Difference and Repetition

by Gilles Deleuze, Paul Patton

Since its publication in 1968, "Difference and Repetition", an exposition of the critique of identity, has come to be considered a contemporary classic in philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. The text follows the development of two central concepts, those of pure difference and complex repetition. It shows how the two concepts are related, difference implying divergence and decentring, repetition being associated with displacement and disguising. The work moves deftly between Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Althusser and Nietzsche to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics, and has been a central text in initiating the shift in French thought - away from Hegel and Marx, towards Nietzsche and Freud.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France, Psychology, Metaphysics, Psychoanalysis

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Una dintre acele cărți care te fac, dacă ești tînăr și neliniștit, să exclami melancolic: „Duoamne, da ce prostălău sînt! Nu pricep nimic”.

***
488 de pagini fără egal în istoria filosofiei.

Un volum profund despre ceva foarte important (repetiție și diferență), scris cu o claritate admirabilă și tradus în românește cu strălucire:

„Diferența era astfel cuprinsă în identitate ca desfășurată în reprezentare. Corelativ cu acest fapt, repetiția, la rîndul ei, nu mai putea fi definită decît ca o diferență fără concept; această definiție continua, firește, să presupună identitatea conceptului pentru ceea ce se repeta, dar în loc să înscrie diferența în concept, ea o punea în afara conceptului, ca diferență numerică, și punea conceptul însuși în afara lui, ca existînd în tot atîtea exemplare cîte dăți sau cazuri numerice distincte” (p.440).

Mai limpede de atît nu se poate :)

P. S. De reținut: Deleuze spune din capul locului că repetiția se deosebește de generalitate, cum se deosebește și de asemănare. Ceea ce înseamnă în mod necesar că și generalitatea și asemănarea se deosebesc radical de repetiție, deși nu știm dacă generaltatea și asemănarea diferă și între ele la fel de radical. Este drept că numai o singularitate se poate repeta. Logic...

[David M]

Despite his infamous boast of having ejaculated in Kant's rectum, it seems to me that Deleuze made his home completely within the history of philosophy. Perhaps his provocations only make sense against the background of a quasi-scholastic reverence for the classics.

Now that I've finally read every page of Difference & Repetition, I'm sorry to say that I still can't decide what to think of the man. I took a few notes as I read.

*

When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). - pp 241

But then whose world? Is this the world in which any of us live? is there a way to move there?

Deleuze is said to have acquired his life-long love of philosophy from reading Being and Nothingness as a teenager. While his mature thought would obviously develop in a very different direction, away from phenomenology, toward structuralism and beyond, I wonder if his fundamental orientation remained Sartrean throughout. I see the basic aim of Difference & Repetition as ethical, addressing the question, How should one live?

Sartre notoriously represents the apotheosis of subjectivity, in which freedom becomes absolute. As a post-structuralist, Deleuze is supposed to have no truck with such cartesian naivetes. Yet looking at a passage like the one above, I can't make sense of it except as a claim for the absolute freedom of thought. Moreover, Deleuze's praise of immanence would seem to deny that there is any outside which orients (and constrains) thinking; this looks like a conception of subjectivity as hyperbolic and untenable as Sartre's.

*
"A nightmare is perhaps a psychic dynamism that could be sustained neither awake nor even in dreams , but only in profound sleep, in a dreamless sleep" - pp 118

A nightmare too deep for dreams, this is indeed an evocative image. The unconscious becomes an absurd doctrine if we think of it as a series of representations that just happens to fall below the threshold of consciousness. Absurd, yet often difficult to avoid; it seems that Freud himself often fell into this error. If it is beneath or beyond representations, then how is it possible to speak of it at all?

Paul Ricoeur addresses this problem in his great book Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. He admits to a certain modesty, indirection, restraint in what he as a philosopher is able to say. That does not appear to be Deleuze's approach. The imperative to think without representations seems to give total license to nonsense at times. The passage quoted above continues

In this sense it is not even clear that thought, in so far as it constitutes the dynamism peculiar to philosophical systems, may be related to a substantial, completed and well-constituted subject, such as the Cartestian Cogito: thought is, rather, one of those terrible movements which can be sustained only under the conditions of a larval subject

Would it be pedantic to look for a method in a sentence like that, Deleuze's equivalent of phenomenological reflection or the logical analysis of language? Is he saying that in order to do philosophy we should first fry our brains on hallucinogens? just how did he arrive at some of these startling conclusions of his?

*

Been picking at this for a while. Just read the central chapter, "The Image of Thought." Deleuze's erudition isn't faked, I don't want to join the this-is-bullshit brigade that stalks continental thinkers wherever they go, but I have to wonder if this is really a serious work of philosophy. What else could it be? an obscene prose poem aping the form of a Kantian treatise. Duchamp never meant for his urinal to be discussed seriously by art historians in the same breath as Poussin, and it at least seems possible that article like the following are simply not getting the joke, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/del...

Given that I likened it to a prose poem, I should add that as such it often succeeds fantastically. I've never been a fan of the shrill hysteria and sloganeering of the Guattari collaborations, but Deleuze himself could fucking write.

A well-known test in psychology involves a monkey who is supposed to find food in boxes of one particular color amidst others of various colors: there comes a paradoxical period during which the number of 'errors' diminishes even though the monkey does not yet posses the 'knowledge' or 'truth' of a solution in each case; propitious moment in which the philosopher-monkey opens up to truth, himself producing the true, but only to the extent that he begins to penetrate the coloured thickness of a problem.

On the one hand, damn! but then again, honestly, what the hell are you talking about, my friend?

Foucault famously loved Deleuze's early books and, at a time when phenomenology was part of the philosophical establishment in France, said that they represented the extreme opposite of Merleau-Ponty's way of thinking.

Throughout his work MP took great pains to show, against Descartes, that it's not really possible to doubt the world. It's like claiming to behold a square circle. You can say these words but they don't mean anything. Phenomenology of Perception is a book that at times leans heavily on common sense. All MP's analysis depend on their being such a thing as a norm of perception, which can be contrasted with pathological cases. These pathological cases, in turn, must ultimately be understood against a ground or horizon of meaning. Percpetion is already a whole; we perceive a whole, not discrete bits of sensory data; and perception is also the model for all further truth and meaning.

Deleuze seems to have an entirely different model in mind. He begins chapter 3 by ridiculing common sense, the idea that there are things that everybody knows. He apparently wants to do Descartes one better. Not only can the world be doubted, it must be dissolved in a miasma of lunatic ideas. He stresses that it is only a violent encounter that sets us thinking. I'm reminded of Kant's notion of the sublime in the third critique: the point at which the categories of reason break down, and we are face to face with the formless. Such romanticism was only one annex in Kant's kingdom of thought, but Deleuze wants it to provide the basis for his entire philosophy.

Personally I'm partial to the idea that there are limit-experiences in life, intense encounters which break down our day-to-day understandings; and yet afterwards, if one wants to talk about the experience, one must inevitably fall back on the same basic grammar and repertoire of meanings as before. Of course it's not necessary to talk about the experience. One could fall mute, but that clearly is not the choice of the verbose Monsieur Deleuze.

*

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a certain sense the central idea of Difference and Repetition can be summed up reasonably quickly. Simply put, these two things, difference and repetition, have historically always been thought, starting from identity as the basis from which they can be determined. In other words, I have difference because I have something that is different from something which has been identically given, or, I have instances of repetition, because I am repeating things which we take to be identical in a certain sense. Deleuze contrary to this approach which, from Deleuze's reading, has historically conditioned philosophy from Plato up until Hegel and the present day, will dedicate himself to the task of forging a concept of difference and of repetition in-themselves, that is to say, what would we be speaking of, when conceiving of difference via its own positivity, or of repetition via its own internal positivity, outside of their being coordinated according to the value of identity?
The response to this question has something to do with what Deleuze calls “the science of the sensible” or “transcendental empiricism”. Broadly speaking, Deleuze is in dialogue with the empiricist thesis, principally sustained by Hume, that our experience is a set of sensations, which possesses the appearance of causality but whose fundamental causal coherence would simply be a habit of thought, a conventional manner of understanding. Causality is a result of the habitual accumulation of these experiences which creates a commensurate habit of thought around these experiences, the belief in the existence of causality. As such, Deleuze, as the name transcendental empiricism implies, intends on transcending the level of the conjunction of sensations, to go beyond this impasse in which Hume seems to place experience as regards the possibility of attributing broader explanatory coherence to it. To this end Deleuze divides his explicative model between what he calls the actual, that is, the side on which our own experiential life resides and the virtual, which Deleuze describes as the cause of the effect of the actual. While the virtual is transcendental in relation to the actual, it is immanent to itself across the differences which constitute it. The actual in broad terms is everything that we know of as the qualitative and quantitative world within which we live. The virtual is that condition which could bring about the genesis of the qualitative and quantitative contents of the actual world. In this way, Deleuze refers to the virtual as the being of the sensible, or the reason for the sensible, or finally the reason for qualitative diversity. The point however, is that the virtual is not, and never can be sensible; it is that basis of experience which cannot itself be experienced. In this sense the virtual must properly remain the unconscious of thought, that which can never enter into thought as a given content, but only as the condition of possibility for that which is given, which strips the given of its own self evidence.
Deleuze will be more specific however saying that intensity is the particular form of difference as the reason for the sensible. The virtual, more specifically then, is the structure through which the diverse distributions of intensive singularities and the differential relations which can pertain between them can sustain a form of coexistence in a spatium which will not be reducible to the spatiotemporally given. It becomes this spatiotemporally given in its actualization in the present world. That is, Deleuze will maintain that this intensive world of difference, or this world of implicated differences, these diverse distributions of differential relations, can virtually sustain coexistence amongst themselves within the virtual field. It is the fact that this difference as intensity is always asymmetrically or unequally distributed which leads to the processes of actualization which generate the formation of the actual world from the virtual coexistence of the differential elements. It is owing to this inequality of distribution that Deleuze names the fifth chapter of the book, "the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible"; that is to say, the sensible contents of the world come to be via the asymmetrical distributions of intensity and the differences which result therein, which bring about actualization as sensible forms in the present, and habitually experienced world. Therefore the actual world for Deleuze is this constant explication of the implicated world of virtually coexistent differences. These differences are ideally synthesized in the virtual world according to the title of the fourth chapter.
The most important point for Deleuze however is that there is no form of resemblance which can be sustained between the virtual and the actual worlds. Within the virtual itself there are no processes which can be said to take place, which in any way conform to the notions of repetition of identical forms which we understand the actual world to be. Differences communicate in the virtual field by resonance and forced movement which mean that there are no actually given identities which persist, but only singularities which find themselves always maintained within the patterns of interaction in the coexistence of the virtual. As such, difference in the virtual is the pure un-grounding of all forms, or the informal itself. For this reason the Deleuzian idea is radically opposed to the Platonic idea. The Platonic idea is the proposition of the notion of an ideal formality which can organize the appearance of particular cases in the actual world; Plato´s ubiquitous “chairiness” which would maintain the nomination of actual chairs in the sensible world. For Deleuze, to the contrary, the ideal condition is the absence of formality, or informality in the field of pure difference as the condition of possibility for formality in the actual world. There are things which actually possess form because the cause of the virtual coexistence of intensive differnces constantly produces the actualizations which produce all the forms of understanding which exist in the world of representation as conceived of via identity.
It is this then which determines repetition as the true potential of difference. Given that there is nothing which persists in the virtual as purely identical, the singularities are repeating each other throughout the differential system of communication, that is, the system repeats itself continuously, in the eternal return of it self differentiation, owing to the absence of identity in the virtual. Through repeating via difference rather than simply differentiating identities, it is this which Deleuze understands as giving his ontology a truly affirmative character. Being affirms itself by repeating itself throughout its differential system within the immanent virtual field.

[N Perrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

For millennia thinkers have posited the eternal question: "Can we make philosophy even more inaccessible?" Difference and Repetition offers us a resounding yes. In his long awaited sequel to Being and Time, Deleuze takes what you loved about BT and just runs with it.

I'm talking dense technical vocabulary. I'm talking some Aristotle/Kant smack down. I'm talking revision of the foundations of Western metaphysics. I'm talking tortured prose and lofty poetic allusions that leave you gobsmacked.

If you're the kind of pseudo-philosopher disgusted by the analytic clarity of Anglophonic philosophy, and if you're the kind of masochist who loves reading that pretentious big book classic so you can look intellectual as such, then this little philosophical morsel will differenciate your socks right off.

This, ladies and gents, is a masterpiece. You'll never hear the tick-tock of a clock the same way again. Embrace the Difference.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's said often enough, but it's true: Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is the most important work of philosophy to have been published in the last century. It's not even as though this is a bold statement any more - it's just kind of trivially true. Understanding why though, is another matter entirely. After all, not only is almost the entire history of the Western philosophical canon given over to a specifically Deleuzian reappraisal and critique, but so too does Deleuze offer his own, novel take on metaphysics, all the while engaging with elements of biology, thermodynamics and early-modern calculus, constructing out of these disparate fields one of the most elaborate and carefully wrought philosophical edifices available to us today. If it sounds like alot, it's because it is, and even with its hefty-ish 300 pages, the book barely feels like it's able to contain the wealth and weight of ideas which dwell within.

Hence the notorious difficulty of this work, which, far from stemming from any kind of 'continentalist' temptation to poetic reverie, is saturated with arguments wound tight with precision, themselves born from a fiercely studied engagement with a frankly intimidating range of material. Propelling this bustle of philosophical activity however, is nothing less than the construction of a 'philosophy of difference': a philosophy which, rather than thinking of difference in terms of identity (i.e. difference as the difference 'between' one thing and another), aims to free the concept of difference from any reference to the identical, understanding it on its own terms in order to think a 'difference-in-itself', a 'pure' difference that isn't simply 'between' two already-existing things, but rather and more profoundly, constitutive of any one 'thing' at all. To speak of a philosophy of difference then, is to speak of a philosophy of Becoming (rather than 'Being').

Such are the stakes involved in this reconception of difference, one which refuses to take for granted the nature of 'what is', and aims to open the question of how things come to be as they are in the first place. Indeed, the philosophical power of Difference and Repetition is drawn not merely from its offering up of new answers to old questions, but from rethinking the very questions that have defined philosophy so far. Thus against the Platonic tendency to ask after 'What Is?' ('What is Justice?', 'What is Beauty?), Deleuze will substitute an entirely new set of questions - How? Where? In which case? How many? From what point of view? - genetic questions, so-called insofar as they ask after the genesis of things, the manners and fashions in which any-one-thing is engendered to begin with. It's in this light that one ought to understand the call, sounded within, for an 'overturning of Platonism' - a call marked by Deleuze to be the very task of all modern philosophy.

Yet the real genius of the book lies deeper still: not merely in its laying out a program for any future philosophy, but its attempt, fearlessly made - to fulfil it. Drawing from and retooling a host of philosophical concepts - from Plato's Ideas to Bergson's multiplicities, Nietzsche's Eternal Return and Freud's unconscious, Difference and Repetition sets out a fully fledged theory of individuation conceived only and wholly from the perspective of difference; that is, from the perspective of genesis. It's a magnificent endeavor, one that has to be read to be believed, constituting the immortal germ for which this book will be remembered. While I've only really conveyed the bare bones of what is in fact a full blooded re-imagining of philosophical possibility, trust that from truth to sense, aesthetics to ethics, no field of the adventure called philosophy remains here untouched, subject irredeemably to the Event of thought that is this incredible book.

[amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

in place of a proper review, a note on difficulty: ronald bogue compares the structure of this book to that of a "topological puzzle"; deleuze himself puts it better, i think, in this book's description of differential ontology: "a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself)." (71) the way this text is structured is tortuous. any attempt to read it for the first time without a guidebook will only result in tremendous pain and a bad misreading, and even with exterior guidance it is brutalizing. this is intentional, and integral to deleuze's venture behind and beyond the enculturated subjective presuppositions of propositional reason. in chapter 2, he gives the dark counsel that

[a] nightmare is perhaps a psychic dynamism that could be sustained neither awake nor even in dreams, but only in profound sleep, in a dreamless sleep. In this sense, it is not even clear that thought, in so far as it constitutes the dynamism peculiar to philosophical systems, may be related to a substantial, completed and well-constituted subject, such as the Cartesian Cogito: thought is, rather, one of those terrible movements which can be sustained only under the conditions of a larval subject. (151)

deleuze intends to give you nightmares.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Za Deleza se možda može reći da ne misli ubedljivo, ali teško da ne misli uzbudljivo. Njegov haosmos teksta uzbudljivo je skijalište za filozofske slalome koji sami po sebi obistinjuju ideje razlike i ponavljanja. Čitanje je borba kroz paradokse, saučesništvo u meandriranju teksta, koje ne obećava ništa sem spletki intelektualnih sklopki. S vremena na vreme, kroz turbinu razliko-ponavljanja bukne neki istinit(osn)i zrak/znak, koji načisto obuzme i obraduje, a ponekad Žil na žilijen secka poslednje neuronske sinapse koje um može pred sebe i svet da stavi. Bez obzira na sve, u svom najboljem svetlu, ovo, treba da se pre svega čita i doživi kao književnost, što može podrazumevati i jednu vrstu reakcije tela na golicanje uma. Treba prigrliti sve paradokse, sva saplitanja, izokretanja i, kako prevodilac kaže „pojmovni nomadizam” i prepustiti se.

(Sosir je rekao da u jeziku postoji samo razlika. (So+sir) Neka mu bude.)

Elem, hajlajtovi (punktovi) putovanja:

„Zadatak života je da omogući koegzistenciju svih ponavljanja u nekom prostoru u kojem se raspodeljuje razlika.” (8)

„Simulakrum nijie kopija, već on izokreće sve kopije izokrećući i modele; svako mišljenje postaje agresija.” (9)

„Ako je ponavljanje moguće, ono je pre čudo nego zakon.” (16)

„Maske ne pokrivaju ništa izuzev drugih maski.” (38)

„Ne ponavljam zato što potiskujem, potiskujem zato što ponavljam, zaboravljam zato što ponavljam.” (40)

„Mera je samo omot nekog ritma i nekog odnosa ritmova.” (45)

„Ništa ne učimo od onoga ko nam kaže: ‘radi kao i ja’. Naši jedini učitelji su oni koji nam govore ‘radi sa mnom’.” (48)

„ (...) jer mišljenje je onaj trenutak u kojem određenje sebe čini jednim pomoću jednostranog i preciznog odnosa upravo sa onim neodređenim. Mišljenje pravi razliku, ali razlika je čudovište.” (58)

„Večto vraćanje ne dovodi do povratka ‘istog’, već vraćanje uspostavlja sámo Isto onoga što postaje.” (77)

„Nesuštinsko obuhvata suštinsko kao slučaj, dok je suštinsko sadržavalo nesuštinsko kao suštinu.” (86)

„Razliika je pravi sadržaj teze, tvrdoglavost teze.” (95)

„Duh večitog vraćanja nije u pamćenju, već u rasipanju, u zaboravu koji je postao delatan.” „Jer, ako je večito vraćanje krug, Razlika je ta koja je u središtu, a Isto je samo na obodu – u svakom trenutku rasredišnjeni krug, stalno izuvijugan, krug koji se okreće samo oko onog nejednakog.” (100)

„Fenomen blista upravo u razlici, objašnjava se kao znak, a kretanje se proizvodi kao ‘učinak’.” (102)

„Na svakoj razlici je da prođe kroz sve druge i da samu sebe ‘hoće’ odnosno da pronađe sebe prolazeći kroz sve druge.” (…) „Svet nije ni konačan ni beskonačan, kao u predstavi: on je dovršen i neograničen.” (103)

„Biće je zaista ono razlikujuće razlike.” (115)

„Večni povratak nije vera, već istina vere…” (163)

Zadovoljstvom nazivamo proces razrešenja razlike (163)

„Slika mišljenja samo je oblik u kojem univerzalizuje mnjenje tako što se podiže na racionalnu ravan.” (223)

„Glupost nije životinjstvo.” (248)

„Najlošija književnost pravi zbirke pošalica; ali najbolju opseda problem gluposti koju ona sledi sve do vrata filozofije…” (249)

„Rešenje uvek poseduje istinu kakvu zaslužuje s obzirom na problem na koji odgovara; a problem uvek ima rešenje koje zaslužuje s obzirom na sopstvenu istinitost, odnosno lažnost, to jest s obzirom na svoj smisao.” (261–262)

„Ideje su kompleksi koegzistencije, sve ideje koegzistiraju na određen način.” (304)

„Filozofi se dive sebi kad govore kao nabusiti mladi ljudi.” (306)

„Ontologija je bacanje kocki – haosmos iz kojeg izlazi kosmos.” (323)

„Ono prvo u mišljenju jeste krađa.” (324)

„Čitav je svet jedno jaje.” (349)

„Svaka tipologija je dramatična, svaki je dinamizam katastrofa. Nužno ime nečeg okrutnog u rađanju sveta koji je haosmos, u tim svetovima kretnji bez subjekta, uloga bez glumaca.” (354)

„Svet se pravi dok Bog računa; sveta ne bi bilo kada bi račun bio ispravan.” (359)

„razlika je dovoljan razlog promene samo u meri u kojoj ta promena nastoji da je negira.” (362)

„Kako da nemislivo ne bude u srcu mišljenja?” (368)

„Razgovetno nije drugo do neprozirno.” (408)

„Prestajući da bude mišljenje, razlika se rastače u ne-biću.” (421)

„Materija je, dakle, identitet duha, to jeste pojma, ali kao otuđenog pojma, pojma bez samosvesti, postavljenog izvan sebe.” (456)

„Najveće je iskušenje shvatiti večito vraćanje kao selektivno mišljenje.” (474)

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever challenged myself to read. There’s no way I could have gotten through it without a lot of help from commentaries and on-line synopsis. Two commentators, in particular, helped me through the tome: Joe Hughes’s reader guide did a good job of contextualizing Deleuze’s arguments in relation to those of his predecessors- particularly Kant and Husserl. Even more helpful was Benjamin D. Hagen’s wonderful blog, Sketching a Present, which offers a (very) slow reading of Difference and Repetition’s particularly impenetrable opening two sections. I hope Hagen considers completing his slow-reading as a book, although it would probably have to be 1000-plus pages. Obviously what understanding I might have of this book owes a great deal to Hughes and Hagen.

Of the most noted French post-structuralists, the one I am generally most familiar with is Derrida. The similarities and differences between Deleuze and Derrida fascinate me. Both seek a radical critique/ reinvention of metaphysics and the concept of being, yet the similarities seem to me to pretty much end there, surprising for two thinkers so widely associated with one another. Derrida’s is a metaphysics of absence- the subject is reduced to the trace- the signature of a being that is never fully present to itself. Yet in insisting on absence and/or spectral presence, Derrida’s is still a metaphysics that revolves around subjectivity. The ever-reinterpretable traces of individuality may be all that defines a subject, yet such traces are tantamount. Deconstruction is inversing the canonical metaphysics of presence, but by doing so it is playing by inversions of the old rules.

At first glance, Deleuze’s metaphysics is more conventional than that of Derrida. For Deleuze, presence is as primary as it ever was for Kant or Husserl, some might claim more so. Yet for Deleuze, subjectivity is nothing more than an incidental byproduct of a presence that is always in flux. It is a Deleuzian chest-nut to say that his presence is a becoming rather than a being, and it seems to me just so. The subject is a momentary manifestation of a churning world. The insecurities of such a manifestation do not concern Deleuze the philosopher, although those of Deleuze the momentary manifestation do, it seems to me, sometimes make themselves known through his writing. If Derrida is rebelling against the history of metaphysics, Deleuze is trying to rewrite the history.

Any book as bold and influential as Difference & Repetition is going to develop a cult proclaiming its otherworldly perfection- it’s every perceived flaw being a secret source of wonder. I am not such a cultist and there were a few things about Difference & Repetition that I found quite frustrating which I truly believe to be results of weakness on the part of Deleuze rather than on myself as a reader. Simply as a well ordered and coherent presentation of related ideas, the book is a train-wreck. Similar complaints are often levied against the works of Derrida, Heidegger, and indeed philosophy itself. But Deleuze seemingly cannot complete discussion of any aspect of his (exceptionally rich and complex) argument without switching to another, barely related branch of reasoning. Descriptions of key concepts are spread out, seemingly at random, in every section of the book. Some are not fully fleshed-out until the Conclusion. Indeed, it seems to me almost impossible to have any understanding of any part of the text until one has read the whole thing, gone back, and tried to put the broken parts Deleuze offers back into some kind of systematic whole (as I have attempted to do below).

Compounding the problem is Deleuze’s insistence on renaming key concepts willy-nilly. I’ve heard Deleuze’s most ardent supporters claim that his refusal to adopt a consistent vocabulary is reflective of his concept of being as ever-changing. I’m going to call bullshit on that. Even according to Deleuze, the subject is a momentary manifestation of being. One momentary manifestation has to communicate with another and that requires some attempt at consistency. For me, the constant changes to designations-of-concepts was just sloppy philosophizing.

Some of Deleuze’s crudest detractors have pointed out that Deleuze’s discussions of biology and physics are not scientifically sound. Deleuze’s defenders content that the philosopher does not mean his utilization of scientific motifs to be taken literally but metaphorically, and I agree with that. I do, however, wonder if the metaphors deployed do not invite such criticism since it is clear at times that Deleuze’s understanding of the science he is using as illustration is shaky at best. It would have been better, I dare say, to explicate a philosophical argument with philosophical language.

None of this is to say that Deleuze is not a gifted writer, but merely an undisciplined one. I enjoy Derrida’s prose but one can tell that he was always striving for literary effect. Reading Deleuze, it seems like he was always writing off-the-cuff, trying to get the ideas in his head on to paper. Sometimes the resulting prose is quite sparse and utilitarian, but other times, particularly when he lets the personal shine through, it is sublime- revealing the deepest poetic instincts.

Now, for an attempt at a synopsis: Difference and Repetition is, above all else, a critique of representation as it has operated within the history of western philosophy. In the book's conclusion, Deleuze states that the central goal of philosophy through that history has been to make representation as infinite as possible- to leave as little as possible outside of philosophical illumination. Representation, as we know it, requires a degree of stasis, actually rather a lot of it. Philosophical, and indeed prosaic, representation have traditionally revolved around identities. These figures of representation are not entirely static of course. They interact with other identities and effect the others while in turn being affected by them. Difference, we can say, has traditionally been subordinated to identity, treated as a byproduct of the latter. One of Deleuze's hopes for philosophy is that if difference can be freed from identity's shadow our thought might then not have to rely on opposition and contradiction- the thinking that, for Deleuze, takes its “highest” and most oppressive form in the Hegelian dialectic. Rather than synthesis and the negation that Deleuze associates with it, our thought could revel in a liberating multiplicity.

The prioritizing of representation goes back to the philosophers of ancient Greece. Plato distinguished three categories in relation to the Ideal: the model, which is to say the Idea, or Form, itself; the copy- that which represented the Ideal form in material reality; and simulacra- the phantasm of represented Ideality, the ghost-like doppelganger of the copy whose repetition of its appearance puts the relation between model and copy in question. If simulacra appears to be a copy of the Form but is not, then how can the copy itself be proven to be an authentic representation of the Idea? Simulacra would then be an anarchic and problematizing actor in the play of representation, one that would be best kept off stage.

Deleuze asks us early on to try to think of something we cannot represent. Difference is not, of course, anathema to representation, indeed it would seem to be a necessary aspect of it. I recognize thing x as such in part because it is different from thing y, and this conditions the representation of the world that I use to comprehend reality. But if difference is so central to our regimes of representation and understanding, why cannot we imagine difference in itself? Difference is subordinated to representation, to the “difference” (and therefor also the resemblance) between two (represented) things. Difference itself is faceless.

In the first chapter, Deleuze offers a “vulgar theory of difference” to demonstrate how clueless we really are in our day to day thinking about this essential concept. There is, according to this vulgar theory, an inverse relationship between conceptual extension, the number of related predicate-concepts that can be related to a concept, and comprehension, the set of necessary determinating attributes that define a concept. The larger a concept's extension, in other words the broader a concept is, the less specifics needed to comprehend it. A true singularity could only be comprehended as such through infinite comprehension. If something is truly one of a kind, it would have an infinite number of determinating attributes. Conceptual blockage occurs when a concept inevitably fails to fully describe and represent a singularity in its absolute uniqueness. Concepts can, however, point to determinating resemblances between things. The word/ concept “cat” describes nothing with great, little less infinite, comprehension but it does represent a real resemblance between, for instance, my pet kitty and a wild tiger. This “vulgar theory” of common-sense is, then, incredibly useful, but it actually brings us no closer to things in themselves, or of differences in themselves. It reveals only the resemblances that are the bread and butter of representation.

Deleuze offers a model of the ways in which difference in itself is subordinated to resemblance. In fact, he does so at three different instances in the book. I will try to condense these three descriptions into one account. The most detailed discussion occurs in the third chapter, “The Image of Thought”. Philosophy always tries to represent the truth and it always claims the title of truth for the representations that it offers. Thinkers as diverse as Plato, Descartes and Kant have all insisted in one way or another that a thinker knows what it is to think. Thought, for philosophy, is self-recognizing. Deleuze defiantly rejects this self-validating tradition. He characterizes this philosophical self-presentation as a malevolent stupidity that intentionally attacks genuine thought and turns it against itself. Genuine thinking, for Deleuze, is always a “lucky trespass” in which an intruder accidentally disturbs the self-satisfied peace of the image of thought. But to have any hope of engendering such a crisis/opportunity, we need to understand the edifice we are up against and its means of supporting itself.

Deleuze claims the image of thought is based on a series of eight postulates- pre-philosophical presumptions that shape the way philosophy will proceed. First, as we have already noted, it is presumed that we can all think and that thinking seeks out 'truth.' Secondly,it is assumed that sense, imagination, memory, and thought work together harmoniously when trying to ascertain an object. Next, it is assumed that the object this quartet confronts is a static object with a static identity. Then, it is assumed that this identity can be represented.

Deleuze first, and perhaps most clearly, breaks down the nature of philosophical representation in the first chapter of the book, so let us now turn to that section. It should be noted that some important clarifications are made in the Conclusion, in which he characterizes representation as a transcendental illusion. I will thus also be including some notes from the final section. Deleuze says that philosophy tames difference with four primary shackles of representation: identity, analogy, resemblance, and opposition.

Identity is manifested by the Platonic ideal. The Idea of the Beautiful and that of Ugliness are, according to the Platonic theory of the Forms, identified singularities that cannot overlap. The Ideas are identical to themselves, and therefor different from one another. The transcendental illusion of representation here pertains to thought. An identical thinking subject is posited that in turn grounds the identity of an originary concept. Deleuze will frequently refer to this paradigm as “common sense”.

Analogy is the comparison of (the difference between) two things based on categories such as genus or genre. Difference is knowable in Aristotle only by what it divides into such categories, although this difference ultimately serves as a relation between things based on these categories. Here the transcendental illusion pertains to being. Difference is subordinated to judgment and everything is a “this” or “that” based on the categories.

Resemblance seeks to find similarities between things that seem to minimize difference. Leibnitz could be said to treat difference with resemblance when he claims that difference was created, or chosen, by God to create maximum compatibility and harmony in the universe. Difference, understood as compatibility, is not so much difference at all but the very manifestation of totality. Here, the illusion pertains to sensibility. This subordination of difference to resemblance is often referred to by Deleuze as “good sense.”

Finally, opposition contrasts identities with each other. Hegel (Deleuze's old target) claims to find difference- or contradiction as he calls it- at the foundation of genesis, but this still assumes a beginning with two static identities in an antagonistic relation. The illusion here pertains to ideas. Difference is subordinated to a false image of itself as the negative, the limit, and as opposition.

Philosophical representation, then, can mediate difference, but cannot capture it. All of the shackles of representation listed above rely, in some way or another, on an identical and identified perspective. Representation can contain difference to that one point but it cannot capture (represent) it because representation is static and difference is ever flowing, even when contained in one point.

It is easy to forget, but the idea that an identity can be represented is, in fact, only the fourth of the eight postulates, if by far the most widely discussed. We still need to complete our survey of the image of thought. So, back to chapter 3. The fifth postulate is error, the acknowledgment that thought is sometimes mistaken, but only because of outside interference. The sixth postulate states that designation is a neutral expression of the “whatness” of an object. Next, it is postulated that problems are derived from their ability to be solved. The final postulate is that the result, the solution, is the purpose of thought.

I think we can easily guess that Deleuze does not agree with any of these postulates and will try to attack each of them with intellectual savagery. But the individual attacks will make more sense once we have a better sense of what Deleuze thinks is really going on behind the image of thought, in other words, when we have a better sense of his concept of difference-in-itself. At this point it can simply be said that Deleuze claims that all of these postulates mistake the empirical for the transcendental. They seek to reduce thought to a question and answer test- a matter of being correct or incorrect. They thus deploy notions of falsity and negativity that help reify identity and, thus, representation.

So, what does Deleuze think is “really” going on? What is the image of thought obscuring? We've probably all figured out by now that the answer to this question is the same as that to “what is difference in itself?” Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to that question. Indeed, one could argue that it is, according to Deleuze, unanswerable because difference in itself is precisely that which cannot be represented, and representation is all philosophical language is good for. But much of this imposing tome is nonetheless dedicated to trying to explicate difference in itself as far as it is able.

Difference & Repetition often doesn't even seem so much like philosophy as much as a kind of religious text or creation myth. It proposes a kind of radical cosmology. Indeed, one of the more obscure thinkers to heavily influence Deleuze in this work is the 13th century theologian John Duns Scotus and his notion of the univocity of being. Scotus argued that concepts that were applied to both God and humanity meant the same thing when applied to either. In other words, the differences between humanity and God were questions of quantity not quality. A good person was good in the same sense that God was good, God simply had way more good than any person. The entire cosmos, both its divine and mortal aspects, could be described in the same language.

Deleuze takes the outlines of this concept and actually takes it a step further. All aspects of the entire cosmos can be described with one word: “difference”: a generic concept of being that forgoes all individuations and hierarchies. Part of the reason we have difficulty imagining difference in itself is because we've become so accustomed to opposing and subjugating difference to identity. Rather than even relating difference and identity, Deleuze relates difference only to indifference, or void. It is the presence which first distinguishes itself and does so by illuminating not just itself, but the void along with it. Difference breaks from the void, but also affirms it. It is almost as if difference and indifference collaborate to reveal each other.

From here, the book will, much like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, attempt to navigate us from the unrepresentable “real”- pure difference- to the represented world that we all know. Indeed, the very structure of the rest of the book is modeled on the Critique of Pure Reason, albeit the (as the commentaries informed me) lesser-known original version of the Critique, not the “compromised” revision for which Husserl so harshly criticized Kant. Some of the language, unsurprisingly, is very un-Kantian. Indeed, the work seems an attempt to fuse the philosophies of Kant with that of the Nietzsche imagined by Deleuze in his earlier work, “Nietzsche & Philosophy.”

In the second chapter, Deleuze proclaims that all phenomena are the result of contractions in time and space. In chapter five, these will come to be known as intensities, but the use of this term by Deleuze is very confusing because once an intensity becomes, well, intense enough it then constitutes an Intensity. For now, this little, random intensity that we begin following in chapter 2 is just an intensity of time and space in contraction, not an Intensity. The simplest intensity can be thought of as a presence or present. It is the primitive knowledge that “we/I am/ are” in a moment that we/I are in the presence of a moment known as the present. What kinds of questions can such a presence understand? Probably something along the lines of “we/I are thirsty or hungry- how does a thing like us/I satisfy thirst or hunger?”

A presence learns to satisfy such needs through habit- the generalization of the activity of what Deleuze calls larval selves that collectively constitute the multiplicity that is a self. At a certain point, habit starts not simply to generalize but to actively contemplate the activities of larval selves and we start to take the giant leap towards imagination and memory.

So then, what is a memory? On an abstract level, it is a synthesis of the present and the past. Presence is no longer only concerned with the present. That present is reshaped by the knowledge of the past. The two temporalities are successfully, and fairly simply synthesized by a passive presence. To get to a slightly less abstract understanding of memory, we should take notice that the title of the book is not “Difference...” and introduce ourselves to the second title-concept. For memory is, of course, a kind of repetition, in which a presence mentally returns to their impression of the past. Memory repeats the past in the form of the presence's mentally captured impression of that moment.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.’

Yeah this took forever. I read Difference & Repetition once, understood less than none of it & decided to reread with a guide while taking careful notes and recording my impressions in a journal. It ate up most of 2019. The remorseless sloganeering of the fine & granular distinctions between similar-but-heterogenous terms like the particular vs. the singular, equivalence vs. exchange, the universal vs. the general are deployed by a laser-focused methodology which unfolds into one of those recherché medieval maps meant to enclose all the cosmos. Beautiful and elegant even if it doesn’t exactly correspond to all the latest science--and hellaciously difficult to read. Still not sure I understand enough (or any) of Difference & Repetition but at least I feel adequate to write a little about it now. I’m not gonna declaim the cliff notes or write up a glossary because much better & smarter people than me have already done that, some of them on this very site, but if you’ve got a minute, I want to get inside some of its problems and tell you what the weather’s like there.

This book is a helical transposition of certain concepts in philosophy which, through their augmentation and extension, turn the whole sordid enterprise upside down--which is good, I mean, standing on your head can feel sort of delirious but it’s also great for balance and core strength in the longterm. These contrarian reversals--’what if the opposite was true?’--can be an exhilarating sugar rush with a febrile comedown or, if rigorously sustained, an index of embryonic territories fresh with inchoate possibilities. The skeleton key here, for Deleuze, is to give metaphysical priority to difference over identity. Easy right?

There’s a reason difference comes before repetition--the exterior stamen of this book is repetition, and the fecund pistil is difference. Or something like that, Deleuze is better at horticultural conceits than I am. Anyway, the value of identity decreases as we understand the windswept morphology of substance, matter, energy, what-have-you, these are not engraved categories but differences-in-themselves which tilt, shift and change, and their so-called identity is a temporal assemblage of certain repeating traits. The coherence of identity is a ‘habit of thought’ more than a correspondence to the fathomless disparition of difference across our worlds and the inconceivably profuse worlds outside & beyond them. As Deleuze puts it;

‘Everywhere couples and polarities presuppose bodies and networks, organized oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions. Stereoscopic images form no more than an even and flat opposition, but they depend on something quite different: an arrangement of coexistance, tired, mobile planes, a ‘disparateness’ within an original depth. Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary.’

Let’s talk about ‘the virtual’ for a second because this idea seems to brutalize everyone who reads Difference & Repetition into helplessness. In Deleuze’s own words, the virtual is a plane of difference which is ‘the cause of the effect of the actual’, an asymmetrically stacked plane of possible differences (an immanent condition of possibility, rather than eternal and universal ideality, the inverse of Plato’s realm of forms) which exerts a phantom influence over the forms & formalization of reality, ‘the actual’. I had a lot of trouble unpicking the state of the virtual--I mean, is it an a transcendental ontogeny in immanence’s clothing? Because it seems like a crypto-transcendental lighthouse with tinted windows. I guess this tightrope between transcendence and immanence is necessary to zig-zag around the negative and neutralize its post-Hegelian monopoly on experiential differentiation, necessary for the individuation of forms in the actual world without tension, without contradiction, without the ruptures of history as the primary logic of autopoiesis. So instead we have the bodylock of transcendental empiricism, an incongruous (‘different’) conjugation of concepts, the ignition switch to the only possible ‘science of the sensible’ which can register but never know the informal / intensive singularities cohabitating the intangible spatium of the virtual. These intensive elements are embedded asymmetrically across the virtual and become sensible / formalized through several synthesized processes detailed in the second and fifth chapters of the book--and I have nothing to say about them. They are torturous to read and make you feel like an idiot baby.

I’ve talked a lot about difference and not much about repetition--which is something Deleuze does too. Sometimes repetition would get lost altogether and it seems like it is only in the title, as in the book, as a vessel wherein Deleuze reinstalls difference as the primary modality. Would that it were that simple; no, repetition is another hornet’s nest. Enter Nietzsche; the ‘eternal return’ is true & real but only insofar as it is the return of difference, not of the same. This is the final knot in an aleatory materialism, since there is nothing homologous in the uneven, sawtooth-organization of the virtual, so we find its singularities duplicating themselves across the communication networks in the real. To prove this point, let me repeat myself;

I hate this book. Five stars.

[Kev · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not finished yet but I have a few observations.

Deleuze is the first post-modern continental philosopher to do competent math, science (physics and biology), theology and philosophy that it has been my pleasure to read since college.

This book is momentous. He gives a philosophic basis for chaotic complexity that is both dexterous and sublime. This is the most important work of the 20th century in humble opinion.

Superficiality would dictate that difference and repetition have no truck except glancingly with each other. This couldn't be further from the truth. Not only are they related. They are constitutive of each other. The implication of this are far-flung and far-reaching.

My whole worldview and faith are altered. Wonderful.

In examining repetition beyond the superficial generalities we come to realize difference is the interiority of repetition and repetition is the exteriority of difference. Difference in embedded in repetition for itself. Repetition results in difference expressed in itself. So what might have seemed to be mutually exclusive Deleuze teaches us is really interdependant and interrealated. Shocking and exciting.

[Ivan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Positively sophomoric drivel about favourite philosophers of PoliSci college students - Nietzshe, Kant, Kierkegaard etc.

Imagine an illiterate blind idiot trying to describe mathematics. That's what this book is. Pure philosophers had better stay away from the subjects they are completely and utterly incompetent in. I am surprised anyone received any academic distinction for this mass of idiocy.

Contains reductio ad hitlerum many times within the text.

Philosophy-wise you will do yourself a service reading Claude Levi Strauss, Aristotle interpretations, Ruth Benedict or even Ian Buruma instead, Buruma which is, despite all the jumping to conclusions and facile generalisations he uses is still a notch better than this collection of mind-vomit instead. Theater and art history wise, better read the books of Paul Claudel, 50 years earlier, but none the worse. Mathematics and physics wise - better read the Einsteins Introduction to General Theory of relativity or Hawking's Brief history of time. I don't have any recommendation about theosophy, but anything is better than this.

Even the simplest scientific vulgarisation book is better than this.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Existence is not a predicate. Everything Kant writes is inspired by Baumgarten’s assertion. Descartes’ cogito takes a determinate and makes it an indeterminate by implicitly bringing in time while making thinking of the self into a being in the world by first assuming away the world. Kant will explicitly bring in time and make it a transcendental. As with Descartes, when one assumes away the world, what must remain is the thinking self and itself as an identity. Kant will correct that mistake by always making it meta by thinking of thinking about something, rather than, the thought itself.

Within Joyce’s Finnegans Wake it is as if we lived in a world without space or time and just had our pure intuition and feelings as a guide and as quoted by Deleuze vicus is recirculation, or in other words, history repeats itself. (a quick reminder, Joyce’s first two pages of Finnegans Wake is jam packed with how he is going to tell the story as it relates to Ireland and he gives accolades to Giambattista Vico and his New Science and Vico’s (‘vicus’) recirculation theory of history, or in plainer language history repeats itself, or in the context of this book Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence establishing repetition of a difference without a concept.

The ‘negation of not being’ does not necessarily exist as Being. All determinations are a negation of the infinite. Spinoza says that, and Duns Scotus needs the absolute being of being to be real such that all of the representations within the simulacra are part of the attributes of the one true substance and Scotus and Deleuze would argue that Thomas Aquinas analogical method is not sufficient for establishing the identity of the self or the nature of Being (the ultimate Good, the universe, or Plotinus’ ‘One’ that which is not just an image of an Identity)

Plato gives us ‘oneness’, Aristotle brings us to ‘one, two, three and so on’, and the repetition of a sequence needs a negation of an idea (or Leibnitz’s monad, a thing within itself for itself as a opposed to a difference within itself or a repetition, that is a thing for itself with a difference without a concept, pure idea of an abstract or a virtual reality within itself).

Kant’s pure reason gives us intensity and extension, in other words time and space by making them intuitions with coherence within us not outside of us and Kant will insist that effects come from causes because he says it must (Hume would disagree) . Kant merges Leibnitz’s abstract perfectly windowless building blocks of ideas (monads) with Hume’s experience as the foundation for reality and gives us coherence through relationships with context, Deleuze takes Hume out of Kant for the most part and leaves Leibnitz in and puts in Bergson, Spinoza and Duns Scotus while leading to Nietzsche’s self-proclaimed most important thought of all ‘eternal recurrence of the same’, but Deleuze won’t allow a ‘same’ or ‘similar’ just a constant repetition of the same possessing a difference without a concept.

There’s no easy way to describe the depth of what this author is getting at. There has been a 2500 year mistake in philosophy and thought and it starts with the first premise of all foundations being derived from assuming that existence and its negative are valid premises while forgetting that ‘existence is not a predicate’ and it’s similar to assuming how the calculus explains the world necessarily when it assumes the very small or the very large exist as an object such as in calculus with its delta gamma arguments or its reciprocal inverse, or in other words, existence needs relationships between entities and relativity in order to give being meaning while all the time the real question comes down to ‘why is there something rather than nothing’, and all questions of being get turned into a presumption of the negation of the negation does not bring us back to the beginning. Deleuze tries to solve the paradox by appealing to Nietzsche, especially using his ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ and leans towards Duns Scotus and Spinoza while not embracing St. Thomas Aquinas.

Deleuze is a very good writer who tackles complex concepts and assumes his reader wants to understand. Most readers will be richly rewarded for taking the effort to read this book. I should have read this book before having read his Anti-Oedipus. That reminds me Deleuze slips into a lot of Freudian garbage as he’s writing this book as he did with his other book, he’s got the ‘death wish stuff’, and uses arguments about the ‘unconscious represses itself to keep it from itself’ non-sense. I just ignore that and focus on the other parts of the book.

This is one of those books that deserve more than five stars and for me I found it well worth my time.

[Kelan Steel Lowney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the key that invented the lock. It has all the answers, but you have to figure out the right questions to ask. It's philosophical Ouija.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have wrestled with this text for 2 years. Truth be told I am still not quite sure Gilles is saying half the time. I suppose for a text that is profoundly against grounded determinacy this might be appropriate.

I have my misgivings with this text, the dizzying style and intoxicating insights can give way to frustration and accusation of non-sense. Though since sense is, apparently, grounded in non-sense, we might find at this point D has already outflanked us.

Metaphysically, I would like to offer the critique that a multiplicity, a ground which rumbles beneath us, and a set of purely differential relations is.. too delirious to be constructive. Is Deleuze merely saying "woah man.. its like all subjective and relative.." - no, this is a profoundly lazy reading, and possibly a kind of conservative clutching at previous forms of determination.

This aside, this book has changed my thinking irreversibly, and almost imperceptibly. Perhaps I am left with some delirium and confusion, without a program or system, but perhaps so much the better. The profound caution against subordinating difference to identity guards us against all forms of overdetermination, objectification, dogmatism, reification, misapprehension and misdiscrimination. We get a critique of representation that lets us slip into their cracks, occupy their border regions, and apprehend their limitations. Being gives way to becoming, and at this point I am tempted to perform a vulgar mapping of Deleuze onto The Laozi.

Still it is difficult to understand exactly what the object of Deleuze's thought is in this book, and again, we find that this is somehow the point (The Laozi begins by telling us that the way of the Dao cannot be told?) Is he an Idealist, trying to elucidate the laws of thought? I don't think so, we find a commitment to realism, empiricism, and materialism in these pages. Now are these principles exactly distinct to us anymore? We have both a critique and edification of philosophy. Can thought go beyond its image?

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second time reading this book. I think the first time, I found the first two chapters mind blowing, but the rest of the book mostly escaped me.

This time around, the other chapters seem even more amazing then the first two.

What's difficult about reading this kind of Deleuze is that he really does expect you to be familiar with the other philosophers he would throw at you. And yet we all understand that many of these philosophers wrote and thought within certain, perhaps imcompossible aesthetics. Deleuze pulls out these aesthetics and combines them together to show how they line up and how they differentiate. This makes his writing difficult because while he is writing philosophy he is also writing philosophy about philosophy. The amount of complexity that arises quickly can get out of hand.

What Deleuze wants to do, and what makes this book so great, is that he tackles the implicit aesthetic of the philosophical tradition itself. He is highly critical as to how we understand the particular reference points of philosophy as they are presented. As so many have said yes, Deleuze turns Plato on his head here. Deleuze is taking the concept of identity as not being the primary mode of philosophy but instead takes difference itself. One way to get to this is to understand a tri-part system of difference, where we first have difference which may not even exist, we have differentiation which is what Badiou calls being-as-countable and we have differenciation which is best understood as Being, or at least the unitary wrapping of Oneness itself.

This concept of the one, that for Deleuze there is many and there is sometimes One, is best exemplified by the eternal return. The form of what returns is always One but it is the same one even if it is different... this is to take chaos itself as affirmation.

Which really is the main push here. Deleuze wants to get away from the boring dialectic identity that envelops any kind of dialectical analysis using Not. He wants to get away from the boring hypostasis of representationalism; that deferral of meaning implicit in more traditional forms of thought that create structure but only to wrap its meaning making "structureness" within the exteriority of ontology metaphysics of presence. Deleuze does this by looking at the various contingencies themselves, localized as difference and building from the formality of difference so that we can begin to get at how the force of ideas carry through, how the creation of the content expressed in the general idea can arise from contingency itself... so that we don't always have to appeal to some kind of fictitious absoluteness to ground identity or make ground an expression of the identity of One. We can understand each difference on its own, as its own originary process. This loses for us the possibility of totality itself, but not necessarily... Deleuze seems to go so far as to want to explain everything in terms of itself but he stops short in the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. We don't need to define a noumenomenal world of Not to buffer our own universality. In this sense, Deleuze is fine with contradiction and over-coding. We see here in this post-structuralism the loss of the absolute in order to have a world... that the most concise referent in discourse isn't the absolute One, which makes it a boring discourse of enforcing the one everywhere -- rather the most concise referent is the world itself, which not only includes the possible but also the impossible.

This advances Deleuze to the point of pure contemplation. He over turns the aesthetic controls on philosophy so as to free thought up for its own interplay rather than using it as a point of control of what we are allowed to think or not think. I repeat. The lack of explication and wrapping of thought (as what makes it asymmetrical) is a force on its own, its own formalism. And though he appeals to other discourses, such as math and science to exemplify these structures, their appearance is seemingly uncorrelated. How can he justify this? The normal aesthetic of philosophy, as we are so familiar with it, would be of comfort as it repeats what we already understand. It makes sense through its repetition of formality. But this new point: the argument can only be its own justification. Determination is its own difference. For that reason, there are points at which Deleuze approaches nonsense. For in talking about the creation of meaning, we can only appeal to mechanisms that are foreign to meaning. Said again, Deleuze opens the door, to let us think the impossible. It is this very edge of sense that Deleuze would have us stand, at the font of the thinkable itself.

[katie luisa borgesius · Rating 5 out of 5]

people like to talk about how impenetrable this book is, but really it just requires some background reading. set some time aside for it, treat it like a project; you can start with Plato and Diels and Kranz, then work your way up to 1968. you'll be alright as long as you don't skip anything. have fun!

EDIT: a friend just took me up on my word and showed me a pic of himself with a big smile next to all the books he'd bought. it was funny because he had to get a new two-bedroom just for them, but then i was like ummm wait you only have philosophy here, dude i said don't skip anything

[lily🤓 · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah man fucking difference and or repetition

[Bernardo Moreira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sem dúvidas, um dos livros mais incríveis que já li.
Essa leitura foi uma montanha russa. Comecei o livro sozinho, e de cara (apesar de já estar terminando a leitura em grupo d'O anti-Édipo), já senti a densidade do conteúdo. Mesmo assim, não conseguia parar de ler. Deleuze, num esforço que é frequentemente qualificado como de história da filosofia, entra nas rachaduras do pensamento para fazer emergir aquilo que não para de escapar. No meio da leitura, alcancei os colegas que já estavam lendo em grupo e me juntei a eles, o que foi importantíssimo. Os debates intermináveis me trouxeram uma compreensão muito mais profunda do texto, que por várias vezes aparece como obscuro à primeira vista (por isso, sou extremamente grato aos amigos do grupo). Mas o que realmente me transformou foi o modo o qual Deleuze lê outros autores e os acopla em sua virulenta máquina teórica. Diferente de suas colaborações com Guattari, claro, mas já aqui Deleuze trata de questões importantíssimas para suas discussões futuras dentro dos moldes incessantemente subvertidos da "filosofia pura". Diferença e Repetição 'coroou' Deleuze como minha principal influência, diante de sua surpreendente astúcia na produção teórica. Um livro extremamente ágil e veloz, um verdadeiro arrebatamento. Não se lê uma única vez. Diante do Oceano, prepare-se para o excesso.

[Valdimar · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretzels is the metaphysics of continuity
https://youtu.be/Sg2im6mi0eo

[Andrew]

As a former Deleuze fanatic, it was interesting to revisit the early ideas of someone whose ideas were once so important to me. Yes, there was a lot of bloviating. Yes, there was a lot of reliance on these just incredibly silly Freudian, Lacanian, and structuralist concepts. But, on the other hand, there was an attempt at a very serious-minded, continental-flavored empiricism, flawed as it was. And the last chapter is actually still quite thought-provoking.

[Mélanie Pindado · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deleuze siempre nos hace implosionar las ideas preconcebidas de los conceptos que arroja sobre el tablero del pensamiento.
Foucault, en este caso, como en otros, hace una apología del pensar de su compañero, escribiendo 'al modo de' el propio Deleuze. Nunca fáciles ni complacientes para el lector, para quien los piensa, siempre fértiles, siempre abriendo preguntas, regalando imágenes, esquemas, problematizando, 'dramatizando la Idea'.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has been acclaimed as Deleuze's masterpiece, which made me very eager to read it ever since I was a student; however, I am only getting to it now in my early fifties.  Unfortunately, I found the book difficult to read, as it was formatted in such a way on the Amazon Kindle that I could only read it by tilting the screen at a nearly 45% degree angle and, furthermore, the font size at times became too small for my eyes to read easily.  I tried to read the first 3-5 sentences of each paragraph, and I sort of skimmed the rest.  My final judgment is that this text was about as interesting as a Warhol representation of a Cambell's soup can would be to an art-viewer whose tastes were nurtured in the 19th century.  Apparently, Gilles Deleuze has read a great deal, and it is clear from reading this book that he has put effort into creating a philosophic voice where he can project himself as an intellectual who spits out words from the full spectrum of the various disciplines of Western thought, including philosophy, science, mathematics and physics.  However, in his quest to seal the breach between analytical and continental philosophy, it seems to me that he has used a tactic which is in fact the direct opposite of Wittgenstein's stripped down approach to constructing a balanced and arithmetically-mediated system where the style of his intellectual regimen is carefully enumerated heuristically proposition by proposition.  Instead, Deleuze engages in what I see as an infinite extension of representations and a sort of frolicking to-and-fro in keeping with the immutable music of the cogito, something which the more rhetorically-inclined philosophers at Oxford wished Wittgenstein to conform to when they invited him to be a guest lecturer.  I find this book to be neither nutritious on an intellectual level nor fulfilling on an artistic level and, it seems to me, the overall effect is that it leaves the reader more confused by philosophy than he was before he began and it leaves the would-be philosopher intellectually unsatiated and, indeed, less eager to engage in additional intellectual pursuits.  Two stars.

[sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never having been formally trained or particularly talented in philosophical thinking, it's possible that I'll never really fully understand Deleuze. But what I have gotten out of Difference and Repetition over the past six months has been extremely valuable in changing the way I think about identity, memory, and politics. By prioritising difference in itself as a method of escaping from the primacy of identity – an assumed truth in philosophy since Plato – Deleuze is able to account for fluidity and change, and to reconsider the ways we experience the present as a contraction of both past and future (or, in his words, past pushing through the present into the future). Like Heidegger with his question of Being, Deleuze wants to completely break from the history of philosophy and develop a new system founded principally on difference as a primary determinate of meaning in the world. I am a long way from grasping the implications of Deleuze's ontology, but the experience of grappling with this has changed me in some substantive way. Even when the writing is borderline impenetrable, it rings true like the best poetry and fiction.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure what rating to give this text. It is a very bizzarre, tense text. I did not really understand it, and could not get through all of it...but good friends of mine and teachers have spoken highly of it and Deleuze philosophy. So perhaps I shall return again. After all, most philosophy begins as bizarre and inaccessible. Michel Foucault called Deleuze the major philosopher of our epoch...so...it's probably just me and not Deleuze...

[Clayton Crockett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greatest book of 20th century philosophy.

[Javier Rouco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy tocho este libro la verdad. Quizás demasiao tocho. Tocho en lo k viene a ser todos los sentidos de la palabra

[Sajid · Rating 4 out of 5]

What does it mean to adopt Difference and repetiton in a new form without form and ground? What does it mean to liberate difference from its subordination to the model of representation? These two are the most consistent questions Deleuze tries to handle throughout this monstrously dense and complex book–which took me over a month to finish, even Heidegger's Being and Time or Derrida's Of grammatology didn’t take this much of my time and effort. Did he give me more than Heidegger or Derrida in this case? Of course not. But Deleuze liberates you indeed. Not from any mere ideological fashion. But from the very root of supposition. Or more appropriately, he frees us from the dogmatic image of thought.

Deleuze goes back again and again to Plato,Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant and Nietzsche(though Spinoza was his motivation to tackle all these great minds). Besides, there are so many reference to calculus, geometry, evolution etc. which might make it difficult who comes from a nonscientific background. Again and again Deleuze tries to think difference in itself. Because he thought that from Plato to Aristotle, from Kant to Hegel,everybody tried to understand difference through the concept of identity, resemblance, opposition and negation. That's why the indeterminate, inequal,chaotic and formless force of difference couldn’t be thought in any other field, like science, sociology, anthropology etc. For Deleuze, there is not something which comes first so that we have many other things and the differences between them,on the contrary, there are a priori differences, disparity that's why we can say of something that it is a thing. Differences and relations between them determines them. What he calls for is the groundlessness of ground,the depth of the surface,the intensive field that makes quality,extention possible. The chaosmos which this Cosmos is or becoming. The Nietzschean eternal return where nothing returns as the same,but another. Not the represtational plane surface of the earth, but the fracture on the face of the earth and fragmentation in the sky. A dice of throw where every chance is implicated, every throw is affirmed,rather than hypothetical chances of probability or possibility. No calculation for solution, but the very process of the calculation, the game of the divine. In the sky of course. Rather than the problem-solution dialectic relationship, there are problematic fields giving rise to other problematic field only to be solved in a determined manner to be problematic again.

So Deleuze makes literally everything problematic. If for him,by thinking difference in itself, the entire dogmatic image of thought collapse, what have we to do rather than making stutter every last horizon possible? The self,the identity, the human being are not same again. Some fluctuating point of difference they which repeat themselves only to be remembered in the memory of another.

[Faith Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I feel like Foucault is easier for me to understand as I have a humanities and not science background, Deleuze’s philosophy, once processed, is applicable to my own slow reconstruction of my worldview.

The points of “Difference and Repetition” came together for me at the end of the book when Deleuze tied his thought to Darwinism with the statement “We do not know what individual difference is capable of” (248). Not only is the individual capable of biologically repeating code but still creating something different, they can also process and repeat others’ thoughts and perspectives into new ideas, objects, and points of view. Everything is repeated but there will be variations of difference in events, history, and thought.

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es duro el camino pero bonita la recompensa, al final DyR son los amigos que hacemos por el camino, concluye el proyecto inciado en la Lógica del Sentido y abre las puertas a tantas formas diferentes de ver el mundo que es muy dificil resumir un libro así que te acompaña durante toda tu vida. Lo he leído ayudado por guías y vídeos en internet, y el mundo de posibilidades que ofrece es increíble. Deleuze siempre en el corazón.

[Milo Galiano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un análisis impresionante de Foucault de Lógica del sentido y de Diferencia y repetición. Sigo sin comprender que se le dijera que no se le entendía escribiendo.