Thinking Difference

Critics in Conversation

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by Julian Wolfreys

Fordham University Press

Due/Published March 2004, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0823223086

"Difference" has been a term of choice in the humanities for the last few decades, animating an extraordinary variety of work in philosophy, literary studies, religion, law, the social sciences indeed, in virtually every area of the academy.

In projects ranging from deconstructive readings of canonical texts to a radical rethinking of the sacred, "difference" has been the node around which theorists have explored questions of conflict, power, identity, meaning, and knowledge itself in postmodern culture. At this point, what difference does "difference" make?

In this imaginatively conceived book, Julian Wolfreys talks to thirteen leading scholars about the place of "difference" in their own work, in their own fields, and in their teaching. How has intellectual engagement with difference, its celebration of otherness and opposition, whether in a work of art or in world politics shaped teaching, reading, and writing in today's colleges and universities? And at a time when identity politics and cultural critique have been institutionalized by the academy, has "difference" been domesticated?

Personal and revealing, these conversations come together as a kind of collective self-portrait of the humanities at one of its important junctures. Thinking Difference offers provocative reflections on what ideas and practices will drive the next generation of critical thinking.