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This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of difference. It explains that only a process philosophy where process and product are the same can hope to prevent the subordination of difference to identity and suggests that Deleuze's philosophy meets all these requirements and represents the most consistent difference philosophy of all. It also discusses Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and his view on the history of philosophy.

The opening chapter in this section outlines the implicit value system and binary normative logic—the valorization of difference over and against identity—that has dominated the ‘philosophy of difference’ in France and played an important role in the ‘politics of difference’ in the Anglophone world and beyond. By detailing a series of surreptitious conceptual operations aimed, in part, at disguising the rigidity of this metaphilosophical axiology, it calls into question the sacralization of difference, with special attention paid to its operative historiographical paradigms and its ultimate political consequences. It develops, in this regard, a metaphilosophical critique of one of the deep-seated normative commitments that has dominated a very significant portion of contemporary theory. This critical intervention thereby brings together one of the central motifs of the book as a whole, which aims at dismantling the more or less discreet attribution of value to difference in a seemingly unlimited number of domains (including history, politics and aesthetics).

This chapter focuses on Gilles Deleuze's engagement with the philosophical thoughts of Polish Russian rabbi Solomon Maimon, discussing Maimon's commentary on Immanuel Kant entitled Essay on Transcendental Philosophy. It highlights Maimon's reliance on concepts and Deleuze's claim that the fundamental elements of a philosophy of difference cannot be grounded in any form of identity. The chapter explains that Deleuze is prepared to accept a distinction between finite consciousness and something a priori and transcendental, but on the proviso that we do not conceive of the latter in terms of unity, understanding, or a cogito.

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's engagement with the mathematical philosophy of Albert Lautman. It suggests that mathematical work which was drawn upon and played a significant role in Deleuze's philosophical project is that of Lautman, and explains that the speculative logic which Deleuze constructs as a part of his project of constructing a philosophy of difference is dialectical in the Lautmanian sense. The chapter provides an account of Lautmanian dialectic and evaluates how it operates in Lautman's work.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet “musically thinks” difference, enacting in musical sound how difference arises through repetition. This analytical essay demonstrates how processes of timbre, dynamics, articulations, register, and pitch shape the Quartet’s overall formal design in which differing plays an integral role. The essay takes account of music differing through the three parts of the single-movement Quartet: Part 1, Reaching Out and Tethering; Part 2, Reaching Up and Renewing; and Part 3, Affirmation. The analysis also demonstrates how Gubaidulina’s musical thinking of difference resonates with the philosophical thinking of Gilles Deleuze, especially in his 1968 Difference and Repetition, and how such thinking of difference has a distinctive significance for the composer who is female.

This chapter outlines Rancière’s major contribution to contemporary debates on art and politics by situating it in relationship to the work of his predecessors, and more specifically the paradigms of content-based commitment and formal commitment found respectively in Sartre and Barthes. It highlights the refreshing departure that he proposes from established models for thinking art and politics, but it also underscores some of the limitations inherent in his transhistorical conception of politics as well as in the hermeneutic framework he uses to interpret works of art.