Deleuze, Hegel and the post-Kantian tradition

Abstract

This paper revises the characterization of Gilles Deleuze as an anti-dialectical and anti-Hegelian thinker (encouraged both by the secondary literature and by Deleuze himself), focusing in the nuances which make those characterizations incomplete or inadequate. This nuances are deployed in three stages: 1° the historical and biographical circumstances in which Deleuze is educated and formed as a philosopher (where the history of philosophy, and particularly the Hegel-Husserl-Heidegger triad held the academic hegemony); 2° the method that Deleuze develops to work with canonical authors of the history of philosophy (by pushing those authors to their “differential limit”); 3° the way in which Deleuze aligns himself with the post-Kantian tradition under the fundamental influence of Salomon Maimon (who requested a genetic and immanent method for the critical philosophy). These stages converge into some guidelines which contextualize the relation between Deleuze’s dialectical project, centered in a differential conception of problems, and Hegelian dialectics, centered in contradiction and negation.