1 - What Difference does Deleuze's Difference make?
from INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Philosophies of difference, where difference maintains its grounds from beginning to end without being eclipsed by identity, are exceedingly rare. In fact, if we subtract from their ranks those which, in their struggle to maintain the primacy of difference, succumb to the ineffable and turn their back on the creation of concepts, the number of philosophical heterologies turns out to be minuscule. And of course it is not by chance that the fortunes of philosophical heterologies are better served inside process philosophies. Although to be a process philosopher is not a guarantee that one will also be a philosopher of pure difference, movement and the reflection on movement that constitute the raison d'être of the philosophies of process offer a rich soil for the nurture of tou heterou philia. In the distance travelled between the Heraclitian river with its flowing waters being eternally qualified as alla kai alla (different upon different) and the Bergsonian durée, the birthrights of difference are well protected. But a process philosophy, in order to support a purely heterological thought, has to be capable of doing without subjects steering the process (or being steered by it), without substantive names designating ‘blocks’ in motion, and without points of origin or destination marking the allowed trajectory. Only a process philosophy where process and product are the same can hope to prevent the subordination, in the final analysis, of difference to identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deleuze and Philosophy , pp. 3 - 28Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006