ABSTRACT. This Knowledge Cultures special issue on difference begins with the metaphysical problem of difference that began a Saturday afternoon conversation between Professor Carl Mika and Dr Vanessa Cameron-Lewis. This conversation between friends brings together an Indigenous Māori philosophy that centres on the All with a feminist Deleuzian philosophy of immanence. Sitting in Carl’s living room watching the ocean throw itself onto the red rocks of Wellington’s southern coast, Vanessa summarises her problem with equivocity as a pathological state of hierarchical being, which she claims grounds coloniality. Her question to Carl is whether Western theory, specifically Deleuzian and feminist new materialist theory, can provide an escape from this problem of coloniality. Carl, as is typical, avoids any definitive answer. Instead, the conversation travels its own path that, at times, seems well-lit but always falls back into darkness. The aim of sharing this speculative discussion is to bring others into the conversation. This introduction was sent to the authors of this special issue as a generative starting point for their contribution. The idea is to bring discussions on difference and diversity out of the enlightenment logics of identity into the darkness of metaphysics and mystery. The problems here are based on questions of how to live with the world rather than how to identify it.

Keywords: counter-colonial; immanence; Indigenous philosophy; metaphysics

How to cite: Cameron-Lewis, V., & Mika, C. (2025). Between the all and the immanent: A Māori-Deleuzian conversation on difference. Knowledge Cultures, 13(3), 7–16. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc13320251

Received April 29, 2025 • Received in revised form May 23, 2025
Accepted May 23, 2025 • Available online December 1, 2025