Reconsidering Difference : : Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze / / Todd May.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn State University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: May, Todd,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2021]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- lntroduction -- 1. From Communal Difference to Communal Holism: Jean-Luc Nancy -- 2. From Linguistic Difference to Linguistic Holism: Jacques Derrida -- 3. From Ethical Difference to Ethical Holism: Emmanuel Levinas -- 4. From Ontological Difference to Ontological Holism: Gilles Deleuze -- Conclusion From Difference to Holism -- Index