Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A note on references
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC (1890–1940)
- PART II THE REIGN OF EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY (1940–1960)
- PART III STRUCTURALISM AND BEYOND (1960–1990)
- 8 The structuralist invasion
- 9 Foucault
- 10 Derrida
- 11 Philosophies of difference
- 12 Fin-de-siècle again: “le temps retrouvé”?
- Conclusion: the philosophy of freedom
- Appendix: philosophy and the French educational system
- References
- Index
11 - Philosophies of difference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- A note on references
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC (1890–1940)
- PART II THE REIGN OF EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY (1940–1960)
- PART III STRUCTURALISM AND BEYOND (1960–1990)
- 8 The structuralist invasion
- 9 Foucault
- 10 Derrida
- 11 Philosophies of difference
- 12 Fin-de-siècle again: “le temps retrouvé”?
- Conclusion: the philosophy of freedom
- Appendix: philosophy and the French educational system
- References
- Index
Summary
As for the truths which the intellectual faculty – even that of the greatest minds – gathers in the open, the truths that lie in its path in full daylight, their value may be very great, but they are like drawings with a hard outline and no perspective; they have no depth because no depths had to be traversed in order to reach them, because they have not been re-created.
(Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vi, 303)Although Derrida's talk of differance is tinged with his own peculiar coyness and taste for paradox, the general theme of difference is fundamental for all poststructuralists, who are in principle wary of thought that reduces diverse elements to the sameness of unifying concepts or theories. Moreover, even though Derrida is most strongly associated with the notion, he offers a focused discussion of it in only one essay (“La différance”). By contrast, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Irigaray provide extensive developments of what they call, respectively, the differend, difference, and sexual difference.
LYOTARD
Even before his book-length treatment of difference in Le differend, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) insistently and powerfully developed the theme of a reality somehow beyond and different from intelligible structure. He did this in a variety of keys, speaking of desire in the context of psychoanalysis, of line in the context of art, and, in a wide range of contexts, of figure, event, and singularity.
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- French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century , pp. 318 - 352Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001