An Approach to Difference and Repetition

Abstract

Truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of Difference and Repetition in his 1973 "Letter to a Harsh Critic," "it's still full of academic elements, it's heavy going." (1) I'll say! (Part of that academicism comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as the primary thesis for the doctorat d'Etat; the secondary thesis was the big Spinoza book). The context of these remarks is useful: Deleuze has just been noting that "the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex." (2) Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive force by various means: (3) (1) by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested the rationalist tradition by the "critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power [pouvoir]"; (2) by enculage / immaculate conception: making the author say something in their own words that would be monstrous. These are famous lines, and the last is certainly fun in an epater les bourgeois sort of way. But what is really important in my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write "in your own name," as he claims he first did in Difference and Repetition: Individuals find a real name for themselves ... only through the harshest exercises in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere w/in them, to the intensities running through them. [This is] a depersonalization through love rather than through subjection. (4) So that's our challenge in introducing Difference and Repetition: can we help our students avoid subjecting themselves to it as a monument in the history of philosophy, as is the case with an Oedipal relation to the history of philosophy in which you give yourself up to be a mere repetiteur: an old occupational title in the French academic system? Rather, can we help them turn their reading of it into a "harsh exercise in depersonalization," that is, an opening up of themselves to the multiplicities and intensities within them, indeed, within all of us, student and teacher alike? Can our encounter with it be a depersonalization through love? Can we learn from it, rather than gain knowledge from it? Luckily, Difference and Repetition contains a discussion of learning; it thematizes the challenge it poses to us. The discussion of learning occurs at a key point in Difference and Repetition, at the turning point of the book, the end of the middle chapter, "The Image of Thought." Let's look at the architecture of the book, which after the Preface, has a pleasing and significant asymmetry: Introduction: Repetition and Difference Chapter One: Difference in Itself Chapter Two: Repetition for Itself Chapter Three: The Image of Thought Chapter Four: Ideal Synthesis of Difference Chapter Five: Asymmetrical Synthesis of Sensibility Conclusion: Difference and Repetition At first glance we see that the title/subject of the book, difference and repetition, structures the book. The conclusion repeats, with a difference, the Introduction, while chapter 4 repeats chapter 1 and chapter five repeats chapter two. Chapter three is the center of the book, the pivot on which it turns. In a useful article, Tim Murphy will claim it is the "caesura," the pure and empty form of time, which breaks naked repetition and opens the way to a novel future, repetition with a difference. (5) We should note that in an interview from 1988, Deleuze says that "noology" or the study of the image of thought is the "prolegomena to philosophy." (6) So, roughly speaking, we can say that the first part of the book (introduction and chapters one and two) is Deleuze's voyage of depersonalization through the history of philosophy (repeating it with a difference, his enculage of the philosophers he writes on). …