Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and the challenges of difference

Abstract

To create a philosophy of difference: what does it mean? How is it possible to capture the movement of something singular, without subordinating it to universal categories, without submitting it to the limits of identity and representation? Moreover, how can we capture the experience of ourselves without reducing it to the expression of faculties always ready to externally project the synthetic unity of self, or even without spatializing the density of said experience's creative duration [without defining the density of said experience's creative duration in spatial terms]? While these questions undoubtedly give Deleuze's thought its North, they were already somehow present in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, suggesting directions unexplored by the author of Difference and Repetition. Merleau-Ponty intends to unveil the originally non-intellectual nature of the links produced throughout the experiment, while Deleuze seeks to give ontological dignity to difference itself. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the place accorded to difference by the two philosophers in order to understand some of the challenges faced by a thinking that refuses to submit to the empire of identity.