Beyond Difference

Abstract

We misrecognise ourselves in the image of the other and through this misrecognition come to constitute an idea of ourselves, an identity which is fragile and predicated on that which is external to us. Such an understanding necessarily problematises any straightforward distinction between same and other insofar as I misrecognise the other as like me on the basis of my own misrecognition of myself and I fail to grasp that which is truly other in the other just as I fail to grasp what is truly other in myself. Where then does this leave ethics in relation to the other? In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001), Alain Badiou presents what might be understood to be an intervention on this very point. Against what he characterises as the ‘ethical predication based upon recognition of the other’ (Badiou, 2001: 25), Badiou posits what we might understand as an ethics of the same, that is, for Badiou, ‘the real question [of ethics] … is much more that of recognising the Same’ (Ibid.). For Badiou, any theory of ethics which would purport to found itself on a notion of difference from the other is destined to, at least philosophical, failure insofar as the positing of any foundational difference between self and other is necessarily ignorant of the constitutive difference which would entail to everything including the self itself.

Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences. Even the apparently self-reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations, and Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: ‘I am another.’

(Ibid.: 25–6)