Deleuze, Hegel, and the Post-Kantian Tradition

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze has often been characterized as an "anti-dialectical" and hence "anti-Hegelian" thinker. Evidence for these characterizations is not difficult to amass. In his well-known "Letter to Michel Cressole" (reprinted in Negotiations as "Letter to a Harsh Critic"), Deleuze, while discussing his post-war student days in the 40s and 50s, says explicitly that, at the time, "what I detested most was Hegelianism and the dialectic."1 Nietzsche and Philosophy, which Deleuze published in 1962, is an avowedly anti-Hegelian tract; its final chapter bears the ominous title, "Against the Dialectic."2 Even as late as 1968, Deleuze writes that the themes of his magnum opus, Difference and Repetition, were in part attributable, as he states in its preface, "to a generalized anti-Hegelianism."3 This theme is echoed by Vincent Descombes, in his influential book Modern French Philosophy, who characterizes the entire generation of philosophers to which Deleuze belongs-which includes Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Franqois Lyotard, and Michel Serres-by their reaction against Hegel (and in particular against Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel).4 Foucault himself noted in his inaugural lecture at the College de France: "Whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, our entire epoch struggles to disengage itself from Hegel."5 These characterizations have been repeated so often in the secondary literature that they have assumed an almost canonical status. They are the lens through which Deleuze's thought is inevitably read and interpreted, to the point where they have become cliches (in Deleuze's sense of this term) that prejudge the nature of his thought and pre-program its interpretation and reception. Such characterizations, however, are at best partial and at worst inaccurate. Deleuze is not an anti-dialectical thinker as such: one of the explicit aims of Difference and Repetition is to propose a new conception of dialectics, based on a principle of difference rather than a model of contradiction.6 In this sense, Deleuze's early anti-Hegelianism is primarily polemical, and must be understood in the context of the revised theory of Ideas proposed in Difference and Repetition. In what follows, I would like to defend these claims, not by analyzing Deleuze's reading of Hegel as such, but rather by analyzing the context in which that reading should be understood. That context not only includes Deleuze's relation to the history of philosophy in general, but more particularly his relation to the post-Kantian tradition to which Hegel belongs. In his early work, when his anti-Hegelian polemics were strongest, Deleuze undertook a revisionary interpretation of the entire post-Kantian tradition-an interpretation in which the work of Salomon Maimon played a pivotal role. Deleuze's explicit critiques of Hegel, and his renewed concept of dialectics, should be understood in terms of the broader project Deleuze was pursuing in his work prior to the writing of Difference and Repetition. Deleuze and the History of Philosophy Deleuze's early polemical reaction against Hegel must be contextualized, both sociologically and personally, in terms of the academic institutional milieu in which Deleuze was trained as a philosopher. (This milieu has been analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu in works such as Homo Academicus and The State Nobility).7 When Deleuze was at the Sorbonne, doing philosophy meant doing the history of philosophy: in order to pass the agregation examination in philosophy, which allowed one to teach in the French educational system, students were required to do close readings of classic texts in the history of philosophy. If they wanted to do "creative" work in this context, philosophy students necessarily had do so in the context of interpretive readings of this type. Franqois Chatelet, a fellow student at the Sorbonne, and later a colleague at Vincennes, recounts a story that illustrates the manner in which Deleuze, as a student, was able to negotiate the tension between the university's requirements and his own interpretive invention: I preserve the memory of a reading by Gilles Deleuze. …