ABSTRACT
Addressed here, despite the range of topics, is a particular topos. The topos in question concerns the attempt to rework and thereby to readdress the philosophical task in terms of the centrality of ontology. It is in relation to this centrality that art, mimesis and the avant-garde come to be presented. The conception of ontology at work here starts from a rethinking of ontological difference, a constitutive component of which will be the primacy of existence. However this does not mean that what is at stake is the specific historical presentation of existence, which, as the expression of its historicity, derives its force from its opposition to essence. It is rather that existence denotes, in the first place, more than the simple attribution of the fact of existence since it brings into play the articulation of existence within modes of being. The articulation is necessary. The analogy would be the impossibility of thinking being outside of the categories since being is categorial. This move neither effaces nor evades the question of being. On the contrary, it signals a reorientation within philosophical questioning. In the second place; as existence will involve modes of being, it will also denote the ontological rather than what is taken to be its opposite namely the merely empirical. Consequently, not only does the opposition between existence and essence come to be displaced, the posited universality of existence itself (as opposed to its primacy) is checked by its having been dispersed within differential modes of being. While the presence of dispersal works against universality it does not hinder let alone weaken the force of a differential ontology and its semantic and interpretive correlates.
