Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is my second time reading this book. I think the first time, I found the first two chapters mind blowing, but the rest of the book mostly escaped me.
This time around, the other chapters seem even more amazing then the first two.
What’s difficult about reading this kind of Deleuze is that he really does expect you to be familiar with the other philosophers he would throw at you. And yet we all understand that many of these philosophers wrote and thought within certain, perhaps imcompossible aesthetics. Deleuze pulls out these aesthetics and combines them together to show how they line up and how they differentiate. This makes his writing difficult because while he is writing philosophy he is also writing philosophy about philosophy. The amount of complexity that arises quickly can get out of hand.
What Deleuze wants to do, and what makes this book so great, is that he tackles the implicit aesthetic of the philosophical tradition itself. He is highly critical as to how we understand the particular reference points of philosophy as they are presented. As so many have said yes, Deleuze turns Plato on his head here. Deleuze is taking the concept of identity as not being the primary mode of philosophy but instead takes difference itself. One way to get to this is to understand a tri-part system of difference, where we first have difference which may not even exist, we have differentiation which is what Badiou calls being-as-countable and we have differenciation which is best understood as Being, or at least the unitary wrapping of Oneness itself.
This concept of the one, that for Deleuze there is many and there is sometimes One, is best exemplified by the eternal return. The form of what returns is always One but it is the same one even if it is different… this is to take chaos itself as affirmation.
Which really is the main push here. Deleuze wants to get away from the boring dialectic identity that envelops any kind of dialectical analysis using Not. He wants to get away from the boring hypostasis of representationalism; that deferral of meaning implicit in more traditional forms of thought that create structure but only to wrap its meaning making “structureness” within the exteriority of ontology metaphysics of presence. Deleuze does this by looking at the various contingencies themselves, localized as difference and building from the formality of difference so that we can begin to get at how the force of ideas carry through, how the creation of the content expressed in the general idea can arise from contingency itself… so that we don’t always have to appeal to some kind of fictitious absoluteness to ground identity or make ground an expression of the identity of One. We can understand each difference on its own, as its own originary process. This loses for us the possibility of totality itself, but not necessarily… Deleuze seems to go so far as to want to explain everything in terms of itself but he stops short in the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. We don’t need to define a noumenomenal world of Not to buffer our own universality. In this sense, Deleuze is fine with contradiction and over-coding. We see here in this post-structuralism the loss of the absolute in order to have a world… that the most concise referent in discourse isn’t the absolute One, which makes it a boring discourse of enforcing the one everywhere — rather the most concise referent is the world itself, which not only includes the possible but also the impossible.
This advances Deleuze to the point of pure contemplation. He over turns the aesthetic controls on philosophy so as to free thought up for its own interplay rather than using it as a point of control of what we are allowed to think or not think. I repeat. The lack of explication and wrapping of thought (as what makes it asymmetrical) is a force on its own, its own formalism. And though he appeals to other discourses, such as math and science to exemplify these structures, their appearance is seemingly uncorrelated. How can he justify this? The normal aesthetic of philosophy, as we are so familiar with it, would be of comfort as it repeats what we already understand. It makes sense through its repetition of formality. But this new point: the argument can only be its own justification. Determination is its own difference. For that reason, there are points at which Deleuze approaches nonsense. For in talking about the creation of meaning, we can only appeal to mechanisms that are foreign to meaning. Said again, Deleuze opens the door, to let us think the impossible. It is this very edge of sense that Deleuze would have us stand, at the font of the thinkable itself.
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