Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

its being identical through the cognitive and practical mediation of the

Subject.

The distinctive difference of anything is rather the boundary, the

limit, of the subject; it is found at that point where the subject-

matter stops, or it is what this subject-matter is not.(The Phenom-

enology of Mind,69, emphasis in the original)

Hegel’s philosophical project is indeed stated here: to explicitly

abolish difference affirmatively in order to introduce identity, not

through a formalist, intellectualized process of substituting the concept

for the thing, but rather through a process of negating the thing, of

subsuming the singularity of the thing in the becoming that the work

of the negative deploys in history.

This is what Hegel declares:

Here is what I have wanted to do: to collaborate in bringing philo-

sophy closer to the scientific form, closer to the point where it will

be able to shed the name of ‘loveof knowledge’ and to become ‘true

knowledge’. (The Phenomenology of Mind,70, emphasis in the original;

translation modified)

What did Hegel want to do? He wanted his philosophical project not

to be purely intellectual, since it is not aimed at knowing the identical,

but at creating it through the abolition of difference, and not in

seeking to know the truth, but by bringing it into being through the

abolition of singularity.

The abolition of difference is not a purely intellectual process, nor

does it consist in going back from the particular to the general follow-

ing a purely formal method. The abolition of difference, in Hegel, is an

historical process, not merely an intellectual one.

History is the process within which the singularity of the event,

its difference, comes to be annulled, or rather absorbed, and runs

into its other, into the ideal identity, through the work of neg-

ation and mediation of the mind. Reality thus loses its light-

ness; the event becomes solidified as historical-dialectical

Necessity.

Hegel creates the paradigm of historical legitimation, and thus founds

in a powerful way the totalitarianism of necessity that dominates the

political experience of modernity. Hegel identifies the dialectics as the

modern form of Fate. Fatum, that is, what is said, the verdict that has

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