Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics by Michael James Bennett

Author:Michael James Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The univocity of being

So Deleuze says there are two types of identity, and two types of conceptual unity, operative in Aristotle: the synonymous identity of eidē within a genos, and the merely equivocal identity of genera in being, which has to be treated, if it is going to be treated at all, as analogical. The danger with analogy, Deleuze says, is that it tries to restore something like synonymy or a purely relative account of difference at another level. There’s “a certain complicity between generic and specific differences (despite their difference in kind)” (DR 38). Specifically, unity by analogy is accomplished in judgment, an operation of representation that subordinates difference to identity: “Analogy is itself the analogue of identity within judgment. Analogy is the essence of judgment” (DR 33). Deleuze therefore contrasts the Aristotelian conception of being, as something said in many equivocal senses but unified by analogies in representation, with the thesis that “being is univocal” (DR 35) drawn from Duns Scotus and developed by Spinoza and Nietzsche (DR 39–41).

As is well known, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze undertakes the quasi-Platonic project of developing a concept of pure difference, “difference in itself.” On my reading, it’s a reworking of the Sophist’s ambition to give a true account of the “false pretender as such.” The notion of “difference in itself” is meant to correct the faults of the tradition of thinking about difference that treats it as a function of identity, a fall away from, or defect of, the identical, of which Aristotle’s analogical conception is typical. The project of a “philosophy of difference,” Deleuze says, is to rescue difference from its “maledictory state” (DR 29).

The problem with treating different senses of what it means “to be” by means of analogy is that it makes the entire ontological problem relative to the conventions or idiosyncrasies of human judgments and representations. Treating applications of the predicate “being” in terms of analogies between different senses of “to be” presupposes that we already understand, or have concepts ready-made for, these different manners of being—for example, categories like space and time, relation, position, quality and quantity, substance and accidents. This is too bad. Judged analogies and represented likenesses take for granted static “concepts,” forms of identity within representation, and “categories” as representative conventions ennobled into eternal verities:

Analogy is the essence of judgment, but the analogy within judgment is the analogy of the identity of concepts. That is why we cannot expect that generic or categorical difference, any more than specific difference, will deliver us to a proper concept of difference. (DR 33)

In other words, thinking about being in terms of analogies between senses of what it means “to be” is not conducive to rethinking difference, liberating it from its maledictory inheritance and its impotent relativity to identity. In contrast, Deleuze expects that what he calls univocity will deliver us to a proper concept of difference. Univocity is the tool for conceiving of being such that it is “truly disengaged from any subordination in relation to the identity of representation” (DR 66).

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