Ethics at the Boundary: Beginning with Foucault

Taking Differences Seriously

I mean by the phrase "taking differences seriously" freeing differences from the conceptual and linguistic formations that promote recognitions based on categorical grouping and what we might call domination by images of familiar normalcy and global similarities. ¹ I have in mind a discipline of turning out of those ways of speaking and thinking that intend to bring unity and essential harmony to highly diverse events and entities. Those are ways of thinking and speaking that assume that original identities define basic resemblances among classes of things. I understand this claim to mean that many current and established ways of thinking are dangerous for this country's diverse culture and for our global neighbors. In the context of the 2010 American Philosophies Forum conference theme, I want to take a step in the direction of taking differences seriously by considering some things Foucault said about what I will call boundary experiences (which he occasionally termed limit experiences). The constructive emphasis will fall on what I will call boundary experiences as sites of beginning when people take differences seriously.

I believe that Foucault and Deleuze are right, that the function of categories in our knowledge can exercise a homogenizing movement that suppresses, dislocates, and silences the differences of things: "Categories organize the play of affirmations and negations, establish the legitimacy of resemblances within representation, and guarantee the objectivity and operations of concepts. They suppress the anarchy of difference, divide differences into zones, delimit their rights, and prescribe their task of specification with respect to individual beings. . . . Difference can only be liberated through the invention of an acategorical thought." ² The bewildering, dispersed multiplicity and "anarchy" of things constitute a major segment of the problem. Without the unities and identities provided by categories, how would we recognize and evaluate anything? In "Theatrum Philosophicum" Foucault and Deleuze agree that when they are able to pay attention to what happens with acategorical perceptiveness they find remarkable, intangible, distinctive occurrences, "the shock of differences," the phantasms of events. ³ Recognition does not necessarily depend on the function of categories. First, there are different occurrences—occurrences and not solid, dense objects or things that hide the origins that give them identity and meaning and only make their secrets available to reasonable analysis and consideration—occurrences that are not under the domination and control of social functions (e.g., a useful function such as that of a slave or a convenience of knowledge such as an important person or a student).

Beyond the essay I am referring to, Foucault and Deleuze, to make this thought of phantasms clearer, will have to give accounts of the ways events happen in their specific differences and environments, the ways they stand out in their differences, the ways their various "shocks" occur. Deleuze will turn with his nomadic thought to articulations of a way of life that on his terms is radically nonfascist and in which most traditional concepts will be neutralized by what we might call an erotic art of thinking. Foucault, on the other hand, will continue to refine his genealogical/ archaeological thought to develop his own ways of interrupting and neutralizing the destructiveness of the categorical dominance of knowledge and the primary value such dominance gives to identity, as distinct to events that stand out in their force of differentiation. In order to take a first step into this issue of differences without categorical identity, I turn now to boundary experiences.

Experiences at the Boundary: Foucault

As I engage Foucault in connection with boundary experiences and acategorial thought in mind, I will make a distinction between thinking about things and thinking with them. I can use a careful dialogue as an example to make the distinction clearer. In a reflective and disclosive conversation with another person or persons we are certainly thinking about each other up to a certain point—about what, exactly, the other is saying, about its discursive meaning in the particular situation, perhaps about the other's emotional qualities and what they show. We think about him or her in many ways that we can describe...