Exploring the Concept of Difference: Insights from Antonia Pont and Audre Lorde

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.

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— Jabe Bloom (@cyetain) August 24, 2021

Hunting down the source of that fantastic quote lead me to a wonderful essay by Audre Lorde: „The Master‘s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master‘s House“ where I found a follow-up paragraph to the one  @cyetain‘s quoting. It’s beautiful and powerful at the same time:

Within the interdependence of mutual […] differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

(Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, Calif: Crossing Press, 2007, p. 111)

It also reminds me of  @AntoniaPont‘s „A Philosophy of Practising“ with its beautiful treatise of „practising“ who writes the following on „difference in itself“:

[The] aim would be to think difference on its own terms.

This new thought of difference – difference in itself – does not find and name what is different between existing concepts. It is a concept in itself. Arguably, it designates the name of how we can begin to think that which hasn’t been imagined yet, the mechanism for change that isn’t modification within an existing regime.

(Pont, Antonia. A Philosophy of Practising: With Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 2021., p. 105)

Obviously, it‘s a bit of a stretch to simply compare and link these two trains of thought on „difference“. Yet, „thinking of difference in itself“ in the context of Audre Lorde‘s quote leads us to the question what „difference in itself“ means for creativity and the power this „raw connection“ creates: „the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.“ (Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 111)