Logics of Similitude and Logics of Difference in American and Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Abstract

In his now classic study, The American Evasion of Philosophy, Cornel West documented how American pragmatism, with its Emersonian roots, side-stepped modern philosophy's epistemological turn in favor of an ethically centered project: evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy?from Emerson to Rorty, West writes, results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criti cism (1989, 5). The task of philosophy, for the pragmatist, as for Marx, is not to know the world in itself, disinterestedly, but to transform it, to reconstruct it. Similarly, the self articulated by the pragmatists is one defined not primarily by epistemological projects and functions but in terms of moral agency. What wish to suggest here, following some suggestions of Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, is another way by which American philosophy, now stretching back all the way to its Puritan and not just Emersonian roots, evaded, or, in this case, resisted, elements of modernity, specifically its logic of identity and difference, by retaining an older logic, described by Foucault as a logic of similitude. From its beginning, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault's life's work was a study of the logic of dividing practices, viz., the logic that built the walls of modern institutions, preserving sameness and difference?e.g., the asylum, the prison, the hospital?and separating the mad, the sick, the criminal, the poor, the perverted from the normal. With modernity, Foucault claimed, A sensibility was born which had drawn a line and laid a cornerstone, and which chose?only to banish (1965,64). By such a logic the modern subject assertively constitutes itself as sovereign, struggling constantly to define itself as not the repressed other, who has been condemned to the other side of the wall; but, ironically, all the while this modern subject continuously subjugates himself within the endless binary logic of sameness and difference, thereby internalizing the policing mechanism of the social order. I am not guilty. am not guilty, Kafka's character K pleads before the magistrate, without even knowing the crime of which he has been charged. Everyone is guilty of something, replies the magistrate. In a world thoroughly