No-where and now-here: utopia and politics from Hegel to Deleuze

2006In this dissertation I investigate Gilles Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism, arguing for its significance in understanding Deleuze (and Guattari’s) work as a whole and specifically its political implications. Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to sidestep idealism and its historical working through of contradictions and differences brings them, I argue, close to the tradition of utopianism, which is characterized by subtraction, isolation, paradoxical reversibility, and the elision of the negative. In contrast, Hegel’s critique of autonomy, one-sidedness, and unreflected oppositions allows for a problematization of these characteristics of utopianism without sacrificing an emphatic notion of freedom and justice. ❧ The Deleuzian concepts of deterritorialization, flight, and difference are contrasted with the Hegelian concepts of Aufhebung, opposition, and mediation. Hegel’s emphasis on relation, struggle, and reconciliation through the concept and the labor of history is replaced by Deleuze with non-relational difference, detachment, and immanence. The proximity of such a thinking with the utopian imaginary is presented via a reading of classic utopian texts as well as theories of utopia put forth by Louis Marin, Fredric Jameson, Ernst Bloch, and others. Hegel’s treatment of the French Revolution in the Phenomenology of Spirit reveals his thinking of the political as a laborious negotiation between the particular and the universal. I analyze Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on capitalism in light of the utopian motif of affirming one side of a particular socio-historical trend accompanied by a repudiation of its other side. Where Hegel analyzes such dualities in terms of their mutual reciprocality, Deleuze and Guattari repeat the utopian gestures of affirmation and escape. The distance thereby created between the prosaic, actual world and an intensified, virtual one can be grasped as a space of invention; this utopian capacity is the strength of Deleuze and Guattari. It is Hegel however who provides the concepts for reflecting on and bridging the gap between the ideal and the real, without which political theory remains unable to think beyond the ideologically shaped desires of a particular historical moment