Once we see the way that the question of difference versus identity is linked up with the question of affirmation versus negation, we can also see how our seemingly metaphysical starting point can quickly develop political consequences. These start to peak through in this section when Deleuze asks why, if difference is affirmative and productive, it has such a long history of being linked to contraries (Aristotle), limits (Leibniz), and ultimately opposites (Hegel).
Our claim is not only that difference in itself is not 'already' contradiction, but that it cannot be reduced or traced back to contradiction, since the latter is not more but less profound than difference. On what condition is difference traced or projected on to a flat space? Precisely when it has been forced Into a previously established identity, when it has been placed on the slope of the identical which makes it reflect or desire identity, and necessarily takes it where identity wants it to go - namely, into the negative. ^15
Begin with the identical and difference will always be relegated to the negative -- not the same, not changing. Where does the concept of identity that leads to this negative spiral come from though? The footnote (15) that appears at the end of that last quotation gives us the most straightforward answer to this question -- from a vast reduction and simplification of reality:
Louis Althusser denounces the all-powerful character of identity in Hegel's philosophy, in the form of the simplicity of its internal principle: 'The simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction is made possible only by the simplicity of the internal principle that constitutes the essence of any historical period. It is because it is possible in principle to reduce the totality, the infinite diversity of a given historical society ... to a simple internal principle, that this very simplicity thereby accrues by right to contradiction and may be reflected in it.' This is why he criticizes the Hegelian circle for having only a single centre in which all the figures are reflected and retained.
Hegel (and later Marx) are able to make opposition and negation the motor of history only because they so dramatically oversimplify it. Whole eras are summarized by one principle, which means that the next era can be summarized by the opposite principle. Of course, Hegel isn't alone in looking at history this way. Our textbooks are full of the Romantics rebelling against the Enlightenment, of the Renaissance breaking through the gloom of the Dark Ages, etc ... In reality these accounts tell us very little about the complexity and the contingency of the changes that were involved. There's never just one thing going on under the surface of history but a complex mess of forces acting in all directions. This is why history is so hard to predict in advance and so easy to see as inevitable from the safety of your armchair.
These simplifications thus ultimately have a political motive. Their goal is not just to "objectively understand" history, but to make it appear inevitable and necessary. The intent is actually to make whatever political power prevails at the moment look either inevitable and permanent, or inevitably on the brink of collapse, poised to give way to a new utopia (or, these days, it seems, dystopia). The whole content of their claim to be objectively representing the facts and merely illuminating a historical logic boils down to their assertion that it just couldn't be any other way. Which of course, justifies the inevitability of their own politics, whatever that is, as the only correct one. Necessity, Universality, and a simplifying Identity are they stick they use to try to argue us into submission.
It is the same every time there is mediation or representation. The representant says: 'Everyone recognises that ...', but there is always an unrepresented singularity who does not recognise precisely because it is not everyone or the universal. 'Everyone' recognises the universal because it is itself the universal, but the profound sensitive conscience which is nevertheless presumed to bear the cost, the singular, does not recognise it. The misfortune in speaking is not speaking, but speaking for others or representing something. The sensitive conscience (that is, the particular, difference or ta alia) refuses.
The politics of Identity are always ultimately conservative. Not in the sense of being on the Left as opposed to the Right -- there is just as much 'conservation' on either side of the divide -- but in the sense of having a fixed blueprint for society in mind, a stable end state that would apply to everyone for ever and ever, amen. Sometimes this state is in the past, sometimes it is projected into the future. In either case though, you see a politics imagined as a goal and endpoint (a State), rather than a process. And once you have the final solution in mind, it's only a small step to seeing its perfect inevitability as demanding any sacrifice and rejecting any compromise.
Deleuze, by contrast, is very much an anarchist, albeit of an extremely philosophical variety. The beauty of anarchism is precisely its lack of a fixed State. It doesn't have an endpoint because it is all a question of the consensual process of living with differences, rather than submitting to the one true ruler. It is the only "ism" that you can call creative, or (philosophically) progressive, and it has none of the inevitability of other politics. It is nothing but the process of imagining what happens when people cooperate in asking what they can do together. Which is to say that it is a politics of affirmation, focused on the possible not on the limits. In fact, for Deleuze, I think it's less about choosing a politics and letting that dictate whether you affirm or negate, than it is about having a "taste for affirmation", if you will, and letting that interest in seeing what we can make, be your politics. There's no discussion of necessity here. There's no "common sense" here about how we obviously need to have a state with borders and democracy and capitalism and even human rights. Maybe we want those things, but there is no end to history, and hence no guarantees. It reminds me a bit of Robert Nozick's quip regarding necessary truths in philosophy: "Lack of invention is the mother of necessity".
So we have the affirmative anarchist poet who creates difference, and the negative politician who limits us to identity:
In very general terms, we claim that there are two ways to appeal to 'necessary destructions': that of the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which 'differs', so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation. The two may coincide in particularly agitated moments, but they are never the same.
Or, to connect the whole works back to Nietzsche's parody of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, we can talk about our "anarchist masters" and "slave politicians".
... the point of view of the slave who draws from 'No' the phantom of an affirmation, and the point of view of the 'master' who draws from 'Yes' a consequence of negation and destruction; the point of view of the conservers of old values and that of the creators of new values. Those whom Nietzsche calls masters are certainly powerful men, but not men of power, since power is in the gift of the values of the day. A slave does not cease to be a slave by taking power, and it is even the way of the world, or the law of its surface, to be led by slaves. Nor must the distinction between established values and creation be understood as implying an historical relativism, as though the established values were new in their day, while the new ones had to be established once their time had come. On the contrary, the difference is one of kind, like the difference between the conservative order of representation and a creative disorder or inspired chaos which can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be confused with it.
In either case, the important point is that Deleuze conceives his focus on Difference instead of Identity as a political choice in the broadest sense of the term -- only difference allows us to affirm all the possibilities of the world.
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