03:00 PM to 04:15 PM TR
Aquia Building 219
Section Information for Fall 2023
Fulfills the requirement for a course in continental philosophy for the Philosophy major.
Fall 2023 Topic: Re-thinking Difference
In a modern western context, ‘difference’ has often functioned as a negative term, as something that is used as a basis for exclusion or discrimination. On this course, we will examine the work of a series of thinkers from the late 20th and early 21st centuries who argue that what is called difference in western modernity is often a disguised – and politically and ethically pernicious – form of Sameness. To be seen as ‘different’ has typically meant being seen as ‘less than’ an implicit standard or norm, while ‘otherness’ has been reduced to that against which individual and national identity is oppositionally defined.
The thinkers we will read on this course argue that: (a) this way of thinking about difference is embedded in and reinforced by the paradigms of western philosophical modernity, including concepts of identity, the subject, and the universal; and (b) difference remains to be thought in ways that do not involve comparison, opposition, or negation, and that make space for the plural, irreducible, and incommensurable in ways that do not imply exclusion or devaluation. Difference and radical otherness (what thinkers in this tradition often call alterity) is here thought as constitutive of subjectivity, ethics, human being, and (following Nietzsche) life itself.
We will track the concept of difference as it appears in key writings by Jacques Derrida (différance), Jean-François Lyotard (the differend), and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (the rhizome and assemblage). We will turn to the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva who complicate the theorization of difference via the notion of sexual difference and will conclude by reading Édouard Glissant, who draws on Deleuze and Guattari to resituate the question of difference in an Afro-Caribbean, decolonial context, focusing on Glissant’s concepts of creolization and opacity. Together these thinkers seek to hold open the thought of difference as that which resists being grasped as knowledge but remains vital to lived relations.
Credits: 3
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