The Expulsion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the Ethics of Internal Difference

To compare Deleuze with another thinker is already to proceed in counterpoint to Deleuzian practice, to refuse at some level to follow Deleuze’s own method. The monograph (as applied to Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Leibniz, to name only philosophers) is Deleuze’s favored method of investigation. Deleuze does not orchestrate encounters of contradictory voices, but instead revoices the philosophical character (personnage) he is studying. He isolates himself (selectively) in a windowless monad with the object of his inquiry to enumerate the essential qualities upon a single plane of immanence. If, with Guattari, Deleuze offers readers a bewildering multiplicity of objects to consider, these are understood to be singularities, each enclosed in the splendid isolation of its “operative function” (1993: 3). Between these singularities and the totality that Deleuze calls the univocity of being, no dialectical relations inhere, but rather an absolute leap of perception.