8 - Deconstructing Hegelianism: Deleuze, Derrida and the question of difference

Summary

The major postwar movements of French philosophy (existentialism, phenomenology and Hegelian Marxism) regarded Hegel as one of the key thinkers of the modern age. By the 1960s, however, Hegel's dialectics was the philosophical project most in need of deconstruction and transformation. This chapter thus focuses on two major poststructuralist thinkers: Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and his critical encounter with, and conceptual transformation of, Hegelian dialectics; and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and his Heideggerian-inspired deconstruction of metaphysics, for which Hegelian dialectics is both an essential reference point and primary target. At issue here is the problem of constructing a genuinely post-Hegelian philosophy, a project that presents us with at least three alternatives: (a) can Hegelian dialectics be overcome via Nietzschean anti-dialectics? (b) should Hegelian dialectics be transformed, rather, into an experimental thinking of non-conceptual difference? or (c) should the Hegelian system be submitted to a deconstruction of its limits, confronting it with a radical difference that exceeds its dialectical unity? I shall suggest that Deleuze initially explores the first path (a) before turning to the second (b); Derrida pursues the third path (c), which submits Hegelian dialectics to a radical “displacement” that unravels its metaphysical claims to totality, unity and closure.

In this respect, Deleuze and Derrida both engage in related confrontations with Hegelian thought; but they do not reject or repudiate Hegelian dialectics so much as transform it such that it opens up a different way of thinking – a thinking of difference as such.