system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Relationship between Derrida's deconstruction and Hegel's dialectics?

For background, I have very little knowledge about Derrida's deconstruction, though I have a decent grasp of Hegel's dialectical thinking.

It may be just a superficial similarity that Derrida's deconstruction and Hegel's dialectics both have to do with binary opposites, but I couldn't help but wonder if Derrida ever explicitly or implicitly addressed the relationship between his project of deconstruction and Hegel's dialectics. Did he see them as having anything to do with each other? What are the qualitative differences between what is attempted/achieved by dialectical thinking and what is attempted/achieved by deconstruction?

Thanks in advance.
gpt
Hegel was actually one of the big names Derrida continually engaged with. Although many of his peers at the École (e.g. Deleuze and Foucault) were satisfied with just inheriting Hyppolite's extremely negative (and contentious) view of Hegel as an unnuanced thinker of identity, Derrida when he turned towards Hegel's texts themselves found much to agree with.

Deconstruction itself is, in a way, an expansion of Hegel's dialectic where the Self is forced into confrontation with the Other and must incorporate it by transcending/overcoming/annihilating/lifting-up \[sublating\] the difference between the two. What is substantial about the difference between Hegel and Derrida is difference-itself. Where Hegel thinks that difference marks out the possibility of synthesising Self and Other, for Derrida difference is always the exterior to a system (its differánce) which it is in constant dialogue with, yet unable to subsume.

Methodologically, dialectics and deconstruction are almost the exact inverses of each other. Dialectics seek out the real identity underlying differences (Self and Other unified in the transcendental identity of Absolute Being i.e. the "identity of identity and non-identity") whereas deconstruction seeks out the real difference underlying identities (the presence of absence). To an extent, Derrida's approach is comparable to Adorno's Negative Dialectics which aim to establish the "difference of identity and difference", seeing the totalisation of the Real by identity as a bourgeois mechanism ("bartering") which was invented to allow the universal, quantitative exchange of qualitatively different things.

Derrida's deconstruction is different than Adorno's Negative Dialectics in some important ways. Most significant of all might be the rigid anti-foundationalism which deconstruction supports, and yet which Negative Dialectics repels by being materialist. Negative Dialectics tries to found itself on the difference between Ideality and Reality (Adorno was a dualist). For Derrida, however, the Real is different than itself according to the ontological absence by which its identity is established (it is never a real-as-presence as Heidegger believed, but is defined also by its absences - the concealed meanings of Being \[*lethe*\] and its historical trajectory).

Overall though, in simpler terms, deconstruction wants to support the actual difference between terms which results in their equality rather than their hierarchisation. An important example of this is Derrida's discussion of speech and writing. Many past philosophers like Rousseau and Husserl considered writing to be an inferior form of speech. According to the orthodox view, writing is a simulacrum since it tries to symbolise (letters) a system of symbols (vocalisations), which are what is really connected to reality. Then, writing is more distant from reality than is speech, and whatever is derived from it is artificial and deficient. What Derrida points out here is that the assertion that speech is more originary than writing *occurs always in writing, and is enabled through written mediums* (the book, the essay) which allow the expansion of thought beyond the communicative limitations of speech. Then, what appears to be a hierarchy is actually grounded in a real equality between writing and speech.

By looking into the logic of 'logocentrists' (people favouring speech over writing), Derrida gives us an example of deconstruction, since he shows us the difference and interpenetration of writing and speech which is taken for granted by logocentrists.

Derrida and Hegel are weird together though, since Derrida only wrote one book in his life on Hegel called 'Glas', and it's a heavily obscure text comparing Hegel to Genet, rather than directly engaging with Hegel on his own.

Hope this helps!