I've just come across the Dif-ferance resource site courtesy of Phillweb. Both are good resources, with the purpose of the former to 'promote scholarship, teaching, and research pertaining to the notion of difference and to publish jointly or independently the Journal "Dif-ferance" among other publications'. Well this can sure help me struggle with difference as otherness as I've come to this material late, with few resources.

My understanding of the issue is that the traditional view of otherness is that it is relative to the same. That is to say, the other is that which is other than the self. This relative view of otherness is remains the standard position the development of Western philosophy from Plato through Heidegger. In the latter half of the 20th century, postmodern philosophy began to challenge this view of otherness. The argument was that the traditional understanding could never encounter the other qua other---and was therefore oppressive, unethical, and violent--and thsi meant that otherness must be met on its own terms, so to speak, rather than defining it in terms of the self. Okay, if the former unduly favors the self does the latter unduly valorizes the other? That is what I'm currently struggling with.

Digging further into the Dif-ferance site I find Rudolph Gasche's The Eclipse of Difference which is a chapter from his Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. He reinforces the above history of difference.

Were one to write a general philosophical history of the concept of difference, one might be tempted to view it as the history of the progressive emancipation of difference from identity. Beginning with the Parmenidean conception of pure identity, of Being free of all difference, such a history would document the movement of difference from its position, in Plato, as one pole of a dialectical structure to its acquisition of the dominant role in the constitution of identity, or the Absolute, in German Idealism ..... If at the dawn of philosophical thinking difference scarcely left the shadow of identity, identity now barely shows its face, and, with its departure from the scene, this brand of criticism would seem perhaps to have liberated itself not only from the exigency in Western thought to think of difference and identity in relation to each other, but also from the thought that difference exists only within identity, the One, the whole ---whether or not the concept of difference has been taken up in the concept of the unity of all that is.

Although Vattimo's target is the doctrine of difference in Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, he approaches this doctrine primarily through the works of the latter's disciples, in particular Bernard Pautrat, Jean-Michel Rey, and Sarah Kofman. As a result, Deleuze and Derrida are portrayed as having developed a theory of difference according to which difference is repressed and forgotten by Western thought. As a follow-up to Heidegger's meditation on the ontological difference, and as a return to Nietzsche's rememoration of an originary difference under the figure of Dionysos, this theory, aimed at bringing difference back, rendering it present again, would demonstrate a way of stepping out of and beyond metaphysics.