Identity and Relative Difference

Let's pick up where we left off last time. Two weeks ago, I established that there were no such thing as absolute difference and that the only kind of difference was the relative difference. But what’s the relative difference based on? A relative difference consists of an information in conflict, in contradiction, in opposition. A Porsche and a Mercedes, a Triumph and a Peugeot can be in contradiction with each other. But a Porsche and a tree can’t, because they don’t belong to the same genus. Aristotle already made that clear. There is no trick here: the tree too can be opposed to the rest of the world (the whole of beings minus one).

Jacques Derrida once wrote “There is no outside-text” (“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”). He is implying this obligation of every being to be read or understood in a context; the tree is in a context, in a situation, one can watch it from the path in the woods or from a plane, as a dot in the endlessness of the forest. Then, putting the tree in its context would be enough, logically speaking, to draw the absolute difference from the tree-in-context. But contexts are like matryoshka dolls, they are nested within one another: the tree-in-context is to be read in a context too. Let’s just remember Derrida’s words: there is no outside-text. An object is necessarily enclosed in a context, whatever this context is.

We already approached the idea behind the absolute difference: it leads to an oversized contradiction, opposition or an interval too big for us to be able to recognize anything at all. It’s not so about a limit of knowledge as it is about information/data we can gather. Humanity doesn't give birth to data, data preexist any human agency and establishing differential connections between them is a basic condition for any form of intelligent life and beings endowed with reason in the world. Absolute difference is thus a myth: only a difference between something and something else can exist, an object cannot be differentiated from everything else as a whole. We can then come to another conclusion thanks to the idea of absolute difference: difference is expressed by a positive information about an object distinguishing itself from another object belonging to the same class (or genus, if we follow Aristotle’s wording). We have definitely gained ground in terms of a positivity of difference here, but we need to keep looking into difference, especially into its relationship to identity and this position of superiority it seems to request to perform an act of differentiation. Is this view from above so essential? Finally, there is yet to explore this silent part of difference so crucial to the verb differere: gap, reference, shift, distance.

Identity is always discussed within the scope of difference: it’s one of the oldest couple of philosophy and difference has been so far mostly an identity concept; identity builds itself around difference, it channels it so strongly that it almost prevents its development: before differentiation (I'd rather use the french mise en différence), by being what difference infers, presupposes or implies; during differentiation [mise en différence], difference being one with identity; after differentiation, identity setting the difference’s teleology. The principle of identity remains very theoretical even between a very high number of objects: we don’t need to call on Hume here – who sends the whole concept of identity back to a fiction of the imaginary – to plainly claim that there is no pure and formal identity between objects, should we only take into consideration the issue of temporality or context. The old problem of the river simultaneously different and identical has been long solved: Rn+1 =Rn+T and no R=R, even if I consider temporality only. The concept of river might stay identical and stable, but the river in itself is never the same.

Difference here points to a more holistic identity, a common genus, a common class as discussed earlier. We already know there is no primary object we could use as a common (universal?) identity of which all other mundane objects are only a variation. There is no world in which all objects belong to a unique genus, a unique class "primary object". It is then safe to conclude that classes and genres are multiple. I already introduced the idea of an identity defining a difference's teleology: we are now sure that difference is for identification; what would be its role besides revealing a specific identity? It's precisely Aristotle's and Plato's approach: building a chain of differences – called division – to reach the indivisible: the essence of the thing.

A difficulty remains though. The establishment of difference comes from outside itself: judging, sorting beings requires to be put in a special position - the position of a spectator looking from above; the only position legitimating the possibility and powers of judgement about things and beings – a first step before sorting, gendering them – is necessarily a position of transcendence. In other words, the only answer would be to extract ourselves from the world – in a way taking the Demiurge's place – a mere utopia since I am in the world and can be simultaneously in and outside the world. This difference, I think it from my own point of view, my context, my situation, I thus start by presupposing it. To stop presupposing it, I need to think of a concept that won't require this absurd transcendental element of difference, a concept never leaving the plane of immanence where human being and difference are distinct, where human being are not spectators anymore, and definitely not in a position above anything.

The difference concept deploys a logic of integration, classification and specification – as Deleuze and Aristotle showed – and not of discovery and exploration. And yet, what we're trying to curb here is the monstrosity of difference, the tragedy of its discontinuity, in other words an attempt to "save" the difference by building a more harmonious concept. To sum up, we learned today that relative difference is the only true difference and that relative difference was a difference between two objects belonging to the same class, the same genus. We also saw identity was something that would be difficult to reach – if not impossible to reach. But we have to develop this idea of discovery and exploration for our concept of difference. In the next (and last) part of this series about difference, I'll try to build a concept from what we learned in these four episodes, a concept that would broke the circle of a difference as monstrosity.