Autrement qu’autre. Dire et penser l’altérité : une philosophie du paradoxe, de Platon à Derrida

Contemporary philosophy is sensitive to an approach that renounces the need for a single foundation as the principle of any explanation of the realities of the world and of our lives. It is therefore attentive to the tension expressed by the preposition “meta” in the word “metaphysics”, and wary of the modern “ontologies” that Kant did not fail to deconstruct. It therefore adopts the term “difference” as the key to understanding all that is. The word “paradox” highlights the fact that all difference is not opposition between mutually exclusive terms. It belongs to the most rigorous philosophical language and has been meditated on throughout the history of philosophy. Plato initiated it in a few pages of the Sophist, by examining the link between the two terms “same” and “other”, a tension that Aristotle nevertheless found difficult to accept, but which Plotinus singularly deepened. It returned in the twentieth century with Levinas and Derrida, in a cultural context where metaphysical reflection is making new departures.