Deleuze vs Hegel: Beyond Kant and Representation with Henry Somers-Hall

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And we've already begun planning new courses for winter of 2026, shaped directly by your feedback, and I promise you, you will not be disappointed. So, if you're ready to learn with us, this winter will be the season of real discovery. Alright, let's get to it. Today we are diving into Deleuze vs. Hegel, beyond Kant and representation, with our guest returning to us today, Henry Summers Hall. Welcome to ACID Horizon, the theory podcast. Now, for those who've been listening for a long time, you will notice, in a way, two wolves within me. One is Deleuze, one is Hegel, and they're both ripping Kant to shreds in a sort of melee philosophical and transcendental violence. So, thankfully, we're going to not set the record fully straight, but we are going to get into Deleuze vs. Hegel, where the two end up differing, what problematics they take that are not being the same problematic, how they derive their lineages from Kant, and the general problems of the transcendental of experience, of sense, of judgement that come into these huge thinkers, both for like indignity, or are they? And to discuss this, we have, again, Henry Summers Hall to talk about his book, Hegel, Deleuze, and the critique of representation. I think we found out it was his PhD thesis. So, we have - unbelievable. Anyway, Henry, welcome back to the show. Thanks. It's great to be back. Okay, let's start off. Because everyone's been hovering around Deleuze a lot. They're already going to know there's a lot of anti-agealism in the work. With people who aren't as serious clued up on Deleuze and indeed, The Hegel, why is it important to place thinkers such as Deleuze and Hegel into conversation? Insofar as we know as people are doing Deleuze stuff for a while, Deleuze did aim to challenge Hegel's hegemony of a philosophy in France and indeed over the philosophical world at the time, as well as what he would term Hegel's philosophy of identity to which he counterposed his own of difference. I mean, is the importance of Deleuze and Hegel being read together simultaneously that they take their positions from a similar set of philosophical problems? Yeah, I think so. That's really key. I mean, like you said, it was my PhD thesis. So, there's obviously the kind of genetic story and then this sort of more logical story. And the genetic story was that I sort of ended up with the Stephen Holgate, the Hegelian as my supervisor, when Miguel Beistegui went off to, I don't know, I can't remember, Spain or Italy, but he got a grant somewhere and I was in need of a supervisor. And so Stephen Holgate became my supervisor. And so the PhD was always going to be around Deleuze and there was always going to be a bit of Hegel, but suddenly with Stephen Holgate supervising it, it became a very Deleuze-Hegel thesis. So there's that genetic story. But logically, I think you can see both Deleuze and Hegel as responding to problems that you find in camps in many ways. So, I mean, in this book, I work through those connections through such and also through Aristotle, although obviously not on Kantian, but through the ways in which they respond to these classical problems of representation. But I think in many ways, the question is, yeah, how does one resolve the problems one finds in camps? And Deleuze and Hegel, in a sense, present two different ways of going beyond that Kantian problematic, you know, two different ways of kind of trying to fix the limitations of the Kantian philosophy. Yeah. And one of the points to which you coalesced is this Hegel Deleuze binary is around the idea of representation. And I just want to ask, what does it mean to say that both Hegel and Deleuze have a critique of representation? So for Deleuze, it's it's finite representation. And for Hegel, it's more to do with the limits of the kind of ways of thinking that Kant was was establishing regarding simple judgment. Like I say, the X is why the cat is black. And for Kant, that that was it. That was the limit of our conceptual valence that's there. I guess I'll stop. How do Deleuze and Hegel respectively bring forward this problematic of representation? It's really a question. I mean, there are lots of different ways you can get into this. I mean, one issue, I think, is if you think about basic categories of thinking, then obviously when you read Kant, Kant gives you the categories of thought, he says, these are the basic functions of judgment. And then the categories that we organize the world through kind of emerge from these functions. But when he tries to give you an account of why these functions and not others, why these categories and not others, then he kind of struggles to to really give an account. And I think one way you can see Deleuze and Hegel is kind of responding to this is both of them are trying to give an account of how the basic categories that we understand the world and come into being. Now, Hegel does that by recognizing this limitation in the categories and seeing categories as emerging from each other through an imminent process. You know, so you begin with being and then you get nothingness and then through the interrelations of the two, you get becoming through determinate being or something and other and all of those categories. And that's how categories emerge. Whereas for Deleuze, what you find is that these categories emerge from a kind of prior field of sense, which is structured in a different way to the categories themselves. So in both cases, they're really, you can see it as a question of sense, like a logical sense. When when Hegel says these niskavisen essence is the being pastness, he's trying to argue he's arguing that if we think about categories like the infinite and the finite, then to understand the meaning of those, we need to understand the whole dialectical process by which they've they've emerged as they are. And that's how we know what the infinite isn't what the finite is. What Deleuze does instead is argue that the sense of propositional categories, categorical structures of judgments comes from a pre-representational field. And it's the way in which that pre-representational field operates that organizes what counts as meaningful and and non meaningful. It kind of sets up the structure of the world as it is. So so these are both really dealing with the same the same issues, which is kind of the fixness of categories. The fact that these categories are universal and so on, able to capture the specificity of experience and the the seeming arbitrariness of the categories we're using, the lack of any way to define the sense of those categories. So both both Hegel and Deleuze give different accounts of the emergence of those. So I think I think both of those approaches are kind of interesting movements that both begin in Kant for them or Aristotle, depending on how you what you begin from. No, I mean, it's a good place to start from, especially given that one of the big frustrations people have when when reading can is that ultimately these categories are just either borrowed from Aristotle or they're borrowed from the German language. I mean, Nietzsche said, we don't need to believe in God if we still believe in grammar, because these are just grammatical forms that Kant says are just bluntly given there. I mean, but at the same time, he wants to give them an eternity of validity. I mean, in the letter, we basically denounce this victor who sort of goes beyond the Kantian prohibition of looking into things themselves. He says, No, this system is eternal. And then Hegel asked sort of sharp and say, Oh, no, these concepts have a history. And indeed, if they develop as concepts to his the concept itself must have a history. And it's interesting to get into this particularly in relation to delers there, because it's not that it's not so much that delers is vacating the idea of a history of concepts. He's rather putting like, as we say, he's put like a metaphysical like substrate around the concept that doesn't necessarily have to be the history of a subject. Because for Hegel, it's all about your sub the substance of all this is subject. And for delers, you don't need to have the transcendental conditions of experience, they don't need to be personal. Whereas for Hegel, if I would put it in a decent binary, I guess, for Hegel, the structure of the experience of reality is structured like a subject, the way the experience is produced is structured in the same way that we are. Whereas for delers, the way that we are structured more in the sense of the production of experience that doesn't always contain that. Yeah, I think I think there's another way. I mean, a structure that I I also find quite useful to understand this is this is maybe going back to hold it in. So so if you think about Kant, and hold it in, you know, holding in asks, you know, where does this, where does where does the kind of categorical structure where you have a subjects and objects come from? What's the origin of that structure? And hold it in says, and that prior to a long prior to this originally division, bad derivation, but that's the derivation he takes judgment in German to have. There has to be just being, which is undifferentiated, a kind of pure being. So if we're going to understand the kind of the genesis of the transcendental system for hold it in, we need to move back to a position prior to categorical determination. Now hold it in solution there, I think, is problematic because for hold it in all determination is ultimately judging. So when you move outside of judging, you just end up with like emptiness being just becomes completely indeterminate. And so that indeterminacy of being can't really explain why the categories emerge and why this division happens. Now the two responses to that I think are one can say, well, actually, there's more than one form of determination and that this transcendental ground of being is differentiated, but not in the same way the judgments are. And that's the claim that Delos will make. There's a differentiated transcendental field, which is not structured like judgment, but which gives rise to divisions between subjects and objects. Now the alternative is to say, well, okay, we'll begin with pure being, and then we'll show how dialectically those categories transform into subjects and objects and all of that stuff, the stuff just emerges from that. So one kind of preserves this transcendental structure that you get in Kant, where you've got subjects and objects, but gives a different notion of grounding, and that's what Delos does. And the other essentially argues, Hegel argues, that if being is empty, then it collapses into the phenomenal and we don't have anything outside of representation. So I think that's another way in which you can kind of draw out this difference between the history of concepts, one which involves the kind of double play between the transcendental and the empirical, which is the Delosian answer. And the other which sees the whole of history as being like the metaphysical deduction in Kant, the whole of history is this slow unfolding of categories. But they're here, they're like, everything's, everything's representation, but representation has a lot more dynamism than Kant gives it credit for. So that's, that's another way to tell the same story, I think. And I think putting those two together, and more stories, you start to get a sense for the difference between their two projects. So I want us to take a step back for a moment and let's imagine that us three are having a conversation in a bar or something like that right now. And then one of our uncles shows up, a neophyte, a newcomer of sorts. And we're mentioning Delos, we're mentioning Kant, we're mentioning Hegel, we're going to bring Jean-Paul Sartre into the mix. And the person who approaches us asks, what are you guys talking about? And what are the stakes of what you are talking about? And I would turn around to them and say, oh, we're talking about the philosophers Delos and Hegel and Kant and Sartre and so forth. And one of the key or critical issues at stake in our discussion is what happens when we experience unity? And what are the structures at work there? And I think this is a fundamental issue or problem that underlies many of the thinkers that we're looking at. And in taking our step back right now, I hope that we can just do a little synopsis to get everybody on board who might be listening and a little bit lost in the sauce. We have Kant, we have Delos and Hegel. And as we mentioned right at the beginning, Delos and Hegel are responding to particular issues in Kant. Then we also have the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre that you do a very fine job of introducing in your book, Henry, somebody that I think is not mentioned enough in this discussion and as somebody who stands as a linchpin between the issues in Kant's philosophy and the way that Delos attempts to correct the Kantian view. So with that said, there are two other important terms at work here, ego and consciousness. So I know that these terms in and of themselves have different meanings between all of the philosophers that we're talking about, and some of them might not even use that particular term as a central term. But how are we to understand the role of ego and consciousness from Kant to somebody like Delos? And how does he pass through Sartre? And how does Delos, for example, ultimately understand consciousness and ego and its place within this cosmic field of differential relations versus Kant, as we said, who basically establishes his philosophy on this metaphysical distinction that separates subject and object a priori. What I'm trying to do is kind of simplify the discussion here, but do so in a way that doesn't get us lost in so many terms. So I was hoping you could just walk us through those figures, Kant, to Sartre, to Delos, and maybe add a mention of Hegel at the end, just to show what are the real stakes in understanding the problem that's addressed in your PhD. Can you try to force me understanding chapter in there as well? A versus B deduction, the Holy Imperial legal structure of one versus the other. I'll give it a go. Well, I mean, the starting point maybe, if we're going to go down the Kant route is, if you think about the transcendental deduction in the critique of pure reason, right? So that's the bit where Kant says, okay, we think we experience a world of appearances, sense data to kind of not quite be accurate, but we think we just see this field of sense data. The experience is really experience of a world of objects. And he kind of wants to work out, well, what makes possible experience of a world of objects? Now, the Kantian claim to start with, he says, well, let's think of a claim that we can begin with. And he says, how about this? He says, the I think must be able to accompany all of our representations. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means essentially, if you think of like, like a multiplicity of stuff, then for it to be mine, I need to be able to hold it together in the same place. So if you think about like, there's an example in one of the commentaries where if you think about a sentence like, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, then in order to understand that sentence, you need to think all of those moments simultaneously as a unity, right? If it's like, there's a different consciousness attached to each and they're kind of siloed off, you're not going to get the meaning of a sentence. So in order to think a multiplicity of stuff together, and objects of multiplicities of stuff tied together. So in order to think that, there needs to be like an I think that ties all that together. And then he kind of ticks off and he says, well, there needs to be an active synthesis to make that possible and all of that. Now, what that kind of implies, what that brings with it implicitly is a whole series of structures of representation. So in the outset, there's the notion that what we perceive is constituted from discrete multiplicities, things that are separate from each other, that are in a sense, self standing that we need to, in a sense, bring together actively by tying them together by an intellectual project. So in the background is the model of judging. So when you make a judgment, you hold together a series of representations by, by into a unity. So you say, I think this glass is transparent, this glass is full of water. So judging is the model Kant uses. And ultimately, what Deleuze is going to argue, and Sartre is going to argue this too, and Bergson too, is that Kant's mistake is a transcendental illusion, which is that all determination is ultimately understood by him as judging. So if something's got a structure to it, if it's like, if it's not just like a kind of a hazy, homogenous field, it's going to have this structure of representations and tied together in the same way we make judgments. Now, what Sartre says is that, no, there are different ways in which consciousness can be organised. So if you think about the way we relate to objects in the world, for instance, in time, then what kind of holds this glass together that you guys can't see because you're listening to the audio of it, I'm picking up a glass and I'm sort of turning it around. And the different aspects of the glass are held together because it's like an object in time that's unfolding itself in duration. So insofar as we understand it as a temporal object that takes time to unfold where there's a duration that has a kind of a real substantial meaning, it's not a series of points, the object kind of has its own unity to it. This is Sartre's point and it's also Bergson's point too. So what Sartre argues then is that our natural orientation to the world is in terms of a kind of generational understanding where the world has its own inherent unity and consciousness has its own inherent unity because it relates to the world as it unfolds in time as an interpenetrating multiplicity as Bergson would say. But where Kant goes wrong is if we reflect back on our experience, so we in a sense take our experiences outside of time, past memories, sort of the dead memory of our experiences, then because time's no longer playing a role, we do need to represent things to hold them together. So in a sense what Kant does is he mistakes the world in its kind of creatingness for the world as represented as having been created where that creative act is no longer holding things together. So for Sartre, given all of that, it's only when we reflect back that we need the 'I think' to hold these things together and in our everyday lives, the transcendental field, the way the world is organised, is held together without the need for an 'I' behind it. It kind of organises itself, it's an autochthonous organisation as Melmont would say. So that's the notion that you find in Sartre. And then what you find in Deleuze is that, Deleuze will say essentially that Sartre's moved a long way down this road, but the problem with Kant really was that you had a kind of 'I think' poll and you had a multiplicity. Now what Sartre has done is he's got rid of this notion of the 'I think', but consciousness is still playing the role of kind of like one of those polls. So in so far as I intend towards the world from a particular point, that kind of prevents this field of organisation from being pre-individuated. So it has to be unindividuated because the Kantian model emerges when things are separate from each other, and so they require the 'I think' to hold them together. But Sartre doesn't quite get as far as he needs to, because the consciousness is still doing too much work individuating this field. So Deleuze then posits the notion of an entirely pre-individual transcendental field as the ground for our experience, and holds similarly that it's when we reflect or when we move into representation that we start seeing things in terms of properties and universal properties and judgments and these things. So that moment is there from Sartre. But there's a much more radical break from a kind of Kantian personal tradition. Well, let's put Deleuze on blast here for a second, because one of the things that it seems that Deleuze is doing, and Sartre is doing as well, they are criticising Kant for the fact that he makes the subject function part of the architectonic structure of reality. Deleuze is looking at Sartre's move where consciousness still exists as this unifying function. Something like the ego then, and our experience of an ego, is then consciousness reflecting on itself. Deleuze is going to criticise that, because that puts the notion of reality firmly within the theatre of representation. That's something that we'll have to impact a little bit later on. But then the question that maybe Kant and Sartre are going to put to Deleuze then is, how is it then that something like the notion of the personal, the individuated, the ego operates then? How does Deleuze think something like an ego functions or emerges within reality? The best place to look for this is really chapter two of difference from repetition, where you've got this whole account of repetition. But I think there's the limitation with Sartre. When Sartre's talking about Bergson, there's a point when he's talking about Bergson, and he sort of says, I really like Bergson, but I didn't quite say it like that, but I really like Bergson, Bergson's really great. But then he sort of says, the trouble is that Bergson sees all of these synthesis that's happening, but there's no synthesiser. There's nothing doing the synthesis. And Sartre's like, well, that's just nonsensical. You can't have synthesis without something doing the synthesis. From a Deleuzean point of view, that's still too caught within this tradition. That's another way of formulating that kind of claim that Deleuze makes. So what happens when you get to chapter two? Well, it's almost like you have a field, an intensive field where these determinations are non-predicative. They don't operate in temper judgment. And the field individuates itself into a subject. So it's almost like if you put like a napkin on the table, and then the central point kind of pulls itself up. And so, and it's like the topology changes such that there's a subjective moment there. So that's the key claim. And I think that's the claim that's... I don't think it's so controversial now, but the idea that a field can be self-organising is really fundamental to Deleuze. And if you think about Hegel and Sartre and Kant, they all hold that there needs to be an individuated moment that does synthesis. So there's no possibility of the pre-individual. And so, I mean, consequently, that sounds weird, this notion of synthesis without subjects. But if you don't have the notion of a non-subjective synthesis, you've got no possibility of explaining the genesis of subjects at all, right? Because any synthesis is always going to pre-suppose the subject is already there. So to jump ahead to the phenomenology of spirit, the phenomenology of spirit kind of begins with this subject-object relationship that's empty, but it's still there. And then as the text goes on, it kind of gets filled out with all the detail. But Hegel begins with these point individuated points as empty and shows that that doesn't run. They have to kind of get more content. But he's not able to think the pre-individual in the way that, say, Deleuze is able to because of that starting point. No, I think that's a good point to bring up against Hegel, because it always revolves around a certain, I guess, scholastic ambiguity about what, where is Hegel's, why there's so many different Hegel's, and it's why sublation, in many ways, could be the logic of having one's cake and then eating it. Because there's a thing with Hegel is, well, if you, do you need a phenomenology of spirit to get into the logic? If you ask Hegel when he was writing the phenomenology of spirit, he'll say, yes, that's all the ladder, as H.J. Saras called it. You need to throw it way afterwards, but you need to do the phenomenology so you can get past this subject-object-extinction, so you can go do the logic. But then when you do the logic, the subject-object-extinction arises at the end and then says, oh, turns out this was all, this was actually all that was happening the entire time. And there is this kind of problem of an A-subjective or a subjective Hegel. I guess, how would Deleuze apply that, I mean, would the critique be essentially for Hegel? Because given that Hegel, I mean, you studied with Stephen Hallgate, Hallgate is one of the great defenders of the thesis that Hegel's logic has no presuppositions whatsoever. He does also say you have to kind of get work on that presupposition, there's no presuppositions until he gets into the logic. But would Dr. Deleuze and refrain to the Hegelians be that you want to have this sort of self-grounding, auto-developmental system, but you fundamentally need to presuppose, essentially a fundamental identity over difference in the first place. You need to presuppose a subjective structure. Because I guess one of the things that we've been talking about the personal and the ego a lot, and I think the function of the ego for Kant is always a matter of identity. Would that be the main repose to the Hegelian defence there? I mean, I think all the way through, I mean, the key figures that Deleuze draws on are Feuerbach and Bergson and Althusser. I think what you begin with in the logic and the phenomenology is an abstraction. And Hegel's clear on this, you know, that there's this moment of abstraction to a pure being. Now, what if you look at say Maloponte, Maloponte is great. I mean, happily, we should happily talk about Maloponte as long as you want, but not that you do want it. But I'm going to talk about Maloponte. If you think about the opening of the phenomenology of perception, Maloponte makes this brilliant claim where he says the most basic structure of perception is a figure against the background, right? That's the most basic structure. That's true. You know, if I hold up this glass of water again, then it is only visible because there's other stuff around it. It's contextual. Now, Hegel abstracts from that. But if that really is, if it's necessarily the case that difference is inherent to determination in the way that Maloponte says, then that abstraction changes the nature of what we're dealing with. So that moment of abstraction is not like an innocent moment in relation to Maloponte. It's a moment that brings us onto a different plane of analysis. It treats what we're talking about as if it was a kind of empty substance. And that's a transposition rather than abstraction. And you find the same with Fireback. So Fireback will say that what Hegel's really talking about is those aspects of existence that are kind of shared, those things that allows to communicate. And that Hegel presented the most perfect account of the structures necessary for communication. And Altiza will say the same thing, you know, that there's this moment whereby the individual becomes recognized that makes them a subject capable of recognition. There's a process whereby subjectification happens such that you can be incorporated into the Hegelian system. So I think all the way through, you get this claim that what Hegel's in a sense presupposing is that abstraction from this kind of messy world we're in is a process that is a cutting away of the inessential. And that's all it is. And it's an innocent process. Whereas what all of these figures will show in different ways is that there's a creative selection that goes on in moving to that starting point that involves a decision. There's a decision to begin with pure being. Because my life comes to say, well, there's no such thing. Everything is like figure background structure. So I think that's really the kind of riposte to Hegel is that that moment of abstraction is really a movement from a non representational plane to a representational plane. And it's treated as empty and innocent, but really something very sophisticated is going on. Do you think that that view of abstraction, which I mean, if you look at the history of German idealism, there was always a sense in which abstraction was treated as the philosopher's unique talent for thoughts. I mean, people like Victor and Shelling, what I call sometimes the theory of the special boy, they will talk about the idea of conviction, which I don't believe Spinoza had, but they believe they do have, which they have a unique talent to abstract for themselves. And what is it they get when they abstract for Shelling? It's the absolute immediately like a shot from the gun. For Fichter, it is the pure eye that's doing this activity. But when it comes to this, this activity of abstraction, it comes with it comes with a certain image of what they think thinking is. And that is he said, you said this transition from abstraction into from a non representational form into a representational form. Deleuze is big challenge. This is the idea of the image of thoughts. I mean, is that I mean that that is a direct challenge to German idea or post Kantian thought generally, isn't it the idea that we have to change our image of what thinking is, which in a way requires us giving too much good faith to the operations of say a Hegel or even the Fisher or Shelling. Yeah, I think that's really, really good point about changing the image of thinking. And I think once again, this is where Bergson is really, really key. Because I mean, like the I was actually teaching yesterday I was teaching Bergson's introduction to metaphysics. And it's great because it sort of begins with this really simple case where he says, you think about like moving your arm, that that movement's got a unified qualitative activity. I kind of move it and it's got a certain speed to it. If it would be different if I went quicker or slower. So but it's but it's a unity where the difference is included within that unity in a very particular way. He says, what we tend to do is we replace that that unity in time with the trajectories through which my hand moved when I moved my hand. So the trajectory is very different. It's like it takes place in a space. So a bit like the I think there's another element that contains it. And it's divisible as much as we want. It's like a line and you can cut it up and you can it's essentially compose the points where between any two points on that line, there's a further point. So so what's happened there is we've moved from a situation where we have a kind of a unified differential structure where to use a term Deloitte uses the things very useful. It's like a substantive is a multiplicity to a situation where we've got the multiple the multiple points that make up the line. Now why I bring this up here is because when you look at Hegel, what Hegel does when he when he kind of reconstructs the movement is rather than moving back to this point before the one and the many this point that where you just have a unified movement and the difference is kind of interpenetratively contained within it a qualitative notion. Hegel begins with the many or the one depending on where you are and shows that it implies the other term. So he begins with the many and then reunites it with the notion of the one. So in a sense, Hegel begins already within the structure of representation. And where representation has this problem where how do we reconcile the one and the many? This kind of traditional problem. Hegel gets this kind of notion of the one and the many kind of united in the structure of a contradiction. Essentially, the elements are held together. We can't think it in terms of the understanding which rubbish your understanding is really shit. But if we move to reason, reason lets us think these terms in the movement from the one to the other. But it's a movement between two categories that are categories of representation that emerge after we've made this transposition from like the movement of the arm or the hand to the trajectory. So Hegel's question is like, how do we think the trajectory in a coherent way? Whereas Bergson's problem is how do we think the movement without falling into thinking in terms of trajectory? I don't know if that's helpful, but that's not always true. I think there is. I think it's good to bring Bergson in because at least for me as a reader of Deleuze, I am a reader of Deleuze, possibly in the quite literal Warwick sense of its Kantianism. The key to it is Kant. Deleuze sometimes says this, but that doesn't help. But yeah, it really is hard to get to Bergsonianism. Bergsonism, I guess we call it in there. Well, I mean, on that point, I think the one way that Deleuze does depart from Kant is the fact that in his attempt to undercut the image of thought that we see in Kant and in Sartre as well is that he attempts to strip the ontological privilege ordinarily accorded to things like the ego, the conscious, the subject function broadly construed. And one of the figures that we have not brought up, and it's actually at least wasn't in the dissertation as far as I read, which was up to the Bergson chapter, is Nietzsche, especially with regard to the fact that I think one of the goals or aims that Deleuze borrows or imports from Nietzsche is investigating and overturning the philosophical drive toward a will to truth. And that's the one thing that I see Deleuze doing in his overturning of Kant and in his criticism of Sartre is that, for example, in Sartre, by leaving consciousness in place as this already prefigured unity, it does leave in place a sort of will to truth. But one of the problems that we get then with Deleuze is if we replace truth with the differential field as a generative principle rather than a predictive principle enforcing either true or false, let's say, how does he sidestep the old problem in philosophy of grounding in general? And do you think that Deleuze's metaphysics in some ways produce a truth without turning to another form of transcendence? And you're rubbing your temples. That is a really good question. I mean, it's a bit off the script, but like it's hard not to address because I mean, I see, I call it a kind of soft polytheism that we get from Nietzsche and the gay science that kind of flutters through even Bergson's thought a bit, even though we wouldn't call him a Nietzschean, but certainly is in Deleuze's thought as well when we think of difference as a swarm, a multiplicity of forces, an agon. And so how is it that we then elevate that principle to a generative principle in the cosmos? One that in some sense undermines or undercuts a more familiar notion of truth with a capital T, but then has some ground or at least there are some pegs or some straps, if you will, that allow that metaphysical principle to remain in place, I guess as a truth, so to speak, which describes the way that reality is. Can I change tack again? Go for it, that's a good trend. I like Spinoza a lot. My good friend Jeff Bell is very much the Spinozist Deleuze and I'm the Kantian Deleuze. We have lots of discussion about which is the silly discussions about which is the greater influence. So this isn't something that's absent from difference of repetition, but what I take to be really central to a thousand plateaus is the question of distributions, the two distributions and I think this is the way of framing what you're talking about, Greg. They kind of argue that there are two different ways of understanding grounds. We're in this world, this noisy world where there are things in the world, but things happen in slightly different ways to expect and if you look at the natural world, animals kind of have the same type, but they all differ in some ways. There are all these slight differences from ideal structures. Now, one way of understanding the world is to see behind this world a field of atemporal ideal structures. That's the traditional model of philosophy. That's the sedentary distribution as Deleuze and Guattari call it. Now, on that model, you look at the world in time and you say, and this is what Hegel does in the science of logic, you look at the world in time and you say, well, it's kind of like the ideal forms, but in the translation into time, these kind of accidental differences emerge. Maybe you would say, oh, matter can't entirely incorporate the ideal forms, or you would say that there are slight deformities in the movement from, say, an ideal type of a species to the particular thing. That's what QVA says, for instance. Hegel makes the same point. He says, the natural world is just the kind of the idea of the science of logic, but it's kind of, there's a kind of entalserung thing where it's kind of put outside of itself, and in being put outside of itself, contingencies kind of come in. So that's one model where you have this kind of atemporal ground and then the world is kind of like a noisy version of that, the moving image of eternity. Now, the other model is to see the ground of the world as being becoming and process, and then you see the structures we find in the world as being temporary transient forms. You say a bit like, if you think about like when you pull the plug on a bath, the whirlpool as the water goes down forms a temporary structure that's relatively stable, but it's within time, and in the end, it unfolds itself. It's not a circle, it's a spiral with an end point. So I think that's the move that Delures will make to say that the ground is this intensive ground. Now, the question about truth, now that's going to change on this model because if the ground is becoming, then we're not just going to be like abstracting to get to the atemporal structure of things. There's a transposition there once again. We kind of move from a field of processes to judgments and determinations that are fixed in some way, and for Delures and for Bergson and for these other thinkers, that's a creative process. So it's not that it's arbitrary, well, it's not that it's ungrounded in any sense and that there's no definitive basis for it, but there is an arbitraryness there. So Bergson will say, when you think about the colour white, there's a choice you make when you see these field of things and everything resembles itself in some way in saying that the lily white of the lily is the same as the white of the snow. You've made a decision there in taking these singular things and putting them together, but there's still like a lily whiteness of the lily and there's still like a whiteness of the snow. So to just kind of move a bit further on into 1000 plateaus, if you think about the stuff about Eskimos, is it Carpenter book on Eskimos that they talk about in Move into Brighter Spaces Plateau, according to the analysis given there, they are making claims about the world on the basis of a kind of resonance with the underlying fields of intensity, the way the wind carves its way through the valleys and the way the ice is formed and the rippling on the water. Those are signs of the intensive basis for their concepts. So there's something creative there, they're making a selection for a practical purpose, but it's not an arbitrary, it's not like, you'd be like a really ex Eskimo if you chose the wrong signs, you just wouldn't be able to do anything. So I think with the movement away from a sedentary distribution, you have the notion that truth is creative, but in the notion that truth is creative, you don't have the notion that it's created from an entirely arbitrary field. And maybe at this point, this will help us transition to our discussion of Bergson, but I actually want to mention something that your book helped me understand and an argument that I often come up against when people argue against the concept of the production of the new. So for example, when we talk about a differential ontology or a differential field, we are thinking it in a way that's absolutely different than the notion of categories that are part of the architectonic of reality in some sense. With that said, becoming is quote unquote the subject of metaphysics insofar as it does not have discrete forms. And there's this image that you put forward in the Bergson chapter, the kind of string of pearls analogy, right, where we can look at categories in terms of these sort of discrete beads on a chain that go along. And often when it comes to challenges put forward to not only Doliz's arguments about the nature of becoming and the production of the new, we might even say Bergson's arguments, the notion of a fluid duration versus the string of pearls way of looking at the cosmos affords us a view where, for example, how is it that the new is produced? Well, one way that I used to argue this was, well, Doliz believes something like that all of the elements of reality can be combined in an infinite number of ways and those recombinations therefore produce new things. And somebody might argue back by saying, well, if all of those atoms and subatomic particles were already existent and prefigured in such a way within reality, then there is nothing new within reality. All of those combinations have been prefigured some way. So what we're doing in that case, we're taking the Kantian problem and we're just granularizing it and spreading it out through all of the atoms and grains of reality, what we're calling the atomistic view. But if we have a view of ontology that is like Bergson's fluid duration, where the very condition of the existence of the continuity of that duration is the production of the new constantly and incessantly. It's that which is always in some sense escaping a kind of discreteness of categories, always standing outside prefiguration and the image of thought. Yeah, no, great. I think we're like, yeah, back to the opening of difference repetition, like generality. How does generality work? Well, you take all of this stuff that's kind of constantly changing and then you choose a couple of variables and you ignore all the rest of it. And you say, well, my system just includes these two quantities. And then you can get an experiment that you can repeat. And it's useful. It's really useful. It's not that it's not bullshit. It's like you can do this and it's really valuable. But you know, you're not selecting from a field of independent things, you're transposing what's a kind of interpenetrative temporal world of becoming into structures that are quantifiable by that process of taking variables, you're not taking variables, you're constituting a framework. I mean, as they say in a thousand plateaus, you're gridding the world. And in doing so, repetition does become possible. We get the beads on a necklace and you get the notion that if we could, if we were like the devil, we could put all of the molecules back in the same place they were and then everything would repeat. But you're right. I mean, if time, when Bergson talks about, you hear, you hear the bell toll four times and it's the same tolling in one sense, but qualitatively, it's different each time because each brings the previous tolling with it. Now, if you go back, the whole of our conscious life for Bergson involves or is incorporated into this moment, the whole of my conscious life is, is colouring this moment of experience now. And then, you know, you think, well, okay, well, I'm a moment in the world, but you can broaden that out. And further and further and further, such that the whole of the universe is inflecting this moment with it in such a way that this moment has a radical novelty that it could never have existed without the whole, the whole of becoming before that. So I think, I think there's quite a strong claim here that's quite interesting with Bergson's making on this point. And it's good to highlight notion of creativity against this overarching worry about Hegel, which is the idea of systemic closure, the sort of thing that meant that it drove the tide to actually a kind of madness. The system is over and then what else we to do? And then Foyerbark shows up and says, luckily, we are the system. It's the friends we made along the way, then Bauer, then Shtiana, then Marx. But I know, Henry, thank you so much for joining us today. We're going to actually going to go listeners behind the paywall. Actually, if you want to hear a little bit more, actually, I do have a burning. It's mostly about Bergson, but I do have a burning question about about the primacy of the practical and Victor and can because I think there's a good way of transposing into it. But if you want to hear that, please feel free to join us on the Patreon. 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