From Metaphysics toward a Philosophy of Difference: Deleuze and Derrida

Abstract

The famous French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are often called the philosophers of Difference to emphasise the importance of the Difference concept in their works. I dedicate this article to the description of the mentioned concept as well as to its role in the conception of the so¬called philosophy of Difference. But to fully understand the logics of these two philosophers, we will need to steer away from one of the strongest prejudices addressed to many post¬modernist philosophers. That is, we have to give up the idea of considering them the opponents of any metaphysics. I will try to prove that Derrida and Deleuze begin as heirs of metaphysics and only then come to the impossibility of metaphysics, the statement of which, however, requires paradoxical formulations – the metaphysics points at its own impossibility and simultaneously at the impossibility of impossibility.