Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze

By Todd May

Book Overview

French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. Reconsidering Difference has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism," takes the phenomena under investigation--community, language, ethics, and ontology--and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271016574
• ISBN13: 9780271016573
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Appraising and constructing (on) difference

In this critical study, Todd May seeks to appraise the trend to see difference as the constitutive element of our experience, that is, the viewpoint that 'difference plays a more fundamental constitutive role than has previously been recognised' (p. 2). Such an appraisal is, however, not only for the purpose of questioning the (possible) 'foundationalist' underpinning of such like viewpoints (p. 11), but more importantly, to offer a complement to difference-related viewpoints by means of 'positive rearticulations' (p. 203) in four areas. The first area concerns "community" and in this respect, May discuses Nancy and the view that individuals are exposed and therefore not self-enclosed beings as they are constituted by what is outside of them on grounds that the very idea of closure is self-contradictory. For these reasons Nancy seeks to articulate community as 'being-in-common' (p. 34) not as that which is shared, but that which arises from being with the other, a view that avoids the twin dangers of liberal individualism and totalitarianism. For May, however, this conception is ambiguous as it fails to separate two aspects, namely, the constitutive (i.e. what it is to be in community is) and the normative (i.e. how to conceive community in a non-totalitarian way) resulting in four main weaknesses that characterise Nancy's account. In improvement, May proposes a view where 'a community is defined by the practices that constitute it' (p. 52). The second one concerns "language" and for this reason May chooses to discuss Derrida. In particular, the claim that, in denying that being is presence, let alone absence and to some extent not even différance, there is a play in language that precludes capturing language itself even though for Derrida 'we think only in signs' (p. 79). For May, this claim involves simultaneously defending three views, namely, that of 'the operation of linguistic meaning', 'the philosophical project', and 'their relationship' (p. 80). In outlining Derrida's argument regarding philosophy and its relationship with language, May finds fault with the idea that any alternative to the traditional philosophical project (i.e. metaphysics) must come to terms with language in use (i.e. bearing metaphysical traces). In adopting the view on language advocated by Sellars, May argues for a conception of language in more practical terms, that is, 'as a practice of groups of practices' (p. 118). As the third one deals with "ethics", May considers the position held on this matter by Levinas particularly that concerning the other in the face of 'identitarianism', that of reducing the other to pre-conceived categories or classes, a valorisation that is faced by a trilemma (p. 129). That is, refusing to accept differences vs. accepting differences relative to our own standards vs. accepting differences relative to anyone's standards, premised on fundamental question: how to think and experience the other when language precludes such thinking and