To Come Into Being: Hegel, Deleuze, and the Theater of Movement

Abstract

This paper explores two attempts to conceive of a genetic model of cognition and ontology of becoming through divergent accounts of the relation between conceptual and non-conceptual difference: Hegel’s conceptual realist account of becoming as the movement of radical negativity, and Deleuze’s structural realist account of Ideas as the individuation of intensive difference. I show how both attempts organize their respective accounts in relation to the perceived limitations of representation, understood either as an impure kind of cognition, or as a dogmatic model of thought as recognition. In both cases, representation is pathologized as preventing philosophy from grasping the creative dimension of thought, and its place within a dynamic reality.

Nevertheless, I argue that just like the conceptual realist strategy surreptitiously relies on an unintelligible criterion of non-conceptual difference to set the dialectical movement of conceptual contradiction in motion, so the structural realist attempt to subtract becoming from the concept surreptitiously relies on the conceptual hypostasis by philosophy in order to assign an ontological valence to specific mathematical paradigms. By showing their disavowed dependence on what they presumably overcome, I finally indicate the necessity to elucidate the inextricability between the conceptual, structural, and the ontological dimensions of the “universe of discourse,” within which the semantic and epistemological scope of philosophy become integral to a revisionary account of representational cognition.