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INTRODUCTION Gilles Deleuze is now considered to be one of the most important continental philosophers of the twentieth century. Deleuze’s philosophy marked a radical break with the dominant postwar phenomenological tradition in France and a return to metaphysics, albeit a ‘metaphysics of difference’. One of the key influences on the direction of Deleuze’s philosophy is his attempt to avoid what he calls the ‘philosophy of identity’ or ‘representation,’ which he sees as culminating in the absolute idealism of the nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Deleuze argues that Hegel’s philosophy completes the philosophy of identity, which can be traced back to Aristotle . He claims that the privileging of identity leads to certain fundamental structural difficulties in the history of philosophy. Deleuze’s claim that he wrote in an atmosphere of “generalised anti-Hegelianism” (DR, xix) makes clear the centrality of Hegel for Deleuze’s own project, but the vehemence of his rejection of Hegelian dialectic often occludes the affinities between them. These affinities are not to be found in the results of their investigations , nor in their methods, but rather in the central problems from which their respective philosophies emerge. Both Hegel and Deleuze can be seen as attempting to overcome the limitations of Kantian philosophy, on the one hand, and an abstract and external image of thought, on the other. This book aims to provide a critical account of the philosophical relationship between Hegel and Gilles Deleuze. There are, of course, many ways of characterizing the connections between Hegel and Deleuze. A straightforwardly historical analysis would allow us to see the influence of Hegel on the formation of Deleuze’s philosophy, and such an analysis would indeed prove useful in understanding the connections between them. The limitation of such an approach is that it has a tendency to turn Hegel into a straw man. What is important in such an enquiry is the way in which Hegel appears to Deleuze and analysis of the accuracy of Deleuze’s reading, or the strength of his criticisms, can easily fall away in the face of the need to illuminate Deleuze’s own position. A purely analytic approach suffers from other difficulties, however. Often Deleuze uses Hegelian language, such as ‘the Idea,’ ‘the concrete universal,’ and ‘dialectic’ itself. Deleuze’s use of these terms is clearly not equivalent to that of Hegel, however, and without some kind of account showing the development of their vocabulary, we run the risk of equivocation. Deleuze often uses Hegelian language to show that 1 2 HEGEL, DELEUZE, AND THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION the same problem, the problem of representation, is being addressed by the two philosophers, but he also often does so in the spirit of parody, with the intent of showing the distance between their approaches to this problem. The approach I have taken is to show how both Hegel and Deleuze develop their philosophies from a common problematic, which Deleuze calls finite representation. The fact that we cannot rely on Hegel and Deleuze having the same terminology means that we need to find some other way of relating them. I aim to do this by showing how their (different) concepts emerge from this shared problematic. By analyzing the development of the systems (and divergent uses of terminology) of Hegel and Deleuze as responses to philosophers that they both engage with, such as Kant and Aristotle, I want to provide a framework for comparing and critiquing them that does not rely on taking their vocabulary at face value. A central strand of this book will therefore involve tracing the logical development of the problem of representation and looking at how Hegel and Deleuze take up the work of earlier figures, in order to provide a genetic account of how these concepts develop. Thus, we will compare Hegel and Deleuze’s treatments of Kant and Aristotle to see exactly where their diagnoses of the problem of representation diverge from one another. The analysis of the problematic will be the ground for an analysis of their attempts to overcome the difficulties of representation. The aim of this inquiry is not simply to provide an account of Deleuze’s work, however, and as well as explicating Deleuze’s own philosophy through an investigation of his connections with Hegel, I also hope to show the relevance of the questions Hegel asks for modern philosophy. I argue that Hegel was dealing with the same fundamental problems as Deleuze and that even if ultimately we find...

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