Difference and Repetition (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultur) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

_Difference and Repetition_ is perhaps the single most important text in Deleuze's corpus for understanding the nature of his project. It is likely that fans of _Anti-Oedipus_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_ will disagree with this assesment, but these latter texts only take on their full critical force when understood in light of this text.

The aims of _Difference and Repetition_ are two-fold: On the one hand, Deleuze presents his critique of what he calls "the image of thought" which, he contends, is a way of thinking that tends to dogmatically reinforce dominant ways of thinking. Here we are given Deleuze's critique of representation and identity and the grounds under which they become possible and come to totalize the field of thinking. On the other hand, _Difference and Reptition_ strives to formulate a new ontology and aesthetics capable of explaining the conditions under which it is possible for something new to be created. The result is that Deleuze is able to avoid substance metaphysics based on the matter/form distinction in order to formulate a metaphysics of morphogensis capable of explaining how forms themselves are generated. Thus Deleuze brings about a reversal of Platonism, such that beings are no longer seen as the realization of forms, but instead as the actualization of processes in becoming. Putting Deleuze's project in Kantian terms, difference becomes the cipher for a transcendental aesthetic that no longer shackles the different to the identical (Deleuze claims that the philosophical tradition is without a concept of difference, but has always subsumed difference under identity), repetition describes the modes of synthesis taking place in relating differences to differences through differences (Deleuze argues that repetition is not the repetition of the same but of a difference and is thus productive). The final two chapters of _Difference and Reptition_ then give a complex account of the process of individuation that takes place through difference and its synthesis by repetition in generating new forms out of problems, questions, and the intensities they produce. Where Kant had only been able to approach aesthetics from the perspective of the spectator and the subject, Deleuze produces an aesthetics of creation itself, where the aesthetic process becomes unbound from the subject and is the affirmative and productive power of being producing itself in and through itself.

This book is as difficult as it is rich, but will deeply reward the diligent reader with both a new perspective on the world and how we relate to it, and an increased understanding of what it means to do philosophy.

It's a funny thing-while Derrida became a sensation in the 70s and 80s explicating the play of signifiers, this explosion of Deleuze's philosophy was already happening, but as yet with little notice. When people look back some day, this will be hard to understand.

Difference and Repetition is perhaps Deleuze's most difficult book, but everything from his later work is already here. It is a book to read over many times. If you're just starting with Deleuze and want to understand his philosophical project of overturning Platonism, perhaps it would be better to start with the essay, "Plato and the Simulacrum," which appears in the appendices of The Logic of Sense, a book Deleuze wrote the year after Difference and Repetition and one that is almost as important.

So what of D&R? What is about? No brief summary could do it justice, so the following must be thought of as grotesque parody whose only purpose is to send readers to the real thing. Difference is Being, which is ever and again expressed in Repetitions that are never the same. We are Repetitions. This is a philosophy of immanence-it is about what passes through us, through things, through thought. It is an attempt to think what is unthinkable and unsayable. Its philosophical precursors are Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson. It is a repetition of those philosophies, and yet fresh and new, a difference. As Deleuze says, a philosophy (or work of art) is to be evaluated by what it does to us, how it affects us, what it sets in motion within us and beyond us. On those terms, D&R is full of riches, but don't expect it to "hit you" all at once. This explosion is still happening ...