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April 29, 2004
Trevor, I've just picked up a copy of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. It's a large tome. I notice that it renounces Hegel: --ie., the Hegel of French philosophy in the late 40s/early 50s; a construction of Hegel that is based on the Kojevean/Hyppolitean interpretation of Hegel that Bataille worked within.
Hegel is a central target in this Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.
I have not read Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (it's on order ) so I do not know if the renunciation of Hegel begins there. I suspect that it does.
It does, according to this account over at Smoke Writing.
From this I infer that Deleuze interprets Nietzsche as having a anti-Hegelian ontology (the will to power as different forces) and an ethics. Nietzsche becomes a philosopher of difference.
Why is Hegel a target?
Here is my guess. In order to establish his philosophy of difference Deleuze considered that it was necessary to displace Hegel because he had a "merely conceptual account of difference."
So what does that mean? Presumably, Deleuze wants to establish a non-dialectical account of difference; one that has no or little connection of negation. Hence contradiction is not the ground of difference. Difference is substituted for Hegel's negation and opposition.
On the Delueze reading of the French Hegel, Hegel was a target because he gave primacy to identity and made difference secondary or derivative. Hence we a critique of identity (sameness) and the overcoming of the metaphysical tradition represented by Hegel.
It is a shift away from the Hegel and Marx combination of the Kojevean-Hyppolitean interpretation of Hegel towards a philosophy of multiplicities.
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If it helps, Deleuze's rejection of Hyppolite's Hegel really goes back to his review of Hyppolite's Logique et existence (translated and published in the English translation of LE), and his 'la conception de la difference chez Bergson' (translated in Deleuze's Desert Islands). Both these are from the early 50s, and both (together with Nietzsche and Philosophy) inform Difference and Repetition. In each case it is, as you say, an idea of 'difference outside the concept' that he's interested in; Deleuze thus raises the same objection to Hegel's dialectic as Schelling (he mentions Schelling's conception of difference approvingly in DR).