We must now look at Derrida and Deleuze side by side as they relate to the Hegelian conception of difference. Deconstruction, as we have characterised it, lives and breathes in the tension between two recent, fundamental, and inescapable moments in the history of Western thought: (1) Hegel's closure of Western metaphysics; and (2) Heidegger's critique of ontotheology. Heidegger revealed the ontotheological determination of Being as presence lying at the heart of all metaphysical thinking up to and including Hegel. But all efforts to escape the system, including Heidegger's, have failed and must always fail because they inevitably employ the language, logic, presuppositions, and concepts of the tradition in order to execute thought against the system. In using these concepts, they affirm the very system from which they seek escape. ‘[A]ll anti-Hegelian thinkers’, we recall, are ‘very close to Hegel’, the more so at precisely the moments they seem most radically opposed.

Deconstruction does not therefore seek a radical escape from the system, but rather, to locate and agitate the moments of imbalance within the system, whereby its desired completion disrupts itself. For this reason, deconstruction operates precisely within and at the limits of the system of Western thought, and makes absolutely no pretensions to the contrary. In Derrida's words: ‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it.’ According to Derrida, this strategic inhabitation is to be the task of the philosopher for the foreseeable future: ‘The movement of this schema will only be able, for the moment and for a long time, to work over from within, from a certain inside, the language of metaphysics.’

Like Heidegger (and not unlike Deleuze), Derrida understands Hegel's Aufhebung in terms of the ontotheological emphasis on presence – the Aufhebung raises up (relever) the two contradictory terms into a higher unity, resolving the difference that subsists between them.