Escaping the Dialectic

This paper argues that a central thread uniting much of 20th-century French philosophy is a reconfiguration of Kant’s transcendental dialectic as a response to the dominance of Hegel’s thought. After setting out Hegel and Kant’s accounts of dialectic, the paper explores how Merleau-Ponty uses Kant’s concept of antinomy and Derrida uses the concept of a transcendental ideal to develop a non-Hegelian account of thought. In contrast to Hegel’s sublation of contradiction into conceptual unity, these thinkers highlight how Kant’s transcendental dialectic reveals the limits of conceptual thought and how, once resituated as operating between conceptual and non-conceptual aspects of the phenomenal world, it opens the way towards an understanding of pre-conceptual structures such as perception and différance.