Difference and Repetition [Paperback]

Gilles Deleuze (Author), Paul Patton (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231081596 | ISBN-13: 978-0231081597 | Publication Date: April 15, 1995 0

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts—pure difference and complex repetition&mdasha;and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, Difference and Repetition moves deftly to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a long-overdue, and skillful, translation of one of Deleuzes most important and original works...It occupies an important place in Deleuzes oeuvre as the first text, following a series of historical commentaries, in which he philosophizes on his own behalf. It occupies an equally important place in the evolution of French philosophy in the 20th century, as it articulates a profound critique of the philosophy of representation while constructing a metaphysics of difference freed from subordination to a logic of identity. While charting the development through the history of philosophy of the concepts of ' pure difference and ' complex repetition, Deleuze proposes a new image of thought, which readers familiar with his later works will recognize. A difficult and challenging text that has done as much as any to initiate the philosophy of difference that characterizes much recent French thought, this book is one of the classics of recent European philosophy.

Review

This is a long-overdue, and skillful, translation of one of Deleuze's most important and original works...It occupies an important place in Deleuze's oeuvre as the first text, following a series of historical commentaries, in which he philosophizes on his own behalf. It occupies an equally important place in the evolution of French philosophy in the 20th century, as it articulates a profound critique of the philosophy of representation while constructing a metaphysics of difference freed from subordination to a logic of identity. While charting the development through the history of philosophy of the concepts of 'pure difference'and 'complex repetition,'Deleuze proposes a new image of thought, which readers familiar with his later works will recognize. A difficult and challenging text that has done as much as any to initiate the philosophy of difference that characterizes much recent French thought, this book is one of the classics of recent European philosophy.

(Alan Schrift, author of Nietzsche's French Legacy : A Genealogy of Poststructuralism )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (April 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231081596
• ISBN-13: 978-0231081597
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #43,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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54 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing, March 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Logic of Sense: Difference and Repetition (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) (Hardcover)

It has been said that Deleuze stands in a class all his own. Moving freely between the movements of structuralism, psychoanalysis, logical analysis, phenomenology, Kantian critique, and on, Deleuze proves unlocalizable in any one tradition (with the possible exception of a certain form of Bergsonism). Unlike other French philosophers from the school of sixty eight, Deleuze does not seem to fall into the so-called linguistic turn, but instead formulates a highly complex process philosophy capable of simultaneously accomodating these views and going beyond them.

_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.

46 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An explosion in philosophy that is still going on., February 23, 2001

By 

Karl Henzy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Difference and Repetition (Paperback)

Difference and Repetition is a megaton bomb exploding in Twentieth-Century philosophy. So why is it so many have never heard of it? Because the explosion is still happening, and will continue to happen, as thinkers inevitably go back to this text again and again. If we do not see the flames and the rubble, that is because this explosion is happening at a different speed, as Deleuze would say, in a time span that began in 1968 and will continue well into the decades to come.

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 ...

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Crux of Thought, February 11, 2003

By 

Adrian Chan (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Difference and Repetition (Paperback)

It took me reading Deleuze's books on Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault and his collaborations with Guattari in Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus to finally get through this book . Difference and Repetion explains all the others, but is incredibly dense and in no way an introduction to his thinking. If you're familiar with his project, however, then this brings the rest of his readings into focus.
It's in this book that Deleuze gets as close as he ever comes to replying to Hegel, and in that sense it's here that he contends with the master and the dialectic--a battle or contest characteristic of his French compatriots (see Vincent Descombes' fantastic book: Modern French Philosophy; and Michael Hardt's summary of the early Deleuzian projects: Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy). Difference and repetition are such an alternative to the dialectic that they're difficult to grasp without a serious grounding in metaphysics (see his books on Kant and Hume especially), Spinoza, and Bergson.
Deleuze wants to show that there is a materiality of expression that is also a movement within time, an unfolding that is also a becoming ( and in this sense in contrast to Being). This movement image (which founds his analysis in the Cinema books) grounds for Deleuze a transcendental empiricism, which is to say a non-conceptual and material, positive and affirmative idea of thought. Read his books on Kant and Hume first for an overview of his critique of representation.
I think this book is stunning, and i hope to read it over and over. The first three chapters are incredible, and amount to nothing short of a complete undoing of representational thought, or what he characterizes as a logic of the same.