible.
>>
>
> An ontology of difference has to be genealogical (though, as one of the
> presses reviewers said, he saw most of my readings as being deconstructionist,
> but whatever). The reason for this is that an ontology of difference invokes,
> among other things, a rethinking of time or temporality, introducing an
> element of untimeliness. This means that genealogy has to be something more
> than history -- at least history as Foucault criticizes standard analyses in
> the introduction to the Archaeology and elsewhere, the history that would
> forsake transcendental and teleological explanations for events but still
> domesticate events by serializing them. Foucault says in the introduction to
> one of the later History of Sexuality books that while his work has generally
> resided in the field of history the work he was doing was something other than
> historical. I take that to mean, at least in part, that he was doing work on
> materials that might be considered historical, but the work was informed by an
> ontology of the event that made it [the work ]something different.
>
>
>
>> 3. Aristotle, Augustine, Gnosticism, Duns Scotus, Epicureanism, Foucault,
>> Deleuze. That's a big project. Have you written a history of philosophy?
>> What is the connection between these very different strands of thought?
>>
>
> Yeah, pretty big, I think, which is why it's taken me seemingly forever to
> write it. But again, it's a genealogy rather than a history. I'm not trying
> to trace the development of the idea of difference from Aristotle to Deleuze,
> to outline it's different manifestations or the positions taken on it (I know
> that a history can be a lot different from that, but it's only meant to
> illustrate what I'm not doing). I try to take strategic forays into
> philosophies of the past, and part of the reason for this is that I think an
> ontology of difference, precisely because it has something to do with time,
> demands a reengagement with and reassessment of philosophies of the past. One
> of the remaining narratives of today that I think needs to be dismantled is
> that our past was metaphysical, and now we're not (or at least we aspire not
> to be) -- the sort of relations established between a past that was
> metaphysical and so needs to be dismissed, or that had something that we have
> lost in our contemporary attempts to escape metaphysics and so must return to
> -- need to be replaced by a more complex assessment of our relation to the
> past. One of the things I think this means is that we need to think a bit
> differently about the ways in which we can and might want to approach the
> philosophies of the past, and the way we might wish to engage in them -- ways
> that maybe aren't so hung up on whether what we are drawing from them is what
> past philosophers "intended" or "expressed as part of their culture," but
> which are no less rigorous because of that.
>
> Put in Deleuzean terms, I try to explore a series of "minor philosophies"
> (i.e., Epicureanism, Gnosticism) along with the "becoming-minor" of "major
> philosophies" (i.e., Aristotle). Deleuze and Guattari hold that the minor is
> not simply the quantitative opposite of the majority, nor is it the margin as
> opposed to the centre, but rather that difference that puts the oppositions of
> majority/minority or centre/margin into question. Hence they argue that
> becoming-minor is the source of genuine creativity. The more genealogical
> portions of the book try to show how this becoming-minor appears in those
> philosophers that might have been allergic to it, as well as how others have
> sought to develop it.
>
>
> Hope some of this makes sense. Thanks again for the questions.
>
> Nathan
>
>
>> Yves.
>>
>
> Dr. Nathan Widder
> Lecturer in Political Theory
> University of Exeter
> Exeter EX4 4RJ
> United Kingdom
> Web page: http://www.ex.ac.uk/shipss/politics/staff/widder/
> MA in Critical Global Studies:
> http://www.ex.ac.uk/shipss/school/ma/global.php
>


Partial thread listing: