The Crowning of Anarchy, Remarks on the Age of Pure Difference

Abstract

The question of truth is bound to the question of the relation between identity and difference. Historically, the bond between truth and the primacy of identity was forged through the conviction that to speak of truth is to speak of being, or what is (the case). Since Parmenides, being becomes intelligible solely in relation to identity, or the One, with difference either being excluded from “what is” altogether, or as in Plato and Aristotle, finding its subordinate “place” within being. After Hegel, whose thought accomplishes this “placing” in an absolute way, philosophy has sought to reverse this priority, while still insisting, necessarily, on thinking and speaking about what is the case, and therefore of truth. This essay raises the question of the coherence of this reversal. Characterizing the past century as the one in which philosophy’s aim was the overcoming of the perennial priority of identity, it attempts to show not only that post-Hegelian thought was at multiple levels divided on this aim, but that what Gillian Rose called the “metaphysics of pure difference” went uniquely awry—both in terms of its consequences and in its failure to maintain a genuinely critical relation to so-called “philosophies of representation.”