Negation, Disjunction, and a New Theory of Forces: Deleuze’s Critique of Hegel (original) (raw)

I would like to day to revisit the relationship Deleuze establishes with Hegel in a way that moves beyond some of the polemical language of Nietzsche and Philosophy and elsewhere, and that also moves beyond the position of many critics that Deleuze is a poor reader of Hegel and the position perhaps still held by some defenders that Hegel is irrelevant to Deleuze's thought. I will start by examining the discussions of force, consciousness, selfconsciousness, and desire in the early chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, with the view to locating moments where the dialectic falters in such a way that space opens for the kind of new formulations of these terms that Deleuze offers in Nietzsche and Philosophy and The Logic of Sense. In making this foray into Hegel, I am less concerned whether Deleuze had this particular reading of Hegel in mind when launching his own critique of dialectics than whether this reading can make sense of Deleuze's moves and thereby illuminate the Hegel-Deleuze relation. What I hope to show is that there is a sophisticated reading of Hegel off of which Deleuze's critique can be explained and justified, one that redeems his claims that, for example, no reconciliation is possible between Hegel and Nietzsche, and one that shows that beneath the seemingly blunt opposition Deleuze's rhetoric at times establishes with Hegel, a more subtle differentiation takes place.

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