Abstract
The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently reiterated and developed by Philip Tonner, that Heidegger offers a univocal conception of Being where there is one sense of Being that is said throughout all entities. Although these authors maintain that this claim holds across Heidegger’s oeuvre, I purposefully adopt a conservative hermeneutical strategy that focuses on two writings from the 1927–1928 period—Being and Time and the following year’s lecture course translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic—and emphasize the lesson of the ontological difference that Being is always the Being of an entity, to argue that with regards to these texts, at least, an alternative equivocal interpretation is possible in which Being is always said differently. The conclusion draws out the implications of this for the relationship between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Deleuze’s differential ontology.
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Notes
I would like to thank Emma Ingala and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and helpful suggestions on an earlier version.
Hackett (2011) does not develop this, but I have argued elsewhere that in a number of post-Kehre writings Heidegger explicitly affirms an equivocal account of Being (Rae 2014a: 18–27).
For these reasons, I do not engage with another text that might be thought to be tied to the 1927–1928 texts: the important 1929–1930 lecture course, translated as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995), in which Heidegger distinguishes between the Being of stones, animals, and humans. Doing so would (1) greatly expand the scope of the paper beyond what is editorially acceptable, while (2) the discussion of the Being of different entities in the 1929–1930 lecture course depends upon a number of the arguments—such as whether (i) it is the ‘same’ sense or voice of Being that is expressed throughout different entities, (ii) Being is a genus, and/or (iii) the relationship between entities and Being—that I explicitly outline and engage with through the 1927–1928 writings.
To ensure that ‘difference’ is not reduced to a single entity—a move that would risk inadvertently re-introducing a fundamental identity—Deleuze explains that ‘difference’ is not a single thing but a differentiating process in which the ‘differenciation’ of the virtual, non-spatial–temporal process of becoming is ‘differentiated’ into spatio-temporal actual multiplicities, which in turn are subject to further differenciation (see Deleuze 1994: 209f.).
In a series of post-Kehre writings, from the late 1930s through the early 1940s, Heidegger also develops a notion of ‘event’ that deals with the way(s) in which Being appears or is appropriated (see, for example, Heidegger, 1999; 2013. Good overviews are found in Vallega-Neu 2014; Raffoul 2020). Although this points to a further point of contact between Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s ontologies, space constraints and the pre-Kehre focus of this paper mean that I must simply note the overlap and leave a detailed comparative analysis of this aspect of their respective thinking for another occasion.
Although he does not mention Heidegger’s notion of multiplicity, it is interesting to note that ‘multiplicity’ is also a crucial concept of Deleuze’s ontology (see Rae 2014a: 125–130).
In the post-Kehre ‘Letter on Humanism,’ from 1947, Heidegger defines ‘metaphysics’ in terms of (1) an assumed response to the question of the meaning of Being, (2) a focus on entities rather than the question of the meaning of Being, and (3) a dependence on a logic of binary oppositions (2008: 225–232). Heidegger’s critique of the logic of binary oppositions is then part of his attempt to overcome the Western metaphysical tradition (see Rae 2010).
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Rae, G. The Equivocity of Being: Heidegger, Multiplicity, and Fundamental Ontology. Hum Stud 44, 351–371 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09581-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09581-8