On Nothing rather than Different: A non-Argument

2020

This essay is an attempt to apply the Derridan notion of différance to Barthelme's two short stories entitled "Nothing: A Preliminary Account" (1987) and "Sentence" (2003)

2018

The Anglo–American literary criticism (especially mid 1960s/70s) gives us an impression that the term ‘difference’ must have originated in the structuralist model of analysis in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure. The arrival of poststructuralism dealt with the concept of difference in a different parlance in Derrida’s Writing and Difference or in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. However, the fundamental problem of the concept of difference has been central to the fundamental problems in philosophy and the concept has had an intriguing genealogy beginning in preSocratic Milesean and Pyrrhonist philosophy that came to be rooted in the idea of identity with Aristotle. The paper attempts to trace briefly the trajectory of the concept from the Milesean philosophers upto the middle of twentieth century.

Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2017

The seminars set out to provide a forum for scholars working in continental philosophy to engage with problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western philosophical thought. This volume both reflects and extends the original impetus behind the project, bringing together articles arising directly from the seminar series, as well as other contributions sought from scholars whose work both aligns with, and extends the concerns motivating the series. This special issue is both critical and constructive in its approach to the problem of difference. It is critical of the liberal framing of difference as a deviation from a hegemonic norm whose contours and constitutive exclusions go unrecognised. It is widely argued that the liberal subject is founded and maintained through violent exclusions and disavowals. While posited as neutral, the liberal subject is conceptualised around parameters that are male, white, Western, rational, able-bodied, and individual. This supposedly universal subject is posited in a form that denies the fundamental participation and dependence of human life on the concrete living milieus of the Earth. It is also predicated on a devaluation of the creative capacities of the myriad forms of life. There are two senses in which this volume thinks difference constructively. First, we affirm a thinking of inter-subjectivity in which difference is the ground for relationality and respect, rather than something to be overcome through a violent reduction to the logic of the same. The difference or interval between subjects does not hinder or render relationality impossible; rather, difference grounds the very possibility of an ethical relation. Beyond the context of inter-subjectivity, difference is also explicitly affirmed as ontological. In this sense, difference is not merely that which distinguishes disparate things but the constitutive force which produces any 'thing'. Each 'thing' is itself differing from itself. Being is becoming. In 'Onto-Ethics and Difference', an interview focused on her recent work, Elizabeth Grosz speaks with Rebecca Hill about Grosz's thinking on ontology, the incorporeal, difference, sexual difference and new materialism. 1 Grosz's essay in this

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2020

This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism emphasizes this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This article experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radically resembling Euro-American thought in its conceptualization of the nature of difference, that is, the form that difference takes as a relation. It argues that in schematic representations of Amerindian and Euro-American cosmologies, difference for both is always a matter of institution and construction, and resemblance is a matter of essence and necessity. Thus, paradoxically, arguments about radical difference may in fact be read to assert an underlying essentialism as to the nature of difference itself. I conclude by proposing that we abandon conceptions of the nature of difference, in favor of a focus on “styles” of difference, and discuss some non-anthropological examples of this approach, as well as instances of different “styles” of difference from my own fieldwork.

2021

Peter van Inwagen (2001) has given a probabilistic answer to the fundamental question 'why is there something rather than nothing?': There is something, because the probability of there being nothing is 0. Some authors recently examined van Inwagen's argument and concluded that it does not really work. Three points are central in their criticism: (i) the premise which states that there is only one empty possible world is false, (ii) the premise which states that all possible worlds have the same probability is not plausible and (iii) the argument is not significant for the question it sets out to answer. In this paper, I shall show that (i) even if there are many empty worlds, this does not necessarily invalidate the argument in its general lines, (ii) the examples they offer to support the intuition that possible worlds may have different probabilities fail, and (iii) even if the conclusion of the argument does not really answer the question van Inwagen sets out to answer, it is still not an insignificant response to the question.

International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2012

This essay is an attempt to apply the Derridan notion of différance to Barthelme's two short stories entitled "Nothing: A Preliminary Account" "Sentence" (2003). The research seeks to illustrate that everything is the victim of language plays. Accordingly, as long as différance is one of those plays, it is going to be deconstructed within the stories by its own jeux. Through "Nothing: A Preliminary Account", the discussion is sought after making a threshold from which language could be seen as the major problem of our world. It does so by constructing the new world of nothing within its story. On the other hand, throughout "Sentence", our beliefs about construction of any ideological system for defining anything are depicted as false and fake. As one sees the new definition of 'sentence' from Barthelme's outlook, the essay provides the reader to see the arbitrariness of différance world construction from another angel. Furthermore, using deconstruction methodology creates ways to go beyond the world of words; it is like watching language from outer space. Although deconstruction is aware of being trapped within the labyrinthine made by language, it has no other way to use it. In fact, deconstruction cannot use language, but also it cannot not use it. Deconstruction in Barthelme's stories constructs another world. It puts language under erasure, but at the same time invites the reader to go beyond its world.

International Journal of Žižek Studies, Special Issue on Less Than Nothing, 2014

I argue that Žižek's Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism presents us with a radically original variety of metaphysics both in terms of Žižek's own intellectual development and the history of philosophy. Rather than being concerned with the study of being qua being, Less Than Nothing proclaims that we ought to investigate nothing qua nothing inasmuch as contemporary physics demonstrates that the more we analyze reality the more we find a void, this latter now in matter of fact exhibiting the traits of ultimate reality rather than the order of the perceived universe. Before arriving at this, however, I demonstrate how Žižek is led to contemporary physics in order to overcome inherent limitations in his own previous metaphysics of Hegelian inspiration. If thinking substance as subject imposes upon us the recognition that substance as a self-articulating totality of necessity is an illusion, subject being nothing but a synonymous for its constitutive tension with itself, if we are to explain how this weakly structured nature does not collapse upon itself we must go further. In this manner, Less Than Nothing outlines one way in which we must step beyond Hegel to find new metaphysical solutions for impasses that have emerged out of thinking the obscure ground of the psychoanalytic subject.

This paper takes a look at the concept nothingness through the Early Modern Era and the refutations against these arguments. This paper evaluates the preconceived notions of upholding the rejection of nothingness for two centuries until the 1990's came about with the school of Metaphysical Nihilists. In 2000's this school of thought was refuted against and was seen to be brought down. I come up with a new theory about the world being made out of infinitesimals by using radical Pythagorean theory, in which nothing could maybe exist in the end run if the universe is an ultrafilter.