Anti-Hegelianism and the dialectics of difference: is contradiction or affirmation the principle of philosophical movement?

Gilles Deleuze, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The standard reception of my work as "anti-dialectical" and "anti-Hegelian" is at best partial and at worst inaccurate. I am not against dialectics as such; I am against Hegelian dialectics. I propose a new conception of dialectics based on difference and affirmation rather than on contradiction and negation. Where Hegel's dialectic concerns concepts ("baggy clothes too big for the real"), my dialectic concerns Ideas in the form of problems — multiplicities of differential singularities.

Salomon Maimon, the obscure post-Kantian, provides the methodological key: a substitution of the trio Maimon-Nietzsche-Bergson for the standard post- Kantian trio Fichte-Schelling-Hegel.12

Sources

  1. The various orders of Ideas would have to be determined. Alexis Philonenko:'1 would like a clarification from Mr. Deleuze.
    Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, pp. 113–114
  2. Perhaps this does not appear sufficiently clearly in Kant: according to him, two of the three moments remain as extrinsic characteristics (if Ideas are in themselves undetermined, they are determinable only in relation to objects of experience, and bear the ideal of determination only in relation to concepts of the understanding).
    Difference and Repetition, pp. 226–227

Where the argument is made

  • Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, the central chapter 'Against the Dialectic'), Bergsonism (1966), Difference and Repetition (1968, especially the chapter 'Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference'), The Logic of Sense (1969). The "Letter to Michel Cressole" in Negotiations (originally 1973)

How the argument was received

Most polemically articulated in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962); developed constructively in Bergsonism (1966) and Difference and Repetition (1968). The "Letter to Cressole" (1973) gives the famous self-description: "what I detested most was Hegelianism and the dialectic." But the polemic is in service of a constructive alternative — the affirmative dialectic of problems — not a refusal of dialectics altogether. Held with full force throughout.