Deleuze's Hegel: Criticism and praise at the edges of thought

Abstract

Hegelianism reached its peak in France in the middle of the twentieth century, when Kojève and Hyppolite were the dominant personalities of the scene; by contrast, the sixties were characterized by a generalized anti-Hegelianism. In these pages, I will analyze the criticism directed by Gilles Deleuze, one of the protagonists of this reaction against the heritage of the German philosopher, but I will not take a destructive approach. On the contrary, I will show that this moment of criticism leads to the possibility for thinking again with Hegel, and for retrieving the complexity and vitality of his work—against the interpretations that are washed up and dead. Criticisms about Hegel may be found throughout Deleuze’s work, and they are multiple in tone as well as in their perspective: from mockery to technical issues, from explicit to implicit arguments, from generalizations to rigorous and specific takes. My proposal is to organize and select such variety of criticisms in relation to the structure of Hegel’s Science of Logic and addressing: (1) the Doctrine of Being and the false beginning; (2) the Doctrine of Essence and negation as the engine of movement; and (3) the Doctrine of the Concept and the identity toward which all differences are conducted by the circle of return (Rückkehr). These criticisms are linked in an order of increasing complexity that will deepen in the dimensions of Hegelian thought. However, the isolated consideration of these criticisms hides the nature of the problem. Only the syllogistic relation holds the truth of the Hegelian ontology. Being, Essence, and Concept must be conceived in a relational way, and the boundaries of the Science of Logic must be surpassed toward the whole system where Hegelian logic achieves a genetic character, and the Idea enlivens matter endlessly. At this point, both authors seem to enjoy a sudden complicity where Hegel, according to Deleuze, would “maximally approximate the real movement of thought” and become a “thinker of genius.” Nonetheless, it is also the point where Hegel will “maximally betray and distort” such real movement of thought. It is a delicate conceptual equilibrium at the razor’s edge, which only the interpretation may turn toward one side or the other. Interpretation is, after all, the life of a text. There is not, after all “another Hegel than the forces that take him.”...