Much more than in the case of Derrida, the characterisation of ‘anti-Hegelian’ fits comfortably with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In reflecting upon his education in the philosophical tradition, Deleuze famously said, ‘I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of the negation’, and, ‘what I detested most was Hegelianism and dialectics’. Deleuze's 1962 work Nietzsche and Philosophy is explicitly anti-Hegelian in scope: ‘If we do not discover its target the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy remains abstract and barely comprehensible … the concept of the Overman is directed against the dialectical conception of man, and transvaluation is directed against the dialectic or appropriation or suppression of alienation. Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche's work as its cutting edge’, and as we have already cited, Deleuze regards the entire modern problematic as arising from out of a ‘generalized anti-Hegelianism’. From the 1954 review of ‘Jean Hyppolite's Logic and Existence’ through 1991's What is Philosophy?, written with Felix Guattari, Deleuze's work bears the explicit markings of anti-Hegelian thinking.

However, as in Derrida's case, the meaning of this opposition is not as simple as it is sometimes cast, and will depend upon how Deleuze understands Hegel and his relation to the philosophy of difference. What this avowed anti-Hegelianism amounts to or why Deleuze so vehemently commits himself to it is not obvious, because Deleuze himself, though offering many direct and indirect jabs at Hegelian dialectics, never undertakes a clear and consistent engagement with Hegel's thought. In her essay, ‘Who's Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?’, Catherine Malabou rightly notes that for Deleuze, ‘No outline of Hegelian philosophy is drawn, if by “outline” we understand what What is Philosophy? calls the “plane” of someone's thinking. This plane, constitutive of each particular philosophy, is a complex play of movements.’ Even in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze's most ardently anti-Hegelian book, Hegel plays more the role of a foil than an interlocutor, a character against whom Nietzsche's Übermensch emerges, rather than an object of extended critique.