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Difference and Repetition

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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.

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 ...

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.

Difference and repetition struck me as nothing I've ever read before has struck me. The fun thing about "reading" it, is that, when you think about it, the act of reading itself makes understanding parts of this work more clear. Reading this becomes a "machinic" activity as it were: immediate, affective, with its own unpredictability, with many gaps, moments of insight, despair, and so on. It seems contradictory, because I think it is the most rigorous and analytic of all of Deleuzes works. But it is immensely dense, as other reviewers also say.
It is certainly the crucial work in his oeuvre. Really if you have tried it a few times, you will notice that many ideas of his later work are based on the crucial notions of this grand exploration. Anti-Oedipe is such a delight to read and easy to understand after this one.

And I think it is good for those who want to approach Deleuze's thought, to start with the Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux, then read some of the smaller and intensive works (What is philosophy, Leibniz et le Baroque). Then try this book. You will get many references and want to read all others once again.

It is clearly in this work that you will find the first monstrous and frontal attack against Hegel's dialectic. The fun thing is that this is a complete "anti-work". Every conceivable concept of modern philosophy (from the concept of "common sense", "history", or "being") gets an "anti", with which Deleuze consistently builds his grand idea of the immediate, the pre- or non-representational and the virtual--against any metaphysics. It is moreover his first, and I think also his last work where he builds his philosophy in a consistent manner.
After this one, I think he started exploring fragments of his thought more deeply, in his other works, which are derivatives so to speak. This is his goodbye to classic French philosphy (strong tradition of exploring the "history of philosophy") and his entrée into his own experimentation with the concepts he just developed.
To conclude, just some practical notes. The problem with the book is that, unlike his other works, you have to read all of it (because it is so consistent). This makes it a project for months, or even years. Good luck.

Difference and Repetition is the most brilliant work of philosophy I have read. However the book does rely on a huge amount of background knowledge which took my over a year and a half to compile. My advice for any reader attempting to read D&R is to read Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. All of the obscure references to mathematical and scientific concepts are throuroughly explicated in DeLandas book. I can honestly say that if it were not for Intensice Philsosophy and Virtual Science I would not have been able to comprehend the key philosophical concepts deployed in D&R such as singlarities as pre-individual attractors and the nature of the virtual.

D&R is a work which may require intense effort from the reader, as none of the concepts are adequately explained by deleuze himself. But the challenge is most rewarding as the book gives you the concepts to think about a world without pre established identities and stabilities. Only now is science beginning to comprehend the universe as inherently random and dynamical which gives rise to complex self organizing systems.

A classic of modern philosophy and a brilliant achievement by an author who thought outside all contemporary philosophical trends to overthrow the 'father' of philosophy: Plato.

Much worth the effort, if a 19 year old Undergraduate can make sense of this book then anyone with enough time, patience and conceptualisation should be able to master this brilliant work.

This is (arguably) the most important work written by Deleuze for a reason that seems to me is often obscured or merely forgotten: it is (maybe) the only work that seeks to lay the foundation for a systematic treatment of `difference' and by ex-tension (or in-tension) `repetition'. It does not seek to derive `difference' and `repetition' (simply) from identity and the in-dividual. It seeks to think of `difference' and `repetition' in themselves. And this is what is important here: thinking (and not some petty play of figures and words in the frontal attacks or soul mating with particular thinkers) in its rhizomatic form rather than its arborescent one.

What is therefore central in this work is `idea', and (therefore) `perception'. In simple terms, Deleuze has managed to provide us with some foundational links with the philosophies of mind, language and time (and moreover besides). He has given to the philosophy of difference a central and unifying role (across such and other disciplines) to play.

In this sense `difference' and `repetition' are not only (simply) linked between them (in the sense that one leads to the other), but also linked with other important notions usually discussed and developed in other (philosophical) disciplines. Let me provide some brief indications.

Chapter 1 is concerned with `difference', not as mere `diversity', `otherness' or `negation', bur rather as `general' or `specific' difference, where the latter refers to the moment when difference is reconciled with the concept in general. In this manner, Deleuze sees `difference' as a concept of reflection in relation to `representation' that involves `movement'. He further discusses the notion of `eternal return' and questions the adoption of a `meta-viewpoint' for thinking about `difference' and `repetition' - the latter being the relation between originals and simulacra.

In chapter 2, Deleuze lays out the relation between (the dualities) `repetition' and `sensing', `habit', and `difference', under the guise that "difference inhabits repetition", in that it "lies between two repetitions" (p.76). He also makes the distinction between `natural' and `artificial' signs, hence the distinction between two types of `difference', one being the expression of the other. In parallel, he distinguishes `active' from `passive' synthesis (relative to time) in that "the activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject" (p.86). Finally drawing on Bergson, he distinguishes the `real' centre from where emanates a series of `perception-images' from a `virtual' centre from where emanates a series of `memory-images'.

Chapter 3 is for Deleuze the most important (sic) because the thinking of `difference' and `repetition' is based on a dogmatic image of thought characterised by eight postulates, each with a dual form, the artificial and the natural.

In Chapter 4, this duality underlies the development of the notion of `idea' in that it is problematic, hence dialectical, an "n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity" (p.182) in a `perplication' as the distinctive and coexistent state of ideas. Each `idea' is thus linked with `difference' and `representation' in that "the representation of difference refers to the identity of the concept as its principle" (p.178). In this manner he makes the claim for the superiority of problematic-questioning approach over the (traditional) hypothetico-apodictic approach because questions are imperatives.

Chapter 5 starts with the claim that "difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse" (p.222). Difference is therefore (a given) `intensity' expressed as `extensity'. There is `depth' that unites intensity and extensity. Therefore, `depth' is the intensity of being from where emerge at once extensity and the qualities of being. In this manner Deleuze accepts a dual condition of difference: one natural and one artificial.

In the concluding chapter Deleuze argues that 'representation' is a site of transcendental illusion which comes in four interrelated forms relative to `thought', `sensibility', `idea' and `being'. Hence the problematic of 'grounding' representation and his argument (or Idea) for 'groundlessness', and the justification of the use of (systems of) 'simulacra' as sites for the actualisation of ideas. Hence that of `difference' and `repetition' where the former is not only located between the levels and degrees of the latter, but also has two faces, namely, habit and memory.

Overall, despite the difficulty of the text itself as it takes for granted knowledge of the philosophies of some other thinkers (e.g. Bergson), it is a central text in the philosophy of difference and for just this reason, a text one must have read!

In this book, published in 1968, Deleuze constructs a theory of morphogenesis based upon an ontology of difference, just as Heidegger built an ontology out of Being. And contrary to the traditions of philosophical idealism from Descartes to the great Germans, Deleuze recasts the ancient philosophical vision of Ideas incarnating themselves -- and actually making possible -- the material world. In doing so, he is trying to overturn the transcendent status which Plato gave to the Ideas -- and hence, to a philosophy of Same -- by giving them a kind of Aristotelian embeddedness in the physical world. Deleuze's Ideas are more like Aristotle's entelechies.

Ideas, Deleuze insists, are multiplicities of differential relations that exist in a virtual state that becomes actualized via what he calls "intensities." Intensities occupy the intermediate realm between Ideas and "extensities," or the world of actual things, the very things which they make possible by explicating fields of individuation which make it possible for Ideas to become incarnate. Intensities are non-material fields of differential relations, such as events, becomings, slowing down and speeding up of relations, potentialities of energy flow, energy gradients, etc. They are, to use a more popular terminology, morphogenetic fields which precede and make possible the world of extensities. (In the later books with Guattari, they resurface as the Body Without Organs and the plane of consistency which is opposed to the plane of organization (i.e. extensities)).

The process whereby intensities actualize Ideas is termed "differenciation," i.e. the production of form through difference. Thus, by Difference, Deleuze refers to the morphogenetic process in general, while "Repetition" refers to the three different types of synthesis of Time which he opens the book by discussing. These three syntheses of Time, or types of repetition are: habit, memory and the production of novelty via Eternal Return. It is clear that Deleuze's discussion of the emergence of novelty, which breaks the cycle of repetition with the singularity of the new, was the source for Alain Badiou's event ontology.

Ideas, then, are not just confined to the cavern of the human skull for Deleuze, but actually have an ontological reality to them that is entirely independent of the human psyche. He is, in this sense, resolutely opposed to traditional idealism, and though his philosophy is thoroughly materialistic, it is also quite metaphysical. He is constructing a metaphysics of contemporary complexity theory, and his work belongs together with the same group in France, like Rene Thom, that was busy constructing the theories of self-organization and morphogenesis that led to the creation of chaos and complexity theories.

This is a dense and difficult book to read, and it takes a while to develop its ideas, so one must read it slowly and patiently as he builds up to his theory of morphogenesis, which climaxes the book. Reading it will make many murky passages in "A Thousand Plateaus" clear. Slavoj Zizek has said that this is the better book, and though it is a masterpiece, I don't think it quite equals the heights of "A Thousand Plateaus," which is very possibly the best work of philosophy produced in the second half of the twentieth century. "Difference and Repetition," though, might be the second best work.

SEE ALSO MY YOUTUBE VIDEO "GILLES DELEUZE'S DIFFERENCE & REPETITION DISCUSSED BY JOHN DAVID EBERT 1/2"

Just as all his books, this book should be used, no read (as Foucault puts it).
It is not a difficult book, except if you try to read it.
I tend to read every paragraph twice and go back every couple of pages and re-do it all. This is where meaning starts to emerge. Then you can use it as many times as you want.

This is Deleuze before taking off. This is not his greatest book. This book represents Deleuze talking to his past and contemporaries. Deleuze talking to us, now, about representation, individuality, etc. The unrepresentative future will bring MP to the top.

4 stars because there are next and "more unique" steps in his flight, this is the take off. It's obviously fundamental: no take off, no flight.

This book might be too much philosophy for the non initiated. MP (ou AE) is definitely a better start as its fun is much more accessible.

At first the text overwhelmed me; but soon after throwing the text against the walls a few occasions. It bounced back to me; and then everything seemed clear. Quite honestly, this is the most difficult text by Gilles Deleuze in relation to his later works; very important and vital to the studies of theory. Highly recommend!

One of the most radical evaluations of Western phenomenology and metaphysics, this book also contains the seeds of a radical political philosophy. A must read.