Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers, Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts -- pure difference and complex ...

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys's novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys's novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze's three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze's third synthesis depicts, Antoinette's fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some (...) of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this paper I identify and explore resonances between a contemporary dance piece – Jonathan Burrowss and Matteo Fargions Both Sitting Duet (2003) – and some theories from Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition (1994). The duet consists of rhythmic, repetitive patterns of mainly hand movements performed by two men, for the most part, sitting on chairs. My argument, with Deleuze, is that the repetitions in the dance are productive rather than reductive. They are never repetitions of the same. (...) The ways in which the hand patterns are played with constitute the multiple differences and repetitions we witness. I discuss these in relation to Deleuzes theories of repetition, specifically the ways in which repetition differs from resemblance avoiding the limitations of notions of origin and representation. I argue that, because of these differences which are bound up in the affective qualities of the duet that characterise the distinctive relationship between the two performers, the work, like Deleuzes theories, is transgressive with potential for change. I demonstrate this through its resonances with Deleuzes notions of simulacra and importantly his discussion of the Other. In the process, I aim to show how dance and philosophy can open up something of each other and, in this instance, suggest ways of thinking encounters otherwise. My aim is to foreground the transgressive potential of the extended repetition of the dance for making differences that matter between self and other. (shrink)

_Germinal Life_ is the sequel to the highly successful _Viroid Life_. Where _Viroid Life_ provided a compelling reading of Nietzsche's philosophy of the human, _Germinal Life_ is an original and groundbreaking analysis of little known and difficult theoretical aspects of the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In particular, Keith Ansell Pearson provides fresh and insightful readings of Deleuze's work on Bergson and Deleuze's most famous texts _Difference and Repetition_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. _Germinal Life _also provides new insights into (...) Deleuze's relation to some of the most original thinkers of modernity, from Darwin to Freud and Nietzsche, and explores the connections between Deleuze and more recent thinkers such as Adorno and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

When students read Difference and Repetition for the first time, they face two main hurdles: the wide range of sources that Deleuze draws upon and his dense writing style. This Edinburgh Philosophical Guide helps students to negotiate these hurdles, taking them through the text step by step. It situates Deleuze within Continental philosophy more broadly and explains why he develops his philosophy in his unique way. Seasoned Deleuzians will also be interested in Somers-Hall's novel interpretation of Difference (...) and Repetition. (shrink)

The essay attempts to approach some of the critical nuances of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. It takes its lead from Deleuze’s distinction between learning and knowledge. Learning implies a “depersonalization through love,” in mutual presupposition with an “encounter” that moves one to thought, while knowledge is recognition via pre-existing categories. Throughout the article, Deleuze’s encounter with Kant is the guiding thread.

질 들뢰즈(Gilles Deleuze)의 대표적 저작 『차이와 반복』(1968)은 ‘차이’와 ‘반복’이라는 두 개념에 있어서의 잘못된 이해의 역사를 규탄하고, 두 개념의 올바른 정의를 바로 세운다는 목표 하에 쓰인 책이다. 즉 반복 개념에 주목해본다면, 책을 관통하는 것은 ‘재현의 반복’에 대한 비판과 이를 대신하는 ‘차이의 반복’의 개념화다. 본고는 책의 2장에 등장하는 세 가지 종합의 기술 안에서 이 두 형태의 반복 개념이 등장하는 양상을 다루고자 하며, 이러한 본고의 관심사가 주목하게 되는 것은 세 번째 종합 중 두 번째 종합이고, 그것의 이중적 구조다. 본고는 두 번째 종합을 특징짓는 (...) 이원성의 구조, 혹은 ‘애매성(ambiguïté)’을 근본적인 설명의 대상으로 삼으면서 그것의 상세한 해설을 제시하고, 그 가운데 두 번째 종합이 바로 이 두 가지 상반되는 반복 개념의 방향을 동시에 가리키고 있다는 점을 논설할 것이다. 또한 우리가 보기에 『차이와 반복』곳곳에서 두 번째 종합에 관해, 혹은 그것과 세 번째 종합의 관계에 관해 비일관적이고 양립 불가능한 진술들이 발견된다면, 이는 바로 이 애매성을 중심으로 두 번째 종합이 이원화되고 있다는 사실에 의해 합당하게 설명될 수 있다. (shrink)

In this essay I’d like to help readers prepare to learn from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.1 Such an essay is needed, as truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of it in his "Letter to a Harsh Critic": "it's still full of academic elements, it's heavy going"2 Now part of the “academic” aspect of the work comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as the primary thesis for the doctorat (...) d'Etat in 1968.3 But that doesn’t lessen the need for help when first approaching the book. The context of Deleuze’s remarks in his “Letter” should be noted: he has just been noting that "the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex."4 Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive function by various means. First, by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested the rationalist tradition by the "critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power [pouvoir]." Second, and quite notoriously, by “a sort of buggery [enculage] or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception.” That is, by making the author say something in their own words that would be “monstrous.”5 These are famous lines, and the last is certainly amusing in an épater les bourgeois sort of way. But what's really important in my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write "in your own name," as he claims he first did in Difference and Repetition. (shrink)

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the (...) process, he introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze claims that it is in virtue of a relation of expression which holds between intensive processes of individuation and virtual Ideas that the former determines the latter to be actualised in concrete entities. He is, however, less than forthcoming in this book about exactly how we should understand the relation of expression. This article addresses itself to this lacuna. It clarifies five characteristic features of the expressive relation, partly by drawing on Deleuze's discussion (...) of the relation of expression in Expressionism in Philosophy, party by examining familiar examples of expressive relations. It then maps these characteristic features of expression onto Deleuze's discussion of the relation between Ideas and intensity in Difference and Repetition, showing that virtual Ideas are ontologically inseparable from the intensive processes that both constitute and actualise them in the production of actual entities. By way of conclusion, this expressive account of the relation between the virtual, the actual and the intensive will be compared and contrasted with several leading accounts to be found in the secondary literature. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss Deleuze’s account of the reversal of Platonism in chapter one of Difference and Repetition, tying it together with Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception. In Difference and Repetition, there are only two references to Merleau-Ponty – one in the note on Heidegger that was added at the insistence of his examiners, and one brief mention in a footnote. Nonetheless, as we shall see, many of the discussions of the origin of representation, as (...) well as the relation of the determinate to the indeterminate in the structure of difference, and the nature of depth, draw heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s work. While there has been some recognition of this influence, I want to draw out some specific points where Deleuze draws on Merleau-Ponty within chapter one of Difference and Repetition. On the other side, as far as I am aware, there is no sustained discussion of Plato in Merleau-Ponty’s work. In showing how Deleuze takes up Merleau-Ponty in his explicit project of reversing Plato, I want to show that the move to a philosophy of the simulacrum is synonymous with Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. I will begin by talking about Plato and representation, which ends the chapter, before returning to the beginning of the chapter to look at the nature of difference, then turning to the question of how representation covers over difference. I want to conclude by looking at what Deleuze considers to be the limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s account. (shrink)

This essay starts from a consideration of Deleuze's theory of time. It begins with the empty form of time. But the essay's aim is to understand Deleuze's reversal of Platonism in his 1968 Difference and Repetition. There is no question that the stakes of the reversal of Platonism are ontological. But I argue that what is really at stake is a movement of demoralisation. The essay proceeds in three steps. First, we determine what sufficient reason or grounding is, (...) for Deleuze. Sufficient reason is struck with an irreducible ambiguity. It is this ambiguity in sufficient reason that allows it to be taken advantage of, to be used by representation and good sense for a moral purpose. The second part of the essay will therefore concern ‘the moralisation of sufficient reason’. Its focus will be good sense. But then, third, we must understand Deleuze's ‘demoralisation of sufficient reason’, which necessarily passes through others. Like sufficient reason, others are ambiguous, at once lending themselves to what cancels differences, and opening the way towards difference and intensity. The third step focuses on what Deleuze calls ‘the ethics of intensive quantities’. In the Conclusion, I examine Deleuze's famous, almost cliché, definition of ethics as not being unworthy of the event and, through the empty form of time, I connect it to Kant's formalistic ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I explore two distinct but related emphases in Deleuze's later philosophy, both on his own and in collaboration with Félix Guattari, having to do with literature. The first is the emphasis on the work of literature as an assemblage whereby the author constructs lines of flight in the pursuit of self-experimentation and self-transformation. The second is the rejection of metaphor across Deleuze's work. I use Difference and Repetition to chart the origins of these emphases, by (...) unpacking the metaphysics of language contained in Difference and Repetition. I first recount the basic structure of Deleuze's intensive ontology, before going on to discuss the way in which the ‘fundamental encounter’ forces thought to formulate Ideas, which, as they are transmitted through the subject, alter her nature. This self-transformation is tantamount to a kind of ‘death’, whereby one is continually explicated, but this explication implies the transcendental Other-structure at the end of Difference and Repetition, wherein the Other, through language, gives birth to ‘possible worlds’. I end with the development of an unexplored concept in Difference and Repetition, the loquendum, which is what must be spoken precisely because it is inexpressible, the purely intensive. Language comes closest to this intensive use in its aesthetic, poetic, literary modes whereby authors distort their own languages. (shrink)

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is a notoriously difficult work of philosophy. Moreover, it is a work of philosophy that has led to quite divergent interpretations. How are we to account for this phenomenon of generating such distinct interpretations and appropriations? In this article, I apply Deleuze's theory of problems, questions and individuation to Deleuze's text as a way of understanding the stylistic strategy of his writing. Given Deleuze's critique of identity and representation, he would fall into a performative (...) contradiction if his writing were designed to transmit an identical thought from sender to receiver such that the receiver then could be said to represent Deleuze's thought. Rather, I argue, Deleuze aims to write ‘machinic’ or ‘productive’ works that lead to the production of something new through the reader's encounter with the work. Not only does Difference and Repetition theorise the process of creative individuation in the production of beings, I contend, but it also forces the reader to undergo a process of creative individuation, through which they produce a non-identical double of the work in the process of their reading that then takes on a life of its own. It is this phenomenon of the book as a machine for producing difference, I contend, that helps to account for the tremendous creative fecundity it has generated in being appropriated by a wide variety of disciplines and practices. (shrink)

This essay describes and evaluates the conception of mereological structure that underpins Deleuze’s account of ontogenesis in Difference and Repetition. A theory of mereology is a theory of composition: it asks what it is to be a part making a whole, what it is to be a whole collecting its parts; in short, in what the relation of making or composing consists. The locus classicus for modern mereology is the third of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (‘On the Theory of (...) Wholes and Parts’), which deduces the definitions, axioms and principles governing the relation of parthood and associated notions, such as wholeness, separation, simplicity and complexity. My question is this: what happens to these notions when they are no longer the terms of a ‘calculus of individuals’ and, instead, become the terms of a differential calculus of individuation? (shrink)

This essay is concerned with an enigmatic passage at the heart of Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition which locates the origin of ideas in an “aleatory point”. Deleuze develops this claim th...

Progressive educators must find ways of addressing the unconscious investments of desire that subvert free actions if they want to inspire just practices. This essay takes up that challenge, describing what a Deleuzian pedagogy might look like and what it can do by combining an exploration of learning, ethics and autonomy in Difference and Repetition with the activation of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought in contemporary Communities of Philosophical Inquiry.

L'œuvre de Deleuze contient encore beaucoup de mystères. L'unité de la philosophie deleuzienne est-elle à chercher du côté d'une ontologie? Constitue-t-elle une ardente défense de l'immanence radicale? S'agit-il plutôt d'une philosophie du virtuel? Le consensus fait défaut autour de cette œuvre polymorphe. K. Ansell Pearson prend ici le parti de placer l'entreprise deleuzienne sous la bannière du vitalisme. Cet aspect de l'œuvre deleuzienne avait bien sûr déjà été remarqué. De manière explicite, Deleuze condamne lui-même l'idéalisme au nom des forces de (...) la vie. L'auteur ne nous apprend donc rien de neuf en assimilant le deleuzisme à la dernière des grandes pensées vitalistes. Là où il innove, c'est en donnant une consistance à l'ensemble des concepts biophilosophiques du système deleuzien. Des notions insuffisamment problématisées par les interprètes qui se contentent le plus souvent de reproduire la langue deleuzienne sans en penser la cohérence d'ensemble. C'est ainsi que les notions de devenir-animal, de vie anorganique et de corps sans organes trouvent un sens à travers l'idée avancée par l'auteur d'une «vie germinale». (shrink)

. Book Reviews. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 401-418.

Gilles Deleuze's two-volume theory of film, _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_ and _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, have slowly been making an impact on Anglo-American film studies. The special issue of _Film-Philosophy_ on his work (vol. 5, 2001) and David Rodowick's excellent introduction, _Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine_ (1997), are just two signs, among many, of the growing interest in Deleuze's writings on cinema. His work has also inspired the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to propose a new theory of film that significantly departs (...) from Deleuze. Agamben has developed a new theory of 'gestural cinema', arguing that '*the element of cinema is gesture and not image*'. [1] He has also argued that this new theory of gestural cinema means that cinema belongs, essentially, to the realm of ethics and politics, and not aesthetics. It is this new theory that I want to introduce. (shrink)