Anyway:
I suppose the best way to go about this is to focus on the issue of overlap: the point at which I drew my line in the sand, then reached over to shake Iona’s hand.
While I cannot speak perfectly for Iona, my sense of it was that while they agreed that looking for the intersections and overlaps (that between different philosophical traditions and philosophers (was a legitimate way of going about philosophy, they felt there was a deeper and more effective way to go about it. To put it in their words:
“The goal might be simply to locate those points of intersection and overlap among these methods in order to assist them to working more together and less at each other’s expense, as you indicate; but another goal, the prerogative of the thinker, would be to achieve a more complete division of these substances into their more fundamental natures, so that the human consciousness and experience for the first time can be truly understood and unleashed.”
Now the first thing I would note here is that Iona’s style of exposition has been a little vague and challenging to me. But as I understand them, what they are arguing here is that we should analyze and push deeper than the methods themselves into the underlying structures of consciousness and experience in order to break beyond the differences of method. And I can appreciate this to the extent that this is what Deleuze more or less tried to do.
My issue with this is, first, their underestimation of the value of intersection and overlap as was suggested by the use of the qualifier “simply” (overlap seeming like an expression of the common core suggested by human consciousness and experience (and, secondly, with the futility of thinking we can reach such a full understanding of the other as to facilitate such an ambitious agenda.
(But before I go on, I should first explain the import of overlap: if you think about, what we tend to start out with and continue to work with, as the intellectually and creatively curious, are those overlaps of interest that tend to emerge be between the main players in our culture and are the result (or are sustained by the lesser players that adapt those overlaps and participate by adding their own takes on it. Take, for instance, the mind/brain issue: many philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers have engaged it and there has been a lot of overlap in the ways they have dealt with it. This is why many major players tend to quote other major players. And what is a philosophy 101 textbook but a catalogue of those overlaps and digressions into the details of how those overlaps came to be? And it is via those overlaps that we work towards the details of what a particular thinker with a particular method has had to say on the issue.
(The main issue I expressed with Iona is that while their’s is a worthy attempt, I’m not sure it can ever be truly achieved due to the fact that an individual is always a particular point in space and time. We can go through the process of turning content into form via form all we want. But what we can never do is actually look at it through their eyes. This is why you could know a particular philosopher and their method virtually word by word, but the process will always be your own because you can never truly know their process as they experienced it. Therefore, no matter how hard we try, I’m not sure we can ever get beyond the overlap.
This goes to Deleuze’s point that friendship is a matter of knowing the other’s madness: until they know your madness, they cannot be your friend. In this sense of it: you can know a friend as deep as anyone possibly can; but what you can never do is know them completely. I mean there is a sense of unknowing in the notion of madness: of not being able to grasp it by any rational tools available to you. You can never know them through their eyes. And because of this, you can only sustain the relationship through the overlap and the pragmatic truth test of what works to keep it going. Why would it be any different with any philosopher or their method?