SEGALEN OR THE PASSION FOR THE DIFFERENCE : FROM THE CONCEPT TO THE WORK IN L’ESSAI SUR L’EXOTISME

Abstract

It is not only with an ethnological and aesthetic point of view that the Essay on the exoticism of Segalen sides of the Difference, but it is also - and maybe a first- of a philosophical point of view. The history of this concept allows us to bring to light the tension which “lives” in the text. He could have tried, in a quite Hegelian perspective, with harmony which constitutes the Beautiful and the “aesthetic principle”, but the Essay on the exoticism is a real manifesto which shows that, Segalen knew how to resist such appeal : with his prejudice of “the Difference”, he is closer to contemporary philosophy, in particular to Deleuze and to Foucault, than to Hegel. Hegelian philosophy, to be understood as a thought of the identity, did not stop him from trying to think what remains inflexible in the identity and in the reason-in brief, of what Segalen tried to think under the name of the Other, of the Difference or of the Exoticism