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Difference

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The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ((PHGI))

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Abstract

This chapter considers the question of difference in the context of the relationships between German Idealism and contemporary philosophy. The main focus is Kant and Hegel, on the side of German Idealism, and Derrida and Deleuze, on the side of contemporary philosophy. Romantic authors, such as Hölderlin, Shelley, and Keats, are discussed as well.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 41; Positions (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,1972), 55.

  2. 2.

    See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 51; Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292; Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 7.

  3. 3.

    Derrida, Positions, 40–1.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 41.

  5. 5.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1985), 1.

  6. 6.

    Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,1994).

  7. 7.

    Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995).

  8. 8.

    Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 118.

  9. 9.

    Arkady Plotnitsky, The Principles of Quantum Theory, from Planck’s Quanta to the Higgs Boson: The Nature of Quantum Reality and the Spirit of Copenhagen (New York, NY: Springer), 207–46.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 5.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 203, 206, 202.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 203.

  13. 13.

    G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 31.

  14. 14.

    Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 16, 20.

  15. 15.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburg, PA; Duquesne University Press, 1969).

  16. 16.

    See J. F. Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 258.

  17. 17.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115.

  18. 18.

    Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 5–6.

  19. 19.

    See Arkady Plotnitsky, “The Calculable Law of Tragic Representation and the Unthinkable: Rhythm, Time, and Thought from Hölderlin to Deleuze,” in At the Edges of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Post-Kantian Thought, ed. C. Lundy and D. Voss (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 123–45; and “The Paradoxical Interplay of Exactitude and Indefiniteness: Reality, Temporality, and Probability, from Hölderlin to Heisenberg to Musil,” in Physics and Literature, ed. A. Heydenreich and K. Mecke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 202.

  20. 20.

    Following Plotnitsky, “The Paradoxical Interplay,” 212.

  21. 21.

    Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters (New York, NY: Penguin, 2009), 323.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 326 (translation modified).

  24. 24.

    Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York, NY: Touchstone, 2008), 121.

  25. 25.

    For example, Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 7.

  26. 26.

    Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984), 122.

  27. 27.

    Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 305, 308.

  28. 28.

    James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 118.

  29. 29.

    A prominent recent critique of the concept of the (Platonist/Parmenidean) One was offered by Alain Badiou via the mathematics of set and category theories (“the multiple-without-One”). There are, it should be noted, concepts of the One that are not Platonist/Parmenidean, such as that of François Laruelle within his framework of non-philosophy.

  30. 30.

    Rüdiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist, trans. E. Wiggins (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

  31. 31.

    Plotnitsky, “The Paradoxical Interplay”, 208.

  32. 32.

    See Plotnitsky, The Principles of Quantum Theory; and “The Paradoxical Interplay”.

  33. 33.

    Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 149.

  34. 34.

    Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 413–4.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 413.

  36. 36.

    Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993).

  37. 37.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1974), 223.

  38. 38.

    See Plotnitsky, “The Calculable Law”; and “The Paradoxical Interplay.”

  39. 39.

    Derrida, Of Grammatology, 26.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 85 (my emphasis).

  41. 41.

    Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228.

  42. 42.

    See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, NY: Vintage, 1990).

  43. 43.

    Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. J. T. Wilde and W. Kluback (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne, 1958), 104–5.

  44. 44.

    Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 27.

  45. 45.

    Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292–3.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 293 (my emphasis).

  47. 47.

    Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 26.

  48. 48.

    Derrida, Writing and Difference, 279.

  49. 49.

    Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 3.

  50. 50.

    Derrida, Of Grammatology, 26.

  51. 51.

    Derrida, Positions, 44.

  52. 52.

    See Derrida, Writing and Difference, 251–77.

  53. 53.

    Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 19.

  54. 54.

    Derrida, Positions, 43–4.

  55. 55.

    Nietzsche, Gay Science, 32.

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  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Arkady Plotnitsky

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  1. Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Tilottama Rajan

  2. Department of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK

    Daniel Whistler

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Plotnitsky, A. (2023). Difference. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_15

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