An Approach to Difference and Repetition

Truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of Difference and Repetition his 1973 Letter to a Harsh Critic, still full of academic elements, it's heavy going. (1) I'll say! (Part of that academicism comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as primary thesis for doctorat d'Etat; secondary thesis was big Spinoza book). context of these remarks is useful: Deleuze has just been noting that the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of Oedipus complex. (2) Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive force by various means: (3) (1) by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested rationalist tradition by critique of negativity, cultivation of joy, hatred of interiority, externality of forces and relations, denunciation of power [pouvoir]; (2) by enculage / immaculate conception: making author say something their own words that would be monstrous. These are famous lines, and last is certainly fun an epater les bourgeois sort of way. But what is really important my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write in your own name, as he claims he first did Difference and Repetition: Individuals find a real name for themselves ... only through harshest exercises by opening themselves up to multiplicities everywhere w/in them, to intensities running through them. [This is] a depersonalization through love rather than through subjection. (4) So that's our challenge introducing Difference and Repetition: can we help our students avoid subjecting themselves to it as a monument history of philosophy, as is case with an Oedipal relation to history of philosophy which you give yourself up to be a mere repetiteur: an old occupational title French academic system? Rather, can we help them turn their reading of it into a harsh exercise depersonalization, that is, an opening up of themselves to multiplicities and intensities within them, indeed, within all of us, student and teacher alike? Can our encounter with it be a depersonalization through love? Can we learn from it, rather than gain knowledge from it? Luckily, Difference and Repetition contains a discussion of learning; it thematizes challenge it poses to us. discussion of learning occurs at a key point Difference and Repetition, at turning point of book, end of middle chapter, The Image of Thought. Let's look at architecture of book, which after Preface, has a pleasing and significant asymmetry: Introduction: Repetition and Difference Chapter One: Difference Itself Chapter Two: Repetition for Itself Chapter Three: Image of Thought Chapter Four: Ideal Synthesis of Difference Chapter Five: Asymmetrical Synthesis of Sensibility Conclusion: Difference and Repetition At first glance we see that title/subject of book, difference and repetition, structures book. conclusion repeats, with a difference, Introduction, while chapter 4 repeats chapter 1 and chapter five repeats chapter two. Chapter three is center of book, pivot on which it turns. In a useful article, Tim Murphy will claim it is caesura, pure and empty form of time, which breaks naked repetition and opens way to a novel future, repetition with a difference. (5) We should note that an interview from 1988, Deleuze says that noology or study of image of thought is prolegomena to philosophy. (6) So, roughly speaking, we can say that first part of book (introduction and chapters one and two) is Deleuze's voyage of depersonalization through history of philosophy (repeating it with a difference, his enculage of philosophers he writes on). …