A critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German idealist G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation provides a critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German idealist G. W. F. Hegel. While Hegel has been recognized as one of the key targets of Deleuze’s philosophical writing, Henry Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegel has its roots in a problem the two (...) thinkers both try to address: getting beyond a philosophy of judgment and the restrictions of Kant’s transcendental idealism. By tracing the development of their attempts to address this problem, Somers-Hall offers an interpretation of the sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, providing a series of analyses of key moments in the history of thought, including the logics of Aristotle and Russell, Kant’s own philosophy of judgment, and the philosophy of Bergson. He also develops a novel interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and situates his philosophy in relation to the broader post-Kantian tradition. In addition to Deleuze’s relation to Hegel, the book makes important contributions to the study of Deleuze’s philosophy of mathematics, as well as to the study of several underappreciated areas of Hegel’s own philosophy. (shrink)

This paper will articulate an underappreciated side of the psychoanalytical Deleuze: his relation to Melanie Klein, particularly as it appears in The Logic of Sense. Deleuze's engagement with Klein largely follows his familiar strategy of re-reading a thinker off of a twist in one or two of that thinker's key concepts. With Klein, this twist involves re-reading her story of psychic development on the basis of disjunction rather than negation, so that the psychic surface that emerges generates a persistent non-correspondence (...) between self and other and between concept and thing. Deleuze thereby makes Klein a central figure in his ontology of sense and his analysis of how the physical surface of bodies generates a metaphysical surface of thought. However, Deleuze's ultimate turn is a Nietzschean one towards overcoming, the thought of eternal return, and the demolition of the Oedipal Law. As this final turn makes clear, even in his early writings that engaged more directly and affirmatively with psychoanalytical thought, Deleuze was already on an anti-Oedipal path. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on the mutually implicated structures of tragedy and self-formation found in Hegel’s use of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology. By emphasizing the apparent distinction between particular and universal in Hegel’s reading of the tragedies in Antigone, I propose that a tragedy of action (which particularizes a universal) is inescapable for subjectivity understood as socially constituted and always already socially engaged. I consider universal/particular relations in three communities: Hegel’s Greek polis, his community of conscience, and my (...) reading of certain feminist communities. The position I propose establishes a ground from which to approach subjects, and implies that all subjects may be understood as the result of relations embodying potential tragedy. This speaks to contemporary concerns about marginalization, identity articulation, and relations of recognition. (shrink)

This thesis argues, contrary to Gilles Deleuze’s critique of method and disavowal of textuality, that there is a re-constructive textual method at work in Deleuze’s 1968 treatise Différence et répétition. It is a method not for interpretation, representation, or deconstruction but for prolonging and reactivating historical and contemporary texts into the present and for the future. It is demonstrated how Deleuze’s method synthesises temporally and thematically heterogeneous texts and make them resonate with each other. The analysis is conducted, first, through (...) a notion of telling stories as a complementary device to Deleuze’s definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts. Second, by showing how Deleuze – instead of offering solutions – connects, develops, and repeats problems from which the new is drawn. Third, by discussing his positive and re-constructive concept of critique and by arguing that his use of free indirect discourse should be understood as a metaphysical and political tool. Finally, by claiming that Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity can be viewed as a synthetic and methodological device that brings a heterogeneous given together. In concluding, it is proposed that Deleuze draws on tools and technics developed in literature and mathematics, specifically differential calculus and geometry, to develop methods for philosophy. Studying Deleuze’s method in Différence et répétition not only offers a prism for throwing new light on Deleuze’s philosophy through his understudied methodology, but also contributes to the development of innovative philosophically inspired methods for re-constructing the present. In addition, this study shows that while Deleuze pushed continental philosophy beyond its hermeneutic, structuralist, and existentialist heritage, he also contributed to the development of novel methodologies. (shrink)