The previous chapter left us with a question: What is philosophy? Derrida and Deleuze reached ostensibly differing understandings regarding the nature of philosophy and the task of the philosopher. We saw this clearly in our articulations of their respective concepts of difference. Derrida, we saw, embraced a Nietzscheanism based upon the divorce of the signifier from its traditional pretention to truth – understanding ‘sense’ and hence ‘truth’ as something that is always produced – thus opening the notion of the signifier to the possibility of limitless dissemination of opposition, slippage, and internal contradiction. On the surface, it would therefore seem as though Derrida were providing a differential version of thought situated within the broader framework of what we might think of as philosophy of language. Indeed, consider the opening words in Of Grammatology: ‘However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.’ Or the titles and subtitles of his early works: in addition to Of Grammatology, we have Writing and Difference, containing such essays as ‘Force and Signification’, ‘La parole soufflee’, and ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’; along with Voice and Phenomenon, subtitled, Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology.

For his part, Deleuze reads Nietzsche as formulating a differential ontology of force, will to power, and eternal return, an ontology of pure immanence and univocity of being that implies its own ethical perspective on life. For this reason, we can all too easily be tempted to say that the only difference between Derrida and Deleuze regarding their concepts of difference is that Derrida's is motivated by and situated in a differential philosophy of language, while Deleuze is articulating a differential ontology. Indeed, as we have seen, Derrida himself seems to suggest that any differences between him and Deleuze can be understood as strategic or methodological, citing disparities in ‘the “gesture,” the “strategy,” the “manner” of writing, of speaking, of reading perhaps’.