ABSTRACT
Much of what I have written so far can be described in terms of the way philosophies of difference have responded to dialectical thought. One very simple way of thinking about autobiography in theory is to see it as a residue that is both necessary to the formulation of the theory and necessarily something to be purged once the theory has been formulated. Autobiography, in this view, cannot be a proper part of any theory, and is sublated by any properly theoretical system. But if autobiography cannot be written off or out in this way, then it becomes an important element of any attempt to resist certain kinds of theoretical system. Autobiography can therefore usefully be brought together with postcolonial theory, given the latter’s debt to the same philosophies of difference previously mentioned. Postcolonial theory is generally taken to exemplify a mode of thought hostile to dialectics as in some way a kind of primary colonialist philosophy, particularly for instance in its recourse to Frantz Fanon, whose more critical comments on the dialectic are seized upon and extended by Homi Bhabha in particular. Such a critical stance toward the dialectic also comes through in the postcolonial recourse to Foucault’s work. Foucault does insist upon the endless mobility of the Hegelian dialectic in particular, and yet Foucault’s work is generally taken to be a form of anti-dialectical thinking. So, writing about Gilles Deleuze, Foucault gives the following programmatic statement of an anti-dialectical thought:
The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence; affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of the multiple — of the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not limited or confined by the constraints of the same; thought that does not conform to a pedagogical model (the fakery of prepared answers) but attacks insoluble problems — that is, a thought which addresses a multiplicity of exceptional points, which is displaced as we distinguish their conditions and which insists upon and subsists in the play of repetitions.1
