THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF DIFFERENCE IN DERRIDA AND DELEUZE

The aim of this paper will be to shed light on the Husserlian origin of the concepts of difference found in the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. As is well known, the notion of difference plays the key role in their thought, albeit in contrasting ways. Whereas difference in Deleuze may be said to be the principal metaphysical concept around which a system (of immanence and heterogenesis, that is) is to be built, for Derrida difference is always a kind of a double movement of differing and deferring, that transcends metaphysics and serves as the impossible condition of its possibility. According to this classical view, their conceptions of difference are almost like two parallel lines with no point of intersection, one directed towards immanence and the other one towards transcendence. I will try to show that this is not entirely true, by arguing that their respective conceptions of difference converge in, or better yet, stem from a common root that is found in Husserl's phenomenological attempt at overturning Platonism. Therefore, this argumentation will consist of two parts: I will first inspect how Derrida and Deleuze come to grips with the problem of Platonism, which may be said to be their common and main philosophical adversary, and how their solutions seem to rest upon the notion of sense; then I will turn to their relation to Husserl in order to show how these two very different philosophical utilisations of the concept of difference both have their origin in Husserlian phenomenology.