Hegel and Deleuze: Together Again for the First Time

Topics in Historical Philosophy

by Karen Houle (Editor), Jim Vernon (Editor)

Hegel and Deleuze cannily examines the various resonances and dissonances between these two major philosophers. The collection represents the best in contemporary international scholarship on G. W. F. Hegel and Gilles Deleuze, and the contributing authors inhabit the as-yet uncharted space between the two thinkers, collectively addressing most of the major tensions and resonances between their ideas and laying a solid ground for future scholarship.

The essays are organized thematically into two those that maintain a firm but nuanced disjunction or opposition between Hegel and Deleuze, and those that chart possible connections, syntheses, or both. As is clear from this range of texts, the challenges involved in grasping, appraising, appropriating, and developing the systems of Deleuze and Hegel are varied and immense. While neither Hegel nor Deleuze gets the last word, the contributors ably demonstrate that partisans of either can no longer ignore the voice of the other.

Genres: Philosophy

282 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2013

About the author

Karen Houle is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Canada. Her university degrees focused first on biology, then history & philosophy of science, and finally political philosophy. She is the author of numerous articles on the following thinkers: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Spinoza, Jacques Derrida, & Luce Irigaray, and the following subjects: animality, plant ontology, micropolitics, friendship, copyright, & reproductive technology.

With Jim Vernon (York University), she co-edited a book of essays on Hegel and Deleuze (2013, Northwestern). Houle recently completed a monograph titled Toward a New Image of Thought: Responsibility, Complexity and Abortion (2013, Lexington Press, Outsources Series). She is the author of two books of poetry: Ballast (published in 2000 by House of Anansi Press) and During (published in 2005 by Gaspereau Press), and numerous essays on and about art and art making in non-academic venues. She is also the translator (from French to English, & with the help of Melissa Chong and Pegless Barrios) of Le Quan Ninh's (2011) collection of aphorisms and short essays on musical improvisation entitled "Improvising Freely: The ABC's of An Experience." (Publication Studio, PS Guelph).

Reviews

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one is a doozy — but whatever can one expect from picking up a book written by inscrutable contemporary philosophers on the two arguably most incomprehensible and complex thinkers of philosophical history? I thought many of the articles were too jargon heavy for me to understand them properly — and most of the time it just felt like the authors were posing —, but Jay Lampert's article was (almost) lucid, quite insightful and enjoyable. He was the only writer in the compilation to attempt and pull off a line-by-line reading of Deleuze's most direct and prolonged treatment of Hegel. Continental philosophy could very well do with a small dose of analytical exactitude in works like these.