Difference and Repetition (Bloomsbury Revelations)

If you are interested in Deleuze read the book itself, because it is much simpler and more interesting than the reviews written on it!!!

First class.

This is Deleuze’s first, but in some ways most complete (albeit in a traditional sense) philosophical magnum opus. He himself felt this was the starting point for his later work, however in my experience is among his least read - I think, because it is so difficult. In terms of being difficult, hard to follow, formalistic philosophical text - which it is - it actually takes most, in terms of content and style from Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza than Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. This means, I think pretty much everyone will find it difficult, trained philosopher or not.The core of the book is Deleuze's big philosophical binary - Difference and Repetition - which are set up very much as metaphysical concepts to rule all others, a replacement for many other concepts more familiar such as Being, Becoming, etc. Difference first, is the obverse, the undifferentiated ‘black abyss’ of the Parmenidean/Platonic concept of Being, everything is ‘One’. If everything is ‘one’ then the relations between difference is the real core of the concept. Difference then is the principle that actually creates something, if everything's the same, or if everything is in an exact equal relationship to everything else, then there is nothing. So indifference is both being and nothing, Difference is the ‘Ground’ - but it is a ground of rising damp, rather than a Heidgeerrian ‘being there’.From this, Deleuze draws upon Duns Scotus and Spinoza - to link this sense of Difference to an ontologically immanent ‘Being/Becoming’ / Flood-Ground that bridges the gap between representation & correspondence (or Being and Thought). This is the start of Deleuze’s famous ‘plane of immanence’ (although its not called that here) and the key to understanding how deeply thought through this anti-Platonic anti-Emanationists metaphysics really is, it’s also the key to his famous anti-Hegelianism. For Hegel, determination is what makes something different from another thing, and this then is negative, i.e. determinate negation. But for Deleuze, it is a positive and active principle. What makes something different is the positive content of identity, not the negation.Similarity, Deleuze sees that in the history of western metaphysics, the concept of authentic Being, with negation following determination, means that the task of rationality is to return to being via identity / Analogy / Opposition / Similarity. Deleuze wants to subvert that.The main problem with Hegel, is this idea that difference is just negation/contradiction, this for Deleuze is not ‘affirmative’, so really, the key battle here is Nietzsche versus Hegel. The eternal return is the same as chaos (chaosmos) for Deleuze, everything repeats but not actually the same, because difference is the grounding foundational truth. In Deleuze’s view, Hegelian dialectics sees contradiction and negation everywhere, rather than seeing it as an affirmative truth that everything is becoming/different. Hence, for Nietzsche, the morale of the eternal return is to say ‘yes’ to everything, so the fact that difference means you really are saying yes to EVERYTHING - everything that happens and everything that doesn’t happen, so we don’t live in a cyclical universe of determinism, we live in a multiverse where every possibility happens.As well as Duns Scotus and Hegel, there are long discussions, in this vein, on the thought of Spinoza, Aristotle, Plato, and many others. For example, Deleuze’s interpretation of how Duns Scotus gets around pantheism, is to say Being is retaliation and ‘degrees of being’, so essentially a conception of ‘difference’ things are the same but all different, this introduces another famous Deleyzian notion of intensity. So for Deleuze, ‘individuation precedes matter and form’, we are what we are because what we are is a constant change and becoming - this will be relevant to when he talks about Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.His second big concept, is of course, Repetition. Starting with Hume on habit - everything is a contraction, in the sense of two moments in time coming together, like the paradox of the arrow. So he says ‘difference lies between two repetitions, or conversely two repetitions is between difference’The idea of contraction, and habit (Hume’s explanation for induction) is merged with a Bergosian view of time where the past and future interpenetrate with an ever present ‘now’, so there is no time or certainly not clock time - but just repetition of a now.For Deleuze, a view of objective time was tied to a view of other objective things - and so for him Kant was the first to basically subjectivise time, and to make pure time part of the subject, and so really this view of time is the ‘death of god’ - because we start to do away with notions of a noumenal reality. (Mircea Eliade’s notion of Kant and free will…) This ties in with what was stated in Chapter 1, and repeated here, that the true death of God is death of the subject, and by this they mean the transcendental Cartesian cogito subject. Once time is incorporated, and then let go, you have little else.As the chapter develops, Deleuze develops a very interesting theory about how Platonism, Phenomonemology and Kantianism all favour this view of perception as ‘repeating’ some underlying common sense, but he says, in Plato, there is an echo of an anti-platonism, where the copy becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, a simulacra. So really, there is in Deleuze an underlying realism-empircism (or transcendental) realism, whereby we need to understand the underlying reality not as Identity but as Difference. He even calls Difference a metaphysical Becoming. And again, he links it to his views on The Eternal Return.Finally, Deleuze’s chapter on the image of thought. This synthesises what has gone before with an account that essentially, appears to be an early version of speculative realism and the critique of ‘correlationism’ - we ultimately rely (or rather, common sense philosophy) on a naive view that we can at some level reflect reality in our minds, or rather, that the problem of philosophy is based on analysing the difference between thought and being, the model of recognition. So here, we are looking at an extension (and I do believe that) of existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) and a precursor of Speculative Realism. Deleuze is usually lumped in with his contemporaries in terms of post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, etc) - a group by the way who eclipsed both in terms of academic popularity but also general fashionability, the existentialists popular in the 50s and 60s. In this work Deleuze, I think, draws more so on that later group - but also attempts a new project, a radically new and different re-interpretation of all western metaphysics. Yes, in the later work with Guatarri, he comes back closer to the post-structuralist mainstream, but this work remains his metaphysical foundation (albeit, maybe not one he shares with Guattari).He also prefigures his next book, the ‘Logic of Sense’ as well, explicitly talking about sense and nonsense, nonsense, being something whereby the sign/signifier are the same, as the true ‘dark precursor’ of sense.Hopefully this review shows that the book is hugely difficult but hugely rewarding, and despite changes and developments, underpins all of Deleuze’s later metaphysics - with early appearance from some of his most famous ideas - plane of immanence, intensity, etc….although all the bodies have organs in this!