Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Material Causality, Dissemination, Difference

Even though every Philosopher who publishes or even teaches engages in an act of Dissemination, the only explicit treatment of the concept, Derrida's, is generally considered to be extrinsic to Philosophy proper.  But less easy to similarly marginalize is one of Derrida's earliest innovations, the concept of what he calls 'Differance', but which is essentially an active version of a concept that most Philosophers recognize as having Logical pedigree, Difference, some of the implications of which are developed by Derrida's colleague Deleuze.  But, while Dissemination can be conceived as derived from Difference, i. e. as simultaneous multiple acts of differentiation, the entailment of multiplicity indicates more than mere separation.  That entailment signifies, rather, Diversification, of a quantitative variety.  Thus, rather than Dissemination being derived from Difference, Difference is abstracted from Dissemination, i. e. from Diversification.  So, it is Derrida's later innovation that more closely approximates to the concept of Material Causality than does either his earlier one or Deleuze's development of the latter, a shortcoming that is a function of the limits of Structuralism, which is the general context of the studies of each.

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