Difference & Repetition
by Gilles Deleuze (trans. by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) [orig pub. 1964].
From one of the prefaces: “We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.” (xxi)
Introduction: Repetition and Difference
“Repetition as a conduct and as a point of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities.” (1) He repeatedly asserts that “repetition is difference without concept” (e.g. 13). It is the realm of twins, not generality. It is a thing repeated, falling, it seems to me, in the realm of the uncanny and anomaly. The thing exists twice, but is not equivalated. How would this sit with a Saussurian linguistics? What kind of linguistics would this be? Repetition seems here like a pure difference, a difference in the being-in-itself of the things, but in no other way. Thus: “In every respect, repetition is a transgression.” (3)
“In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters – the whole apparatus of repetition as a ‘terrible power’.” (10)
On page 16, he claims repetition is diametrically opposed to memory. A thing is only repeated through its lack of memory. Once it remembers, generality imposes itself and replaces repetition. “In all these cases, that which repeats does so only by dint of not ‘comprehending’, not remembering, not knowing or not being conscious.” (16) What implications does this have for the double? The twin? Is the point of memory the point of destruction? That old legend where if you meet your doppelganger one of you must die? The meeting is the remembering, the generalizing… and thus the destruction? Should we link generalization and destruction? What happens when we do?
Then, Deleuze links repetition to the simulacrum: “Repetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself. It is not underneath the masks, but is formed from one mask to another, as though from one distinctive oint to another, from one privileged instant to another, with and within the variations. The masks do not hide anything except other masks.” (17) With repetition, there is no origin, but. . . what?
