We might call the philosophical period in France ranging from the 1962 publication of Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy to Michel Foucault’s death in 1984 “the epoch of difference.” That period saw the publication of Deleuze’s 1968 Difference and Repetition, Jacques Derrida’s major 1967 and then 1972 works with the appearance of différance and related concepts, Emmanuel Levinas’s 1978 Otherwise than Being (Totality and Infinity was published in 1961, but its influence developed later), and Foucault’s work from the 1966 The Order of Things through the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality. This period also saw related works by Jean-François Lyotard (1988 [1983]), Jean Baudrillard (1994 [1981]), and perhaps the most well known of Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, 1983’s The Inoperative Community. Although the treatments of difference in these works are extraordinarily diverse, it is remarkable how deeply the major thinkers (with the possible exception of Foucault, whose relation to difference is more indirect) are concerned with the idea of difference and its role in constructing a philosophical position. And although I have, a bit arbitrarily, marked 1984 as the end of this “epoch,” its influence continues well beyond that date.