Deleuze, Hegel, and the Post-Kantian Tradition

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 1940s and 1950s, says explicitly that, at the time, “what I detested most was Hegelianism and the dialectic” (N 6). Nietzsche and Philosophy, which Deleuze published in 1962, is an avowedly anti-Hegelian tract; its final chapter bears the ominous title, “Against the Dialectic” (NP 147–94). 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” (DR ix). 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-François Lyotard, and Michel Serres—by their reaction against Hegel, and in particular against Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel.Foucault himself noted in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France: “Whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, our entire epoch struggles to disengage itself from Hegel.”

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 clichés (in Deleuze’s sense of this term) that prejudice the nature of his thought and pre-program its interpretation and reception. Such characterizations, however, are at best partial and at worst inaccurate.