Abstract

This dissertation is concerned specifically with an unexamined moment in the self-representation of the tradition of thinking that links Plato and Heidegger. The notion of difference refers directly to an imperative that is ordinarily set aside and that exceeds all finite distinctions, pointing towards a necessity that is barely, if at all, accessible. The dissertation concurs with the tradition that thinking is called in relation to difference, but attempts to show that implicit in this calling are profound expenditures of which the tradition fails to take note. The first two chapters say how this is possible, the next two, what it means. ;Chapter One and Two turn to the question of whether Plato, in The Republic, can successfully give philosophy, in its difference from non-philosophy, as positive in the relation to non-philosophy. I maintain that Plato gives philosophy as the profitable and advantageous with regard to living well, but only in a simulated gesture of giving that obscures the significance of what philosophy, as it stands in an apparently mediated relation to its other, takes away. With philosophy presumed positive, there is no need to inquire further into the meaning of its expenditure. ;Seeing this giving as simulated, however, points to the expenditure in two ways. In the first place, the costs cannot be construed as so violently negative that Plato's pretense of philosophy as a gainful endeavor becomes absurd. Chapter Three turns to Kierkegaard's reading of Socrates to manifest philosophy as an injustice, as a covert violation of what a concurrent reading of Levi-Strauss shows to be the requirements of all social exchange. ;Secondly, however, the special significance of this expenditure is the discontinuity it brings into play. The specific quantity of loss is a variable function of a fundamentally disruptive discontinuity. Chapter Four maintains, with Bataille and Kierkegaard, that for us to preserve the difference is economically impracticable; the loss is absolute. Moreover, Derrida's opposition to Heidegger now extends and breaks the tradition that maintains itself in relation to difference by bringing the economic imperative to its forefront