Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation by Somers-Hall Henry

Author:Somers-Hall, Henry. [Somers-Hall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438440101
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

THE DETERMINATIONS OF REFLECTION

We can now move on to discuss Hegel's determinations of reflection. The first of these determinations comes from what it is to be an essential determination of reflection. This first determination, identity, arises from the immediacy of reflection. Identity emerges as the first determination as it captures the self-identical nature of essence in its immediacy. It at first appears as the A = A of the understanding, which “grasps everything finite as something identical with itself and not inwardly contradicting itself” (EL, §113 Rem.). We saw, however, that once we had reached the level of reflection, the conception of the relations between essence and appearance as essentially static entities held apart from one another had dissolved. Identity “is not that equality-with-self that being or even nothing is, but the equality-with-self that has brought itself to unity” (SL, 411). Reflection showed the object to be a constant movement back into itself. If identity is to be conceived of as “in the first instance, essence itself” (SL, 412), then just as absolute negation contains a moment of positing of the nonbeing of the other, so identity requires, in its return into self as A = A, a further moment of absolute difference. Without this moment, the identity itself lacks all determination as the two terms collapse into one another. In order for identity to maintain itself as identity, therefore, it must exclude this second moment that differs from it. On this basis, the meaning of identity now rests on difference. Identity differs from difference by excluding it. In making this move, however, identity turns difference itself into a determination of essence, as now difference is given a persistence as that which seems to fall outside of identity.

Difference therefore holds the same position that seeming held in relation to essence within reflection. That is, difference is the movement of identity returning into itself, just as seeming turned out to be an integral movement of essence itself. As such, it is to be conceived of as the pure returning that had been excluded from the concept of identity. Identity, however, represented the beginning and end of differing, in the form of the points of departure and return through the structure of the A = A. This means that if we are going to attempt to characterize difference, we cannot conceive of it in terms of these points. “In the absolute difference of A and not-A from each other, it is the simple not which, as such, constitutes it” (SL, 417). Difference thus becomes a pure differing from itself, “not difference resulting from anything external, but self-related, therefore simple difference” (SL, 417). What Hegel is pointing to here is that we cannot see difference as the difference between two terms, as such a difference would rely on a prior identity; that is, they would differ in respect to something that was an identical determination, as we saw was the case for Aristotle, where all differences in species were to be related to identity in the genus.

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