Part II of the book performs the critical tasks of this project. Both Derrida and Deleuze cite Hegel's conception of difference, specifically in the form of the Aufhebung, as the background against which their own concepts of difference are formulated. Deleuze famously cites a ‘generalized anti- Hegelianism’, an intellectual spirit that is practically ubiquitous in 1960s French thought. But anti-Hegelianism can be difficult to execute, as Hegel has surreptitiously woven into his system every conceivable possibility of antithesis and opposition. As Michel Foucault famously notes, ‘to truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him…. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.’ The question of what it means to escape Hegel comes down, in some senses, to the ways in which one understands Hegel's significance in the history of philosophy more generally. It is in the context of these questions and responses that sharp distinctions emerge between Derrida and Deleuze. Each rejects specific aspects of Hegelian difference. For Deleuze, the rejection is predicated upon his rejection of the negative more generally, while Derrida's rejection of Hegelian difference is that its negativity is insufficient. As we shall see, differance for Derrida is understood as a negativity so negative that it forever eludes the traditional, Hegelian understanding of the negative. In this chapter, we explore what Derrida sees as impossible attempts to break with Hegel, positing Hegel's thought as one of the two pillars of deconstruction, the other being Heidegger's critique of ontotheology.

Though it is a popular stereotype for French philosophy in the 1960s, the characterisation of ‘anti-Hegelianism’ is certainly not a comfortable fit when it comes to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Derrida repeatedly casts his project, explicitly and in practice, as an extended engagement with Hegel's thought: ‘We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point.’