Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze

by Todd May

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.

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Todd May was born in New York City. He is the author of 18 books of philosophy. He was philosophical advisor to NBC's hit sit-com The Good Place and one of the original contributors to the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. Todd teaches philosophy at Warren Wilson College.

Reviews

[Kristen Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Context: I just like philosophy. I didn’t study it, and don’t know anything about the academic world of it.

Pros: I love the way May summarizes Nancy, Levinas, and Derrida — and directly states what they have in common. Also, I learned some vocabulary words.

Cons: Too bad he can’t summarize his own stuff as crisply. Also, the bulk of the book is like: here are all these bits & pieces of those other philosophies that aren’t 100% coherent see argument A, argument B, argument C. Boring, for one. And totally unnecessary. The majority of the book is justifying his own proposal of slight modifications. I can only guess that’s just like, what you do as a philosopher. But i didn’t need a bunch of examples about how they went a bit astray logically. Who cares?

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was going to give this 4 stars just so my evaluation might seem less hyperbolic. But Todd May always presents complex thought in such a clear way that he deserves extra credit for his consideration of the reader. I regret that I did not give the chapters on Nancy, Derrida and Levinas the same (or even adequate) attention as I gave to the Deleuze chapter which is superb, situating Deleuze's emphasis on difference in relation to his emphasis on immanence.