ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and also Jean-François Lyotard in order to analyse how their conceptions of difference serve to challenge discourses of community. One important context for a discussion of community and alterity is the continued persistence of racist and prejudiced discourses. Racism involves above all oversensitivity to cultural difference. Cultural differences, consequently are placed in a hierarchical structure, in which the racist affirms his own superiority and denigrates the other precisely because of his or her otherness. The association of racism with decolonization can now be seen to express itself as a class issue. The chapter focuses on Lyotard's conception of difference in Le Différend and Au juste. In the most recent texts on hospitality, Derrida focuses specifically on questions of toleration and acceptance, and he argues both for the suspension of judgement and for unconditional openness to infinitely singular cultural others.
