Deleuze Against Hegel - Chapter One

"A Young Dialectician"

In this first chapter, Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod turns to Deleuze’s earliest works and formative encounters in his youth which would lead Deleuze to operating a dialectical method of thinking which was utterly Hegelian in its structure and performance. Despite his adoption of an Hegelian framework, however, Deleuze would remain indifferent to Hegel himself (at least this is an indifference noted in the lack of reference to Hegel proper in Deleuze’s early work from this time). Instead, Deleuze would inadvertently operate within an Hegelian framework due to the influence which Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite and his friend Michel Tournier had on him and his early work. This first chapter will illustrate the ways in which Deleuze, relative to his friends and peers,

est assurément plus indifférent à l’hégélianisme, mais il n’en reste pas moins, […] habité par un vocabulaire lointainement issu de la philosophie hégélienne.

is certainly more indifferent to Hegelianism, but he nevertheless remains, […] inhabited by a vocabulary distantly derived from Hegelian philosophy.¹

Deleuze’s earliest texts would see his usage of a “systematic use of dialectical categories” which gestures to the fact that, even if he remained indifferent to Hegel himself, “he was nonetheless deeply immersed in an intellectual atmosphere where dialectical categories stemming from Hegelian philosophy reigned.”² The Hegelian milieu was, in some sense, inescapable during Deleuze’s younger years, given the influence of Hegelian dialectics (however they were individually interpreted) by thinkers like Sartre, Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the like.

Contrary to the prominent image of Deleuze as a vehement anti-Hegelian thinker—an image which, for most, does not permit of any nuance or for an historical development of what would only later become his anti-Hegelianism—Vuillerod notes that Deleuze utilizes “the notions of negation, opposition, synthesis, identity—notions against which later on he will never find words harsh enough to condemn.”³ The irony is that Deleuze would operate within a philosophical position that was utterly Hegelian while never making any mention to Hegel himself. Deleuze was, in any case, a dialectician, despite his disinterest in Hegel’s own texts.

Whereas Hegel seems to haunt Deleuze’s later texts as an insistent adversary, in his earlier work, Hegel’s presence is no less phantasmal, though his name would never be spoken, and he would never be characterized as either adversary or ally.

Hegel was there without being there in these early works, he was present through language and mobilized categories, but absent through texts and theory.⁴

Vuillerod refers to Deleuze’s first published text, « Description de la femme » / "Description of Woman", in which Deleuze furnishes a phenomenological characterization of the other with Sartre as his principal point of reference. Deleuze, contrary to what Sartre’s theoretical move might have been were he the author such a text (regarding the other as another self, therefore, from the male-sexed subject’s perspective, as another man), Deleuze conceives of the other as radically other: as woman. Deleuze thus presents a characterization of a male other in order to then present the female other’s radical difference in clearer contrast, doing so “through the central categories of Hegelian dialectic that the phenomenological description operates.”⁵

So as not to paraphrase a description of an article I am not familiar with, here is Vuillerod’s summary, showing the ways in which Deleuze operates the dialectical machinery (this may be skipped over if you’re not interested in precisely how Deleuze is reasoning dialectically):

At first comes the description of the world and its objects, a world stripped of all subjectivity, a world before the advent of the subject. But the characteristic of this purely objective world is to contain "within itself the principle of its own negation, of its own annihilation." It is because there is in it an object that is not quite like the others, there is in it an object that turns out to be a subject and which, consequently, must be understood as an other. The whole meaning of the world then changes. Taking the example of fatigue, Deleuze shows that in the purely objective world, I have the impression that it is the world itself that is tiring, not me who is tired. I have the impression that it is this steep road which is fatiguing, but that I have nothing to do with it. […] The other expresses another point of view in the world, it somehow opens a breach in the fullness of being and points towards another world, a world where I would not be tired. It thus reminds me that what I attribute to the world, in this case fatigue, is actually something subjective, since it is not shared by the other. […] It is through such a dialectic, taking the logical operator of the self-negation of the objective world, that Deleuze phenomenologically accounts for the male other. […] As the other, the woman is more than a mere object, she does have a consciousness, but unlike the male-other, she is deprived of transcendence, she does not point towards anything other than herself. "As a thing, she is conscious, and as conscious, she is a thing."⁶

What this points to is the fact that the Hegelian milieu provided a conceptual framework in which Deleuze’s way of thinking and reasoning was totally immersed—“Young Deleuze therefore had no need to be a fervent reader of Hegel to be immersed in the conceptual framework of his dialectic. It was enough for him to read Sartre, whom he admired.”⁷ However, Vuillerod points out that Deleuze does not undertake a strictly technical usage of concepts elaborated by Sartre, in the same way that Sartre did not necessarily make faithfully technical use of Hegelian concepts.

Deleuze would operate these dialectical categories in a manner similar to the phenomenology popularized by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty at the time (as opposed to what Hegel referred to as phenomenology, which is in many ways incompatible with this later conception of it).

From Sartre, Vuillerod shifts his discussion to the influence Jean Hyppolite, a professor and French Hegelian, had on Deleuze through the latter’s attendance of Hyppolite’s classes; an influence which seems to have been as significant as Sartre’s upon the young Deleuze. In addition, Deleuze’s friend, Michel Tournier, would prove a source of significant influence; Tournier who, in an essay published around the time of Deleuze’s first publication, would perform “a more explicit Hegelian rereading of Sartre than is present in Deleuze.”⁸

This radicalization of Sartre’s philosophy (which is itself noted by Vuillerod as a radicalization of Husserl’s intentional consciousness) would lead to Tournier’s conception of objective idealism, in which the world is not the subject’s hallucination, but rather that the subject is “nothing more than a hallucination that sometimes comes into the world.”⁹ Here, Tournier synthesizes subjective and objective idealism in such a way that the world is regarded as identical to the subject, and which underlines the other as another manner in which consciosness marks its appearance in the world.

'For the subject, we see it disjoin itself. What was called in it consciousness returns to objects, and in this sense the subject is the world. It remains the external aspect of the subject and like its shell: to give it a name we will call it the other and we will say of it that it does not condition the world but populates it, that it is a contingent and historical subject.'¹⁰

Tournier himself, though, shows a reliance on the conceptual framework developed by Jean Hyppolite. In Deleuze’s article on "Description of Woman", Vuillerod notes that he conceives of the dialectical shifts the female subject undergoes (in her constitution of the identity of thing and consciousness as opposites) likely did not derive from Sartre but rather from Hyppolite. In particular, Deleuze will have derived this dialectical operation from Hyppolite’s text “Logic and Existence” (1954), “a book in which Hyppolite offers a properly ontological reading of Hegel's Science of Logic”, a text which shows itself to be “in perfect continuity with [Deleuze’s] youthful concerns, in which interest in dialectical conceptualization was already ontological in nature.”¹¹

Deleuze’s inadvertent Hegelianism not would not last long beyond 1946, as Vuillerod notes. Despite Deleuze’s pretensions that Hegel’s dialectical framework was something foreign from him, it was an integral part of his early work—a fact Vuillerod gestures to in order to make the point that this is why

the critique of Hegel took such an obsessive form in his work. For Deleuze, it was a matter of tearing himself away from his roots, of no longer thinking in his native language. It is understood that the endeavor took time and that it was only gradually, progressively, that Deleuze abandoned Hegelianism, becoming more and more aware of its limitations and errors.¹²

1. Vuillerod, Jean-Baptiste. La révolution trahie: Deleuze contre Hegel. Paris: Preses universitaires du Septentrion, 2023. p. 29.

2. p. 15. « l’usage systématique des catégories dialectiques. […] il n’en a pas moins été profondément immergé dans une atmosphère intellectuelle où les catégories dialectiques issues de la philosophie hégélienne étaient reines. »

3. p. 15. « les notions de négation, d’opposition, de synthèse, d’identité—ces notions contre lesquelles plus tard il ne trouvera jamais de mots assez durs pour les condamner. »

4. p. 16. « Hegel était là sans être là dans ces travaux de jeunesse, qu’il était présent par le langage et les catégories mobilisées, mais absent par les textes et la théorie.»

5. p. 16. « au travers des catégories centrales de la dialectique hégélienne que la description phénoménologique s’opère. »

6. p. 16-17. « Au départ vient la description du monde et de ses objets, un monde épuré de toute subjectivité, un monde d’avant l’avènement du sujet. Mais le propre de ce monde purement objectif est d’enfermer « en lui-même le principe de sa propre négation, de son propre anéantissement ». C’est qu’il y a en lui un objet qui n’est pas tout à fait comme les autres, il y a en lui un objet qui se révèle être un sujet et qui, par conséquent, doit être compris comme un autrui. Toute la signification du monde change alors. Prenant l’exemple de la fatigue, Deleuze montre que dans le monde purement objectif, j’ai l’impression que c’est le monde lui-même qui est fatigant, et non moi qui suis fatigué. J’ai l’impression que c’est cette route pentue qui est fatigante, mais que, moi, je n’y suis pour rien. […] Autrui exprime un autre point de vue dans le monde, il ouvre en quelque sorte une brèche dans le plein de l’être et fait signe vers un autre monde, un monde où je ne serais pas fatigué. Il me rappelle ainsi que ce que j’attribue au monde, en l’occurrence la fatigue, n’est en réalité que quelque chose de subjectif, puisqu’il n’est pas partagé par lui. […] C’est par une telle dialectique, prenant pour opérateur logique l’auto-négation du monde objectif, que Deleuze rend compte phénoménologiquement de l’autrui masculin. […] As the other, the woman is more than a mere object, she does have a consciousness, but unlike the male-other, she is deprived of transcendence, she does not point towards anything other than herself. "As a thing, she is conscious, and as conscious, she is a thing."»

7. p. 19. « Le jeune Deleuze n’avait donc nul besoin d’être un fervent lecteur de Hegel pour être immergé dans la conceptualité de sa dialectique. Il lui susait de lire Sartre qu’il admirait.” »

8. p. 22. « une relecture hégélienne de Sartre plus explicite qu’elle ne se présente chez Deleuze. »

9. Tournier, qtd. on p. 24. « rien de plus qu’une hallucination qui vient parfois au monde. »

10. Tournier, qtd. on p. 24. « Pour le sujet, nous le voyons se disjoindre. Ce qu’on appelait en lui la conscience retourne aux objets, et dans ce sens le sujet c’est le monde. Il reste l’aspect extérieur du sujet et comme sa coquille : pour lui donner un nom nous l’appellerons autrui et nous dirons de lui qu’il ne conditionne pas le monde mais qu’il le peuple, qu’il est un sujet contingent et historique ».

11. p. 22. « livre dans lequel Hyppolite propose une lecture proprement ontologique de la Science de la logique de Hegel, […] en parfaite continuité avec ses préoccupations de jeunesse, dans lesquelles l’intérêt pour la conceptualité dialectique était déjà d’ordre ontologique. »

12. p. 30. « la critique de Hegel prendra une forme si obsessionnelle dans son œuvre. Il s’agira pour Deleuze de s’arracher à ses racines, de ne plus penser dans sa langue natale. On comprend que l’entreprise ait pris du temps et que ce soit seulement petit à petit, progressivement, que Deleuze ait abandonné l’hégélianisme, prenant de plus en plus conscience de ses limites et de ses errements. »