The same and the different

Abstract

Pour Casimir et Imogene, qui font toute la différence . Auch für die, die andere Wege öffnet . It is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies of the sword: when it taps a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head. It is not at all similar for the man. (G. K. Chesterton) One is at the mercy of others. One's view of oneself, for example, is shaped by the others' gaze. And, beyond specularity, one fears being encumbered by something alien to oneself. In order to accommodate the vagaries of dependency and to contain the threat that others may represent, it becomes necessary to ascertain whether others are friends or foes, which is tantamount to asking whether they are like or unlike one. Difference, then, can be invoked to the disadvantage of those to whom it is applied as when it serves to place an individual's or a community's distinctiveness in jeopardy through oppression, disavowal, exclusion or obliteration. Overt sexual or ethnic discrimination provide evident applications of this discursive strategy. But the logic of betrayal and rejection through differentiation can adopt more insidious forms. Consider the character of the mother in Nathalie Sarraute's L'usage de la parole . In differentiating, through a brutal naming of roles, between the various members of the family who had been huddling together on the sofa (‘She shook them, she forced them to awake, to detach themselves from one another.

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