Different Meanings: a Brief Trajectory of the Concept of Difference

Abstract

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 pre- Socratic 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.