The Society of the Study of Difference held on 12 October 2006 a panel session on the theme Humanity, Individuality and Difference at the conference organized by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at Philadelphia.

To discuss some of the issues surrounding Humanity, Individuality and Difference, Hugh Silverman (Stony Brook University), Brian Treanor (Loyola Marymount University), Eric Weber (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), and Arsalan Memon (SUNY-Independent Scholar) kindly accepted to present papers in a pannel session chaired by Douglas Donkel.

The Differences Between us

Thinking differences is a political and ethical, as well as ontological, strategy.  The task of this paper will be to think the differences between us (the entre nous in Jean-Luc Nancys sense and the differend in Jean-Francois Lyotards sense).  As a question of the political, relationships will be understood not on the basis of identities, but rather in the sense of differences.  The Paul Haggis film Crash will be taken as an instance of the ethicality and politicality of the differences between us.  Such an inquiry will open up an alternative way to write political theory.

Otherness and Difference

The contemporary debates surrounding the “question of otherness” tend to take form around one of two incommensurable positions, which view otherness as absolute and relative respectively. The traditional view of otherness is that it is relative to the same. That is to say, the other is that which is other than the self. This relative view of otherness is remains the standard position the development of Western philosophy from Plato through Heidegger.

However, in the latter half of the 20th century, postmodern philosophy began to challenge this view of otherness. Claiming that the traditional understanding could never encounter the other qua other—and was therefore oppressive, unethical, and violent—these postmodern thinkers claimed that otherness must be met on its own terms, so to speak, rather than defining it in terms of the self. Levinas began this revolution with the assertion “L’absolument Autre, c’est Autrui” and Jacques Derrida hyperbolized this formulation by extending it to its logical conclusion, claiming “tout autre est tout autre.” But the postmodern, all-or-nothing view of otherness generates problems and aporias of its own.

Ultimately, both the traditional, relative account and the postmodern, absolute account of otherness prove unworkable, the former because it unduly favors the self and the latter because it unduly valorizes the other. What is needed is an account that takes seriously the postmodern critique of the tradition without resorting to the ultimately unnecessary hyperbole of absolute otherness. This paper will argue for such a middle position, a distinctively postmodern retrieval of relative otherness. What emerges is a hermeneutic account that claims otherness is a chiasm of alterity and similitude, implying that while every other is truly other, no other is wholly, absolutely other.

Differences in Reason-Giving

In his work, What We Owe to Each Other, T. M. Scanlon exemplifies one of the central flaws of contemporary political philosophy.  He begins his book by explaining that he will take the notion of a reason as primitive.  This is to say that we all know what a reason is, and that we can understand not only what it means to have reason to do one thing or another, but also what constitutes a reason for someone else to act in a particular way.  

Given the prominence of the work of John Rawls in current political philosophy, his work will be the focus of my critique.  I will address the oversimplifications of thinkers such as Rawls and Scanlon when it comes to addressing the way in which persons can be conceived, differentiated, and treated as both givers and subjects of reason-giving.  What it is that one takes to be a reason for acting in one fashion versus another is precisely a source of conflict and complexity.  What it means for something to be a reason for one to act in a given fashion must be taken to be of central concern.  

In his famous work, A Theory of Justice, Rawls bases his notion of personhood on the work of Josiah Royce on the subject.  From that base, he can, whether or not he does, more thoroughly address the complexity of political conflict than he does in his later work.  For, to address it, one must more fundamentally consider the variety of grounds from which persons will base their decisions as to what will or will not constitute a real reason for action.  In his later work, Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples, Rawls abandons the Roycean conception of the person to replace it with an instrumental, though troublingly limited notion.  The conclusion of the paper will present two fundamental, problematic implications of this development in Rawls’s work. 

Un-marking and Re-marking the Borders between Humanity and Animality: Towards Understanding Corporeal Differentiality  

How does one make sense of humanity and animality? Is humanity an identity? Is animality an identity? How is humanity to be understood with or without animality? Are humans rational animals, why or why not? What marks the difference between human animals and non-human animals? At what point does a human become an animal and vice versa? What is the difference between the human flesh and the animal meat? Where is the line to be drawn between them, if possible?  This paper seeks to problematize and rethink the difference between humans and animals via Merleau-Ponty’s notions of flesh and animality and Deleuze’s notions of meat and the zone of indiscerniblility, as they are presented, respectively, in The Visible and the Invisible and in the second and third courses on nature in Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France––––“Animality, the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture” and “Nature and Logos: The Human Body”––––and in the fourth chapter, “Body, Meat, and Spirit: Becoming-Animal,” of the book, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. In addition, Francis Bacon’s paintings are used to illustrate the indiscerniblility and indecidability between the human flesh and the animal meat. Suffice it to say, the clear-cut traditional distinction between a human animal and a non-human animal is called into question and is rethought through their corporeity rather than their intrinsic mental faculties.