Difference and Repetition

Well, it's finally done.  Despite spending the past 2 years reading Deleuze's magnum opus, I'm still not sure how to review it.  It hardly makes sense to get involved in some long technical discussion here.  I could try to write a pithy summary of the thesis, like, "difference in itself is repetition for itself", but that isn't going to convey much without a lot more backstory.  Deleuze creates some amazing concepts to flesh out that thesis, but these individually resist summary because they are so intimately tied together that it's nearly impossible to explain just one without slowly being forced to unravel the whole ball of twine.  

So perhaps the only thing to do is to take Deleuze's own advice on reading philosophy, "If you haven't found the problem to which a concept corresponds, everything stays abstract. If you've found the problem, everything becomes concrete."  The problem in Difference and Repetition is how we can think of a world that has no innate or essential forms.  We begin to understand the stuff around us insofar as we start to realize that it didn't just fall from the sky readymade.  Everything that is was constructed.  This problem leads immediately into others: how was it constructed? from what? what can it do?  And from those we move into the more directly practical question at the heart of his philosophy: how could it be constructed differently?  All the book's seemingly very abstract concepts like differential ideas, and simulacra, and the dark precursor, and the eternal return, respond directly to this problem.  

It's a deceptively simple question.  Often we approach it in ways that are not so much wrong as just terribly incomplete.  We try to control the question, to answer it finally, once and for all.  Objective atoms.  Subjective ideas.  Divine plan.  These are responses meant to close the problem by positing some necessary forms of being.  Deleuze tries to take us beyond these responses, to open the problem and think of a world where nothing is necessary, and everything is ultimately formed by chance.  This might sound like a world of pure chaos in which anything is possible, and in some sense that's exactly what it is.  But even this chaos-god conceived as a totality can become a kind of necessity that limits the world unless we are prepared to conceive the structure of its perpetual unfolding in detail.  And maybe that's all that Difference and Repetition wants us to do -- think all the way through the chaos so that we stay open to it.

 

#reread