79: Gilles Deleuze, pt. 1: Against the Dialectic

The Nietzsche Podcast

Giles Deleuze is one of the most significant figures of French postmodernism, famous for his work with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. In this episode, we're going to consider Deleuze's work, Nietzsche and Philosophy. In the words of Deleuze, the opposition to Hegel runs through the entirety of Nietzsche's work as its cutting edge. Nietzsche's philosophy is truly 'against the dialectic': as Nietzsche's work is perspectival and pluralistic, which represents the only significant challenge to the dialectical mode of thought. In contrast to dialectical labor and seriousness, Nietzsche's way of thinking affirms difference. Nietzsche asserts that being is not premised on negation, but affirmation, in which each force asserts its difference and enjoys that difference. In Deleuze, we find a new systemization of Nietzsche, in which Nietzsche's critique of morality, religion and the sciences can be reconceptualized as part of a struggle on Nietzsche's part against the triumph of reactive forces. Deleuze offers us a new language for discussing and understanding Nietzsche's work, and a radical re-evaluation of the eternal recurrence and the will to power. In this first part of our two-part series on Deleuze, we're going to consider Nietzsche's anti-Hegelianism, Deleuze's interpretation of sense, value & genealogy, the concepts of active and reactive, Nietzsche's typology, the metaphor the dicethrow, and the eternal return considered as a Nietzschean theory of time.