Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by

being carried out, and by the end it involves. (The Phenomenology of

Mind,80–1)

Thus, Hegel first said that difference is not the truth of the thing, but

rather its limit. Now he is saying that the truth of the thing is in the

overcoming of its reality, of its experience: the truth of the thing is in

its dissolution in the historicity of which the Subject (not the living

and conscious organism, but the Subject) is the relay and the mediator.

In Hegel, the beginning is the end. Experience is not the experience

of anything, but only the return to truth, to necessity, of duty, because

truth, necessity and duty are freed (even if in a violent and murderous

way) from the singularity of experience. In Hegel, ‘experience’ is

nothing other than retracing the necessary path that brings the singu-

lar to become Subject. Experience is the dialectical dependence on

history. Hegel says that no one is allowed to flee from history if one

wants to have experience. Experience is created in this dependence;

this after all is the essence of the modern: the subsumption of every

molecule of lived time inside the general category of historicity. In this

sense the modern is the ruthless historical colonization – economic,

communicative, technical – of human time, of our mental time and

activities. Only what has been rendered homologous by the historical

work of negativity approaches the Hegelian definition of experience.

Hegel himself identifies experience with the dialectic ... The system

is not to be conceived in advance, abstractly; it is not to be an all-

encompassing schema. Instead, it is supposed to be the effective

center of force latent in the individual moments. They are supposed

to crystallize, on their own and by virtue of their motion and direc-

tion, into a whole that does not exist outside of its particular deter-

minations ... Experience is supposed to be something immediately

present, immediately given, free, as it were, of any admixture of

thought and therefore indubitable. Hegel’s philosophy, however,

challenges this concept of immediacy, and with it, the customary

concept of experience. (Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 56–7)

The Hegelian critique of immediacy acts like a kind of defoliant, a kind

of ruthless annihilation of anything that lives. Nothing that flees

the incessant work of mediation (labour, technique, communication,

civilization) can be thought and experienced. In this way, the singular

is cancelled and persecuted until it finally gives way to historical

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